Dec 3, 2024 07:29 IST
First revealed on: Dec 3, 2024 at 07:29 IST
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Professor Amiya Kumar Bagchi handed away on November 28 at 88. A legendary Indian tutorial, trainer and establishment builder has left us. For the reason that Nineteen Seventies, there would hardly be any historian or economist in any premier establishment in India who was not uncovered to or grappled together with his writings, whether or not they agreed with a few of his conclusions or not. He might be sorely missed, significantly in immediately’s occasions when the tutorial world is beneath extreme stress in India, with free and non-conformist thought turning into more and more tough and even punishable.
If there was one high quality that distinguished Professor Bagchi, it was his means to face up boldly in opposition to the dominant present, nevertheless highly effective and pervasive it might be, if his personal analysis and conviction pointed the opposite approach. Within the self-discipline of economics, India started to witness by the late Nineteen Sixties and early ’70s a flip away from the research of Political Economic system, (which was the hallmark of our early nationalists, folks like Dadabhai Naoroji and R C Dutt, a practice stored alive by later economists like Bhabatosh Datta, B N Ganguli, Ok N Raj and several other others), in direction of econometrics, mathematical modelling, sport principle, and so on. It was at the moment that Bagchi, as a doctoral pupil at Cambridge, switched from being a sport theorist to probing problems with political economic system, significantly financial historical past. Financial historical past proved vital in making main theoretical breakthroughs, as is clear from the writings of Karl Marx, Dadabhai Naoroji, Maurice Dobb, Ernest Mandel, Andre Gunder Frank, Paul Baran, Daniel Thorner and so many others. Bagchi too used his deep foray into financial historical past to make necessary theoretical generalisations.
Bagchi’s magnum opus Non-public Funding in India, 1900-1939, revealed in 1972 was his first main work because of his shift in focus to financial historical past. Based mostly on analysis from a wide range of sources in India and England, the ebook instantly turned a must-read for each pupil of historical past and economics and it stays so until immediately, greater than 50 years after it was revealed. After a deep and thorough research of all main sectors of the Indian economic system, Bagchi demonstrates, proving many present supply-oriented hypotheses flawed, that the rationale for the dearth of commercial funding and total progress in colonial India was not what economists had been repeating advert infinitum. That’s, the dearth of provide of capital, or its “shynesss”, lack of entrepreneurship, unsuitable social traditions and values in distinction to the so-called “protestant ethic” in England, overpopulation and so forth, however the imposition of the priorities of British imperialism in India which constrained demand severely, limiting the profitability and even viability of funding.
Professor Bagchi’s foray into the financial historical past of the fashionable interval led him inevitably to take a look at the capitalist system as a world phenomenon, which defined the event of some components of the world and the underdevelopment if not decimation of different components. Amongst his quite a few publications, the following main contribution got here within the type of the ebook The Political Economic system of Underdevelopment, revealed in 1982. It’s a research that appears at numerous components of the world which turned victims of colonialism at completely different factors of time for various intervals, beneath completely different colonial masters, however all sharing sure underlying similarities and structural disabilities. The research lined Latin America, Indonesia, China and India.
From right here, the logical subsequent step was his masterly overview of the emergence of world capitalism and its affect, not solely within the early levels of the rise of capitalism but additionally its devastating penalties on a big a part of humanity as much as the present millennium. It was to be his final magnum opus, Perilous Passage: Mankind and the International Ascendancy of Capital, revealed in 2005. On this work, Bagchi, in his inimitable polemical type backed by big quantity of empirical proof, demolishes a number of Eurocentric myths promoted by the dominant Western world, akin to that Europe went forward of the remainder of the world centuries earlier than the Industrial Revolution, or that Europe shot forward of the remainder of the world with the Industrial Revolution due to some intrinsic benefits or capabilities. Quite the opposite, he reveals that the Nice Divergence, the speedy rise of the West was in truth predicated upon surplus extraction and decimation of the remainder. By means of an in depth calculation he reveals that between 1871 and 1916, Britain extracted as tribute from India about £3.2 billion whereas complete British funding overseas was about £4 billion, a big a part of it going to the White colonies and the US. The blood and sweat of the Indian folks thus contributed, in no small measure, to the “peopling of the USA” by way of large migrations from Europe “and its rise as essentially the most economically superior nation on the planet (and) additionally helped enhance the dwelling situations of the Europeans left behind.” A connection Professor Bagchi brings residence so dramatically that our colonised minds didn’t make.
The world will miss an ideal spokesperson for the oppressed.
The author taught up to date historical past at JNU. His newest ebook is Nehru’s India: Previous, Current and Future
