Dating back over 150 years, with heavy wooden doors, ceilings reaching into the skies, a sprawling verandah overlooking a yard with ancient banyan trees, the Circuit House in Bankura is a curious mixture of the Raj and independent India. The latter adorns the wall in the form of portraits of artists like Ramkinkar Baij and Jamini Roy, and the bookshelves, where tomes left behind unwittingly by visiting bureaucrats (Do-it-Yourself Plumbing and Heating, The Economic Development of India by Brian Davey) rub shoulders with those that may not be there quite as purposelessly, for, read carefully, they could just win the CPM a few more adherents among the vulnerable: Das Capital, three volumes, and the collected works of V.I. Lenin.

My visit to Bankura and, just before that, to the Sunderbans had nothing to do with tourism. It was driven by curiosity. On most indices of development, Bengal is trailing. Its rank, on India's interstate scorecard, has slid not just in terms of per capita income but even on social indices such as literacy, morbidity, and the progress of higher education. Talk to a random person in Kolkata and he will tell you the disaster that the CPM government has been for the state. How then does one explain the CPM's electoral popularity and unwavering rural support? It is this conundrum that compelled me to cut into my Kolkata vacation and travel.