Bengal Communities, Development and States

The papers in this book show that the state intervenes in the development process according to its own predilections, depending on the interests and views of those who dominate the state. Ruling elites may have different priorities, as is revealed very clearly in the different policies adopted in Bengal under the colonial state, the state of Pakistan, the state of Bangladesh and the Left Front government of West Bengal. These policies had a differential impact on various communities, Hindus and Muslims, higher castes and lower castes, Bengalis and non-Bengalis and often on different sections within each community. The contributions in this volume share a concern with state intervention and its effects on community formation in Bengal. It also contains essays which address those problems from a development perspective.

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is Director of the New Zealand India Research Institute and Professor of Asian History at Victoria University of Wellington, where he has been teaching since 1992. His academic specialisation is in social and political history of modern India. He has also written on the Indian diaspora and India-New Zealand relations in historical times.

Abhijit Dasgupta teaches sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. He is the author of Growth with Equity (1998).

Willem van Schendel is Professor of Comparative History at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Besides contributing articles to various journals and edited collections, he has previously written Peasant Mobility; The Odds of Life in Rural Bangladesh and Three Deltas; Accumulation and Poverty in Rural Burma, Bengal and South India.