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Abstract
Recent research on intellectual histories of the Global South explore the nature of inheritance and the incorporation of ideas from diverse places into colonial and post-colonial histories. Though research into the histories of science, liberalism and nationalism have multifaceted reference points in the discipline of history, histories of intellectuals in conversation with the history of decolonisation remain a missing link in the history of the twentieth century. Through engagement with the ‘Bengali Intellectuals Oral History Project’ (BIOHP), this paper argues that intellectuals from West Bengal, India, maintained a complex vector of inheritance with Western social thought when contrasted with their East Bengali/Pakistani/Bangladeshi counterparts. The primary interlocutors of eastern Bengali intellectuals were not ‘the West’, but were western Bengal, inside a regional, as opposed to an increasingly global, audience and marketplace of Indian intellectuals.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 See Andrew Sartori and Sam Moyn (eds), Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); and Darrin McMahon and Sam Moyn (eds), Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), especially Shruti Kapila, ‘Global Intellectual History and the Indian Political’, pp. 253–74, for recent appraisals of global intellectual history. For Indian intellectual history, see Vinayak Chaturvedi, ‘Writing History in the Borderlands’, in Social History, Vol. 39, no. 3 (2014), pp. 307–22; Andrew Sartori, Liberalism and Empire: An Alternative History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Ananya Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); and Shruti Kapila (ed.), An Intellectual History for India (Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
2 For reflections on biography in South Asian history, see Judith Brown, ‘“Life Histories” and the Making of Modern South Asia’, in American Historical Review, Vol. 114, no. 3 (June 2009), pp. 587–95; and Stanley Wolpert, ‘Biography as History: A Personal Reflection’, in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 40, no. 3 (Winter 2010), pp. 399–412. Both essays appeared in special editions probing the role of biography in historical writing. Recent reflections on the ‘biographical turn’ in historical writing include Peter France and William St. Clair (eds), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Jo Burr Margadant (ed.), The New Biography: Mapping Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Lloyd Ambrosius (ed.), Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). Clare Anderson’s Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), looks at six figures in the Indian Ocean world.
3 See Pathfinders Series by Routledge [https://www.routledge.com/Pathfinders/book-series/PF, accessed 5 Aug. 2018].
4 Following Lawrence Stone, ‘Prosopography’, in Daedalus, Vol. 100, no. 1 (Winter 1971), pp. 46–79; and T.H. Carney, ‘Prosopography: Payoffs and Pitfalls’, in Phoenix, Vol. 27, no. 2 (Summer 1973), pp. 156–79, Anna Beerens aims to bridge social and cultural history in late eighteenth-century Tokugawa Japan through a study of 173 intellectuals. See Anna Beerens, Friends, Acquaintances, Pupils, and Patrons: Japanese Intellectual Life in the Late Eighteenth Century: A Prosopographical Approach (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). Creating such a bridge for the twentieth century is compelled by the ‘Bengali Intellectuals Oral History Project’.
5 See Dilip Menon, ‘A Local Cosmopolitan: “Kesari” Balakrishna Pillai and the Invention of Europe for a Modern Kerala’, in Kris Manjapra and Sugata Bose (eds), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 154, fn. 11, for how discussions of the nation in Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments (Chatterjee is interviewed in this project) slip between ‘Bengal’ and ‘India’.
6 See Dane Kennedy, Decolonization: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Jurgen Osterhammel and Jan C. Jansen, Decolonization: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); the roundtable titled ‘The Archives of Decolonization’ in American Historical Review, Vol. 120, no. 3 (June 2015), pp. 884–950, with contributions by Farina Mir, Caroline Elkins, Todd Shepard, Jordana Bailkin, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Omnia El-Shakry and H. Reuben Neptune; and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Decolonization in South Asia: Meanings of Freedom in West Bengal, 1947–52 (New York: Routledge, 2009).
7 See the Appendix in this special section for a full list of interviewees. The digital archive is accessible at https://corpora.tufts.edu/?f%5Bcorpora_collection_sim%5D%5B%5D=Bengali+Intellectuals+Oral+History+Project [accessed 23 Sept. 2018].
8 Collecting interviews is ongoing and planned future interviewees as of this writing include Sumanta Banerjee, Samik Bandyopadhyaya, Bharati Roy, Usha Patnaik, Prabhat Patnaik, Tirthankar Bose, Muhammed Yunus and Fazle Abed. Interviews with Yunus, Abed and the Patnaiks are in progress as of December 2018.
9 Interview with Pranab Bardhan, 13 Oct. 2010, University of California, Berkeley (22:44).
10 For an intellectual biography of M.N. Roy, see Kris Manjapra, M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (Delhi: Routledge, 2010); and Isabel Huacuja Alonso, ‘M.N. Roy and the Mexican Revolution: How a Militant Indian Nationalist Became an International Communist’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 40, no. 3 (2017), pp. 517–30.
11 See the shift between Pranab Bardhan’s early work, such as ‘External Economies, Economic Development, and the Theory of Protection’, in Oxford Economic Papers, Vol. 16, no. 1 (1964), pp. 40–54, and his mid-career work, such as ‘Types of Labour Attachment in Agriculture: Results of a Survey in West Bengal, 1979’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 15, no. 35 (1980), pp. 1477–84.
12 Interview with Pranab Bardhan (1:15).
13 Pranab Bardhan, ‘Authoritarianism and Democracy: First Anniversary of New Regime’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 13, no. 11 (1978), pp. 529–32.
14 Interview with Partha Chatterjee, 15 Sept. 2012 (58:40). We see the context of state authoritarianism filtering through Chatterjee’s article, ‘Bengal: Rise and Growth of a Nationality’, in Social Scientist, Vol. 4, no. 1 (1975), pp. 67–82, in which he launched his first critique of ‘bourgeois nationalism’.
