Economic Themes in World Literature

This piece is to bring to your attention an unusual book where selections from world literature have been taken to bring out economic issues salient in them

Last month a new book was published by Routledge that is somewhat unusual. It’s titled “Economics and Literature: A Novel Approach” (edited by François Bourguignon, Avinash K Dixit, Luc Leruth, and Jean-Philippe Platteau, all economists). It is a collection of 21 essays by 26 authors in all, with an introduction by the editors. As I am one of the authors in this book, I am not going to review or evaluate it. My purpose in this substack piece is to bring this unusual book to your attention, describe some of its contents, and then take the liberty of excerpting some parts of my own chapter just to give you some of the book’s flavor.

We were approached by the editors for each of us to choose a novel (or other forms of fiction) from any part of world literature in the theme of which some economic issues play an important role and then write about those issues and the fiction in our chapter. This has resulted in quite a smorgasbord of literary pieces from around the world along with a discussion of the economic issues involved. It also indirectly shows how literature often captures the complexity, ambiguity and nuance of economic processes, institutional relations and the psychological base of economic behavior in a way that eludes the precision-centered quantitative analysis of much of mainstream economics.

Here are the 21chapter names and authors in the book’s table of contents in sequence:

1 ‘A Bengali Novel on Economic Transition in History’ by Pranab Bardhan

2 ‘Tradition and Modernity in sub-Saharan Africa: Insights from Achebe’s Things Fall Apart’ by Ernest Aryeetey and Jean-Philippe Platteau

3 ‘The Art of Conquering Without Being Right: Agency, Education, and Learning by Doing in Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure’ by Paul-Aarons Ngomo, Shourya Sen, and Leonard Wantchekon

4 ‘On Capitalism and Colonialism: The Economic Imperatives Underlying Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies’ by Mukesh Eswaran

5 ‘The Lone Scream in the Dark: Cultural Change and Institutional Transformation in Modern China as seen through Lu Xun’s Novel’ by Debin Ma

6 ‘Zola's "Ladies’ Paradise" and the "Creative Destruction" Theory’ by François Bourguignon

7 ‘Women in a nervous breakdown: Intra-household bargaining and gender norms in South Korea’ by Bishnupriya Gupta

8 ‘Only the Housing Problem Has Corrupted Them’ by Sergei Guriev

9 ‘Can Machines Replace Us?’ by Dilip Mookherjee

10 ‘Contract-enforcement institutions in Gurnah's By the Sea’ by Mustapha Kamel Nabli

11 ‘Marriage and Markets: Lessons from Pride and Prejudice’ by Carmen Matutes

12 ‘The Esterházy Myth: How Economics and Literature Correct Mistakes’ by Piroska Nagy-Mohacsi

13 ‘Chekhov: The Nostalgia for Missed Opportunities’ by Jean-Philippe Platteau

14 ‘The Financial Expert of Malgudi’ by Avinash Dixit

15 ‘Estates, Inheritance and Gifts: Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth’ by Luiz De Mello

16 ‘The Inheritance Mess: Père Goriot and King Lear Offer Us a Mirror’ by Marianne David and Pierre Pestieau

17 ‘The Master, the Helicopter, and Margarita’ by

Luc Leruth and Danielle Meuwly

18 ‘Money in the Faustian Pact’ by Alfred Steinherr

19 ‘How Steinbeck Speaks to Institutions in Economics’ by Stuti Khemani

20 ‘The Economics of Innocence: Imbolo Mbue’s “How Beautiful We Were”’ by Celestin Monga

21 ‘Frank Herbert’s Dune’ by Mark Koyama

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The novel I have selected for this book is titled “Hansuli Banker Upakatha” (The Tale of the Hansuli Turn) by the Bengali writer Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay, published in 1951. He is not well-known outside Bengal—except that two of Satyajit Ray movies, The Music Room and Expedition, are based on his short stories—but in West Bengal he is widely regarded as one of the three most powerful novelists in the post-Tagore twentieth century). Hansuli Turn refers to a bend in the river Kopai in Birbhum district, where the particular hamlet and its people that the novel is about is located. Fortunately, there is a good translation of the novel published in 2011 by Columbia University Press; the translator is Ben Conisbee Baer, a Princeton professor of comparative literature. Even though I have read the novel a few times in Bengali many years back, for my quotes from the novel I have depended on this translation.

The main theme of the novel is the social and economic transformation of a socially marginalized group in a remote village in central Bengal. This transformation is brought about by expansion of colonial ‘modern’ capital, a war economy, and commercialization which shake and transform the lives of an oppressed primitive community in a segregated village society, and the old traditional leaders of the community are replaced by young entrepreneurial-type leaders.

