Aditya Mukherjee
Dec 3, 2024 09:37 IST First published on: Dec 3, 2024 at 07:29 IST
Professor Amiya Kumar Bagchi passed away on November 28 at 88. A legendary Indian academic, teacher and institution builder has left us. Since the 1970s, there would hardly be any historian or economist in any premier institution in India who was not exposed to or grappled with his writings, whether they agreed with some of his conclusions or not. He will be sorely missed, particularly in today’s times when the academic world is under severe stress in India, with free and non-conformist thought becoming increasingly difficult and even punishable.
If there was one quality that distinguished Professor Bagchi, it was his ability to stand up boldly against the dominant current, however powerful and pervasive it may be, if his own research and conviction pointed the other way. In the discipline of economics, India began to witness by the late 1960s and early ’70s a turn away from the study of Political Economy, (which was the hallmark of our early nationalists, people like Dadabhai Naoroji and R C Dutt, a tradition kept alive by later economists like Bhabatosh Datta, B N Ganguli, K N Raj and several others), towards econometrics, mathematical modelling, game theory, etc. It was at that time that Bagchi, as a doctoral student at Cambridge, switched from being a game theorist to probing issues of political economy, particularly economic history. Economic history proved critical in making major theoretical breakthroughs, as is evident 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 economic history to make important theoretical generalisations.
Bagchi’s magnum opus Private Investment in India, 1900-1939, published in 1972 was his first major work as a result of his shift in focus to economic history. Based on research from a variety of sources in India and England, the book immediately became a must-read for every student of history and economics and it remains so till today, more than 50 years after it was published. After a deep and thorough study of all major sectors of the Indian economy, Bagchi demonstrates, proving many current supply-oriented hypotheses wrong, that the reason for the lack of industrial investment and overall growth in colonial India was not what economists had been repeating ad infinitum. That is, the lack of supply of capital, or its “shynesss”, lack of entrepreneurship, unsuitable social traditions and values in contrast to the so-called “protestant ethic” in England, overpopulation and so on, but the imposition of the priorities of British imperialism in India which constrained demand severely, limiting the profitability or even viability of investment.
Professor Bagchi’s foray into the economic history of the modern period led him inevitably to look at the capitalist system as a global phenomenon, which explained the development of some parts of the world and the underdevelopment if not decimation of other parts. Among his numerous publications, the next major contribution came in the form of the book The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, published in 1982. It is a study that looks at various parts of the world which became victims of colonialism at different points of time for varying periods, under different colonial masters, but all sharing certain underlying similarities and structural disabilities. The study covered Latin America, Indonesia, China and India.
From here, the logical next step was his masterly overview of the emergence of world capitalism and its impact, not only in the early stages of the rise of capitalism but also its devastating consequences on a large part of humanity up to the current millennium. It was to be his last magnum opus, Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital, published in 2005. In this work, Bagchi, in his inimitable polemical style backed by huge amount of empirical evidence, demolishes several Eurocentric myths promoted by the dominant Western world, such as that Europe went ahead of the rest of the world centuries before the Industrial Revolution, or that Europe shot ahead of the rest of the world with the Industrial Revolution because of some intrinsic advantages or capabilities. On the contrary, he shows that the Great Divergence, the rapid rise of the West was in fact predicated upon surplus extraction and decimation of the rest. Through a detailed calculation he shows that between 1871 and 1916, Britain extracted as tribute from India about £3.2 billion while total British investment abroad was about £4 billion, a large part of it going to the White colonies and the US. The blood and sweat of the Indian people thus contributed, in no small measure, to the “peopling of the United States” through massive migrations from Europe “and its rise as the most economically advanced country in the world (and) also helped improve the living conditions of the Europeans left behind.” A connection Professor Bagchi brings home so dramatically that our colonised minds did not make.
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The world will miss a great spokesperson for the oppressed.
The writer taught contemporary history at JNU. His latest book is Nehru’s India: Past, Present and Future
