Pranab Bardhan’s ‘Charaiveti’: Musings of an academician

Sandeep Dikshit

Though a memoir by a development economist and social scientist, the book’s title may not prompt impulsive, off-the-shelf purchase. It would be better to tabulate what the book is not about. As Pranab Bardhan says, ‘Charaiveti’ is not a biography but more of an academic’s quasi-memoir, with a special effort to keep the interest of non-academic readers alive with a profusion of stories and anecdotes, each of the latter leaving a chuckle behind.

Bardhan may perhaps have borrowed the technique of keeping social commentary to the foreground to keep students engaged in his lectures. On a field trip in the plantations of Kerala spread over undulating hills, he would notice a strange division of sexes when the sirens went off at 5 pm, signalling the close of work. One unending stream of women would head downhill in the direction of their homes and another, entirely of men, in the direction of toddy shops!

The economist, unlike many of his ilk, did not start out from a privileged home. His overcrowded house, with no running water, situated in a filth-strewn Calcutta lane represented and still represents the way most of urban India lives.

The setting where poverty degrades and endows its residents with supernatural canniness to survive awakens him to the actual micro politics that hums through the neighbourhoods — the mastans (musclemen) who run all rackets from prostitution to betting and are connected via an intricate chain to politicians, first of the right and then of the left. The four chapters of Bardhan’s coming-of-age span India, the US and London, but never does the narration flag, become tendentious or self-obsessed.

This movement across three continents in just his student life is what gives the title of the book — ‘Charaiveti’ in Sanskrit means ‘to keep moving’. And Bardhan has moved. In Geneva for a mind-storming session one day, back to Berkeley, off to India again. It is not for nothing that he accumulated three lakh frequent flyer miles on one airline alone.

But Bardhan never lost sight of his roots. He wonders about the contradiction between cleanliness inside Indian homes versus the squalor outside which, he is convinced, a bit of community work would have set right. Fittingly, his first book on the problem of collective action being at the heart of India’s socio-political problems has been his most cited work by social scientists and his contribution to the invention of modern development micro theory acknowledged by all.

This halo sits lightly on Bardhan. As he flitted between world’s metropolises, much like the two different streams of men and women coming down from Kerala plantations, his keen eye picks up the changes that have occurred. London’s character has changed, for instance. It has become more boisterous. He wonders whether it is because from being once the capital of a plundering empire, London has now become the laundromat for the world’s corrupt money.

His early days of poverty, growing up in Calcutta where red was the dominant colour and association with liberal economists do not make him, or perhaps avoided making him, a woolly-headed woke, many of whom flit through his book in delightful chapters on the humaneness of academic greats and the all-too-humane bitching in the faculties of hallowed temples of learning of the West and India. And crucially, in an era where the Centre is mangling academic institutions as per its ideological preferences, Bardhan saw it happening earlier in West Bengal with the advent of the Left. Which is why we need to heed his ruminations on how world-class universities elsewhere have managed institutional insulation from the political process and thereby promoted academic excellence.