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Abstract
Drawing on a new digital collection of oral interviews, this essay examines the place and meaning of the state in Bengali thought. In the immediate aftermath of decolonisation, East Bengal intellectuals, without substantial pre-engagement with the colonial state, favoured forms of political action or praxis that longed for a new state—a longing that culminated in the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. Intellectuals connected to West Bengal, already entrenched in their own economic and social multiverse, never entertained the idea of a new state outside India. Instead, a Foucauldian irreverence for the state and its elite became more dominant there, flourishing through Subaltern Studies. Despite these differences perceptible synergies in the Banglaphone thoughtscape took root in the 1980s that spoke to late Cold War anxieties about the future of participatory democracy and the public good. This convergence of thought across Bangladesh and West Bengal reflected the emergence of an intellectual who elided the notional boundaries of the post-colonial state, yet stood ambivalently before the crucible of neo-liberal temporality, exposing the limits of the discursive subject in the late twentieth-century Global South.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For background to and scope of the BIOHP, see Kris Manjapra, ‘Third World Humanities from South Asian Perspectives: An Oral History Approach’, in this issue: South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 41, no. 4 (2018), doi:10.1080/00856401.2018.1516174.
2. J.H. Broomfield, ‘Four Lives: History as Biography’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 1, no. 1 (1971), pp. 74–90.
3. Judith M. Brown, ‘“Life Histories” and the History of Modern South Asia’, in American Historical Review, Vol. 114, no. 3 (June 2009), pp. 587–95.
4. For a discussion of the discursive relationship between memory and historical reconstruction, see Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 66–154.
5. For details on praxis according to Herbert Marcuse, see Patrick Akard, ‘The “Theory–Praxis” Nexus in Marcuse’s Critical Theory’, in Dialectical Anthropology, Vol. 8, no. 3 (1983), pp. 207–15.
6. Interview with A.F. Salahuddin Ahmed, 22 July 2010, Banani, Dhaka (34:25).
7. Interview with Badruddin Umar, 25 Oct. 2009, Mirpur, Dhaka (49:02, 49:35).
8. Interview with Abdul Gaffar Choudhury, 4 June 2011, London.
9. Interview with Kamal Hossain, 19 Sept. 2010, Motijheel, Dhaka (21:10-23:33).
10. Ibid.
11. Interview with Sufia Ahmed, 23 Nov. 2009, Gulshan, Dhaka (46:09).
12. The concept of ‘two economies’ emphasised autonomous macro-economic structures for East and West Pakistan. For details, see Rehman Sobhan, From Two Economies to Two Nations: My Journey to Bangladesh (Dhaka: Daily Star Books, 2015).
13. Khawaja Nazimuddin, a Cambridge graduate and Pakistan’s second prime minister, was Rehman Sobhan’s great-uncle on his mother’s side, and Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, an Oxford graduate and the last chief minister of undivided Bengal and the fifth prime minister of Pakistan, was his uncle-in-law.
14. Interview with Rehman Sobhan, 1 Sept. 2010, Dhanmondi, Dhaka (13:33).
15. Interview with Rehman Sobhan (16:45).
16. Interview with Abdul Gaffar Choudhury (10:61).
17. Tariq Ali, Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State (London: The Chaucer Press Ltd, 1983), p. 80.
18. Interview with Kamal Hossain (1:55).
19. Ibid. (1:1, 1:4).
20. Ibid. (2:02).
21. Interview with Ahmed Kamal, 12 May 2012, University of Dhaka, Dhaka (10:07).
22. Interview with Kamal Hossain (1:51).
23. Ibid. (1:55).
24. For an account of the early post-colonial decades, see Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Decolonization in South Asia: Meanings of Freedom in Post-Independence West Bengal, 1947–52 (London/New York: Routledge, 2009).
25. Historian Tapan Raychaudhuri (1926–2014) observed that Nehru’s ‘weakness was on the welfare side. We expected that is where he would do the most, but there was too much on his plate and too many forces to take on. He dare not alienate everyone’: interview with Tapan Raychaudhuri, 19 June 2008, Oxford (35:38).
26. Amiya Kumar Bagchi, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
27. Interview with Amiya Kumar Bagchi, 11 Jan. 2010, Kolkata (29:05, 34:41, 39:04, 71:57, 78:44).
28. Interview with Partha Chatterjee, 15 Sept. 2012, Columbia University, New York (43:07).
29. Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2nd ed., 1970).
30. Interview with Amartya Sen, 1 Feb. 2010, Cambridge, MA, USA (49:23).
31. Interview with Barun De, 16 Dec. 2007 (75:53).
32. Interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty, 9 June 2014, Chicago, IL, USA (6:19; 34:04; 93:25).
33. Interview with Partha Chatterjee (66:59).
34. Interview with Ranajit Guha, 29 July 2009, Vienna, Austria (11:48).
35. Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2013).
36. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
37. Sugata Bose, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). See also Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
38. Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
39. See, for example, Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); and Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (London: Zed Books, 1984).
40. Interview with Partha Chatterjee (71:37).
41. For a note on industrial decline and the state of the political economy under communist rule in West Bengal, see Proshanta Nandi, ‘Communism through the Ballot Box: Over a Quarter Century of Uninterrupted Rule in West Bengal’, in Sociological Bulletin, Vol. 54, no. 2 (2005), pp. 171–94.
42. Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen, Statephobia and Civil Society: The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault (Stanford, CA: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 162.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., p. 161.
45. Interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty (102:54).
46. For a detailed exploration of the development and dynamics of civil society in Bangladesh, which represent an interesting case of a ‘strong society in a weak state’, see David Lewis, Politics, Economy and Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
47. To R.A. Longmire, FCO, London, 7 June 1971. SDC11280: Bangladesh: Situation and Option, DO142/414, p. 4, The National Archives, London. In his recently published autobiography, Rehman Sobhan suggests that this report was written with contributions from some Bangladeshis in Washington, DC, including Abul Maal Abdul Muhith, a writer and current finance minister of Bangladesh. See Rehman Sobhan, Untranquil Recollections: The Years of Fulfillment (New Delhi: Sage, 2016).
48. For a note on co-operative credit’s perceived role as a deterrent to nationalism and communism, see Iftekhar Iqbal, ‘Cooperative Movement in Bengal: A Study in Development and Decline’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 54, no. 2 (2017), pp. 232–4.
49. Muhammad Yunus (ed.), ‘Foreword’, in Jorimon of Beltoil Village and Others: In Search of a Future (Dhaka: Grameen Bank, 1984), p. 4.
50. Ibid., pp. 5–7.
51. For a critique of microfinance as an expanding tool of encroachment on human agency, especially that of women, see Lamia Karim, Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011).
52. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and Horizons of Politics’, in Environment and Urbanization, Vol. 13, no. 2 (Oct. 2001), pp. 23–43.