Articles by Chirashree Das Gupta

Responding to Tirthankar Roy's article "The Economic Legacies of Colonial Rule in India: Another Look" (EPW, 11 April 2015), which reinterprets the economic legacy of British rule in India, this article critically interrogates the relationship between ideology, perspective, and method in an emerging strand of economic history. This strand tries to make history writing on colonialism consistent with the rationalisation(s) of contemporary globalisation. This article traces the ideological basis of "neutrality," explores the conceptual and historical fallacies of the "openness" paradigm, and assesses the methodological inconsistencies of cost-benefit analysis in the historiography of reinterpretations of colonialism in India.

It has now become almost conventional wisdom that Bihar under the National Democratic Alliance government has moved onto a new and higher growth path. An examination of the Central Statistical Organisation data for the decade since 1999-2000, however, reveals a cyclical move towards a higher growth continuum rather than any structural break under the nda government. The recent growth path represents the resumption of a long, fluctuating and volatile movement towards a trade-led higher growth continuum that had started in 1994-95 but was interrupted by the impact of bifurcation of Bihar in 2001. A preliminary proposition is that the process of movement to a higher growth continuum since 1994-95 in Bihar follows from the diversified patterns of accumulation through the agency of new entrants to accumulation as an outcome of the social justice movement in Bihar. The evidence presented here belies the propositions around a "growth miracle" under the nda government and indicates a politically fractious movement of Bihar's economy since bifurcation to a volatile higher growth continuum that is lopsided in three dimensions - regional, sectoral and social.