Swadesh Bose  Swadesh Ranjan Bose (; 2 January 1928 – 3 December 2009) was a Bengali language movement activist and an economist. For his contributions to the field of economics he was posthumously given the Independence Day Award, Bangladesh's highest state award. Bose was born on 2 January 1928 in Kashipur village in Backergunge District, Bengal Province, British India (now Barisal District, Bangladesh). He attended Brojomohun College in Barisal, where he became involved in student politics and obtained his Intermediate of Arts (IA) in 1944. The partition of India in 1947 made Barisal part of the new country of Pakistan. His relatives moved to India, but Bose remained in Barisal. There he was a local organiser of the early stages of the language movement, which demanded that Bengali be one of the official languages of Pakistan. Bose was arrested on 10 March 1948 for distributing a manifesto supporting the movement. He was jailed until 1953, and was imprisoned again early in 1954 for demonstrating against Chief Minister Nurul Amin's visit to Barisal. After the United Front came to power in the March provincial election, he was released briefly, only to be detained a third time after the Governor-General of Pakistan declared a state of emergency and dismissed the provincial government in May. Ultimately he was released in late 1956. He earned a BA in 1958, and in 1960 completed an MA in economics at the University of Dhaka. The following year he joined the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) in Karachi. There he co-authored, with American economist Henry J. Bruton, his first book, "The Pakistan Export Bonus Scheme". In 1963, he married Noorjahan. She too had been a language movement activist, and was a University of Dhaka graduate. She was ten years his junior, the widow of a friend, and had a young son, Jaseem Ahmed. It was an inter-faith marriage (he was Hindu, she was Muslim), which upset her family, and got the couple expelled from the leftist political party to which they both belonged. They moved to England, where he completed his PhD thesis: "Regional co-operation for development in South Asia, with special reference to India and Pakistan" and received his degree from the University of Cambridge in 1967. The family returned to Karachi, where he resumed working for the PIDE, under new director Nurul Islam, a fellow Bengali economist. Their work highlighted the economic disparity between the western and eastern wings of Pakistan.