DISCUSSION

Whatever Has Happened to Caste in West Bengal?

Ranabir Samaddar

Taking the discussion in EPW on caste in West Bengal further, a comment on the mobilisation and autonomy of the lower-caste movement post-Partition, the reduced scope for the lower castes to develop a hegemonic politics or strategy, and the importance of a bahujan samaj in this context.

hatever has happened to caste in West Bengal merits serious political attention. Therefore, the discussion on the pages of EPW last year (Praskanva Sinharay, A New Politics of Caste, 25 August 2012, Uday Chandra and Kenneth Bo Nielsen, The Importance of Caste in Bengal, 3 November 2012, and Partha Chatterjee, Historicising Caste in Bengal Politics and Sarbani Bandyopadhyay, Caste and Politics in Bengal, 15 December 2012) on caste in West Bengal is welcome, and also my excuse to join it and take the inquiry further. It seems the discussants are unanimous regarding a few factors, namely that the scheduled caste (SC) movement was strong in Bengal before Independence; that Partition changed the scenario, and then the Namasudras, after their migration to West Bengal, could not build up a similar kind of movement in this part of the land; and that today, with middleclass elites commanding the resources of public life, the autonomy of the caste movement has become a difcult enterprise, if not altogether impossible. The Bengal Situation Against the background of all these factors, it is too early to say if the attention of the big political parties and the government to the Matua Mahasangha on the eve of the last two elections indicates the potentiality and the possibility of the Namasudra movement (mainly in the form of the Matua cult) evolving into a serious challenge to the upper-caste hegemony in the state. Much of this is unexceptionable, and this has been reiterated in many articles, observations, and dissertations. Yet, there is a need to push the discussion towards more contemporary and difcult aspects of the question. In this discussion one can sense an uncomfortable awareness of a paradox
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accompanied by some helplessness at not being able to grasp it. We seem to be saying that we know that caste does not operate in West Bengal as elsewhere in the country, yet we are aware that caste is present in the state as a standard of inequality and social hierarchy. And, the agreement on the explanation seems to be that the upper-caste Bengali Hindus have monopolised all avenues of upward mobility; hence the durability of caste. This is like going in circles, for it begs the question as to why the lower castes cannot forge a collective movement for social justice and break the monopoly of upper-caste power? This aporia, howsoever frustrating it may appear to us, is, however, productive in the sense that it provokes us to focus on two inquiries. One, why could not the Namasudras re-enact their political past on their arrival in West Bengal? Two, is there a larger inquiry concealed in this state of affairs, which would be around the exceptionality of the Bengal situation? It may well be that rather than denying the exceptionality of West Bengal (and trying to prove that it is all the same as elsewhere), a probe into the exceptionality may lead us to more insights as to how the ethics of justice and community has worked in West Bengals contemporary history. Partha Chatterjees (15 December 2012) intervention has two points signicant from the perspective of these two questions the signicance of Partition, which broke the earlier pattern of mobilisation of lower castes in Bengal, and, more interesting for me, the institution of party as the form of power that has subsumed all autonomies in towns and villages of West Bengal. These two points are linked, however, to a larger set of issues. Immigrant Namasudra First, there is a need to rethink if we had exaggerated the possibility of the Namasudra movement in erstwhile united Bengal to build up an autonomous mobilisation of the lower castes throughout the entire land. After all, the Namasudra mobilisation took place in a compact area of four districts of lower-eastern
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Ranabir Samaddar (ranabir@mcrg.ac.in) is with the Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata.

