A Wide-angle Perspective
Deb Mukharji
COLLECTED WORKS OF REHMAN SOBHAN (IN THREE VOLUMES) by The Centre for Policy Dialogue The Centre for Policy Dialogue, 2008, 215 pp., 750
February 2008, volume 32, No 2

Rehman Sobhan is among the best known and respected figures in Bangladesh, some may say a keeper of the nation’s economic conscience. The three volumes of his collected works total an impressive 1448 pages comprising 188 articles and speeches. His insight has focused beyond his training and profession as an economist to cover a wide arc which has included politics, administration and statehood. The span of time over which he ranges effortlessly starts with the last decade of united Pakistan to the fourth decade of independent Bangladesh. It can be said without exaggeration that no understanding of the process which led to the emergence of Bangladesh, and the first three and a half decades of its existence, can be complete without an acquaintance with his work. It is not necessary that one must always agree with his views. But there must be admiration for his passion and commitment to his beliefs, mostly supported by references to facts and figures and, particularly, the complete absence of equivocation.

Indeed, the reader, to quote the author’s own words, ‘will be left with few doubts in their mind on where I stand on the particular issues I have addressed or what I believe should be done to challenge the injustices which have riven and continue to divide national as well as global society’. Sobhan’s approach is perhaps best summed up in the foreword by Professor Amartya Sen, as being ‘characterized by his determined will to challenge and fight against powerful—and sometimes dangerous—forces that imprisoned the human mind and body in dungeons of societal inequity’.

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