Let me start by reminiscing about Amlan Datta (Amlan da as I used to call him). Amlanda was a teacher of mine in Calcutta University. He taught a course on Russian and Japanese economic development. But my acquaintance and familiarity with Amlan da go back several years, long before he became my teacher. For quite some years he was already a close friend and mentor.

I graduated from Hindu School, and went to Presidency College just across the street. In those days in Presidency College, in the circles where I moved around, there was a lot of discussion about politics and many of my friends were leftists. Very soon I found out that they had identified what you may call 'an enemy of the people', somebody they intensely hated. I tried to find out who this person was, and I found out his name was Amlan Datta. It immediately generated interest and curiosity in me. I sometimes have a tendency to go against the current, even though otherwise I often believed in the causes my leftist friends espoused. I wanted to find out what was it that attracted so much (negative) excitement in them. So then I was told there was this book which had recently come out at that time, titled For Democracy, and the impression that I got from my leftist friends was that this was a big obstacle on the way to the Great Proletarian Revolution in India. So I immediately went out to a College Street bookstore and bought it. It was a very short book, which took me only a day or two to finish. What surprised me was that I did not find the book particularly exciting, nor did I find anything in the book highly objectionable. So something must be wrong with me, I thought. I re-read it shortly after, and, to me, Amlan Datta came across as a familiar social democrat. But then I realized, and this I have always noticed since then, all over the world leftists, particularly communists, regard social democrats as their arch enemies, perhaps because they used to be rivals in getting the attention of the working classes. Also, there was a lot of criticism in the book of Stalinism. That obviously angered many of the leftists, who in those days were mainly Stalinists. I for one, in spite of all my leftist sympathies, was never very fond of Stalinism.

One of the rites of passage in entering college was to start going to the College Street Coffee House, and Amlan Datta was a regular fixture there. I did not know him, but very soon, somebody introduced me to him. I think he took a liking to me, so we met often. I, merely a recent graduate from high school, and here was this very well known, and sometimes notorious, professor. We talked about politics a little bit, but then very soon I found that both of us were very much interested in literature and history and culture. So we used to discuss quite a bit of that too and we became good friends. I remember one day when I entered the Coffee House I saw Amlan da sitting alone in a corner reading a book on philosophy. I asked him how he could concentrate on a serious book with so much noise around. He said it did not bother him, it felt like he was reading a book on the shore of a roaring sea.

At one time he probably realized that this fellow did not know quite a bit of the things that he should know. Not about politics, but more about culture. I grew up in a lower middle-class Bengali family. My father used to buy lots of books. But in my household, there were not too many books on Western classical art or that many long-playing records of Western classical music. So Amlan da, I remember one day, suddenly out of the blue, proposed to me that if I had time next Sunday to come to his house around two o'clock in the afternoon. He used to live in Paikpara those days. He had lots of these big books on art with expensive plates of Western classical art. He also had a very good collection of Western classical music. So for the next several months, every Sunday, whenever he was in town, I used to go to Paikpara, spend four to five hours with him, and he used to go very patiently, discussing and explaining page after page of art plates or guiding me through the music on the records. On those Sundays from two o'clock to about six o'clock we would do this, and then we would go out, take the number two double-decker bus to College Street, go to the Coffee House, and meet other friends and then discuss politics. So this was a routine for me long before Amlan Datta became my teacher.

This was also the time when Presidency College used to organize big debates in the physics lecture theatre hall. There were these events in which Amlan Datta would debate with some stalwarts among the communist intellectuals. So with huge fanfare we used to go to the physics lecture theatre: "Today it is Amlan Datta versus Hiren Mukherjee." Another day, "Amlan Datta vs Jolly Kaul". Another day, "Amlan Datta vs Sadhan Gupta or Mohit Sen", and so on. I remember those occasions; we were very excited, as if we were going to see a football match or a chess tournament. For instance, take the day when it was Amlan Datta vs Hiren Mukherjee. Hiren Mukherjee was a very passionate, melodramatic orator. He would give his talk, his eloquent passion sweeping us off our feet, and then Amlan da would rise, and essentially, with very quiet and cool precision, do what I would call, minute 'logic chopping'. In one argument after another, he would try to show the fallacies and non sequiturs in Mukherjee's speech. At the end of these debates, my communist friends used to get very angry. One of them would say, " S****a CIA agent, what more can you expect from him?" To this I would say, "Look, I don't care what you label him or who your brother-in-law is, but tell me what exactly is wrong with his argument?" But nobody would answer me, except to say that the whole thing was faulty, and repeated that he was an evil man, causing problems for the revolution. That, in fact, attracted me more to Amlanda. I remember one day telling him why I was fascinated by the Marxist materialistic interpretation of history. He said he respected Marx a great deal, but there were definite limits to the materialistic interpretation of history. To this day I remember the example he gave me. He said, suppose you are trying to historically explain a revolution. The materialistic interpretation will give you a lot of elements for understanding popular discontent that may have contributed to the revolution, but there is no simple materialistic interpretation of the people sacrificing their own lives for it - they clearly did not materialistically gain from it after their death.

So this went on for some time throughout the whole of my undergraduate days in Presidency College. Then at the university, I became his student. Shortly thereafter Amlan da persuaded me to contribute a couple of articles for the magazine he and Abu Syed Ayub used to jointly edit. I should also mention, that apart from Western classical art and classical music, he also introduced me to Chinese food, which, of course, I liked enormously; in those days in Calcutta Chinese food was still not very familiar to middle-class Bengalis.

Then, there was a big gap. I went abroad and lost touch with Amlan da for a long time. This was the period when, among many other things, he was, for a time, the pro-vice-chancellor of Calcutta University. I was not in Calcutta at that time, but I heard from many people and also read in newspapers that he had to go through a great deal of persecution, harassment and humiliation from leftist students during that time. Later I found out this did affect Amlanda, in terms of the lingering traces of bitterness that I noticed in him. But I also heard many stories of his personal courage and fortitude during those difficult days.

I picked up the thread with Amlan da much later, I think in the 1980s, when he became vice-chancellor of Visva-Bharati. As my parents were there, I used to go to Santiniketan quite regularly, even when I was abroad, so I would see him quite often in the vice-chancellor's house. After he gave up the vice-chancellor's job, for a time he used to live in Santiniketan. I remember those days in the 1980s, almost every evening there would be 'load-shedding'. I remember going to his house in the evening; his maid would finish her work and go away but before going away, she would put out a lantern in front of us. There was no fan, so sweating profusely and attacked by hordes of mosquitoes in the semi-darkness, we used to discuss big issues. It went on for quite some years, until he left Santiniketan. So these are the two phases in my life when I used to see Amlanda quite frequently: one, before he became my teacher, and one long after. All these years, he was a good friend.

This is a somewhat revised version of the Amlan Datta Memorial Lecture delivered on February 19, 2016, organised by the Alumni Association of Calcutta University Economics Department

To be concluded