in their exams.

As a junior teacher I had no influence on curriculum or the examination system, but as the first secretary of the Patna University Teachers Association (1956), a group of us worked out a rational plan for organisation of teaching within the social sciences on a collaborative basis to promote specialisation in research-based teaching, and interaction between different social science faculties and students. Some of us also became members of the Bihar Citizens Committee on Education and organised a series of seminars on ways to improve both school and university education. But my research plans had to be deferred because of the birth of two daughters and my mother-in-law s terminal illness. Between 1956 and 1959 I lost my father, my mother-in-law and my mother. The Registrar called me and suggested that I avail of the leave sanctioned to me for research in Oxford by the Syndicate a year earlier, and get out of the country because the State Government had marked me down as one of the troublemakers , and might decide to transfer me out of Patna. I had just laughed off my brother s suggestion to finance my Oxford trip but the Registrar s warning seemed serious, so I left for Oxford in September 1960 with my two daughters. The Principal of St. Hugh s and Betty Kemp both advised against taking the children, but the departure of the two mothers left me with no option. I was reasonably sure that I would find enough friends to help in Oxford which I did. Those two years proved tough first to get back into the habit of putting in long hours of study in the library while the children were at school, and later to leave them with people in Oxford (where they would be adequately cared for while continuing their schooling) to pursue my research in London and Edinburgh. After the fist year, the RBI reduced my foreign exchange allowance by 200 because of changes in Exchange Control regulations. Unfortunately the delay in my return to Oxford disqualified me for the Fellowship that St. Hugh s College had virtually assured me. The principal offered me a small grant towards my Edinburgh trip and got me some assistance from the Oxford Society which made up half the shortfall that the RBI decision had created. I had to fend off an old tutor s offer to transfer a legacy some old lady had left her to assist me, by promising that I would ask for her help if I needed it absolutely. I was not unused to managing life on a shoestring budget, and those two years at Oxford again bolstered my confidence in my management capacity, plus the realisation that the promise my early tutor