From the Destruction of the British Empire to Self-Destruction (Paperback)
Langue : anglais
Edité par Independently Published, 2026
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- Neuf
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Paperback. This book began with a table.I was looking, for a different purpose entirely, at a set of figures published in September 2024 by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, setting out the share of each Indian state in the national economy at intervals since 1960. West Bengal appeared twice. In 1960-61 it produced 10.5 per cent of India's output and stood third among the states, with a per capita income 27.5 per cent above the national average. In 2023-24 it produced 5.6 per cent, and its per capita income was 83.7 per cent of the national average.I had grown up knowing, in the vague way one knows such things, that Bengal had come down in the world. I had not known that it could be measured so exactly, or that the measurement was so brutal. A community does not often get to see its own decline expressed as a ratio.The obvious question is what happened. The less obvious question, and the one that turned a curiosity into four years of reading, is who did it.There are two established answers and both are unsatisfying. The first, which is the answer most Bengalis give, is that it was done to us: by partition, by Delhi, by freight equalisation, by the refugees we were left to absorb alone. The second, which is the answer most non-Bengalis give, is that we did it to ourselves: by strikes, by communism, by a horror of commerce, by talking instead of working. The first answer is a comfort and the second is an insult, and the reason neither is satisfying is that both are substantially true and neither can be held on its own.What I have tried to write is an account that holds both at once. It takes the external blows seriously, in detail, with the documents: the line drawn by a man who had never seen the country, the refugee policy that treated one border as a legal entitlement and the other as a discretionary favour, the freight policy that abolished a region's single advantage, the market that was severed and not replaced. And it takes the internal choices equally seriously: the preference for the salaried chair over the shop counter, the conversion of every institution into an arm of a political party, the decision to withhold a language from the children of the poor, and the settled conviction - held by every party that has ever governed West Bengal - that the state's condition is somebody else's fault.The title is not a flourish. The Bengali who reads it will recognise the image immediately. A broken spine does not kill. The person continues; he thinks, he talks, he writes beautifully; he cannot stand up and walk in the direction he chooses. That is what happened to this community, and the second half of the title is the part that took longest to be willing to write.A note on what this book is not. It is not a work of original archival research; I am not an archivist and I have relied throughout on the scholars who are, and I have tried to name them. It is not a political tract, though anyone reading it will be able to tell that I have opinions and I have not pretended otherwise. And it is not a lament. There are already enough of those in Bengali, most of them better written than anything I could manage, and the habit of producing exquisite literature about one's own suffering is itself part of what this book is about.Where sources disagree - and on the largest questions in this history, they disagree violently - I have set the competing figures side by side rather than choosing one and hoping the reader does not check. There are places in these pages where the range of credible estimates for the number of dead spans two orders of magnitude. That is not an evasion. It is the actual state of the evidence, and a history of this community that pretended otherwise would be repeating the vice it is describing. Rickbed NandiHowrah, West Bengal This item Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…
N° de réf. du vendeur 9798177544854
- Titre
- From the Destruction of the British Empire to Self-Destruction (Paperback)
- Auteur
- Rickbed Nandi
- Éditeur
- Independently Published
- Année de publication
- 2026
- État de l'article
- new
- Reliure
- Paperback
- Langue
- anglais
- ISBN à 13 chiffres
- 9798177544854
- Illustrateur
- Nandi, Rickbed
I was looking, for a different purpose entirely, at a set of figures published in September 2024 by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, setting out the share of each Indian state in the national economy at intervals since 1960. West Bengal appeared twice. In 1960–61 it produced 10.5 per cent of India's output and stood third among the states, with a per capita income 27.5 per cent above the national average. In 2023–24 it produced 5.6 per cent, and its per capita income was 83.7 per cent of the national average.
I had grown up knowing, in the vague way one knows such things, that Bengal had come down in the world. I had not known that it could be measured so exactly, or that the measurement was so brutal. A community does not often get to see its own decline expressed as a ratio.
The obvious question is what happened. The less obvious question, and the one that turned a curiosity into four years of reading, is who did it.
There are two established answers and both are unsatisfying. The first, which is the answer most Bengalis give, is that it was done to us: by partition, by Delhi, by freight equalisation, by the refugees we were left to absorb alone. The second, which is the answer most non-Bengalis give, is that we did it to ourselves: by strikes, by communism, by a horror of commerce, by talking instead of working. The first answer is a comfort and the second is an insult, and the reason neither is satisfying is that both are substantially true and neither can be held on its own.
What I have tried to write is an account that holds both at once. It takes the external blows seriously, in detail, with the documents: the line drawn by a man who had never seen the country, the refugee policy that treated one border as a legal entitlement and the other as a discretionary favour, the freight policy that abolished a region's single advantage, the market that was severed and not replaced. And it takes the internal choices equally seriously: the preference for the salaried chair over the shop counter, the conversion of every institution into an arm of a political party, the decision to withhold a language from the children of the poor, and the settled conviction — held by every party that has ever governed West Bengal — that the state's condition is somebody else's fault.
The title is not a flourish. The Bengali who reads it will recognise the image immediately. A broken spine does not kill. The person continues; he thinks, he talks, he writes beautifully; he cannot stand up and walk in the direction he chooses. That is what happened to this community, and the second half of the title is the part that took longest to be willing to write.
A note on what this book is not. It is not a work of original archival research; I am not an archivist and I have relied throughout on the scholars who are, and I have tried to name them. It is not a political tract, though anyone reading it will be able to tell that I have opinions and I have not pretended otherwise. And it is not a lament. There are already enough of those in Bengali, most of them better written than anything I could manage, and the habit of producing exquisite literature about one's own suffering is itself part of what this book is about.
Where sources disagree — and on the largest questions in this history, they disagree violently — I have set the competing figures side by side rather than choosing one and hoping the reader does not check. There are places in these pages where the range of credible estimates for the number of dead spans two orders of magnitude. That is not an evasion. It is the actual state of the evidence, and a history of this community that pretended otherwise would be repeating the vice it is describing.
Rickbed Nandi
Howrah, West Bengal
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