On a recent visit to Calcutta, a Cambridge-based Bengali friend felt that an obsession with money now dominates conversation among Bengalis in the city. The arrogance of having money has become as palpable as the anxiety of not having it. Meticulous scholarship on credit cards and stock markets shows up in social gatherings. This is scarcely the chatter she remembered from her college and university days in the city in the early 2000s. Whether or not this is true, what interests me more is the shock with which she described what she felt was an altered relationship between Bengalis and the unnameable — money.
“Bengali culture, as the cliché goes,” the economist, Abhijit Banerjee, writes in his intriguing new book on food, economics, and society, Chhaunk, “is more devoted to eating and travelling than to making money, in contrast particularly with the culture of the immigrants from western India, long settled in Bengal.” Banerjee touches on this tension as an aside to a fundamental debate among social scientists: does economics shape culture, or is it the other way around? Karl Marx famously upheld the former position while Max Weber, a believer in the latter, saw capitalism being shaped by the work ethic of Protestant Christianity. But for generations of Marxist thinkers, the material has shaped the abstraction of culture. Louis Althusser invoked the comment by the mathematician and Catholic theologian, Blaise Pascal: “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.” The opiate abstraction of religion is activated by the material movement of the body.
To say that the tension between culture and economics has shaped the Bengali character might just be breathing new life into the cliché. What is striking is how the tension has defined the intellectual sinews of several notable Bengali economists. These economists have deep interests in cultural phenomena, be it food, adda, or other fields of arts or the social sciences. For them, culture’s relationship with economics is by no means a one-way street. Marx’s insistence on the importance of material reality was a particular polemic against the abstraction of German idealism. And it was the realisation of the impact of material forces on history that turned another Bengali economist, Pranab Bardhan, to the study of economics. To admire Marxist history for him was to fall deep into economics.
“Although I remained an admirer of Marxist history (over time, with a growing list of important qualifications),” Bardhan writes in his delightful academic memoir, Charaiveti, “I soon realised that to delve into the materialist interpretation of history, I needed to understand the intricacies of economics – so that was how I gravitated to that subject.” A turn like this is uniquely symptomatic of the zeitgeist of Calcutta in the 1950s and the 1960s, when Bardhan was a student at Presidency College and at the University of Calcutta. The excitement around a Marxist worldview is obvious. But there is also a unique synergy between the fundamental epistemic modes of disciplines now held at a professional distance from each other. This is the committed polymath amateurism that I think is the hallmark of a certain generation of colonial and postcolonial intellectuals.
This also says much about how economics has changed as a discipline through these decades. Even at the time Bardhan was gravitating to economics, the discipline focused on philosophical issues like moral reasoning or communal ones like civic engagement; it was constituted much more like a discipline in the humanities or the qualitative social sciences. But economics has changed over the years and it no longer addresses those aspects of a liberal education shaped and driven by the humanities and the softer social sciences. It has hardened considerably. It is now preoccupied with questions that lend themselves to formal modelling and statistical testing, with randomised controlled trials invoking scientific positivism to the understanding of the vagaries of human behaviour, desires, and fears.
But the aesthetic aura around cultural phenomena, such as Banerjee’s response to food, has always drawn the fascination of these economists in a distinctive way. There is, of course, the Bengali obsession with food. It was the peculiar economic behaviour of food that first drew the attention of another notable Bengali economist to the invisible working of the discipline.
“The results of the Mohan Bagan v. East Bengal games,” Amartya Sen writes in his memoir, Home in the World, “had some evident economic consequences, including on the relative prices of different types of fish in Calcutta. Since most Ghotis like best a fish called ‘rui’ and Bangals from the east typically have deep loyalty to ‘ilish’, rui would tend to shoot up in price if Mohan Bagan won, leading to celebratory dinners by westerners; similarly, the price of ilish would leap up if East Bengal defeated Mohan Bagan. I did not know that I might someday specialize in economics (I was quite strongly hooked at that time on mathematics and physics, with only Sanskrit as a possible rival), but the elementary economics of a price rise due to a sudden hike in demand was immediately interesting. I even speculated on a primitive theory that this volatility should not in general be present, if the result of the game was firmly predictable. With predictability, the retail fish-sellers would increase the supply of the right kind of fish — anticipating the actual soccer result, and so the demand for the ‘right kind of fish’ would not really exceed the already expanded supply, and the price need not be hiked up. It was clear that the observed phenomena of the respective peaking in the price of rui or ilish depended on the unpredictability of the football results.”
The tension between culture and economics is a human phenomenon. But if Bengalis, such as my visiting friend, are particularly sensitive to this tension, it has ignited a unique intellectual energy in the work of these economists from Bengal. In their heightened awareness of this tension, Bengalis continue a classic Marxist debate in their hearts even when their conclusions depart from the economic determinism
of Marxism.
Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony
