Tulika Books

This book reports findings from surveys conducted by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies’ Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI) in different agro-climatic regions in three villages in West Bengal in June–July 2010 and in May–June 2015. The villages studied were Panahar in the old alluvial region in Bankura district, Amarsinghi in new alluvial region in Malda district and Kalmandasguri in Terai region in Koch Behar district. The chapters in the book portray the production conditions, incomes, employment, poverty, and human development of rural households in West Bengal at an important juncture in the state’s development and political trajectory.

Published in association with Foundation for Agrarian Studies.

The journey of Ritwik Ghatak’s Nagarik from the shooting of the film to its release was an extremely chequered one. While it was shot in 1952, three years before Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, it was released only twenty-five years later, in 1977, after Ghatak’s death in 1976. Set in Calcutta in the immediate aftermath of the Partition, the film chronicles the struggles of a family from North Bengal as they desperately strive to survive in a metropolis that is unable to address the necessities of thousands of people pouring in from across the border. The protagonist Ramu, like hundreds of other young men, struggles to find that elusive job which will enable him to stabilize his disintegrating family. Unemployment, starvation, incessant dislocation, and the yearning for stability and a home mark the lives of the families in this film. While there is no explicit mention of the Partition, the circumstances, poverty, survival struggles, desperation, and the intense and desirous memory of a different past – all indicate that it is Partition that is the structuring absence of this film. Ghatak was to return to the theme in three other films that have been known as the Partition Trilogy: Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar and Subarnarekha. With this recreation of the screenplay of Nagarik, it will be clear that Ghatak’s Partition films, those that deal with the lives of refugees in Calcutta directly, or as in this one analogically, form a quartet and not a trilogy. Nagarik also represents an enticing historiographical idea, the ‘what if’ of Indian film history: perhaps if it had been released in 1952 when it was made, and before Pather Panchali, the accounts of Indian art cinema that have privileged the Ray film would have been different, and Ghatak may have been accepted as an important Indian auteur in his lifetime.

The screenplay of Nagarik in this volume has been recreated from the released version of the film on DVD and the published text of Nagarik by Ira Bhaskar and Rani Ray.

Social Scientist completed forty years of publication in the year 2012. To mark the occasion, collections of essays on specific topics, culled from past issues of the journal, are being published –under a series titled 'From the Pages of Social Scientist'.

The present book, Tributes, is a collection of obituary articles published in the journal from 1983 to 2013. For reasons that are not very clear, Social Scientist published no obituaries until 1983, that is, for the first eleven years of its existence. And even after it started publishing obituaries, it was not systematic in paying tribute to all those who deserved homage. Sometimes, those entrusted with the task of writing the obituary could not produce it in time; sometimes the lags in publication were such that an obituary seemed pointless as it would appear too long after the death of the person being remembered; sometimes there simply was nobody who could be successfully approached to write an obituary; and sometimes the person being remembered was too important a figure on the Left for a potential obituary writer to feel equal to the task.

The list of omissions is striking. There are, for instance, no obituaries on intellectual stalwarts of the Left political movement like B.T. Ranadive, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, P. Sundarayya and M. Basavapunnaiah. And the coverage of the lives of artists and creative writers has been generally very poor. The former set of omissions could be because potential authors thought that the task itself was quite daunting; the latter set of omissions could be because the number of persons capable of writing insightfully about such creative personalities was limited. The tributes collected in this book are also of very uneven lengths, scope and quality. Some, as in the case of Susobhan Sarkar, Ravinder Kumar and Kitty Menon, are long and wide-ranging, while others, even for persons of great importance for the Left, are extremely brief. Nonetheless, the volume, for all its omissions and oddities, celebrates the contributions of some of the most remarkable men and women who have shaped the life of this nation, or helped the formation of the Left intellectual tradition.

Historically, much of economic thought, especially until the 1960s, has been preoccupied with the central concerns of development economics. It is thus contemporary mainstream economics - dominated by those with a touching faith in the virtues and infallibility of the market - that emerges as almost exceptional when viewed in a longer-term perspective. Although economics has gone through many changes over the centuries, the original developmental concerns of economists have persisted until relatively recently - diminishing, ironically, only as development economics emerged as a sub-discipline in the post-war period.

This book reviews the history of economic thought to highlight these enduring developmental concerns in earlier economic discourses. This survey also shows that various schools of economic thought, over the years, have pointed to the role of the state in leading and coordinating economic transformation and progress. In the second half of the twentieth century, often static, abstract and formal approaches displaced historically informed and institutionally nuanced discourses. Thus, the narrow approaches of contemporary economics have marginalized greater appreciation of history and other social sciences.

