CASTE AND THE BENGALI BHADRALOK

BY 

ANIRBAN BANDYOPADHYAY

CULTURES OF CASTE

PART 1

Caste in Bengal is a paradox. Too many examples of public display of untouchability, forced physical exclusion or humiliation, are hard to find. Yet, as one scholar has written not so long ago, leadership positions on almost all significant spheres of the Bengali life are enjoyed predominantly by upper castes. Moreover, in case of arranged marriages; not just caste but lineage and clan too, often enough come into consideration. Ironically enough, voices against caste discrimination and research on history and politics of caste in Bengal, are still a distinctly Bhadralok preserve. How to explain the paradox that there is neither immobilizing untouchability nor adequate representation of Dalits or other marginalized castes in positions of power and authority in Bengal?

Within and Beyond: The Common Sense Definition

The point has partly to do with the generally accepted definition of caste discrimination as publicly display of untouchability, exclusion, humiliation or violence against Dalits or other ‘backward’ castes. 

It is hard, if not impossible, to adequately map the caste question in Bengal, with this definition. However, it is not as if untouchability does not in any form manifest itself in Bengal. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, for instance, has recently written of how Dalit children would be denied food from the Mid Day meal programmes in a primary school in a West Bengal district bordering Bihar and Jharkhand. That, he rightly argues, is an obvious display of untouchability in the public domain, only waiting to be acknowledged. It is possible to actually quantify such instances through social science research, and such research must commence at once. In absence of large, generalizable data, denial, or late, or unfair delivery of a public resource to sections of the target population, however, can be, and is, attributed to malfunctioning of the service delivery machinery. It could be argued, in other words, that the teacher or other staff members concerned were inefficient. They did not know how to carry out their job, and that other teachers at other schools might not actually make such errors. That argument is probably not valid, or true, but it can plausibly be made, because enough data is simply not available. One cannot yet plausibly argue, I mean, that that Anganwadi school that Bandyopadhyay referred to was a typical example. It probably is, or is not, but we do not know beyond reasonable doubt. Having said that, it could still be argued that untouchability, even in the unusual form of denial of food to Dalit children in government sponsored schools, happens not in large towns, but in villages. It would mean that residual traces of untouchability persist in Bengal, in remote pockets, away from the glare of the media and middle classes. The point is that untouchability in various guises does stalk the everyday reality in West Bengal, but social science research is yet to pay adequate attention.

Social science research can think about how to generate adequate data on caste based discrimination, and recent works by Thorat et al. on discrimination against Dalits in the job market, particularly during interview, offers an excellent model for such research. In case of Bengal, caste, and not untouchability in the north or south Indian sense, is a more useful analytical category. 

A most obvious site where caste is highly visible is the marriage market. This is true particularly of arranged marriages amongst Bengalis. Take a look at matrimonial advertisements in newspapers published from Kolkata, for instance. The caste of both prospective brides and grooms is clearly mentioned, and that of the desired match often enough indicated. In case of love marriages, parents are less worried about brides or grooms from among the matching castes. While they are unlikely to be at war if their children marry out of caste, they do not feel ecstatic about it, and occasionally wait for things to go wrong, so that they can attribute the trouble to incompatible caste equations. But how does one account for negligible presence of Dalit and backward communities in positions of power and authority in urban spaces?

Questioning Protests

Bengalis would almost certainly protest against my opinion, as is their wont, generally speaking. It is time, therefore to move to the realm of protests. Bengalis protest against all kinds of injustice anywhere in the world. But they are not equal opportunity protesters. They somehow fail to organize high pitched mass protests against atrocities against Dalits elsewhere in India. This is important, for Bengalis come down to the street and write pamphlets or political tracts, posters and slogans for all kinds of causes. They protest against police aggressiveness against students, against oppression, against marginalized sexualities and even against holding up dearness allowance for militarian public servants. 

