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As a major voice among Left economists, he has written several valuable books in the subject and continuously participated in policy debates. As what is euphemised as “policy maker”, he has served in important positions in the central government and been Finance Minister of West Bengal as well as a member of the Rajya Sabha. He has another parallel career as a journalist, as evidenced by his prolific columns in the Economic and Political Weekly over several decades, and several other newspapers — both in English and Bengali — even till date.

But what make him particularly interesting are the contradictions that seem to define the very essence of his being. He has been, and continues to be, both vociferously public and intensely private. He can be devastatingly cynical, and yet is also known to be endearingly romantic. His personality combines so many warring traits: angry and affectionate; stubborn and sensitive; puritanical, yet generous to a fault. He has been not just argumentative but positively belligerent with his friends, but even so remains fiercely loyal to them. He is clearly a strongly political person, but remains at heart a sentimentalist lover of poetry. He espouses idealistic principles, but also enjoys above all a good gossip. And even as he rails against the times, he is very much a part of them.

All these attributes, combined with his indisputable literary flair and prodigious memory, are what make his memoirs so absorbing and so much fun to read. The Bengali original of this book Apila-Chapila (Ananda Publishers, Kolkata, 2003) generated much enthusiasm and also much controversy when it was first published, in a way that has been typical of the author’s life. The English version captures much of the flavour of the original. But it is sometimes more circumspect, and also less elegantly written.

It is a book full of people, almost too many of them: friends, acquaintances, colleagues. From the start, a dizzying array of personalities fills the pages. There are countless anecdotes, some humorous and some poignant, and they are fascinating also because so many of them have been in the public eye anyway. Many of those who flit through the pages are not only well known in different ways but also part of the elite of India, in different spheres ranging from the literary and artistic to the academic and scholarly, and to the political and ruling groups.

Yet, there are also some notable silences. For example, there is scarcely any mention of his wife Gouri — even though her graceful dignity, quiet efficiency and unswerving loyalty must have made her presence the central stabilising factor of his life. Similarly, there is only the barest mention of his mother, a remarkable woman who embodied genuine empowerment in an age when it was extremely rare. Despite the profusion of his pen portraits, Ashok Mitra steers clear of the truly intimate, perhaps assuming that those who are deeply close are not to be trafficked in words.

The opening chapters are wonderfully evocative of childhood and youth in Dhaka in the 1930s and early 1940s, and the sheer exhilaration of student life in Kolkata in the period just before Independence is also effectively captured, along with whiffs of the momentous times in which these were experienced. Subsequently, these memoirs offer a panoramic glimpse into some broader processes and events.

The heady days of central planning with Mahalanobis in Delhi; the creation of the Economic and Political Weekly; the social and political atmosphere of Indira Gandhi’s “left-leaning” phase in the early 1970s; the bloody emergence of Bangladesh as a independent nation; the violent attempt at destroying the Left in West Bengal over the same period; the grim days of the Emergency; the extraordinary political transformation as the Congress lost the national elections and paved the way for the era of coalition politics; the electoral victory of the Left Front in West Bengal in the late 1970s; the battle over Centre-state fiscal relations; the rising hegemony of neo-liberal economic policy from the early 1990s – all these form more than just a backdrop, as they are inextricably intertwined with the dramatis personae of this account.

Some of Mitra’s ruminations about the difficulties of progressive change in only one state within a federal system and the internal systemic threats emerging even within disciplined Marxist parties that are pushed by varying forces when in power deserve more attention. Even where one disagrees, there is no contesting that he raises critical and thought-provoking questions, and that his reflections are informed by continuing commitment.

The final sections of the book are probably a bit too coloured by nostalgia and an implicit assumption that everything – even progressive politics and literature – was better in the past, and that newer trends and changes are generally adverse. This creates a tendency to accord much greater sanctity to a past which was probably as complicated and contradictory as the present.

The disarming thing is that the author would probably be the first to admit this, as he would be to agree with anyone who brands him as a difficult person. Yet, the impression on reading this book is not one of a difficult man, rather of an incurable romantic, headstrong and opinionated but also full of all the emotions that only caring deeply about people can bring.

So this idiosyncratic memoir is worth reading not only because of the panoramic yet individually detailed view it presents of some six decades of tumultuous history. It is also an insight into a complex but captivating human being.

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