Financial historian Amiya Kumar Bagchi passes away

Amiya Kumar Bagchi. File
| Photograph Credit score: The Hindu

Professor Amiya Kumar Bagchi, who handed away on Thursday (November 28, 2024) night, was one of the excellent economists, students, and public intellectuals of our time. A insurgent all his life, he left the faculty the place he had been admitted initially for talking out towards some injustice, and joined Presidency School, Kolkata, which had a freer ambiance. After his Grasp’s in economics from Presidency, he went to Cambridge College on a West Bengal authorities scholarship, the place he not solely completed his doctoral work but additionally joined the College of Economics and Politics, with a Fellowship at Jesus School.

He had began out as a mathematical economist, in actual fact a Recreation Theorist, however modified course whereas writing his Ph.D. dissertation and, and on the recommendation of considered one of his mentors, turned to financial historical past, a flip for which we should be extremely grateful. He was not an financial historian within the slim sense; quite, he was a macroeconomist engaged on historic knowledge.

Seeing patterns in knowledge

Whereas digging up new and hitherto unavailable knowledge with a diligence that would match that of essentially the most industrious of the historians, he noticed patterns in knowledge which solely his macroeconomics may allow him to see. He was thus an altogether new type of an economist, au fait each in financial idea and in utilized economics, together with financial historical past. The primary excellent product of his prodigious scholarship was his ebook Non-public Funding in India 1900-1939, which many reviewers, even critics unsympathetic to his argument, have in comparison with the monumental works of anti-colonial historiography, similar to these by Dadabhai Naoroji, Romesh Chunder Dutt, and D.R.Gadgil. This work was adopted by his analysis on “Deindustrialization within the Indian economic system within the Colonial Interval” which once more supplied definitive proof to clinch a long-standing debate that had gone on for the reason that days of Naoroji and Dutt.

Amongst his quite a few books and articles, most of that are path-breaking, the one which stands out for me is a chunk he wrote within the Financial and Political Weekly in 1972, wherein he supplied an excellent and authentic define of the dialectics of improvement and under-development in a historic setting on the planet economic system. This work, in its simplicity and its persuasiveness, might be thought-about a real descendant of Paul Baran’s masterly ebook The Political Economic system of Development. It gives a pithy introduction to the argument developed extra elaborately, although maybe with much less instant affect, in his later work, The Political Economic system of Underdevelopment. His final magnum opus was Perilous Passage: Mankind and the International Ascendency of Capital wherein he coated a spread of experiences of nations within the International South, specializing in the demographic collapse initiated by imperialism.

After his stint at Cambridge, Bagchi returned to Kolkata to take up a educating place in his alma mater, the Presidency School, from the place he shifted after some years to the then newly established Centre for the Research of Social Sciences, Calcutta, of which he subsequently grew to become the Director. A staunch believer in Left politics, Bagchi served for a very long time as a member after which because the Vice-Chairman of the West Bengal State Planning Board, beneath the Left Entrance authorities. After leaving the federal government, he established and directed the Institute of Improvement Research, Kolkata. He remained connected to this establishment as a Professor Emeritus until his final days.

An establishment-builder

Admired and revered by legions of scholars whom he taught and guided for Ph.D. work, he was an institution-builder who was an establishment himself. He was a pioneer who re-established on a firmer footing the propositions first superior by the Indian nationalist writers, and within the course of illuminated with extraordinary readability the workings of imperialism in producing underdevelopment. His work was as influential amongst historians as amongst economists, and he was elected the Common President of the Indian Historical past Congress at its eightieth session.

All his life nonetheless Bagchi remained loyal to Kolkata, by no means completely leaving this favorite metropolis of his, although he had quite a few provides of prestigious jobs elsewhere, together with in Delhi. He was merely part of the Kolkata panorama, actively concerned within the cultural and mental lifetime of that metropolis. He contributed articles commonly in Bengali to a number of small magazines that flourish on the initiative of younger students in that State. Certainly, he was for a very long time a outstanding bridge between Kolkata and Cambridge, a good friend of distinguished Cambridge economists like Maurice Dobb, Piero Sraffa, Richard Goodwin, and Joan Robinson; he additionally took nice pleasure in listening to Rabindra Sangeet and discussing the most recent poem of Shakti Chattopadhyay (his precise modern) and the most recent play of Utpal Dutt. Above all nonetheless, he by no means misplaced his religion in a future the place there will probably be a world freed from exploitation.

Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Financial Research and Planning, JNU, New Delhi