The marginalized community on which the novel focuses is that of the Kahars. At the time of this novel the Kahars were working as farm laborers and sharecroppers for the gentry, and sometimes also got some land from them to cultivate on their own. Another community, called Atpoures, was in an adjacent hamlet; their original occupation was that of armed guards; over time they also got some land from their masters, but they were indifferent to farming, and more often took to thievery and robbery as their main occupation.

The masters are of two kinds. Status-wise one was lower, called Sadgops and Mondols, who used to be farmers who worked on their land along with their hired labor, but were increasingly off their own manual labor and dependent only on hired hands, as they became semi-gentrified. The other, higher in status, was the landed gentry always having the workers to till their land and also to be on-call for other kinds of service as the need arose. The poor have to borrow money for their subsistence in half the year from the gentry, and they pay back with their labor and with paddy (the main crop). But at loan payment time, which is immediately after harvesting paddy price is at its lowest, so the poor have to pay a great deal more paddy than when they borrowed, usually in the lean season when price is higher. The Sadgops sometimes also cheat, as they are to keep accounts of labor and credit transactions for the illiterate Kahars, and they forget to do that for months keeping Kahars in the dark about what is due to them.

The main protagonist in the novel is Bonwari, the headman of the Kahar hamlet, who looks after their worldly affairs and is also the protector of their dharma (ethical and religious principles). On behalf of the Kahar community, he tries to ensure adherence to the prescriptions of its gods and forefathers, and respect for its myths, memories and rituals. He is admired and respected in the community. He frequently visits the wooded shrine of the presiding deity of the community, ‘Kartababa’ (Lord/Father), and pays his homage and organizes the community offerings there and asks for his forbearance in cases of lapses in community behavior and for guidance in times of crisis. He gives leadership to the peasants on the fields at cultivation time; and he is obsequiously loyal to the landlords/masters of the community.

Pitted against him is a rather haughty but dynamic young Kahar, Karali by name. The novel starts with a mysterious whistling sound in the forests that continues for days, which mystifies and frightens the community as an omen for bad things to come. While the community cowers, Karali goes with a flashlight into the bamboo groves and finds that the source of the whistle is a large viper around Kartababa’s shrine. He kills and burns the great snake. A part of the community is relieved, but the older members fear that Kartababa is going to punish the community for killing his pet snake.

Karali refuses to work on the fields in the Kahar’s traditional farm work for the landlords. He works as a coolie leader in the nearby small town of Chandanpur where there is a railyard and factory. Karali inspires other young Kahars to follow him to do nonfarm wage work, giving up their forefathers’ life of farm labor under traditional subjugation. Then when the Second World War comes and the Japanese advance near the borders of Bengal, the colonial rulers mobilize wartime production, and the town economy hums and the job prospects and earnings for Karali and his young followers improve. He puts on a coat, long pants, and a cap, and even a shoe, while most Kahars are barely dressed and go barefoot all their lives. For the first time for a Kahar, he also tries to build a brick house for himself, which the Kahars who always lived in thatched huts, led by Bonwari, are against; they object to this breaking of forefathers’ rules, and initially even destroy the foundations of the building. Undaunted, Karali gets police protection and builds his brick house—as if the tall building was ‘the raised banner of Karali’s obstinacy’. In the Kahar community “It is as if Karali is from a foreign land…..They can’t bear so much vanity, so much arrogance”.

Karali constantly moves between the hamlet and the town and is not just the force of mobility and economic change; he also represents the break with the age-old structure of ignorance, superstition and segregation that characterize the life of Kahars. When a big storm threatens the village, the Kahars including their headman look at the ominous sky and think in terms of which of their misdeeds the gods are going to punish them for. Meanwhile Karali rushes to the village and gives them the latest weather forecast the town has got by wire about the storm’s approach. Bonwari thinks: “Storm, rain—since the forefathers’ times, Kahars have received the news from ants, from rainbows, from windspeed; you’ve ….become a foreign infidel; you stick yer ear to telegraph poles in Channanpur an’ hear all this news”.

Karali hears about a boy in the hamlet dying of snake bite. He says the boy should have been taken to the town hospital, they’ve got snake poison injection. Bonwari thinks the boy died as God’s punishment of the community for Karali’s devilry. To Bonwari the life that Karali is heralding is a threat to the moral and existential order of the community.

Karali also pushes on the social and class tension of the Kahars with their landlords. He resents the Kahars’ servile acceptance of the landlords’ use of casual insults even in ordinary conversations with them. He does not like the Kahars’ taking away the left-over food from the dishes of the gentry. Once he said in their face: “Karali don’t eat no polluted waste”. He says the landlords may be stealing the Kahars’ official ration of kerosene (used for lighting) and selling in the black market; he lodges a complaint with the authorities asking for an inquiry into the matter, which, of course, infuriates the landlords.

