Some Recollections (about Kathleen Gough)

In November last year, David invited me over to select a few books as mementos from Kathleen's library. A postcard on the bookcase shelving, with its faded - colour reproduction of a magnificent ancient temple, caught my eye. Turning the card over I surprised myself, for it was one I had sent Kathleen almost two years earlier from Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, near the villages where she had done so much methodical and insightful field work. What memories of India the card evoked for Kathleen, prompting her to put it in view, I of course cannot know. I want to speculate that her memories wove together many images of beauty and misery and political vitality: the remarkable stone carvings; the women who sit on endless roadsides smashing rock for hours with the frailest of tools in broiling sunlight; the energetic public debate that instantly exposes our own political culture's scandalous backwardness and monochromatism. My first visit to India, four months as a traveller, deepened still further my appreciation of Kathleen's accomplishment of discerning, amidst that tangle of stimulating particularities and puzzles, the shapes of political economy and class struggle in village India. Hers was a very fine mind, penetrating and rigorous. With a gift for clear expression, she has left a lasting revolutionary intellectual contribution. When I returned to Vancouver that spring of 1990, I phoned Kathleen full of my enthusiasms and now larger and more tangible curiosities -- for India sharpens the senses. I brought warm greetings from the contacts Kathleen had given me before leaving, and expressed my own gratitude. For it was with her assistance that I had been able, among other things, to walk through rice fields, guided by a village communist organizer, meeting with Harijan families. That spring Kathleen too was full of enthusiasm, and busy with practical preparations for her new project in Vietnam. She planned to study, in the combination of detail and scope at which she was so skilled, the complex efforts to revolutionize productive relations in the Vietnamese village. But practical preparation itself brought a sudden end to her planning. As she recounted to me so boldly: I took the car for a check with the mechanic, the cat for a check with the vet and so decided to take myself for a check with the doctor. Thereby she discovered her rampant cancer. Kathleen approached this malignancy as she had approached other destructive forces in our world: with intelligence and courage. Nothing decent can be accomplished without that, but the tragedy we all know is that no success is assured by that either. In the tragedy of Kathleen's dying I feel deeply it was my very good fortune to have been able to have had time with her. …