In the first three chapters of the book, Erik and Sophus Reinert offer fascinating surveys of mercantilism, the Italian tradition associated with its city-states, and the later German economic tradition. Mushtaq Khan surveys the historical debate over capitalist transformation. Jaime Ros reviews the impact of modern growth theory on pioneering development economists, while Amitava Dutt considers the role of international trade in early development economics. Alfredo Saad-Filho assesses Latin American structuralism and dependency theory. Finally, Tamas Szentes discusses development in the history of economics.

Art as Witness is a cluster of barbed writings and biting images from the underbelly of turbulent India and its neighboring countries. Relying on the sustained work of eminent photographers and artists on rights issues in and around South Asia, and on writings by courageous activists, lawyers, journalists, and social scientists, the book focuses on the terror unleashed by armies, states, and courts of law, and tells the stories of brave survivors. Here, text and image are strained to their limits to convey the hopes and anguish of prisoners, death-row victims, murder-victim families, families of missing people, populations living under martial law, and displaced communities, in a world where democratic rights and freedoms are shrinking every day.

Based on Amnesty International India's 'Art for Activism' project, this book hopes to strengthen global campaigns for a world without fear and torture, a world without death penalty, or disappearances and custodial violence. It hopes to reach out to a wider and more diverse readership/viewership through its parallel narrative of images as visual testimonies, and spillover references to the popular worlds of cinema, music, slogan, and performance.

This is the first in the series of volumes on Modern Indian Thinkers which are being brought out by Social Scientist and Tulika Books. It is an examination of Professor Irfan Habib's work in different areas and an attempt to capture the totality of his thought. The 'Modern Indian Thinkers' series seeks to celebrate those who have blazed new trails and produced new ideas outside the beaten track which serve to carry forward India's social revolution. It is only appropriate that Professor Irfan Habib should be among the first to be celebrated as such a thinker.

The essays in this volume are quite heterogeneous: some are in the nature of surveys of particular areas of Professor Habib's work, some critically examine his positions, some elaborate upon his ideas and some carry his ideas forward. To familiarize the reader with Professor Habib's overall intellectual project, there is an exhaustive interview with him, in which he dwells upon a whole range of themes: from Mughal India to the freedom struggle to the problems of the Communist movement. And to give brief introductions to his seminal works, there are not only articles by particular authors, but also some book reviews that were published at the time his books came out. The fact remains, however, that the essays put together in the present volume only unlock this or that gate to the field of Professor Habib's writings, and the reader will have to make his or her own way through this field. But it is a journey we would like to invite the reader to undertake.

The global crisis that broke out in 2008 raised many fundamental questions about the present economic order. This collection of articles from authors who include some of India's leading economic historians consists of studies in the growth of capitalism, the impact of colonialism, and the implications of the current phase of globalization for India and the world.

The contributors to this volume are: Irfan Habib, Utsa Patnaik, B. Surendra Rao, Raj Shekhar Basu, Sanjukta Das Gupta, Arun Bandopadhyay, Amar Farooqui, Prabhat Patnaik, Vamsi Vakulabharanam, Jayati Ghosh, and Shireen Moosvi, who has also edited the volume.

From an occasionally employed, lower middle-class Bengali Muslim intellectual on the borderline of starvation in the city, he was to become 'the chief accused' at the Meerut communist trials started by the colonial government in 1929. What was the road travelled before challenging imperialism 'from the dock'? In 1913, Muzaffar Ahmad (1889-1973) was just one more in the sea of migrants to Calcutta. His ambition was to be a writer. Yet in the vortex of metropolitan upheaval his life would take a completely different turn.