Then the war economy comes closer. Squadrons of airplanes fly low over the hamlet to reach the airplane hangar built near Chandanpur. Red-graveled tarmac roads are built through the hamlet, where cars noisily go back and forth. Forests are cut down by wartime timber contractors, their tents and a car park come up at the place where Kartababa’s shrine was. With the clearing of the bamboo groves which used to shroud and darken the Kahar neighborhood, now harsh glaring light comes into the area; it’s too bright, and the groves which have been the repository of local ecology, life space and memories are gone.

Bonwari thinks: “You used to enter the village and be struck by a strange hypnotic depth in entrancing shadows….All this destroyed by wiping out the deep shade of bamboo groves, banyan, and peepul. There would be no more free time for droopy-eyed slumbering under trees; there was no place remaining to linger in shade and compose the tale of Hansuli Turn’s dreams”.

The war economy jacks up prices, which is supposed to have limited effect on the Kahars’ food-wise subsistence economy, except for the scarcity of cloth, kerosene and quinine (for fighting the rampant malaria) which the Kahars cannot afford any more. Even in paddy, the landlords suddenly announce that the rent is to be paid in paddy. As selling paddy in the market at higher prices become more profitable, the landlords also become stingy in their usual help in the form of paddy loans when the need arises. More people leave the community in search of wage work.

The social role of women is an important aspect of the life of Kahars. An old woman like Suchand acts as the main custodian of their history and the narrative of past virtue and present decline of values and devotion. Suchand deplores Karali’s transgressive acts. But the younger women are sometimes quite adventurous. Some venture out to construction work in town, then have relations with masons and mechanics and go away with them (as did Karali’s mother in the past, leaving a 5-year old Karali behind); others work as maids in the day and in sex work at night. Suchand’s daughter Bashan has a relation with someone in the town gentry and has a daughter born out of that relation. This daughter, Pakhi, leaves her marriage with a sick, older man and consorts openly and lives comfortably with Karali in his brick building. In a way the Kahars, even though bound by traditional mores and superstitions, are quite permissive of extra-marital relations. There are even festivals providing opportunities for forming non-traditional relations with someone for whom a character feels ‘heat’. Such relations are sometimes given formal recognition (through ‘companion rites’) by the community.

Even Bonwari, the protector of Kahar dharma, is attracted to the wife, named Kaloshashi, of the headman of the Atpoures in the adjacent hamlet. And when Kaloshashi is drowned, tumbling into the water after a fight and tussle with her husband at the riverbank and the latter then goes fugitive, Bonwari is persuaded by the Atpoures to take Kaloshoshi’s niece named Subashi, who looks in some ways similar to Kaloshoshi but younger, as a second wife, to cement an alliance between the two hamlets. Bonwari now becomes the common headman of the two hamlets.

It is when Subashi falls for the charms of Karali, the novel reaches a crisis point, and there is a vicious fight between Karali and the jealous husband Bonwari, in which Bonwari gets badly wounded, from which he never fully recovers. This fight, though immediately over a woman, is the culmination of the clashing values of Bonwari and Karali, representing the clash between the old subsistence peasant economy and the new, brash, commercial economy which lures the young and the aspiring.

Subashi leaves Bonwari when he is unconscious after the fight. At the end Bonwari dies in the company only of the roving balladeer of the community, Pagol, and the trans-woman in the village, Nasubala. Most other people have left him and the hamlet. From his death bed Bonwari hears the constant noise of the timber contractors clearing the forests.

After Bonwari dies Karali comes and touches his feet paying his respect to a vanishing way of life.

“The Kahars are now a new people. In dress, speech, beliefs, they’ve really changed. They’ve exchanged smears of earth, dust, mud for engine oil; exchanged plow and scythe for dealings with hammer, crowbar, pickaxe. Yet even as they toil in Chandanpur’s workshops they die from starvation, die of disease; instead of dying from snakebite they’re sliced by machines, crushed by wagons”.

This clearly is a picture of economic transition, from a low-level debt-ridden subsistence peasant economy to one of a commercial economy based largely on the peasants now working as wage labor. In this transition some individuals (like Karali) act as the dynamic leaders rejecting—and persuading others, particularly the young, to reject-- the traditional ways (of exploitation and fatalism, of subjugation and indignity) in favor of a high exchange-value ‘modern’, more mechanized, economy. This also involves a change in their habits, beliefs, and norms. But as the last sentence of the previous paragraph suggests, the writer of this novel does not consider this transition as necessarily a mark of ‘progress’ from the point of view of workers’ welfare or life chances. The main change may be in the particular form of exploitation, in the nature of uncertainties and perils of life, and in the structures of power. There is also some lingering nostalgia about a vanishing way of life. In any case, in contrast with an economic treatise, a novel usually tries to capture some subjective nuance and ambivalence, even while describing the objective reality of economic change.