The images of Left bookshops being demolished by saffron warmongers in Kolkata and elsewhere in Bengal say more about the destruction of Bengali identity than can be easily imagined. A particular video has left my innards jolted: an old man behind a bookstall, clad in a dhoti and a kurta, pleading with folded hands before a young goon: “Ektu amar kotha ta shunoon apni (Please listen to what I’m trying to say),” as the violent group destroys the books and shatters the stall with iron rods. The young man is just the tip of the iceberg, the rough-and-tumble militia; state-mandated bulldozers have done the bidding of the official authorities and arrived to raze red bookstalls to the ground with their saffron neighbours standing as sadistically grinning neighbours. নাগের বাজারে একজন প্রবীণ বামপন্থী মানুষ বই বাঁচাতে বি জে পি হুলিগান দের বিরুদ্ধে উচ্চ কন্ঠে প্রতিবাদ করছেন কিন্তু এদের কাছে বই এর কোন গুরুত্ব নেই ছিঁড়ে রাস্তায় ফেলে দিচ্ছে, প্রতিবাদ সহ প্রতিরোধ করে বই প্রেমী এলাকার মানুষ এগিয়ে আসেন পরে হুলিগানর পিছুটান নেয়. https://t.co/6U89UsmK9x— Dibyendu Das. (@DibyenduDa21375) October 18, 2026The image of the old man, begging with folded hands, will never leave me. It is not only his age and his attire, but that gesture of calm, polite resistance, of pleading with an unruly youngster, the humiliation of committed, aging love for books and belief in a worldview of common decency, grovelling before savage youth which doesn’t care what their rod hits, whose vicious anger at the books somehow feels empty of real content, as if they don’t really know what or why they hate but remain immersed in violent fury. Bengalis have come a long way. Finally, Bengal has thought what much of the rest of India thought decades back. Or was there Saffron in Red’s clothing all along?A Left bookstall. Photo: Basundhara Dutta.For the best of Bengal, Marxist thought was no mere clothing. It was a fundamental way of understanding the world and its people. A moment returns from Chairaiveti, the memoir of the Berkeley economist Pranab Bardhan. Back in his youth, all the way to his student days in Presidency College in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Bardhan was a keen student of history. Marxism revealed to him that history needs to be understood in materialist terms – through the hard workings of the forces of economic production. Unless one understood this hard power, one could not understand history. Bardhan goes on to tell the story of how this Marxist understanding of history eventually pushed him to economics as his discipline of choice. As someone who has championed interdisciplinary liberal arts education in India over the last decade, I realise that this kind of interdisciplinary epiphany was an unattainable dream for people of my generation, those who went to college and graduate school in the nineties and the 2000s. The colonial model of early specialisation in a single subject, by then, had taken on the bureaucratic character of competitive examinations, leaving little room for intellectual adventures to which Bardhan confesses. I suspect this model of the College Street Renaissance human – College Street is the book lane famous for its debate-friendly coffee house in Kolkata – went out of vogue at least a couple of decades before our time. Another economist, Amartya Sen, narrates in his memoir, Home in the World, being torn between love for Sanskrit and mathematics as well as being rudely jolted by scenes from the Bengal famine of 1943, which I imagine played a role in the shape and form he was to later give to the subfield of development economics. A book-seller at College Street. Photo: Rishi Bandopadhay/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)For Sen, the famished man driven to insanity he saw as a child in Santiniketan was a visceral experience. A commitment to materialism, often translated into sensory language, is one of the key elements that has drawn many writers and artists to Marxism. Marx’s formulation of the mutual entanglement of the ideal and the material has been influential, for instance, for the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to inspire a similar blood kinship between the concrete and the abstract, theory and experience, history and image. Such are the affirmations he takes away from Marx: “Mind and body were not separate spheres of the human. They were interwoven.” And this shows up in the language through which history takes form: “Marx’s metaphors could light up connections in the most apparent contradictions, as when he talked of capitalism coming into history dripping with blood or when he compared bourgeois progress to the pagan idol who drank nectar, but only from the skulls of the slain.”The sensory imagery of Marx’s writing – as for instance in the unforgettable preface to the Communist Manifesto by him and Friedrich Engels, draws me greatly as a writer. It may have been Marx’s radical rebellion against the abstraction of German idealism and the subsequent critique of the Cartesian abstraction of the European Enlightenment. But there are days when the image of the pagan idol who drinks nectar from the skulls of the slain nourishes epiphanic inspiration in its own right. Perhaps on nights of particularly daring flights of fantasy, it evokes the image of the tribal goddess Kali as a radical Communist. But Marxist thought has drawn and shaped Bengali thinkers and writers in a myriad of different ways. The tantalisingly sensory idea of Raymond Williams that culture is ordinary – that it may reside in a miner’s way of drinking beer as in poems written about such beer-drinking – has deepened awareness of everyday life as both aesthetic and epistemology across Bengal and has done wonders for poetry and social science alike. Marxism has also flung sharp ethical challenges. One of the most compelling has been that faced by the historians of the subaltern school in their attempt to give voice to the indigenous tribal in the narration of history, which faces a dead end when supernatural faith has to be excluded by historical reason which a Marxist seems fated to serve.A hoarding placed by the BJP near the CPI(M) state headquarters in Kolkata names the Left parties and warns of “Bambadh,” or the slaying of the Left. Photo by arrangement.What we cannot forget is this: while Communism has failed as a political system worldwide, its power as a system of thought, as a way of understanding social reality, continues to lead us. The deep despair evoked by the destruction of communist bookshops in Kolkata is that this has been true for Bengal in a poignant way. The irreversible erosion of industry, education, and development in Bengal through 33 years of Communist rule – years of which I retain dark, power-cut, bureaucratically stagnant memories as a child and as a young student, is a home truth, even though for many of us, it now feels like a distant and harmless bad dream after the destructive misrule of the last sixteen years. But this has done nothing to take away the power of Marxist thought to explain the world to Bengalis, often in a real and vivid way that has remained beyond the reach of many other schools of thought. Perhaps the greatest takeaway is the understanding of the way social reality remains beholden to the forces of economic production. That hard and soft power work in tandem tells us so much about power and social relations even as we try to salvage Marxist thought from economic determinism.This, then, is the great irony. Communist rule, many have reason to believe, has irreparably damaged Bengal. But Marxism as a way of thinking and feeling the world has been so central to the Bengali mind that there is no darker image of its destruction than the vandalism of communist bookstalls. ‘Vikshit’But this is a Bengal where words and iron rods work together in the same toxic tandem between soft and hard power outlined by Marx. A professor at IIM-Kolkata, Sourav Bhattacharyya, recently put out a social media post where he called out the unthinking “Sanatanisation” of Bengali – Sanatani Bangla is what he called it.The occasion was a poster celebrating the Vikshit Bengali, with images of two contemporary Bengali economists close to the ruling party. No need to reiterate that they are of ilk very different from the likes of Pranab Bardhan and Amartya Sen, one of whose close working partners, Jean Drèze, recently came under critical fire by one of these Vikshit Bengali economists. But Bhattacharyya’s quarrel was with language – pointedly, with the word, Vikshit. While in Hindi the word means “developed”, in Bengali, he pointed out, it actually implies something more neutral, with affirmation far more muted. In a comment on that post, I suggested the word “manifestation”, dallying with “manifest” as Gen Z would have it. One of the most iconic uses of the word in Bengal is: “Education is the manifestation of the perfection already in man”. That was by Swami Vivekananda, whose saffron robe and compassion for the poor and the caste-oppressed has existed in Bengal forever alongside the Communist red. That was the mindboggling plurality of what Bengal used to be. But the takeover of the Bengali vikshit (in Bengali, bikoshito), by the Hindi Vikshit reveals an Orwellian erosion of language that, in the language of today’s Gen-Z protestor, makes “manifest” the brutal trajectory of the destruction of the Bengali mind. Saikat Majumdar is the author, most recently, of the book Open Intelligence: Education Between Art and Artificial.