Geof Wood: 'I feel my identity is tied up with Bengal'
Geof Wood, emeritus professor of international development at the University of Bath in the UK, talks to Sushmita S Preetha of The Daily Star about his latest book, Staying the Course: The Journey of a 'Bengal' Civilian, in which he explores the dilemmas of being an academic immersed in the processes of development and the intersection between policymaking and activism.
How did you end up in Bangladesh, and how did it become a half-a-century-long relationship?
During the brief December 1971 war which confirmed the liberation as reality, I was living in a village in then Purnia District, tucked into the northeast corner of Bihar State in India. I was "being" an anthropologist trying to understand the social class implications of new technologies in agriculture—the so-called Green Revolution. It could be summed up as a "deep structures political economy analysis," which has been a feature of my approach ever since. I became very friendly with the Kosi (the river) Area Development Commissioner Sri SD Prasad—essentially the senior-most official across the two districts of Purnia and Saharsa. I was informally present in the summer of 1971 when he was visited by Mrs.Gandhi's emissaries from New Delhi discussing how to deal with the millions of refugees coming over the border into West Bengal only a few miles away. I was therefore privy to tactical thinking about when India would mount an invasion. I also witnessed the build-up of Indian armed forces later that year, with trucks rumbling through the night. When fighting started, I and another young colleague sat out the 10 days of conflict in the district town, listening to the shelling 40 miles away, once being strafed by a lone fighter plane from Pakistan.
On the day of surrender, we strolled out into the local cantonment and were immediately mobbed in a friendly way, with locals congratulating us for Edward Heath, the then UK prime minister, instantly recognising the independent republic of Bangladesh! An identity with the liberation was thereby established. Later, back at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University in 1973, I was asked to support four senior Bangladeshis (including Sheikh Mujib's brother-in-law) for several weeks during their study tour, trying to understand their reconstruction challenges and implementing the mission of the liberating Awami League. Of course, I learned so much from them. I was merely an interlocutor—prodding and challenging. But I was steadily being "drawn in." At IDS at that time, Michael Lipton was a famous social economist with South Asian field experience. He was asked to participate in the formation of the first five year plan in Dhaka. During his stay he met Obaidullah Khan, a CSP official (then Secretary of Rural Development) who wanted someone to re-examine the Cumilla cooperatives model. Were they being hijacked by the richer classes of peasant farmers? Lipton recommended me and I was invited. Angela, my wife, agreed to interrupt her social work career in Bath, and we arrived in Dhaka during the famine of August 1974.
So that's the factual story of the beginning of my association: essentially a build-up of identity with this devastated society, many of whose intellectuals had been murdered two days before the Pakistani surrender. Temporary substitutes were needed. However, also at this time, there was not much of a tradition among Bengali academics to undertake residential fieldwork themselves in the villages. They preferred to study rural life via "enumerators armed with questionnaires by their instructors." This was the way research was done at the Bangladesh Academy of Rural Development (BARD) in Comilla, but it was an inappropriate method for unravelling the dynamic relationships which were reproducing inequalities under the broad heading of patron-clientelism. These relationships were subsequently analysed by us in Exploitation and the Rural Poor, edited by my counterpart Ameerul Huq.
But why 50 years? Part of the answer has to be a sequential accident. But there were also many attractions. People, first and foremost. How people are varies at different levels of the society. For the poor, there is an outstanding quality of resilience, which can only be admired in the face of terrible deprivations. I sometimes used to feel that their experience of poverty simply could not be real, that it was a performance, and that when I left the family their poverty would mysteriously go away. But of course, I knew that not to be true. The juxtaposition between their lives and mine continues to trouble me. I recount some of this in the book. At other levels of the society, alongside resilience there is ingenuity, risk taking and innovation. Without it, Bangladesh would not have changed so much over the decades. Of course, not all of that ingenuity is put to good public use for society. And then there is the "gentlemen and ladies" class, whose English is superior to mine, who are extremely well educated, confident and generous—always intriguing in how they live and conduct themselves. I have made deep friendships, as valuable to me as any back in the UK. So why not accept invitations to come, why not accept serendipity, why not accept challenges to problem solve, why not accept new working relationships, and why not justify frequent trips and painful separations from home if there are moral purposes as well as pragmatic outcomes? And yes, a buzz.