Taking Muzaffar Ahmad's early career (1913-1929) as its chronological frame, this book examines the dialectical interplay between his social being and the wider social consciousness which made him arrive at communism, in vital conjunction with the sources of self transformation in the city. 1929 marked the end of the first phase in his political life as a pioneer of the communist movement as it had emerged in Bengal and India of the 1920s. This was the year when leading communists were arrested and the Meerut trials began. The biographical details of Muzaffar Ahmad between 1913 and 1929 converged with a significant phase in the social and political history of India and the world. These years can also be read as two crisis-points in the history of imperialism and capitalism: 1913, the eve of the First World War, and 1929, the year of the Wall Street Crash which set off the Great Depression; a period within which socialist ideas and communist activity became politically familiar in different parts of the globe. Many socially alienated, economically distressed and politically dissatisfied urban intellectuals stood at the crossroads of established and radical identity-formations. A 'fraction' emerged, informed by working class protest from below, and the leftward turn in literary and cultural fields. They were moving away from the more established political routes open to those from their social background to combat colonialism, and identifying with a more radical vision of decolonization. The little investigated history of the left in Bengal before the Meerut trials, and the convergences between individual radicalization and a new political space in the city are unraveled by tracing this process, in the context of colonial Calcutta and through Muzaffar Ahmad's transitions. This monograph will interest those engaged with the histories of communism, port-cities, Bengal Muslims, workers, intellectuals, migration, colonial intelligence, and internationalist currents.

dates.sites presents a timeline of the city of Bombay/Mumbai in the 20th century, anchored to its most adored public institution: cinema. Why this timeline when it is now generally accepted that dates are rigid and memories porous – and that the latter needs to be prioritized over the former? How does one create a timeline that is neither cast in stone nor vulnerable to the charge of 'manufacturing a past'? How does one evolve a timeline for a geographically defined entity in the context of its popular cultures that are defined by specific processes of production and distribution? These were some of the challenges that confronted the making of this volume.

The volume is divided into sections by decades, and the decades in turn are separated by a series of calendars designed by artists, filmmakers, and designers. The text is a stitching together of found information and received knowledge from formal/informal, acknowledged/discarded sources. It is layered with images from either the public domain or personal archives. The relationship between text and image, far from being umbilical, is playfully associative. Just as contemporary readings are incorporated with dated markers in the written text, in the image text too, contemporary works are inserted alongside period images –and these incorporations and insertions appear with detectable joint-marks, in order to snap the spell of 'snippets from the past'. dates.sites thus becomes a deliberation on the contemporary with the aid of a speculated upon and collated past.

Written during a period of tumult and gestation in India's history, the essays in this book provide an intellectual's serious commentary on nascent nationhood. What makes this collection interesting is not just its historical value, but also its very evident contemporary relevance. Rare is the mind that can look critically at the present and read available signs to organize and project a picture of the future. Rarer still is the ability to pinpoint the exact issues that will define the grounds of national debate over the next half century. Written during the 1930s and 40s, these essays view problems of communal division, economic disparity, social injustice, neocolonialism, and disunity in the Left with both an intellectual and a human eye. Mukerji sets forth a new kind of humanism, reflecting an understanding of troubled times and indicating ways of possible resolution.

Dhurjati Prasad Mukerji (1894–1961) was a major social scientist. He was professor of economics and sociology at Lucknow University from 1949 to 1954 (having started teaching there in 1922), and then professor of economics at Aligarh Muslim University from 1954 to 1959. A man of great erudition, his interests were so wide-ranging that he might have said, with Bacon, 'I have taken all knowledge to be my province.' Apart from being a social scientist, Mukerji was a novelist, essayist, and critic of note in his mother tongue, Bengali. He was a connoisseur of the arts, especially of music, on which he wrote several books, one co-authored with Tagore. His other publications include Personality and the Social Sciences, Basic Concepts in Sociology, Modern Indian Culture, and Diversities.

Social Scientist completed forty years of publication in the year 2012. To mark this occasion, it is planned to bring out a number of volumes containing articles on specific themes from past issues of the journal. The present book is a part of this series. It contains a set of thirteen essays written by Professor Venkatesh Athreya (under the pseudonym A.V. Balu) to provide readers with an introduction to Marxian political economy, which were published in issues of Social Scientist during the years 1976–78. They are mainly concerned with Volume I of Karl Marx's Capital, with a focus on the origin of surplus value which is the key to the anatomy of capitalism.

These essays had attracted wide attention at the time they were published, and were used extensively in Marx study circles all over the country. What distinguished them was the fact that they were authored by an outstanding professional economist, familiar with frontier research not only in Marxist economics but in bourgeois economics as well, and with a rare mastery over mathematical and statistical techniques. They were therefore written with a panache and sureness of touch that one often finds lacking in standard textbooks.

Since the 1970s, when these essays were written, there have been dramatic changes in the world capitalist system which are of far- reaching economic, political and ideological significance. However, they are being presented in this book exactly as they were when first published. The central reason for this is that they did not deal with capitalism as it existed at the time they were written, except for passing references. Instead, they are an exposition of Marx's ideas as presented in Volume I of Capital, intended for lay readers and students with an inclination to analytical thinking as well as interest in progressive thought. The book does, however, include an introduction by the author explaining the changed context.