On a more serious note, there is not a good cause in the world that cannot have the Bengalis mount a protest procession or wide discussion, except "one". Bengali newspapers rarely publish pieces against atrocities against Dalits elsewhere; somehow even young Bengali students do not find the cause powerful enough to drag them down to the street. Let us ask a straight question. Why do Bengalis not become irresistibly outraged when Dalit children are raped and strung up in public elsewhere in India? It simply would not do to mutter that caste does not exist here, or superstition has died away. The middle class Bengali is fiercely superstitious and irrational. Look at the number of astrological gemstones in the forearms of adolescent and marriageable Bengali women. It is not as if Bengali men do not wear them or women drop them after a happy marriage. All I am suggesting is that middle class parents often enough tend to believe, irrationally or miraculously that some gemstone can find them an excellent son/daughter in law. So Bengalis do believe in superstitions, whether they admit it or not. In other words, the ‘traditional’ has not altogether disappeared from the Bengali everyday.

Historicizing ‘Bengali’ Culture and Civilization

Let us turn now to history. History can be ruthless, so be prepared. Bengalis launched an apoplectic protest in 1932 when the colonial state threatened to assign a large number of seats to Depressed Classes, along with Muslims. The protest campaign rallied all sections of the upper caste Bengali Hindu together, and they raised alarm that ‘the Bengali culture and civilization’ was under a mortal threat which must be resisted to death. I do not want to name the leaders of the protest, or participants, for they constituted the entire who’s who of the Bengali bhadralok. If you do not believe me, look up the National Library collections. I will be too happy to give you the reference to the relevant documents. But the point I am making here is that by the 1930s the Bhadralok had successfully translated their overwhelming dominance in Bengal as ‘the Bengali culture and civilization’. If the Bhadralok were to lose leadership positions, such as seats in the legislature, they argued, Bengal would lose its culture and civilization. It is as if, but for seats in the legislature, the Bhadralok could not continue to produce excellence in Bengali ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’. It is not my argument; all of this is much more starkly written and published in the document I refer to. This is not the space to offer a summary of that document. Those who live abroad can also look up the Zetland collection in the British Library. Once again, I will be too happy to offer the references. So, there was, and I think still is, an equation between leadership positions in politics, culture and professions and the so called Bhadralok pride in the excellence of Bengali culture and civilization. Threaten the Bhadralok with a loss of those secular spaces of power and authority and they respond with a rhetoric of a motivated assault on their culture and civilization. Strange, isn’t it, how culture and civilization is seen to live in legislature, and no one really minds? 

Yet more questions...

It is easy to cite similar instance from subsequent times. But that is not the point. The point is why you probably did not know anything at all about the 1932 mass protest by the Bhadralok. Why, for instance, history books in Bengal portray 1932 events only as ‘communal award’ in a way that it mattered only to Muslims and was an unqualified disaster for the rest? Why is that mass outrage of the Bhadralok not spoken of as an important landmark in the history of Bengal? Why don’t we ask ourselves what exactly it means to be Bhadralok? Who do we refer to as Bhadralok? We say that it is about good manners, but do we refer to a well behaved rag picker, or coolie, or taxi driver, as a Bhadralok? It is time to ask some difficult questions of the Bengali Hindu upper castes. The questions have to address what they do not talk about. Caste, I beg to submit, is "greatest Bengali unsayable". It is there, and lived, but not in quite the manner and form in which it is lived elsewhere in India. Only talking about it in public can clarify matters. The Bengali needs to ask themselves some hard questions.  

Author's Bio- Note:

Anirban Bandyopadhyay researches social and cultural history of modern Bengal and India, with particular reference to caste questions in the public domain. He has a PhD in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India and is working on his first monograph. Bandyopadhyay has published on caste in edited volumes, EPW and South Asian History and Culture. He also publishes general interest columns on caste, cinema, sports, books and politics in Deccan Herald, DNA, Economic Times, Open Magazine, The Telegraph, Anandabazar Patrika and Ei Samay. A bilingual academic cum public intellectual, he currently works as a Junior Research Officer at the Educational Multimedia Research Centre, Kolkata.