Colonial Exploitation of Eastern India

A Site to Document The Extractive Policies Used to Pauperize Eastern India

I am a Bengali. I grew up in the State of Assam in Eastern India. I have worked in various capacities throughout India and have presently emigrated out of India. While working in India, I became aware of the lop-sided regional development. I found that the most popular explanations that were advanced to explain this discrepency were racist in tone. As for example, it was often maintained that Bengal was losing her industries because apparently Bengalis lack something called "work-ethic". On deeper examination I found that the concept of "work-ethic" is vacuous. The work ethic explanation is similar to the racist explanations that has been always advanced to rationalise the disposession of victims of exploitation. As a parallel example one can recount the racist explanations that used to be advanced against blacks (e.g. "blacks are lazy") in order to explain away the dispossession and exploitation of blacks.

I have tried to examine the issue of colonial exploitation of eastern India by using all the principles I have learned in economics and by studying history. My conclusion is that Eastern India became the cash cow for colonial exploitation since the British colonised India and that such colonial exploitation continued unabated after 1947 when India apparently became "independent".

I am designing this web-site to collect and preserve the evidence of colonial exploitation of eastern India. I am a Bengali and the culture I most closely understand is the Bengali culture. This page therefore has a Bengali focus. The focus comes because of my own cultural orientation. I believe that the other eastern states like Bihar, Orissa and Assam has been more thoroughly exploited than West Bengal. In West Bengal, the political mobilisation of left could create some resistence. Unfortunately the states of Bihar and Orissa have not seen such political mobilisation. The present insurgency in Assam can also be traced to decades of exploitation.

I also have to do a job for living. Therefore this web-site will always be perpetually under construction. Feel free to forward me any material which you think should be archieved on this web-site. If our friends from Bihar, Orissa and Assam also contribute then this site will gradually lose its Bengali focus. Please let me know your suggestions to update this site.