Karl Marx's articles in the New York Daily Tribune constitute a separate genre among his works, being originally published in English and based on events in various countries in the world. There is no doubt that the work Marx undertook for his Tribune articles not only influenced his later theoretical work (one major result being his incorporation of colonialism as a factor in the genesis and expansion of capitalism), but also gave him an opportunity to apply the general principles of his method of historical materialism to the study of complex circumstances prevalent in different parts of the world. The perception of pre-colonial and colonial India that he put forth in the Tribune is a classic product of such application. The sheer boldness of Marx's explanation of India's pre-colonial 'non-history'; the remarkable insight into the nature of colonial rule which made it so different from all previous conquests of the country; the lucidity of the exposition of the dialectics of colonial impact; the passionate sympathy for the suffering of the Indians, and, at the same time, the utterly dispassionate account of the historical course that opened up before the country, entirely independent of the will and consciousness of the colonial rulers themselves; all these combine to make the Tribune set of articles a real classic on Indian history.

Iqbal Husain has established the text of Marx's articles from the original files of the newspaper in which they appeared. He has also collected the extracts relating to India from the Marx–Engels correspondence during the period of the articles. Prabhat Patnaik has written a special Appreciation of what Marx's articles on India add to our understanding of his ideas and approach.

The fifty-one essays compiled in this book were written over a forty-year period by India's leading independent filmmaker. They provide new insights into a turbulent era in modern India's cultural history.

Although known primarily as a filmmaker, Kumar Shahani has taught, spoken and written on a variety of subjects over this period, that include the cinema, but also politics, aesthetics, history and psychoanalysis. In these essays Shahani addresses diverse political issues, aesthetic practice, questions of artistic freedom and censorship. There are also personal essays on filmmakers and artists including his teachers and colleagues. Shahani's often polemical positions, as they occur in several previously unpublished essays and presentations, are essential contributions to film and cultural histories of the Indian cinema as well as of the New Cinema worldwide.

The book includes a comprehensive introductory essay, "Kumar Shahani Now," by Ashish Rajadhyaksha.

Khwaja Ahmad Abbas distinguished himself by his ceaseless passion for revolutionary politics, which he expressed through his writings and films. He was a visionary who strongly believed that creative and artistic interventions are indispensable to nation-building. Bread Beauty Revolution, spanning the years 1914 to 1987, encapsulates Abbas's work, ideas, and ideals. It also provides an insight into the beginnings of modern India. The volume encapsulates 74 books, 40 films, 89 short stories and 3,000 pieces of journalistic writing byAbbas. His work flows in three languages – Urdu, Hindi, and English – and he translated his own writings freely from one language to another.

The volume is in ten parts: (i) 'Abraham and Son', about Abbas's birth and upbringing; (ii) 'I Write as I Feel', which includes Abbas's first and best known short story 'Ababeel' (Sparrows), the story of Abbas's struggle after the publication of his short story 'Meri Maut' (also called 'Sardarji'), and Mulk Raj Anand's letter celebrating his literary genius; (iii) 'My First Love Affair', on his lifelong relationship with and unabashed admiration for Jawaharlal Nehru; (iv) 'Naya Sansar', the witnessing of the birth of an independent India; (v) 'Dharti ke Lal', recounting Abbas's love–hate relationship with the Left movement of which he was an outspoken advocate as well as fearless critic, his account of the birth of IPTA, writing the play Zubaidah and being invited to make the film Dharti ke Lal; (vi) 'Bambai Raat ki Bahon Mein', about another love that gripped his mind and soul, the Indian film industry; (vii) 'Reminiscences', containing personal accounts by people whose lives Abbas influenced, as well as a short story by him, 'Achchan ka Aashiq' (Achchan's Lover); (viii) 'Jagte Raho', an account of Abbas's fight against the censorship imposed on his film Char Shehar Ek Kahani (Four Cities, One Story), 1968, which led to the famous case, K.A. Abbas versus the Union of India, and the landmark judgment in his favour holding that pre-censorship of cinema was a violation of freedom of expression; (ix) 'Ek Aadmi', Abbas's 'beginning' as well as his 'end': his review of Shantaram's film Aadmi which brought him to the film world, and Ek Aadmi, his last film, which had a posthumous birth; andfinally, (x) 'Rahi', named after the eponymous movie Abbas made in 1953 about tea garden workers.