And the sequential accident—what do you mean by that?
There has been no long-term planning of my involvement. Basically one assignment led to another, sometimes continuation of research and application to policy, sometimes more random invitations due to some accumulation of reputation which took me in different directions. But behind the element of accident has been a principle. Compared to other social sciences, especially economics, deep structures political economy analysis relies heavily upon an appreciation of context rather than a box of tools for analysing quantitative data often collected by other people originally for other purposes. Those with a decontextualised box of tools can and do travel anywhere—dropping in from the sky for a week or two. The work of a development anthropologist, if I can claim that title, is not like that. Awareness of context has to be accumulated. But beyond academic research, there was a moral commitment to such a devastated country 50 years ago, a commitment now sustained through friends and ongoing fascination.
In a way, the book charts the development trajectory of Bangladesh as well as your own experimentations and explorations of various development theories in the field. It's a book that's quite different from your other academic books. How did it come about? What did you want to achieve through it?
The late and much missed Mohiuddin Ahmed, the founder publisher of UPL, had known me for many years when he asked me in 2019 whether I would be interested to write a book reflecting on my association with Bangladesh. Mohiuddin, supported by his daughter/successor Mahrukh Mohiuddin, was, at that time, reconnecting with some of his past bideshi authors. And he had just published Aiding Resilience Among the Extreme Poor in Bangladesh (2018) with me as the lead editor of a collection of original research essays. As it happens, Covid descended on us and confined me to home and blocks of time to engage with the request.
Earlier on in my career in development studies, there was always a tension between being a "pure" academic and being "applied" in the sense of being directly relevant to people's livelihoods, either operationally or by converting knowledge into policy for adoption by others. I was often challenged by senior colleagues at IDS, Sussex, like Robert Chambers, that I was too theoretical, insulating myself from practical lives. At the same time, I am suspicious of policy people who are atheoretical because I don't think they are understanding the causes of problems which need addressing in all their complexity, and so they are either partial or wrong in interfering with the lives of others. How rational is policymaking? Many governments claim rationality to legitimise their priorities. But in reality—as once explained to me by a senior politician in Pakistan—there are other drivers for policy, usually reconciling various interests, and not even ideological.
I wanted to convey this tension and interface to a younger generation of development studies students, often postgraduate, who had applied careers in mind while studying evidence and theory in their coursework. Additionally, I wanted to convey the story that "doing" development is a messy business, entailing all kinds of compromises and concessions in which principles are easily subverted for second-order preferences. As soon as policy is conceived, it rapidly goes beyond individual starting points as more stakeholders get involved.
The "doing" of development confounds many purists at home in the UK who wish to see aid more directly in the hands of worthy participants. Any diversion for "thinking" and "implementation" capacity is condemned and often confused with corruption. The "left" in the UK, while motivated by seeking to help others poorer than themselves, can be quite critical of the aid process for these reasons. This book seeks to explain the realities of engagement through my exposure and experience; a certain kind of frontline view.
We remain a long way from the realisation of global, human common interests in each other's welfare, as rich countries' preoccupations with economic nationalism and national security take over.
I also wanted to "explain" myself to a Bangladeshi audience, perhaps even justify myself. On the face of it, it is bizarre that a bideshi should claim a space in the nation's knowledge and policy discourses, and even the struggles of some of its people. Development studies, and anthropology within it, is a postcolonial construct in that regard. So there is discomfort; cognitive dissonance even. Our presence has been tolerated gracefully, and perhaps we have mistaken that for "welcome." There is no panacea resolution to this, but a description of the bizarre might help all of us. Perhaps the book title should be "The Journey of a Bizarre Citizen"!
So various audiences have been envisaged.
I thought it was curious that you borrowed the sub/title of your book from that of a colonial officer. I raise this point to ask about what I can only imagine was a rather uncomfortable role of being a White, British, privileged man, with access to various international and national institutions, including foreign donors, trying to help the landless and destitute in postcolonial Bangladesh. How did you navigate that role?
