Oct. 8: The bureaucrat donned the historian's hat and turned his gaze on the past and the present of Bengalis.

The additional chief secretary in the transport department, Alapan Bandyopadhyay, yesterday spoke on the "Rise and fall (and Rise Again) of Bengalis", a topic on which he said he was "largely ambivalent", at the Bengal Club Library Talk, in association with The Telegraph .

Bandyopadhyay felt the theme was a permanent obsession with the "Bengali bhadralok" who lost his supremacy when the capital was shifted to Delhi in 1911, then again during the post-Independence riots in 1947 and the de-industrialisation after the 1960s.

For Bandyopadhyay, "Bengalis" included the likes of Jagat Seth, the Marwari Jain banker of the 18th century Murshidabad court, who was "more rich and influential than the Bank of England in the 18th century"; Eurasian radical Henry Louis Vivian Derozio; and Abu Sayeed Ayyub, who learnt Bengali late in life and wrote some of the best Bengali prose in the 20th century.

Reconstructing the history of Bengal right from the Greco Roman antiquity, Bandyopadhyay quoted poet Satyen Dutta, who wrote: Bangla r muslin, Baghdad Rome Chin, kanchan mulye, kinten ekdin (The fine silk of Bengal was once sold to Mesopotamia, Rome and China). But it was not until the 8th century that Bengal emerged as a regional state, under the Palas, who fought off the Gurjara Pratiharas from the west and the Chalukyas of the south. "This was the last time Bengalis gave north and south Indians a run for their money," he quipped.

Remembering Atish Dipankar, the scholar who exported Buddhism to the east and was ranked first among the 25 greatest Bengalis in a BBC survey, Bandyopadhyay recounted the birth of the Bengali vernacular through the Pala dynasty in the 9th century and then under the pre-Mughal Islam Sultanate in the 15th century.

But the Ganga was changing its course and the tectonic shifts in the 1600 led to the formation of sand banks or chars, which created more cultivable land and consequently more revenues and prompted the Mughals to expand their territory to Bengal.

Islam spread to the fringe people - fishermen and peasants - in the chars around the same time Chaityanite Gaudiya bhakti spread to Vrindavan and Mathura because of syncretic Mughal patronage.

The fall of the Mughals in the 18th century, the massive de-industrialisation in the second half of the 19th century, the broadbasing of politics after World War I and destabilisation of the old-style Presidency elitism by Gandhi changed society and its landscape.

The famine and the Calcutta riots of 1946 changed the contours of public life of Bengal and after Independence and Partition, Calcutta became the moribund capital of a truncated slice of the original Bengal.

Economically, Partition was catastrophic for Bengal. Industrial sickness led to trade union radicalism. The Raj became Indian but there was a cultural divide in industry and commerce that impacted industrial relations.

The social group that maintained their hegemony in Bengal all through this is the literati and intelligentsia. There was a milieu that was less conducive to caste and gender atrocities and more conducive to soft powers by ruling elites that have exercised hegemony rather than dominance. Bandyopadhyay, however, critiqued the utter neglect of the merchant class, traders, entrepreneurs, artisans, suppliers and service providers.

"Past is selectively glorified, and the future narratives are drawn in skewed terms," he said. "Continually looking at the zenith of the past, are we not creating the nadir of the future?"

Bandyopadhyay's prescription for the possible rise of the Bengalis included industrial and infrastructural investment, good governance and appropriate work culture, ease of doing business, devolution of power and reforms.

Start ups in the IT sector are being recognised, their entrepreneurial attempts chronicled. ITC chief Y.C. Deveshwar being given the Bangabibhushan award is a corrective step, said.

"Our plural society must retain its cultural past but also rectify its neglect of some professions. We should steer clear of hollow radicalism and mindless nationalism," Bandyopadhyay concluded.