RESEARCH UNIT FOR POLITICAL ECONOMY
Suniti Kumar Ghosh died on May 11, at the age of 96. It is not a passing to be mourned but a life, rich and meaningful, to be celebrated.
On the face of it, his life had two major phases: the first was one of direct political activity; the second was of research and writing.
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Thereafter began a second phase, in which he steadily and systematically worked, largely on his own, to produce a rich mine of literature: The Indian Big Bourgeoisie: Its Genesis, Growth and Character (1985, then revised and enlarged in 2000); India and the Raj 1919-1947: Glory, Shame and Bondage (vol. 1: 1989; vol. 2: RUPE, 1995; re-published as a single volume in 2007 by Sahitya Samsad); The Historic Turning-Point: A Liberation Anthology (in two vols., 1992 and 1993); The Tragic Partition of Bengal (2002); Naxalbari — Before and After: Reminiscences and Appraisal (2009). Apart from these, he published a number of shorter publications or booklets: Development Planning in India: Lumpendevelopment and Imperialism(RUPE, 1997, 2002); Imperialism’s Tightening Grip on Indian Agriculture (1998); India’s Constitution and Its Review (RUPE, 2001); The Himalayan Adventure: India-China War of 1962 — Causes and Consequences (RUPE, 2002); and India’s Nationality Problem and Ruling Classes (1996, RUPE 2013). He also wrote a number of articles, some of which were excerpts from forthcoming books; these he published in journals such as Aspects of India’s Economy, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Economic and Political Weekly, Frontier, Monthly Review, and Visvabharati Quarterly. (Of particular importance was an article of his in Monthly Review, “Marx on India” [January 1984], later incorporated in The Indian Big Bourgeoisie.) Apart from this we know there were writings in Bengali, such as The Political Economy of Bengal’s Dismemberment, but we do not have further information on them. He was writing as late as 2010, at the age of 92, after which his body simply prevented him from continuing.
… All these were aimed at explaining why the Indian people, despite their heroic efforts, are in their present misery — that is, not from the angle of merely interpreting the world, but of changing it. He wrote in the Preface to the second volume of India and the Raj:
Reviewing the first volume of this book, a professor teaching history at a university correctly referred to me as “not a trained historian”. But I hardly regret the fact, for if I had been what he calls a “trained historian”, I might have been one of his kind.
Like Jean Chesneaux, the French historian, I believe that history and historians are not above the class struggle. As he put it, “our knowledge of the past is a dynamic factor in the development of society, a significant stake in the political and ideological struggles of today, a sharply contested area. What we know of the past can be of service to the Establishment or to the people’s movement.” “In class societies”, he said, “history is one of the tools the ruling class uses to maintain its power. The state apparatus tries to control the past at the level of both political action and ideology.” “The revision of official history”, therefore, “is regarded as one of the essential points of departure for the people’s struggles.”