The story of Bengal’s decline is not merely an economic one ~ it is a narrative of complete cultural and intellectual transformation. We can call this a shift from the “Soil to the Salon”, which represents a pivotal transformation whereby the intellectual class became the architects of their own irrelevance by abandoning the masses. Initially, leaders like Hare Krishna Konar ~ an Andaman Cellular Jail returned revolutionary from an affluent background ~ symbolized a politics rooted in ground reality.
This “Old Left” focused on the fundamental struggles of the masses or basic needs, in rural fields and urban factories. However, this grounded leadership eventually transitioned into the era of Jyoti Basu, when the centre of gravity in politics shifted from the rural fields to affluent urban salons. Originating in eighteenth-century France, salon ~ an informal intellectual gathering of writers, artists, academics, and thinkers ~ became a space that shaped literature, philosophy, and politics. Salon was also integral to a vibrant Bengali culture, but it became a problem when the salon became detached from economic realism and transformed itself only into a forum for ideological discourse.
The original Left movement was anchored in rural land reforms that understood the fundamental relationship between the man and the land. With Jyoti Basu, the movement’s focus began to drift toward the urban and the intellectual elites, and discourses began to migrate from the open fields of rural Bengal into insular intellectual circles. While the Old Left had a visceral understanding of hunger and poverty, this new Salon became preoccupied with narrative making, prioritising academic debate over the basic needs of the common man.
This transition had profound consequences for the state’s socio-political fabric and would ultimately result in driving industries away, retreating into a cocoon of make-believe ideological space that glorified poverty, abjured modernisation and computerisation, and severely neglected infrastructure. That was how the 1991 reforms bypassed the state ~ the states which had invested in human capital and had built advanced infrastructure surged ahead, taking advantage of the liberalised and globalised environment, while Bengal continued to languish in its old ways, way behind states like Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, or Karnataka. Industrialists increasingly encountered an environment where political negotiations mattered more than managerial efficiency.
Labour militancy became normalized and the gherao culture came to symbolise absolute industrial anarchy. The entrepreneur became morally suspect, while the jhola-wala intellectual acquired disproportionate social prestige. Ideological purity, literary sophistication, and political rhetoric came to be valued above commerce and wealth creation, producing a society that became rich in debate, but weak in capital formation and bankrupt in imagination. The “salon” became a culture in which symbolism, ideology and cultural self-image substituted the need for productive economic transformation. Idealistic cadres came to be gradually replaced by a system that prioritized vote-bank politics and minority appeasement over genuine social progress.
The salon replaced the factory floor as the centre of progress, and ideology displaced pragmatism. Hours without count spent in purposeless adda were cherished over engagement in purposeful economic activities. Holidays in schools, colleges and government offices proliferated unchecked, while the rest of India was curtailing these and reinventing a work ethic that prioritised hard work and efficiency above everything else. This era also marked the beginning of a heavily politicised intelligentsia. Historically, conscience keepers like Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Mahasweta Devi portrayed the authentic socio-political landscape of Bengal.
But now the Left shifted from representing the people to judging them, viewing traditional values and faith as backward structures. It was a civilizational and cultural shift that increasingly disowned Bengal’s past rich history of religious revivalism. Ancient Indian knowledge was derided as obsolete mythology, towering religious figures like Sri Chaitanya, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda were treated as embarrassments, to be ashamed of and conveniently forgotten. The Salon practiced a selective morality, where outrage was a curated commodity that catered to global causes, while being strictly rationed at home and turning a blind eye to the limitless atrocities being unleashed in their own backyards.
The state’s decline was further hastened by a collapsing education system that never recovered from the damage inflicted by the Left after they came to power. Bengal possessed one of India’s strongest intellectual ecosystems – anchored by excellent institutions such as the University of Calcutta, Jadavpur University or Presidency College and a dense culture of scholarship that attracted talent from outside. But the 1980s saw a near-total politicisation of all public universities and institutions, when ideology was given preference over merit.
Ever since, the system has been continuing its slide down the slippery slope of decay. Government schools, once the backbone of the middle and lower classes, lost their vitality and pre-eminence in the new social milieu. As intellectual independence gave way to political patronage, institutional norms that prioritised merit were substituted by political loyalty that became the most important factor of advancement in state-run institutions. Thus, institutions that were once centres of excellence lost their vitality and became infested with extreme student and teacher politics, becoming pale shadows of their past glory.
Education increasingly became subordinated to ideological mobilisation and cadre politics that determined recruitment, promotions, campus administration and academic culture. Bengal’s economic stagnation has also sharply reduced the absorptive capacity for an educated workforce that was naturally forced to flee towards advanced states like Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and overseas. This created a vicious cycle: as economic opportunities evaporated, incentives for academic excellence declined, while the outmigration of talent further weakened Bengal’s intellectual capital.
Under the 15-years of the TMC era, campuses increasingly became arenas of factional contestation rather than centres of learning and scholarship, and students from Bengal no longer dreamt of studying in Bengal. The decline was not merely academic ~ it was deeply intertwined with the state’s broader decline. The decline of industrial Bengal, therefore, cannot be seen merely through the lens of economics. It represented the fading of an entire ecosystem where the decays in education, industry, culture, and public institutions reinforced one another. Only a society that has turned completely inwards can prioritise ideological purity and rhetoric over wealth creation and capital formation.
The “salonisation” of Bengal’s politics and society reached its zenith during the TMC era. Economic modernization became secondary to narrative management about identity, culture and political spectacle. Even Bengali identity came to be redefined and made synonymous with loyalty to the ruling party. While economic opportunities disappeared, a sinister, patronage-driven “syndicate culture” flourished. The Salon class ~ comprising poets, academics, painters, theatre personalities, actors and film figures ~ became insulated from the people they derived sustenance from and positioned themselves in their “glass houses of foreign ideologies”.
They had no shame in trading their intellectual integrity for state patronage, awards, committee appointments and state-sponsored perks and privileges. These gatekeepers of our culture infiltrated institutions and engaged in shaping minds and narratives favouring the ruling party, while public discourses dissolved into the domain of absurdity, degenerating into high-command-scripted shouting matches.
The Salon culture became inseparable from the Syndicate culture in their objectives ~ one extorted conscience from those who are supposed to be society’s conscience keepers, while the other extorted money from ordinary people’s pockets. For far too long, Bengal has been sliding towards an endless abyss of degeneration and despondency. We remember Tagore, ‘Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.’ Bengal badly needs that faith now along with the courage to halt its long decline and reclaim some hope for the future.
(The writers, schoolmates once, are, respectively, former Director General at the CAG of India, and Distinguished Professor, RKMVERI, Belur)