Regular work with steady pay remains one of life’s most cherished aspirations. Our society is organised around it: school, college, marriage, children, home, and retirement, all calibrated to the steady cadence of employment. Friendships form in offices; social standing is indexed to the firm we represent.
Nowhere has this been truer than in Bengal. There is a possibly apocryphal tale of Ramdulal De, the global merchant who built a substantial export business with the United States of America, yet still asked his former employer to continue his modest clerk’s salary. The story endures because it captures something: the Bengali attachment to the dignity and the reassurance of a fixed income. Ask a parent what they want for a child. Rarely wealth or fame, but an honourable, tenured posting, ideally allowing time for music or an evening adda over tea.
Yet across India and much of the world, this social compact is fraying. Since 2023, the world’s most valuable firms, including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, have collectively shed more than 100,000 jobs. India’s IT sector absorbed almost 500,000 engineering graduates in 2022; by 2024, that figure had collapsed to fewer than 80,000, a 20-year low. The pattern repeats beyond tech. Post offices are yielding to digital communication, the railways are moving toward driverless systems and online ticketing, armies are increasingly relying on drones rather than boots on the ground. The institutions that anchored middle-class aspiration for a century are being hollowed out. The secure job that generations planned around is shrinking.
The notion of a job feels timeless, but it mostly emerged after the Industrial Revolution when large firms came to depend on meritocratic management. In Bengal, it was institutionalised by the East India Company. The British needed competent, honest, and reliable Bengali babus to staff ports, courts, railways, and the agencies running jute mills, indigo plantations, and tea gardens. The Bengal Renaissance supplied them. English-educated men were despatched across the empire, from Rangoon to Khartoum, as surveyors, doctors, civil servants, and engineers.
The economist, Ronald Coase, explained why firms exist in a Nobel Prize-cited 1937 paper. The transaction costs involved in coordinating production through open markets were high: searching for counterparties, negotiating terms, enforcing agreements. It was cheaper to bring people inside the firm. What has now changed is the cost of those very transactions, allowing entrepreneurial activity outside the firm. Digital platforms have slashed search costs; a craftsman in Murshidabad can now be discovered by a buyer in Milan, sometimes with nothing more than a smartphone and an evocative photograph. Communication tools have made remote meetings nearly frictionless. Artificial Intelligence is automating the verification and the trust functions once performed by institutions. As transaction costs plummet, size alone is no longer a competitive advantage. Advantage shifts to the individual who understands most deeply what they make. For generations, scale was power. Today, knowledge has a higher ROI than hierarchy.
India compounded this problem with its own barriers: capital controls, distribution cartels, and the licence raj. Navigating this system demanded compromises that many were unwilling to make. In Bengal, these challenges were exacerbated. The Naxal movement targeted industrialists; the Left Front made capitalism feel like a moral failing. Civil service, academia, and corporate roles seemed the more honourable path. Some have inferred from this that Bengalis are unsuited for business. That view deserves honest examination. Bengalis simply excelled in the occupations the system rewarded; they made rational choices based on available returns.
Beneath that cultural preference lay a deeper anxiety. The British raj ring-fenced financial institutions, such as imperial banks, insurance companies, and limited liability firms, from native participation. Dwarkanath Tagore founded businesses of extraordinary ambition, yet his enterprises collapsed under colonial headwinds. Wealthy Bengali families invested instead in zamindaris, coal mines, and shareholdings in British-run managing agencies. What generations had carefully built was then confiscated by the post-Independence State. Zamindaris were abolished in 1953 with scant compensation, coal mines nationalised, managing agencies repealed. Partition turned holdings in East Bengal into enemy property. When entrepreneurs elsewhere could recycle accumulated capital into the new economy, Bengal’s was shackled, first by empire, then by policy. A business cannot be launched on credentials alone.
Yet in the past too, Bengali makers showed that deep knowledge could supplant capital. Swadeshi enterprises innovated in industries, from tea to consumer goods. Surendra Mohan Bose returned from Stanford with a chemistry degree and no money, then built Duckback from his family home in South Calcutta. Boroline was Gour Mohan Dutta’s scientific temper distilled into a green tube. When distribution was blocked and capital was scarce, depth of expertise was what carried them through.
The world’s greatest businesses often follow the same logic. Phil Knight obsessed over why some running shoes felt faster and created Nike. Ingvar Kamprad asked what would happen if furniture is shipped flat and built IKEA. That same disposition, the compulsion to interrogate what others accept, lives in the Bengali instinct to spend an afternoon analysing how airflow in Eden Gardens affects swing bowling. It is the instinct of inquiry. For several generations, we simply did not direct it toward enterprise.
The barriers that once made entrepreneurship irrational have largely collapsed. You do not need to be Hindustan Lever to reach Indian households; a small-batch brand with direct digital channels can compete nationally. A cloud kitchen in Kasba now fights on equal terms with a Park Street restaurant. As frictions fall, consumer preference and product knowledge are the only moats worth building.
The prize itself has grown. India’s household consumption has expanded dramatically; the country is on track to become the world’s third-largest consumer market. West Bengal, with a GSDP exceeding $200bn and its strategic position as a gateway to the Northeast, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia, offers a dense, aspirational consumer base hungry for products made with knowledge and intention.
The economic structure of the last 70 years rewarded ‘know who’ over ‘know how’. That structure is shifting. Knowledge, curiosity, and seriousness about craft will be the new currency.
Prafulla Chandra Ray founded Bengal Chemical with 700 rupees and a lifelong love of chemistry, and built India’s first pharmaceutical company. Rajendra Nath Mookerjee, a Shibpur engineering graduate of modest means but soaring ambition, led Martin & Co to build the Victoria Memorial and the Howrah Bridge, still unsurpassed on the Calcutta skyline. Our generation must draw confidence from their spirit and build innovative businesses and lasting prosperity.
What do you understand so deeply that you cannot stop thinking about it? Build on that.
Rudra Chatterjee is Chairman of Obeetee, Managing Director of Luxmi Tea, and writes on finance and economic issues