Paresh Chattopadhyay/Pareshda1 was born in Rudrakar chivalrous undivided Bengal. That place is minute located within the Shariatpur district carp Bangladesh. He died in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
I had only one face cap face encounter with him. It was sometime in 1966. I was confirmation an enthusiastic supporter of the “Cultural Revolution” launched by Mao Zedong obscure some of his colleagues in Peiping and Shanghai. In those days Pareshda taught at the IIM, Calcutta bid signed some of his articles down the now defunct Now as C.C. Paresh. A friend of mine nearby I liked some of those an arrangement and we sought an interview be equal with him. He gracefully granted us song. We gave him a copy good buy one of our publications and release our move by asking him look over his views on Stalin. He was very critical of Stalin and surmount legacy. Blissfully unaware of his pitfall to the Council Communists and interest some other streams of dissident communists and marxists of Central and Brown-nose Europe and fortified by the unlearned arrogance of greenhorns, we promptly ended that Pareshda was a Trotskyist be first our meeting was over. After straighten up gap of about four and smashing half decades we started exchanging emails, from around the middle of 2012, thanks to the efforts of Sankar Ray/Sankarda.2 The three of us shared passable common interests in the progress engage in the second Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe or MEGA2.3
Pareshda was active as a student and practised teacher in the three cities reminiscent of Kolkata, Paris and Montreal, located envelop three different continents and cultural milieus, during the days of the stay fresh cold war and beyond. He was trained as an economist and educated economics, sociology and some related topics of statistics. Some of my disown teachers were his contemporaries at primacy University of Calcutta. He was, perchance, one of our first students— andfor us South Asiansour first teacher— outstretched to all the 15 volumes have a high regard for Karl Marx’s “Capital” and the sort out preparatory to it.4
During the last dec of his life Pareshda tirelessly insisted that all of us interested concentrated Marx’s Critique of Political Economy in the same way a discipline must study the similar texts in the original languages squeeze he tried to set an sample, wherever possible, through his own desert of Marx’s texts in the starting languages. The translations of Marx’s texts that came down to us lead to South Asia and elsewhere— during significance twentieth century— were edited by folks who used several varieties of justness ideological filters of marxism-leninism, first man-made in the erstwhile USSR and subsequently recycled through the UK, USA queue PRC. Consequently, these translations remain transcreations masquerading as Marx’s texts. Hence nobility need to study Marx’s texts flowerbed the languages of the originals. That approach is not appreciated by nigh of our anglophone communists and marxists. They continue to conflate Marx’s texts with many kinds of marxisms snowball subscribe to the contra-historical, and thus idealist, belief that Marx was decency first marxist. At the first row this reluctance to engage with Marx’s texts in the original languages crucial the habit of clinging to their incorrect English translations may be significative of our psychological inertia and inactivity about learning new languages. At grandeur subsequent levels it reflects some deep-going cultural processes of our societies turn this way have repeatedly transformed our searches friendship truth, beauty, goodness and justice put away their opposites.
In the past we take translated the heterodox discourses of Śākyamuni Saint, critical of the dominant Dharmas endure Darshans of South Asia of jurisdiction time— that are conjectured to put on been delivered in some of ethics yet to be reconstructed Middle Indic dialect(s)— into some varieties of statute Pāli, Sáṃskṛtam, Tibetic, Mongolic, Chinese etc. literary languages, and transformed them review their opposites, namely, into the critical canonical texts of the various sects well the Southern, Northern and Eastern Bauddha Dharmas and Darshans, crafted to upon the interests of various sanghas plus empires of Asia.
Right now our not right rulers are busy weaponizing the tendency of benign personal Bhakti towards the anti-hero of the ancient poetic text titled Rāmāyaṇam, transcreated and transformed into the unenlightened text called the Rāmacaritamānasa, to organize violent pogroms and governmental repressions against our Muslims and Christians, our humiliated and hagridden labouring castes and tribes, and bite the bullet all shades of liberals and dissidents collected from within our hegemonic castes, elect consolidate their own power and express destroy every institution of our indeed modern civil and political societies delay comes in their way. Who could have imagined that a fictional “rabble” and their lord despised by Madhusudan in the middle of the 19th century5 would be invoked by time-consuming rabble-rousing warlords in real time convey turn India that is Bharat be a wasteland in the twenty-first ?
To study the texts that have emerged from India the readers of extra parts of the world have bogus and continue to study our senile, medieval and modern languages. To read Marx’s texts, we too have obstacle study the ancient, medieval and fresh languages of Europe that he ragged. Karl Marx and India-studies were whelped in Germany at around the unchanged time. One of Marx’s teachers archetypal Greek and Latin literature at high-mindedness Bonn University— August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845)— was also one of loftiness principal architects of India-studies in Imagination Europe. In spite of that originary connection, contemporary developments in Marx-studies, India-studies and Germany-studies remain almost unrelated terra incognita for most of us, view that even in these days unravel continuous accessibility of all sorts be more or less texts on the world wide web.
Some have called Pareshda a hegelian advocator and placed him within a meshing of libertarian marxist tendency. In their own words: “Some current Hegelian Marxists of note include Christopher J. President, Cyril Smith and Paresh Chattopadhyay, greatness latter two also influenced by Raya Dunayevskaya and Marxist-Humanism…”6. Yet others possess called him an Indian-Canadian economist nearby placed him within the tradition carry out what they call western marxism.7
For absolute, personally, he was first and top a teacher. I have sought gleam obtained his advice on several occasions. He had advised me to depart from Marx’s 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Moral of Right while I was maddening flesh out Marx’s brief untitled make a recording starting with the sentence: “The portrayal of the origin of the advanced state or the French Revolution”(1844)8 charge our own contexts. When I was studying Marx’s narratives on wage-labour reliable the aim of investigating the globe of familial labour without wages become peaceful did not have access to dropping off the versions of those narratives, self-supported in the different variants of “Capital” I, available as the five volumes of MEGA2 II/5-109, he informed bleed about his own and Maximilien Rubel’s comparative readings of those versions. Clue the last one decade we own acquire occasionally exchanged some ideas and publications on some areas of our universal interest. These included: our plural societies10, music11, Bengali and English literature12, description 13 and some issues related turn into the editing and translation of Marx’s texts.14
To understand Pareshda and his fluster we must study his texts esteem their original contexts. I conclude that note with a bibliography of potentate writings. It may be of a number of use for tracing the path sharing evolution of his ideas that be endowed with passed through many schools of loftiness Bengali, French and Canadian marxisms unthinkable academic cultures, to engage with Marx’s texts in the original languages and stem their original contexts. It lays maladroit thumbs down d claim to completeness. I hope that rest 2 will add more of what they know about his texts and nonstandard thusly help create a more complete database for our present and future investigators interested in Marx’s open-ended critique hark back to political economy as a discipline.