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Bengal and there is little evidence to suggest that the three-way game between the upper-caste Hindus, Muslims and the lower castes was played in the same way in other parts of the land. If there was no Partition, theoretically one may say that this mobilisation could have become the hegemonic model of lowercaste mobilisation elsewhere. But, as we know, with Partition the rules of the game changed. The second point to note relates to the main change in the focus of the Namasudra mobilisation post-Partition. After they were forced out of East Pakistan, owing to increasing rigidity of Muslim power there in the wake of the end of the three-way game, electoral mobilisations were no longer a feasible agenda in West Bengal for the Namasudras. Relief, rehabilitation, and resettlement these became the main concern. Though education, foundation of temples, annual congregations, establishment of caste associations, and other social rites recommenced here, these were not the appropriate tools for political mobilisation in post-Partition West Bengal. Namasudras and other immigrant lower castes fought for decent rehabilitation measures in resettlement sites like Coopers Camp, and the more they concentrated on that (and they had to), the more they acquired the identity of an immigrant population with little visible common sociopolitical demands shared by other lower castes in West Bengal. Therefore, the lower castes who in the mid- and late-1960s had joined in large numbers the militant agrarian movements in north Bengal, Birbhum, South 24 Parganas, and in Medinipur, had little afnity to share with the struggling Namasudras. Names of agrarian militants from a lower-caste background, such as Babulal Biswakarma, Kadam Mullick, Hajera Sanpui and Indra Lohar, will feature in any history of the popular movement for justice in the mid- and late-1960s. Ethnography is a necessary tool in this inquiry. But ethnography possibly cannot tell us by itself of the continuities and discontinuities in the lower-caste movement in post-Partition Bengal. What is required here is a critical, event-centric
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sense of contemporary history and the zeal to collect life stories of lower-caste militants to nd out what animated them and the legacies they inherited or aspired to join. But, this is a different issue, pertaining to method, to which we can come back later. What is more important is to realise the signicance of the governing instruments ranging from elections, to measures of relief, rehabilitation and resettlement, to reservation of jobs, etc, that have inuenced the dynamics of subject formation, as well as the signicance of that law of political life, viz, that the subject aspires to overcome the constraints of governmentality in the pursuit of justice. That is where we must realise the signicance of the specic ways in which the lower castes in West Bengal have joined class struggles of the peasants and workers from the 1960s. It will not be irrelevant to mention here that while one of the biggest groups of dalit workers in the city of Kolkata, the tannery workers of Tangra, maintains their caste associations including the Rabidas Sabha, they have persisted with a high degree of unionism and participated in the political militancy of the workers in general. This tells us of the double world of lower-caste consciousness the kin and community life of a caste aware of the inequalities and impediments it faces in this world, but aspiring at same time to participate in

the emancipative generality of the age. Indeed, the lower castes contribute to the making of that generality. Population Prole This indeed leads us to the more important aspect of the matter, and this is my third point, the issue of the lower-castes population prole in West Bengal. If one peruses the 2001 Census data, one would note the following. Out of 19 districts of the state, nine have more than 25% of their respective populations belonging to lower castes. These districts are Cooch Behar (50.11%), Jalpaiguri (36.71%), South Dinajpur (28.78%), North Dinajpur (27.71%), Burdwan (26.98%), Birbhum (29.51%), Bankura (31.24%), South 24 Parganas (32.12%) and Nadia (29.66%). Who are the lower castes here? Besides the Namasudras, the other big groups (10 lakhs or above) are the Bagdis, Bauris, Chamars, Pods and Rajbanshis. Between the two of them, the Rajbanshis (18.4%) and Namasudras (17.4%) constitute 35.8% of the SC population in West Bengal. Bagdis constitute 14.9%, Pods 12.0%, Bauris 5.9% and Chamars 5.4%. The trajectories of the political mobilisations of these groups have been specic, while exhibiting certain common features as well. One can recall here the annals of the Bagdis and Bauris in the agrarian movements in Birbhum and Bankura, likewise of the Rajbanshis in Jalpaiguri, Cooch Behar and the Terai

Survey
August 27, 2011

Experimental Economics: A Survey

by

Sujoy Chakravarty, Daniel Friedman, Gautam Gupta, Neeraj Hatekar, Santanu Mitra, Shyam Sunder Over the past few decades, experimental methods have given economists access to new sources of data and enlarged the set of economic propositions that can be validated. This field has grown exponentially in the past few decades, but is still relatively new to the average Indian academic. The objective of this survey is to familiarise the Indian audience with some aspects of experimental economics. For copies write to: Circulation Manager, Economic and Political Weekly, 320-321, A to Z Industrial Estate, Ganpatrao Kadam Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai 400 013. email: circulation@epw.in

