Amiya K Bagchi: ‘A Political Economist, Economic Historian Who Stands Tall in South Asia’

Kolkata: Towering Marxist economist and ideologue Amiya Kumar Bagchi breathed his last on Thursday, November 28, evening at a private hospital in Kolkata. He was 88. He is survived by two daughters, both of whom are also professors. A few years ago, he lost his wife, Jasodhara Bagchi, also a professor and champion of women’s right.

Paying tributed to the departed professor, several academics and Left Front chairman Biman Basu, CPI(M) state secretary Mohd Salim and CITU national secretary Tapan Sen expressed deep grief.

Bagchi was born in 1936 at Jadupur village of Murshidabad district and obtained his college education in Presidency University, Kolkata. Thereafter he joined Trinity College, Cambridge University. In 1963, he obtained his doctorate from the same university, with his dissertation on private investment in India.

He began his professional life by teaching economics in Cambridge University but left it and came back to India and joined as a professor in Presidency College. In 1974, he founded and joined the Centre for Studies in Social Science in Kolkata and became its director in his later years

Bagchi also played an important role in the conservation of banking and finance records as an economic historian and worked from 1976 to 1978 as an official historian of the State Bank of India. After leaving the Centre for Social Sciences, he joined the Institute of Developmental Studies as founder director.

Doubtlessly, Bagchi was one of the most outstanding economists, scholars, humanists in contemporary India, who did not believe in engaging with the science of economics, particularly political economy, from a purely academic point of view. His was a life of constant engagement and dialectical interactions with the living essence of Marxism, Praxis (the alloy of Theory and Practice) while nurturing a deep sense of respect for those put the theory into practice.

He authored various books, as a solitary writer or jointly. His book, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, was a compulsory read for students of economics, political science, and sociology. Some of his other books are Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascending of Capital, Capital and Labour Redefined: India and the Third World, Colonialism and Indian Economy, Money and Credit in Indian History as well as the Evolution of the State Bank of India.

Inspired by his PhD, his first classic work came out in 1972 titled, Private Investment in India: 1900-1939. The standard argument from the "dyed-in-the-wool free traders" was that India's industrial backwardness was owing to "distorted foreign trade regimes".

Economist P Ramkumar recalled that Bagchi showed in his book that India's slow industrial growth under colonialism was because much of the investible surplus was either exported, or used up in rentier consumption, or aborted because of the low propensity to invest in a poor and low-productive economy with sluggish demand for industrial goods.

In 1982, another seminal work, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, was a sharp attack on the neoliberal, free market explanations of continued under-development in the former colonies. In a long review of that book, eminent scholar Terence Byres noted that the book was “a clarion call to revolution”; it filled a void in the development literature; and stood tall alongside three other Marxist works: Paul Baran’s Political Economy of Growth, Maurice Dobb’s Economic Growth and Underdeveloped Countries and Geoffrey Kay’s Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis. Byres was amused that Cambridge University Press published such an explicitly Marxist book -- given that most of their books were in the laissez faire tradition -- and called it “a kind of dialectic justice”.

In the 1980s, Bagchi immersed himself in another magisterial work, which was the writing of the history of the State Bank of India. Four volumes of this history were published in 1987, 1989 and 1997. In this work, he used rich archival materials to analyse credit institutions and the operation of colonialism in India.

The book was the story of India's transition into a colonial economy but with financial institutions that actively favoured the imperial regime. Author B. R. Tomlinson was to remark in a review that just as the Presidency Bank enjoyed high rate of return on money, Bagchi's volumes had ensured that "their rate of return on intellectual capital is also high"!

Bagchi’s work in the 1990s and after focused on the catastrophic outcomes in Africa, Latin America, and partly Asia, of the stabilisation and structural adjustment policies recommended and enforced by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

“This is the period where I have heard him directly and personally. He would get passionate and genuinely angry about the policy drift in the developing world towards more free market systems -- and also about what he would call "statistical massaging". This was where he would consistently speak about the East Asian developmental experience, and the role of the (developmental) state and society in directing and regulating the market forces there. He would powerfully argue that the reasons for the contrast between the East Asian success and the Indian failure lay in the role of nationalism, land reforms and education in promoting the efficacy of state action in enhancing economic growth in East Asia” said Ramkumar.

In a later autobiographical description, Bagchi was to write: “My basic concern is still understanding the processes of reproduction of structures of inequality, and explaining how the same underlying processes lead to class formation and stratification along lines of gender, ethnicity, and locales of residence. I believe that theories of asymmetric and incomplete information, social externalities and sorting can provide some of the foundations of the Marxian theories of class and the Weberian theories of stratification. As a citizen of one of the poorest countries of the world, I am frequently sucked into various projects with political overtones. But I have not yet found much common ground with the dominant politicians bent on executing neoliberal policies while preserving an extremely unjust social order. The rise of Hindu fundamentalism to power in India has further exacerbated my conflict with the ruling elite...The themes of social and political conflicts and struggles of ordinary people to achieve a decent standard of living in dignity and freedom still form the core of my professional work. So long as the human world retains its unlovely constitution, my penchant for dissent is unlikely to disappear.”

Remebering Bagchi, Calcutta University professor of economics, Ishita Mukherjee, told NewsClick: “Prof Amiya Bagchi was a political economist, economic historian, who actually stands out tall in South Asia. It will be difficult to find another of his kind again. He was a mentor, teacher to hundreds in Bengal and elsewhere in the country and abroad. From Private investment in India to Perilous Passage, all his books are journeys through time in terms of economy, history, politics, society.”

Mukherjee said Bagchi led an interdisciplinary method of studying economics in Bengal. “He was global in thought but rooted deeply in Kolkata, Bengal and more so in Murshidabad, from where he hails. He felt pain in deprivation due to caste, class and gender. He was deeply committed to his Marxist ideology and his penetrating intuitions in contemporary happenings were worthy till he breathed his last. My tribute and respect to my teacher and mentor, the loss is irreplaceable for us” she added.

Economist Indranil Dasgupta, professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, said Bagchi was arguably the best economic historian India has produced. “He has fundamental contribution in many different areas of economic history and colonialism. His book on the unequal development and colonialism in generating under-development is a classic, as is his initial work on private investment in India. His demise is an irreparable loss to Indian economics and economic history. His SBI history is a classic work of how to record financial history.” He told NewsClick.

Amiya Bagchi was also the president of Friends of Latin America (FOLA) and played an important role in cementing Indian peoples’ connect with the Latin American people. Social activist and FOLA member Bimal Charma said,” Prof Amiya Bagchi was constantly observing and updated on the state of affairs in Latin American countries and interference by imperialist counties in the loot of local resources by the US and others. A great human being, he was a pro- people scholar of the masses, who always advocated economics as a tool of social development.”

Reminiscing Bagchi, the vice-president of FOLA, legal doyen and member of Parliament, Bikashranjan Bhattacharya, said that not only was Bagchi a “towering economist, he was also an activist, especially in the praxis of new socialist developments in the Latin American context. He was president of FOLA and was extremely pivotal in guiding the organisation.”