From East Bengal to Britain: Where Sir Partha calls home
INFLUENTIAL ECONOMIST DASGUPTA LOOKS BACK AT HIS CHILDHOOD, MARRIAGE AND CAREER
SIR PARTHA DASGUPTA, one of Britain’s most respected and influential economists who will turn 80 in November, has given possibly his most detailed and intimate interview about his childhood years.
He also revealed how he met his wife, Carol – to whom he has now been married for 54 years – “on a train from Cambridge to London, the 16:36 to Liverpool Street, on April 16, 1966”.
Dasgupta, an academic based at Cambridge for many decades, was speaking to David Zilberman, from the University of California, Berkeley, for the Annual Review of Resource Economics 2022.
Zilberman described Dasgupta as “one of the most creative and significant economists of our time”. adding, “as a researcher, he has combined technical virtuosity with a social conscience and rich imagination to break new ground in different fields”.
He said: “Even more importantly perhaps, he has, in a steady stream of articles and books over the past four decades, reconstructed growth and development economics and the economics of poverty in a way that sees the human economy as embedded in nature, not as external to it.
“That body of work culminated in the launch at the Royal Society in February 2021 of his widely acclaimed treatise, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. The publication, an independent, global review, was commissioned by the UK government in spring 2019, and is due also to be published, with additional technical material for graduate students, by Cambridge University Press in early 2023.”
Recalling the meeting with the woman who would become his wife, Dasgupta said: “The compartment was nearly empty, and I found myself sitting opposite this young lady. I was going to London to break up with a girl I was going out with then. She was a wonderful person, but I knew it wouldn’t work.
“So, I asked the young lady sitting opposite me how I should broach the subject with my girlfriend. I don’t recall what she advised, but when we reached London, I said it would be absurd to simply walk away (we hadn’t even introduced ourselves) and asked her if we could go to a café to have a bite to eat. I didn’t know then that she was on her way to meet her boyfriend, but she said yes.
“We met the following weekend for a walk in the countryside near Cambridge, and I told her we would one day get married to each other. She replied, ‘we will see,’ which I took to mean ‘yes’.”
The couple were married two years later. “She had just turned 21 and I was 25 years old. It was unthinkable that we would live together before marrying; our parents would have been shocked… We have three children, two girls and a boy, all now grown up and with children of their own.
“One night, in 1989 if I remember correctly, in Stanford, I brooded about the peripatetic life I had led since childhood and felt desolate that I had no place I could call ‘home’. And then it struck me I was mistaking home for a place. That home for me was Carol. I have never again worried about the absence of a geographic root in my life.”
Dasgupta was born in the shadow of the partition of India, he revealed.
“I was born in November 1942 in Dacca, East Bengal, then in united India and now the capital city of Bangladesh and known as Dhaka.
“My maternal grandfather was manager of a jute mill in Dacca, which is where my mother was born. The family lived comfortably until the Great Depression, when the market for jute collapsed. My paternal grandfather was an employee in provincial government, residing in Bhanga, the district capital of Barisal, in the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta of East Bengal. My father was born there. My father’s mother was also from East Bengal.
“Barisal is an especially poor region. When my father was born, the family was financially impoverished, but had a long scholastic history.
“My mother graduated from Dacca University and married my father at the age of 22. She had a deep interest in both Bengali and English poetry….When I was growing up, she was wholly engaged in raising a family, managing our home, and looking after my father. I have an older sister, Alaknanda, who became a distinguished singer of north Indian classical music and subsequently a social historian, with a remarkable publication, in Bengali, on life among Bengali middle-class women in the first half of the 20th century.
“My father’s eldest brother, the head of the family once my grandfather had died, left his studies incomplete to support the extended family. He both encouraged and supported my father to study economics in college and subsequently in Dacca University. It is one of the under-appreciated nuances in the colonial relationship between India and England, that at the suggestion of the University’s vice-chancellor, Philip Hartog, my father was appointed lecturer in the Department of Economics even as he sat for the MA examination, in 1926. .
“He borrowed funds in 1934 to work toward a PhD (1934-1936) at the London School of Economics under the supervision of Lionel Robbins, and returned as unarguably the leading economic theorist in the Indian subcontinent... he remained a lecturer in Dacca University until 1946, which is when he accepted a senior lectureship at Delhi College …. It was a wise decision, most especially because India’s partition in 1947 was accompanied by extreme violence in Bengal.
“There were of course, communal tensions, including riots, even before 1947, but in Dacca we had remained safe, in part by the support and protection afforded to us by both Hindu and Muslim students.
“I was too young to feel our dislocation to Delhi, but I do remember we left Dacca hurriedly, with only our luggage and a few of my father’s books.
“In fact, that was pretty much all we possessed.
“I don’t believe the post at Delhi College suited my father, because in a few months we moved to Cuttack, Orissa. And it was only when we moved, in autumn 1947, to Banaras (now Varanasi), where my father was appointed professor of economics at Banaras Hindu University, that I began to live a settled life.
“When we moved from Banaras to Washington DC in December 1950, when I had just turned eight, I entered school properly; perhaps because school attendance was compulsory in the US.
“We moved to Washington DC because my father had been asked by India’s finance minister to serve as chief of the IMF’s South Asian Division.
“We were there for three years, the shortest tenure my father could have if he wanted to draw an IMF pension…. My memory of Washington is that we missed India for a brief while, but then grew to love the place. “I believe my sister made up her mind at age 14 to marry IG Patel, a young economist at the IMF and my father’s favourite there. In any event, they were married when she completed her university studies in India, in 1958. …He had a great influence on my social and political sensibilities.
“Leaving Washington in late 1953 was a wrench for me. My fondness for the US goes back to those years. Even now, when I arrive at the immigration counter of a US airport, I feel like I am returning home.”