This is a very timely book. At one level, it offers discussions on banking related failures in Bengal Province during the 1940s and 1950s. A serious spate of bank failures had been experienced in the province in this period. It is oft stated that these failures left thousands of ordinary people, all of whom were politically invisible and mute, in financial ruin. The book represents an attempt to uncover and depict the anatomy of bank failures and its consequent fallouts. At another level, using the above depiction of how inadequate focus on institutional development facilitates mismanagement and fraud, it ruminates on the sociology of greed.
Prasanta Ray, the author, is Professor Emeritus in Sociology, Presidency University, Kolkata. His other books include Conflict and the State: An Exploration in the Behaviour of the Post Colonial State in India (1991) and Pratyaha: Everyday Lifeworlds: Dilemmas, Contestations and Negotiations (co-edited with Nandini Ghosh, 2016).