In November 2014, representatives from over 170 governments, together with leaders of inter-governmental organizations and civil society – including non-governmental organizations, researchers, the private sector, and consumer representatives – converged in Rome for the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2). ICN2 was organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to mobilize and unite the international community for the protracted struggle against malnutrition. The conference and its preparatory process provided a forum in which the world community, led by governments, affirmed its shared commitment to eradicating malnutrition by adopting the Rome Declaration and reaching agreement on a comprehensive, harmonized Framework for Action.

Ending Malnutrition: From Commitment to Action aims to make available the insights and judgments that emerged from ICN2 to practitioners across the world. It begins with a review of current evidence on the prevalence and incidence of malnutrition across the globe. It then presents analyses of the most salient policy issues to be confronted in a concerted global effort to end malnutrition: strengthening food systems as the core of a sustainable nutrition strategy; promoting social protection to address underlying inequities as well as immediate needs that contribute to malnutrition; using fortification and supplementation, especially, to address micronutrient deficiencies; and ensuring improved access to water and sanitation for an effective nutrition strategy. A concluding chapter focuses on the indispensable role that multilateral institutions can play in accelerating and sustaining global momentum on nutrition, and to secure a place for nutrition at the forefront of the post-2015 sustainable development agenda. Throughout, the emphasis is on practical steps that can be taken by governments and their partners to end malnutrition in all its forms.

The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi on 30 January 1948 was a declaration of war and a statement of intent. For the forces who conspired in the killing, the act was a declaration of war with the secular, democratic Indian state and all those who stood to affirm these principles, as well as an announcement of a lasting commitment to India as a 'Hindu Rashtra'. It was also an act to signal the elimination of all that India's national movement against imperialism stood for. Beyond Doubt is a dossier of historical and critical documents that aims to contextualize the politics, motivations and circumstances behind the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Attempts to legitimize the act of killing and to celebrate the killers have re-doubled since May 2014, following the coming to power of the new regime in New Delhi. The time is right, therefore, to set the record straight.

The visceral hatred directed against Gandhi and the denigration of everything he stood for need to be recounted if we are to understand the political nature of that dastardly act. This book attempts to weave together archival documents from Government of India records relating to developments after the assassination, with translation of works in Marathi, Gujarati, and Hindi deconstructing the ideology responsible for the political killing. While several of the documents have appeared before in issues of Communalism Combat, this compilation presents new material on the subject. The first English translation of Jagan Phadnis's book, Mahatmyache Akher, forms part of the dossier, as do Y.D. Phadke's analysis of attempts to legitimize Gandhi's killing and Chunibhai Vaidya's analysis of Pradeep Dalvi's play on Godse. It also covers the recent controversy over the destruction of files relating to Gandhi's assassination by Government of India. A second volume of this dossier will bring to readers the Report of the Justice Kapur Commission, constituted to investigate the Gandhi assassination, with a detailed introduction and notes.

This book covers the whole range of technology, from the tools and skills of ordinary men and women to the instruments of astronomers and the equipage and weaponry of war. Changes in technology are carefully traced and their consequences examined. Larger questions, such as those of constraints on technological development and the role of the social and economic environment, are also addressed. This volume, in line with the others of A People's History of India, gives several extracts from texts, containing significant information about specific aspects of pre-modern technology. There are special notes on technical terms, sources of the history of technology, the problem of invention versus diffusion, and the development of medieval technology outside India. It includes illustrations taken from medieval sculpture, painting and book-illustrations.

The volume is addressed to the general reader as well as the student, who would like to read about something on which conventional textbooks have little to offer. A special effort is made to keep the style non-technical without loss of accuracy. It is hoped that the theme is sufficiently interesting not only for the historian but for any citizen wanting to know what common people, men and women, did with their hands and tools in earlier times.

The discipline of history in India is under attack—not only from those who adopt a pseudo-historical mode to popularize a mythical version of the past colored with their ill-concealed political objectives, but also from those who, posing methodological challenges through unbridled theoretical relativism emphasizing cultural specificity and difference, end up reorientalizing the Orientals. What is left unquestioned in both approaches is the hegemony of forms of thinking which underlie social and economic inequalities in the present.