15 Susobhan Sarkar, ‘The Thought of Gramsci’, in Mainstream (2 Nov. 1968), pp. 17–25.
16 See Chatterjee’s earliest work, ‘The Classical Balance of Power Theory’, in Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 9, no. 1 (1972), pp. 51–61, and note the stark difference with his mid-career work, after his return to Kolkata, such as ‘In Birbhum after the Floods’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 13, no. 49 (1978), pp. 2001–2.
17 Hitesranjan Sanyal, ‘Continuities of Social Mobility in Traditional and Modern Society in Bengal: Two Case Studies of Caste Mobility in Bengal’, in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 30, no. 2 (1971), pp. 315–39; and Hitesranjan Sanyal, Social Mobility in Bengal (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1981).
18 Interview with Partha Chatterjee (1:03:00).
19 Interview with Partha Chatterjee (1:15:00).
20 Samar Sen, Mahasweta Devi et al., ‘Revolutionary Writers and Artists’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 15, no. 13 (1980), p. 621.
21 Izaz Ahmed, ‘Imperialism and Progress’, in Ronald Chilcote (ed.), Theories of Development: Mode of Production or Dependency? (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1983), pp. 33–72; see also Amartya Sen’s early essay, ‘A Note on Tinbergen on the Optimum Rate on Saving’, in The Economic Journal, Vol. 67, no. 268 (1957), pp. 745–8.
22 Interview with Amartya Sen, 1 Feb. 2010, Cambridge, USA (31:02).
23 Interview with Amartya Sen (35:38). See Amartya Sen’s early work on social choice theory, ‘A Possibility Theorem on Majority Decisions’, in Econometrica, Vol. 34, no. 2 (1966), pp. 491–9; and ‘The Nature and Classes of Prescriptive Judgements’, in The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 17, no. 66 (1967), pp. 46–62.
24 Interview with Kamal Datta, 20 Aug. 2009, Delhi (56:54).
25 See James Belich, Replenishing the World: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), for a discussion of the Anglophone settler historical landscape.
26 Interview with Tapan Raychaudhuri, 26 June 2008, Oxford, England (70:06).
27 For an analysis of the contestations surrounding the notion of a Bengali regional consciousness in late colonial India, see Neilesh Bose, Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014).
28 Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982).
29 Susobhan Sarkar, A Marxian Glimpse of History (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1975); and Susobhan Sarkar, Essays in Honour of Prof. S.C. Sarkar (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1976). See also Partha Chatterjee (ed.), The Small Voice of History: Collected Essays of Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2009).
30 Interview with Ranajit Guha, 29 July 2009, Vienna, Austria (112:22).
31 Taraknath Ghosh, Jibaner Pancalikar Bibhuti Bhusan Bandyopadhyaya (Kolkata: Sankha Prasana, 1983).
32 Partha Chatterjee, ‘Introduction’, in Partha Chatterjee (ed.), The Small Voice of History: Collected Essays of Ranajit Guha (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009), pp. 1–18.
33 Partha Chatterjee, ‘Agrarian Relations and Communalism in Bengal, 1926–35’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies No. I: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1982), pp. 9–38.
34 Partha Chatterjee, ‘More on Modes of Power and the Peasantry’, in Subaltern Studies No. II: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 311–50, republished in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
35 Interview with Anisuzzaman, 25 October 2009, Dhaka, Bangladesh (30:07).
36 Interview with Rehman Sobhan, 1 September 2010, Dhaka (6:00).
37 The 1965 Indo-Pakistan war was a brief formal military conflict in August and September 1965, the culmination of smaller skirmishes over disputed territory in Kashmir. Prime Minister Yahya Khan of Pakistan had served as army commander in this war. He instituted martial law and suspended the Constitution of Pakistan in 1969.
38 Interview with Rehman Sobhan.
39 Interview with Badruddin Umar, 25 October 2009, Dhaka, Bangladesh (56:02).
40 Rehman Sobhan made significant contributions to nation-building in both the Pakistan and Bangladesh periods as well as to issues of welfare economics.
41 Interview with Amartya Sen (6:25); and Rehman Sobhan, ‘The Problem of Regional Imbalances in the Economic Development of Pakistan’, in Asian Survey, Vol. 12, no. 5 (1962), pp. 31–7.
42 Badruddin Umar, Language Movement in East Bengal (Dhaka: Jatiya Grontha Prakashan, 2000); and Badruddin Umar, ‘Civil and Military: False Dichotomy’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 20, no. 29 (1985), p. 1217.
43 Interview with Badruddin Umar (0:00).
44 Interview with Badruddin Umar (71:34).
45 Interview with Mortaza Bashir, 24 June 2011, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2:00).
46 Quoted in Anwar Dil, Bangladesh: An Intercultural Memoir (Dhaka: Adorn, 2011), p. 162.
47 Interview with Anisuzzaman (0:00); and interview with Badruddin Umar (0:00).
48 Methodological nationalism afflicts recent South Asian intellectual history, such as that by Ananya Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). For two critiques focusing on the crippling nature of this nationalism, see Karuna Mantena, ‘The Ideas of Indians’, Caravan [http://www.caravanmagazine.in/books/ideas-indians, accessed 20 Oct. 2015]; and Neilesh Bose, ‘Hiding the Nation in the Global: Modern Intellectual History and South Asia’, in Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol. 15, no. 2 (2014) [http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth =0&type=summary&url=/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v015/15.2.bose.html, accessed 8 Aug. 2018].
49 For a popular history written along these lines, see Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals who Remade Asia (New York: Penguin, 2012).