PROFESSOR Amiya Kumar Bagchi who passed away on Thursday the 28th of November was an outstanding economist and public intellectual of our time, who played a stellar role in exposing the operation of imperialism both historically and in the contemporary era.

Born in a village near Behrampore in Murshidabad district of West Bengal, he was a brilliant student who went to Cambridge University, UK, on a Government of West Bengal scholarship after his Masters in Economics at Presidency College Kolkata. At Cambridge he wrote a PhD thesis that carried forward the work of anti-colonial writers like Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chunder Dutt in tracing the roots of underdevelopment of the Indian economy to the impact of colonial rule. This thesis was subsequently developed into his classic work Private Investment in India 1900-1939. In it he showed that the introduction of “discriminating protection” by the colonial government in the inter-war period produced only a temporary spurt in private investment, after which it dwindled back into insignificance. This was because the Indian market itself was stagnant, since agriculture, the main source of income for the bulk of the population, was not growing at all, owing to the colonial government’s refusal to invest in irrigation and research on seed varieties and better agricultural practices. This niggardliness of the colonial government in turn, as Bagchi argued in a subsequent paper, was because of its insistence that government investment must earn at least 5 per cent rate of return, which it certainly could not in areas of permanent settlement like Bengal where the revenue was fixed in perpetuity, and not even in areas like the Madras Presidency where there were long-term revenue settlements though not in perpetuity.

His opus on Private Investment was followed by a definitive study that confirmed the reality of “deindustrialisation” of the Indian economy in the nineteenth century. He established this through a comparison of the detailed survey data collected by a Scottish doctor, Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, on the number of persons engaged in different economic activities in particular districts in Gangetic Bihar in the early nineteenth century, with Census data for the same districts a century later.

From examining imperialism in the Indian context he went on to study imperialism as a global phenomenon, and underscored its vastly different attitudes towards two different regions. There was, he argued, a basic difference between temperate regions of European settlement, like the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and colonies (and semi-colonies) located in tropical and subtropical regions of the world that were made subservient to the metropolis, like India, Indonesia and China. He established the proposition that the economic surplus extracted from the latter was used to invest in the former in order to bring about a massive diffusion of industrial capitalism from England, first to Europe and then to these regions of European settlement. The complement to the development of the former regions therefore was the underdevelopment of the latter.

The fact that both Australia and India were “colonies” but had divergent development trajectories had been used by defenders of imperialism to argue that colonialism as such could not be held responsible for impeding development, as Marxist writers like Paul Baran had suggested; Bagchi’s distinction between “regions of settlement” and “regions of exploitation”, going beyond the merely juridical category of “colonies”, countered this myth and vindicated Baran’s insight. He published this body of work in a number of articles and books, notably The Political Economy of Underdevelopment and Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital.

In an article on Lenin’s theory of imperialism, Bagchi critiqued the Kautskyan perception that “truce” between rival imperialist powers could usher in an era of world peace. This perception presumed that inter-imperialist conflicts were the only ones that produced wars in the era of imperialism, which was patently untrue. Apart from inter-imperialist wars, there were wars waged by imperialism against socialism, wars of national liberation, and revolutionary civil wars within imperialist countries; Kautsky had not considered these while envisaging the possibility of peace through imperialist truce.

Bagchi saw in neoliberalism an imperialist attempt to re-establish control over the territories that had been lost to it through decolonisation, and was among the earliest critics of the intellectual advocacy of neoliberalism. His review article of an OECD volume based on a set of country studies that made a case for neoliberalism which he titled “The Theory of Efficient Neo-colonialism” and which was published in the EPW long before the neoliberal regime became a reality in our country, was an early and highly perceptive warning.

Committed to the Left all his life, Bagchi spent several years working for the Left Front government in West Bengal, first as a member of the State Planning Board and later as its vice-chairman. He was so involved with the Left’s fortune that he would occasionally write to me with suggestions on what the Left should be doing, and I would pass these on to Comrade Sitaram Yechury, the Party’s General Secretary at the time. His wife, Jashodhara Bagchi, an extremely distinguished academic who taught English Literature at Jadavpur University, was also highly committed to the Left and served as the chairperson of the West Bengal State Women’s Commission under the Left Front government.

Amiya Bagchi was respected for his scholarship among economists and historians alike. He was  general president of the Indian History Congress at its 80th session and had visiting professorships, and honorary doctorates from, several universities of the world. He also held teaching positions at several universities and institutions: Cambridge University, UK; Presidency College Kolkata; Centre for the Study of Social Sciences, Calcutta (of which he later became director) and the Institute for Development Studies, Kolkata, of which he was the founder-director and where he remained as professor emeritus till his last days.

He loved Kolkata immensely and would not ever move out of that city for any length of time. It is for this reason that he did not accept professorships that had been offered to him by the Delhi School of Economics and by Jawaharlal Nehru University.

In Kolkata he taught legions of students who held him in great affection and admiration; this feeling was also shared by his numerous friends, contemporaries and colleagues, scattered all over the world. All of them will miss his warmth, generosity, immense scholarship, and passionate commitment to socialism. His passing is an immeasurable loss to the intellectual life of the country.