Ah! I wondered if you would raise this point. You are on the money! It follows directly on from my reflections above. Yes, in a sense, the privilege has been all mine! In the class- and status-divided society that is the UK, people like me only have limited access to senior powerholders, especially in the bureaucracy, and it is always on "their" terms. The Oxbridge college dinners where business has been done may have faded slightly, but access remains exclusive. I imagine, from reading John Beames (you allude to him as my point of departure) that it was even more exclusive in the late 19th century, as Trollope would confirm. So a British middle class in search of adventure, and maybe impact too, went abroad and became colonial officers! There are various contemporary versions of this syndrome (inferior at home, influential abroad) to be found across the embassies and aid missions of many donors in Bangladesh, alongside applied academics and consultants still getting high on the status of international utility. It is a kind of valorisation, and a key element of personal identity. I do not separate myself from this, though I observe it too. When challenged several decades ago by a Ford Foundation Representative here about me being some kind of Svengali, she was countered by two indignant responses: from me, that as an international socialist, borders were meaningless to me (okay, a bit pompous, but intended as a tease); from my counterpart (in Proshika), that the observation was impertinent in assuming inferiority on racial grounds! We left with the funding approved!
"Development," whether studies, policies, or aid for programmes, has essentially been a postcolonial preoccupation driven by poor preparation for independence for most colonial societies, especially in Africa. Poor legacy and thus guilt for many. International philanthropy for others, which is how Tory Britain approached it across the 1980s and 90s, alongside using publicly resourced aid to facilitate trade and private business opportunities. "International Development" with the incoming 1997 Labour government was different, more closely tied to the global financial system (including the UK Treasury), more rights-based internationally and more directly poverty and gender focussed. Much of that focus for aid has continued as a rationale, with climate change necessarily added. But, alas, in the context of massive aid reduction as a function of rightist populism in richer countries, we have the mantra "charity begins at home." So, we remain a long way from the realisation of global, human common interests in each other's welfare, as rich countries' preoccupations with economic nationalism and national security take over. This welfare abroad (globally) or at home (nationally) is increasingly constructed in Europe at least as an "either/or" trade-off rather than a parallel necessity. International migration is a clear case in point.
Under such conditions, is genuine partnership even possible?
The question I pose is whether we have reached a post-postcolonial era, an acceptance that there is "no end of history," as Fukuyama posited; but rather plural cosmologies (that is, principles underlying national missions and identities) proliferating alongside regime types. Under such conditions, how does anyone conceive of prospects for genuine partnership, different from that between rider and horse in immediate postcolonial times? Only if new generations are educated to think and perceive in global terms, rather than narrow immediate ones of zero-sum games. Nationalism is a curse in the modern age. Our global interconnectedness has to be framed as our common property, not up for grabs by some at the expense of others. Climate change and sustainability demands that perspective. Colonial legacies have to be re-thought and cleared out. Curriculums in many universities round the world are being re-worked to this effect, but labelled and derided by reactionaries as woke! Culture wars are rampant in the West. Witness contemporary debates in the UK about slavery and immigration. The future is today's youth, and they too are being poorly prepared, fragmented into conflict by short-term capitalist interests—witness the fossil fuel arguments at COP28! Youth should be on the platforms, not the old guard. And that applies to Bangladesh, too. Government has a duty to nurture a new generation of public thinkers and leaders.
Where do I fit in? I am proud of Aiding Resilience among the Extreme Poor in Bangladesh and grateful to UKAid for seeing the place for research into advocacy in the EEP-Shiree programme (2008-16). But grateful also for the opportunity to mentor a younger generation of Bangladeshis as well as UK graduates into primary research, analysis, and writing their own publications—which comprises the chapters in the book, which Mohiuddin Ahmed took on at UPL. I was not alone as a mentor. I worked alongside younger colleagues, as well as supervising masters dissertations and PhD theses. That is part of my navigation. Remaining indignant and occasionally passionate about inequalities and exclusion is another part. Staying critically independent is another part, which does not always endear me to powerholders. Staying close to a wide range of interlocutors in Bangladesh is another part. They are my continuous tutors. Forgetting that I am White, unless reminded by the morning mirror. And genuinely in awe of the rich intellectual spirit on display across many forums: literary as well as scientific. A renaissance people here in Bangladesh, which attracted me in the first place and why I stayed the course. From my time in northeastern Bihar, I feel my identity is tied up with Bengal, as it was.
This is the first instalment of a longer series of conversations on development.