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By:

Kiran D. Tare

21 August 2024 at 11:23:13 am

Bengal’s Ludwig Erhard

For decades, Swapan Dasgupta made a career of diagnosing India’s political ailments. As a columnist, editor, author and public intellectual, the erudite and scintillating Dasgupta dissected challenged orthodoxies and defended the intellectual traditions of the Indian Right. However, following his new appointment as the new Finance Minister of a West Bengal in economic doldrums, he perhaps faces the most demanding assignment of his career. His supporters however are confident that if there is...

Bengal’s Ludwig Erhard

For decades, Swapan Dasgupta made a career of diagnosing India’s political ailments. As a columnist, editor, author and public intellectual, the erudite and scintillating Dasgupta dissected challenged orthodoxies and defended the intellectual traditions of the Indian Right. However, following his new appointment as the new Finance Minister of a West Bengal in economic doldrums, he perhaps faces the most demanding assignment of his career. His supporters however are confident that if there is anyone most suited to sort out Bengal’s messy economy, it is Dasgupta. His appointment following the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ascent to power in Bengal after overthrowing Mamata Banerjee’s TMC regime is among the more intriguing political transitions in recent Indian political memory. India has seen journalists cross into politics before. M.J. Akbar moved from the newsroom to the Ministry of External Affairs. Arun Shourie, one of India’s most formidable investigative journalists, became a reform-minded minister in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government. Others, from Manish Sisodia to Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi and Chandan Mitra, have made similar journeys. Yet Dasgupta’s case is distinctive. Unlike many journalists-turned-politicians, he was never merely a ‘reporter.’ Whether in debate or through his prolific and trenchant writings, he has always been an intellectual combatant, a scholar of political ideas with a sweeping knowledge of world history by which he leavens those ideas. Dasgupta has always been one of the most articulate exponents of modern Indian conservatism. Educated at La Martiniere College in Kolkata, St Stephen’s College in Delhi and later the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he earned a doctorate, Dasgupta cultivated a reputation for formidable scholarship. His books, including Awakening Bharat Mata: The Political Beliefs of the Indian Right and The Ayodhya Reference, revealed an uncommon ability to place contemporary political disputes within a broader historical and ideological framework. For his supporters, he was among the few intellectuals capable of articulating conservative ideas in a language usually dominated by the Left. To critics, he was a sophisticated polemicist. Yet, even his opponents seldom questioned the breadth of his reading or the sharpness of his arguments. However, the challenge facing Dasgupta now is no longer intellectual but administrative. The Bengal he inherits bears little resemblance to the state that once led India in industry, commerce and scientific innovation. As he himself quipped in trademark fashion with a sharp historical analogy, the state’s economy resembled postwar Germany. The figures are sobering. West Bengal’s state debt has ballooned to around Rs. 8 lakh crore during the TMC regime. Thousands of companies have relocated or curtailed operations over the years amid a hostile investment climate. The new BJP government has inherited not merely a fiscal challenge but a crisis of confidence. “We are left with a near-bankrupt treasury,” Dasgupta said. Equally troubling, in his view, is the erosion of trust among investors and entrepreneurs. Bengal’s relationship with business has been uneasy to say the least. First the long night of the Left, followed by the TMC’s anti-business, appeasement brand of politics has ensured that the scars of industrial disputes and land controversies remain fresh. In this dire situation, reviving private investment will require convincing businesses that Bengal has changed. In this respect, Dasgupta’s strengths may prove unexpectedly useful. Throughout his career he displayed an ability to engage with ideas, institutions and stakeholders across ideological divides. His early moves hint at a broader vision. Rather than confining pre-budget consultations to Kolkata, Dasgupta shifted the Finance Department’s attention to Siliguri in a moved suffused with deliberate symbolism. North Bengal has long complained of neglect by governments centred on the state’s southern districts. By engaging tea producers, agricultural interests, tourism operators and local business groups, the newly-minted finance minister appears eager to demonstrate that economic revival will not just be a Kolkata-centric project. That said, debt servicing consumes a substantial portion of state revenues. Welfare commitments are politically difficult to unwind and infrastructure deficits remain significant. While public intellectuals excel at identifying problems, governing demands compromises and the acceptance of imperfect solutions. Still, Bengal’s new finance minister possesses as fine an appreciation of history than any Indian politician around. He knows that states decline not just because economic mistakes but because they lose faith in their future. Restoring that confidence may be the central task of his tenure. For years Swapan Dasgupta chronicled India’s political story from the sidelines. Now he finds himself at the centre of one of its most consequential state-level experiments. Whatever the outcome of his tenure, few would deny that Bengal’s finances have acquired perhaps their most learned custodian in decades.

Golden Voice

The passing away of Asha Bhosle feels less like the death of a singer and more like the silencing of an entire sensibility. For nearly eight decades, she was not merely a voice behind the screen but the sound of Indian cinema learning to be bold, expressive, irreverent and when it wished, delightfully unruly.


Born into the formidable Mangeshkar family, the younger sister of Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle was destined for music but not for imitation. Where Lata Didi embodied a near-divine purity, being the nation’s conscience set to tune, Asha Tai became its alter ego: playful, sensuous, restless and daring. Together, the sisters defined the golden age of Bollywood playback singing.


It is tempting and lazy to frame Asha Bhosle as the ‘other’ sister. Yet her genius lay precisely in refusing such a hierarchy. If Lata was the nightingale, Asha was the jazz improviser who was willing to bend rules, borrow from the West, and infuse Hindi film music with cabaret, pop and a certain urban irreverence. From smoky nightclub numbers to aching ghazals, her voice could inhabit characters that Hindi cinema itself was only just learning to write.


Her catalogue, which runs into the tens of thousands of songs across languages, was a veritable parallel archive of post-Independence Indian music. She sang for heroines who ached, wept, vamped, seduced and survived. In doing so, she lent legitimacy to emotions that polite society often preferred to keep offstage.


Her life, too, resisted neat composition. A teenage elopement, a troubled marriage, years of financial struggle and single parenthood were formative movements. Thrown out of her marital home, she returned to her family not as a prodigy but as a provider, singing to sustain three children while rebuilding a career. That she emerged not diminished but emboldened says much about the steel beneath the silk.


Her later partnership with the composer R. D. Burman was both romantic and revolutionary. Together, they reshaped the soundscape of Hindi cinema by fusing Indian melody with global rhythm and producing songs that still feel improbably modern. When Burman died, she endured another personal rupture; yet her return in the 1990s was a striking reassertion of relevance.


It is in relation to Lata that the poignancy of her passing sharpens. Their journeys began in the same household under the stern tutelage of their father, the classical musician Deenanath Mangeshkar, and ended in parallel arcs that now feel like the closing of a cultural epoch.


Between them, the sisters had mapped the emotional geography of Hindi cinema so comprehensively that what follows risks sounding like a shallow echo. The age of playback singing, where voices were larger than actors, and the songs outlived the films, has been quietly receding. Asha Bhosle belonged to a time when a singer could define an actress, and a song could define a decade. Her death marks the near-complete passing of a generation that turned cinema into a musical civilisation.

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