Left Out

The written-for-the-moment essays in Ganguly's easy, unassuming style, straddle an expansive—and sometimes confusing—range of subjects: profiles of commissars such as Promode Dasgupta and Jyoti Basu are lumped together with sketches of Jatin Chakraborty, a feisty, controversial cabinet and sometime Basu bete noire, Darjeeling hills strongman Subhas Ghising—and Mao Zedong. The second part of the book, clubbed under the title 'Positions', is really a smorgasbord of Basu interviews and essays on the apparatchik, socialism and post-Naxalbari flight of capital.

Rising above the awful typos and tatty production, the profiles are possibly the volume's best bet: a pithy one on the late Promode Dasgupta has the commissar defining a bhadralok to Ganguly in no uncertain terms: "He's punctual, analytical, kind and careful about his work. At the same time he is overbearing, intolerant about meddlers, and short-tempered." An interesting observation. Otherwise, Ganguly, whose admiration for the Left is seldom in doubt, signs off lamenting the fall of Bengal under the Marxists putting Bengal "back to where it was—on the periphery of national politics." No disputing this bleak fact.