While addressing protesters at a sit-in site in Kolkata’s New Market area during the later half of January 2020, where thousands had gathered to oppose the discriminatory citizenship law enacted by the Indian parliament a month earlier, octogenarian professor Amiya Kumar Bagchi was trembling with indignation.
He was recollecting his childhood spent in a village located near Baharampur. As a school student, he was attracted by the freedom struggle led by the Congress and Subhas Chandra Bose’s Forward Bloc, and opposed the communal politics of the Hindu Mahasabha. Large sections of Muslims were opposed to the Muslim League too, he recounted, reminding everyone that the Muslim majority district of Murshidabad stayed with India after the partition. It is this history which the Union government is seeking to undo and obliterate through the Citizenship Amendment Act, he asserted, exhorting Hindus and Muslims alike to oppose all attempts to weaken the secular basis of India’s constitution.
This quintessential angry, forever-young public intellectual even in his eighties, breathed his last on November 28, 2024, at Kolkata.
In his distinguished academic career as an economist, Amiya Bagchi had studied in Kolkata’s Presidency College and Calcutta University, before moving to the University of Cambridge for doctoral research. His PhD thesis was on the behaviour of private investment in India in the first two plan periods. This study, which involved a deep historical, theoretical and empirical dive into the process of capitalist development in India under colonial rule, produced a marvel of a book titled Private Investment in India 1900-1939 (published in 1972).
His subsequent body of work on India’s long term deindustrialisation under British rule, the growth of India’s indigenous private industry under tariff protection provided by the colonial government after the first world war, the structural break provided by development planning in the first two decades after independence and the nature and consequences of the turn towards free markets and greater integration with the global economy since the 1990s; published in several papers in the Economic Weekly and its successor the Economic and Political Weekly, and books like The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (1982), Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital (2006), Colonialism and Indian Economy (2010) etc.; established professor Bagchi as a doyen of India’s industrial history and a major theorist of economic development. He also authored a four volume history of the State Bank of India, India’s largest bank, starting with the Evolution of the State Bank of India, Parts I and II (1987).
Bagchi was a trenchant critic of mainstream neoclassical economics. He publicly criticised the Nobel prize committee on economics for denying the prize to Cambridge economists Michal Kalecki, Joan Robinson, Nicholas Kaldor and Pierro Sraffa despite their seminal contributions, because of their rejection of the neoclassical paradigm. When Amartya Sen received the Nobel prize in 1998, Bagchi celebrated the recognition as a break in the trend, with a lengthy academic article in the EPW rigorously chronicling Sen’s intellectual trajectory through four decades, concluding that he had founded a new branch of the human science of development.
The winners of the 2024 Nobel prize in economics, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson are economic historians, who have argued that the nature and motive of the institutions created by the European colonisers in different colonies made all the difference in their development outcomes. While inclusive political and economic systems were built in settler colonies like the United States, Canada, Australia or New Zealand, the coloniser’s aim in colonies like India was to exploit the indigenous population and extract resources for the colonisers’ benefit. This is cited as a reason why the settler colonies have now turned prosperous and ex-colonies like India remain trapped in significant poverty.
Bagchi’s work offers a different perspective on the historical relationship between colonisation and development/underdevelopment. In the introduction to his book on Colonialism and Indian Economy (2010), Bagchi provided estimates suggesting that aggregate surpluses extracted by the British colonisers from South Asia, including Burma between 1870 and 1913-14 ranged between £3.2 to £3.8 billion, which accounted for 75-95% of total British foreign investment worldwide during that period. These estimates of surplus extraction, estimated from the British balance of payments accounts, were comparable with the estimates of scholars like Utsa Patnaik and Javier Cuenca-Esteban, whom Bagchi refers, concluding:
“That foreign investment was absolutely critical in financing the massive European migration during the period in question and in building up the prosperity of especially the English-speaking overseas settlements in the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Moreover, the despoliation of the native peoples of those countries also contributed to the prosperity of the immigrants.”
If the economic sciences committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences found such merit in the work of Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson for identifying the institutional differences between inclusive, benign settler colonialism and extractive, exploitative non-settler colonialism; they may also find it worthwhile to examine the lifelong works of economic historians from Amiya Bagchi and Utsa Patnaik right upto the original theorists of “economic drain”, Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chunder Dutt, and consider them, collectively, for the next Nobel prize in economics.
Bagchi was not only a repository of encyclopaedic knowledge in economics, but also in multiple branches of social sciences and philosophy. He served as a Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, as member and later vice-chairperson of the State Planning Board of West Bengal and was the founder Director of the Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata, from where he retired in 2012. His role as an institution builder, an unapologetically radical social scientist and a spirited, leftwing public intellectual would be fondly cherished by a wide section of colleagues, friends, students and admirers alike.
Prasenjit Bose is an economist and activist based in Kolkata.
