Prof Bagchi–A Man who talked Straight

Abhijit Guha

We heard a gentle knock at the door. I was sitting in front of my teacher Professor Surajit Sinha in the room of the Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta. Sinha said, ‘Please come in’. A tall, fair skinned and clean shaved man entered and sat by my side. He was Professor Amiya Kumar Bagchi as Sinha introduced me to him and told ‘Abhijit has just joined the Centre as a junior ICSSR Research Fellow in Sociology and Social Anthropology’. It was 1984. Professor Bagchi looked at me with a smiling face and asked ‘Have you read Marshall Sahlins’ ‘Original Affluent Society’? Luckily, I had read it and promptly replied, ‘Yes’. Amiya Babu reacted by just saying, ‘If one writes a book, then one should write like that!’ I wondered why of all anthropological pieces he mentioned the name of Marshall Sahlins and particularly one of his trenchant critiques of the capitalist ideologue John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958). Later when I was reading Bagchi’s The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (1982) published by the Cambridge University Press, I found that he cited Sahlins’ aforementioned works.

I met Amiya Bagchi much later at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata during 2017, while speaking at seminars. He carefully listened to my critiques of the land acquisition policy of his favourite left front government without making any comment in the public. Still later, I came to know of his love-hate attitude towards LFG through his personal communications with me on this issue. He viewed LFG as a “Nidhiram Sardar”. On 31 May 2022 in an email to me he stated:

The LFG suffered from the delusion that it could stop de-industrialisation on its own, when it was only a Nidhiram Sardar, with no control over any aspect of policy -finance, industrial regulation, labour policy and so on. De-industrialisation had started in West Bengal from the early 1950s: one Durgapur could not stop it. The LFG and the people of West Bengal paid a heavy price first with Haldia Petrochemicals and the abortive Nano project in Singur. Its main achievements, the foundation of the three-tier panchayat system, eight years or so ahead of the central government legislation, were over by 1987( Bagchi, 2022, personal communication dated 31.05.2022).

In response, I did not however, spare Amiya Bagchi. On the same day I replied:

The bitter irony and the truth of my research on land acquisition was its timming! When I started my research in Paschim Medinipur in 1990-91 the process of sabotaging the land reforms through the acquisition of fertile land by the LFG for industrialisation had already begun! How then could I live in a fool’s paradise praising the goods done by the LFG in the past like a sycophant? Could you just praise Congress party during the emergency or even after saying that Mrs Gandhi and her party did so many “good things” like Bank nationalisation in the past?

There ended our conversation on land acquisition in West Bengal. Amiya Bagchi will always remain an inspiration to me. His agility to think sharp and his combative mood along with the capacity to remain silent on topics he didn’t know is still an inimitable example for me.

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Vol 57, No. 31, Jan 26 - Feb 1, 2025