This book is a collection of essays – both published and unpublished – about the creation of Brahmanical hegemony through the institutions of caste, gender, and religious ideology in the history of early India. The essays focus on the role played by religion and mythology in the making of this hegemony. The studies in this book argue that myths reveal the stories of domination and resistance if we give attention to the process of their production and not take them as factual historical narratives. The idea is not to dismiss myths as false, distorted, or bad history but to examine the kind of reality they represent, to delve into the dynamics of their formation and their impact, and account for elements of continuity and change in them. Pursuing this line of argument, these essays build on the author's earlier classic study, The Origin and Development of Vaishnavism.

The book has three thematic divisions: studies on caste-related social differentiation drawing on the sources for the history, society, and polity of early India as well as reviewing the work of R.S. Sharma, the eminent historian of the period; studies about the gendered development of Brahmanical hegemony; and studies on the historical valences of the various mythological incarnations in Vaishnava theology: Rama, Narasimha, and Hayagriva.

This volume is devoted to the economic and social history of India from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. The book consists of three long chapters, divided into numerous subchapters. The first chapter describes the agrarian order during the main period of the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1398), while the second chapter delves into the urban economy and trading world of the same period. The third chapter deals with the fifteenth century, 1398–1526, a period of political divisions. While describing the economy and social structure in north India during the century, the chapter pays special attention to conditions in the Vijayanagara empire, which flourished during this period in south India.

A special feature of the volume, as with others in the series, is the inclusion of long extracts from sources and technical and bibliographical notes appended to each chapter.

Born in 1945 in Odisha, India, to parents who were deeply committed to the Communist cause as members of the Communist Party of India, Patnaik is one of the most outstanding economists of his generation and a leading Marxist theoretician in the world today. Through his work as an academic, he has contributed immensely to developing a theoretical understanding of India's economy and society, and the tactics and strategy needed to change it in a socialist direction. Patnaik is better known as a leading theoretician of the Left who has kept alive the need for advancing theory to support the struggle for an alternative society. He put into practice his ideas as a heterodox economist when he successfully served as Vice-Chairman of the Kerala State Planning Board under the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala from June 2006 to July 2011.

Prabhat Patnaik's academic insights and strong political commitment have stimulated intellectual activity and inspired personal regard across a multitude of people from all walks of life. Versatile in his knowledge and mastery of different schools of thought but unflinching in his commitment to the use and extension of a Marxist approach, he has influenced several generations of social scientists through his extensive writing, his contributions to academic discourse, and his life as a tireless public intellectual. This volume brings together contributions from some who have benefited from interaction with him over decades, in a tribute and continuing conversation.

There is no area in the agrarian history of eastern India that Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri has not traversed. His journey began with his 1956 contribution in Bengal Past and Present, on "Some Problems of the Peasantry of Bengal after the Permanent Settlement." His extensive opus surveys the agrarian economy of eastern India and all its protagonists: peasant households, zamindars and the state, non-peasant rural agents such as moneylenders, affluent landholders, farmers, and agrarian intermediaries (jotedars), all of whom played their decisive role in the rural agrarian structure of eastern India. His later research explored the impact of colonial rule on tribes and forest dwellers, who were in the process of transition to quasi-peasant communities by the middle of the twentieth century. In his pioneering work, The Growth of Commercial Agriculture in Bengal: 1757–1957, which developed out of his doctoral thesis, Chaudhuri discussed the two important phenomena that shaped the contours of the agrarian economy of Bengal—first, the demographic factor, namely population growth, combined with a simultaneous growth of agricultural production; second, the role of external demand that determined peasant production for the market. He placed value, additionally, on factors such as climate change, natural disasters, and political instability arising out of war and invasions, which affected agricultural production in India.

It is difficult to do justice to B. B. Chaudhuri's academic work given its depth and range. An inadequate attempt is made here under four broad heads: (i) his concept of the peasantry; (ii) the growth of commercial agriculture in eastern India; (iii) the process of 'depeasantization' by which small and marginal peasants gradually lost their land and turned into sharecroppers or hired labor; and finally, (iv) the more or less forcible induction of a large number of tribes and forest dwellers into settled agriculture, resulting in spates of rebellion. The essays in this volume are on diverse themes. A number are on different aspects of the agrarian world, the major subject of Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri's academic research. Many other papers discuss aspects of social and cultural history, which have always interested and inspired Prof. Chaudhuri. There are three essays on Rabindranath Tagore, the towering figure he venerates like most intellectuals of his generation from Bengal, and with whom he also happens to share his own birthday.