september 7, 2013

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EPW

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DISCUSSION

region of Darjeeling district, and of the Namasudras and Jalia Kaibartas in South 24 Parganas. Again, signicant is the fact that while 32% of the lower castes in West Bengal are agricultural workers, as high as 20% are cultivators. The percentage of cultivators among the Doms, Dosadhs and Kaoras is less than 6%, while among the Rajbanshis and Namasudras the percentage of cultivators is above 30%. Bauris and Bagdis record consistently low percentages in almost all indicators like literacy, persons with (never) married status, etc. According to the 2001 Census, only 37.5% of the Bauris are literate, and 4.7% have completed schooling. To put briey, the implication of these gures is that they indicate very little ground for the Bagdis or Bauris to make common cause with the Namasudras in the latters particular demands regarding jobs, seats, education and relief and rehabilitation measures. On the other hand, there is equally little common ground between the two dominant lower-caste groups Rajbanshis and Namasudras with the former concentrated in north Bengal and the latter in the southern part; the former focusing on territorial autonomy and land rights, whereas the latter focusing on jobs, citizenship rights and education. No Scope for Hegemony The fourth point, in this background, is that it was almost a predestined outcome that the pattern and the structure of the lower-caste movement in erstwhile united Bengal could not be transplanted in post-Partition West Bengal, while it was equally true, as if by cruel fate, that a great section of the Namasudras would be compelled to ght for demands that had little to do with West Bengals economy, society and politics. In this sense, the lower-caste movement in West Bengal was not in a position to develop a hegemonic politics or strategy. But this situation forces us to think why what happened had happened in a particular way. Clearly, in the heterogeneous condition indicated above, only general slogans (of land and rural wages in particular) could mobilise the lowercaste peasantry, and this is precisely the
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road the lower castes took from the 1960s onwards throughout the length and breadth of Bengal. This is the road that helped them build alliances with intermediary castes like the Mahishyas in Medinipur and Howrah, or indigenous population groups in Paschim Medinipur and Bankura, where the Mahatos became an important cog in such a popular alliance. From the point of view of science, I think it would be, thus, an error to discard a relational framework and look for a pre-given pattern of popular activism among the lower castes and pass judgments on the basis of a loss of our expectations, formed either on the basis of a pre-Partition past or a received understanding of what is happening in other states in India. By adopting a relational framework, we can also keep aside the perennial dispute about the exceptionality of the Bengal experience. In any case, this takes me to the nal point, and this relates to something mentioned by Partha Chatterjee, viz, the salience of the party structure of the organised political movement in West Bengal that has stabilised upper-caste hegemony and has prevented the lower castes from putting the mark of their autonomous presence on popular movements in West Bengal in search for social transformation and justice. This is an important observation, which has to be pushed further in the context of what we have been discussing. We shall see that the cemented party structure is more a result of present governmental practices of developmental and anti-poverty programmes to be executed by the panchayats, which have resulted in a clientele system and the continuing hegemony of the upper castes. In this structure of developmental politics, there is hardly any scope for the lowercaste peasants and agrarian labour to act autonomously. Bahujan Samaj But, more importantly, the lower castes have left their signature on politics by repeatedly creating the bahujan samaj as the transformative form of political action. This happened in Naxalbari, where the adhiar (sharecroppers), cultivators,
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and tea garden labourers (mostly tea tribes, including Nepali plantation workers) joined hands to create a bahujan samaj. Again, in the early days of the Lalgarh movement, lower castes and indigenous population groups, often mediated by the Mahatos, rose against upper-caste Oriya brahmins, who had become the new bad gentry of the area. Lower castes have repeatedly striven for autonomy by framing a generality, without which a transformational politics of justice cannot happen in our time. The politics of the bahujan samaj I am indicating is not the electoral arithmetic-centric mobilisation we discuss, it is beyond the election-centric mobilisation and alliances, and elevates dalit subjectivity beyond the operation of governmentality. Thus, even in the dry and forest areas of West Bengal, we are speaking of the Jungle Mahals here, we can trace the early signs of the emergence of a new bahujan samaj, and a renegotiation of kin ties in politics and governance. Most of the bad gentry belonging to the upper castes cold-storage owners, paddy mill proprietors, transport operators, leaders of cooperative institutions, etc were isolated from this bahujan and driven out of the area, while Santhal, Munda, Sabar, Oraon, Mahato, Mandal, Kaibarta, Kurmi, Dom, Kahal, Teli, Kamar, Bauri, Hari, Mal, Sardar, Bhumij, and several other groups joined this emerging bahujan samaj, poised to confront what passes on as developmental governance. We have to recall the instance of opposing caste assemblages that happened near Delhi in the wake of the murder of dalits in Dulina in 2002. All these also remind us of the Naxalbari peasant revolt in 1967, when the Rajbanshis, Santhals, Oraons, Bagdis, Nepali-speaking indigenous groups, and others had formed another bahujan samaj. It is, of course, early to say if the upper-caste dominated party structure can be replaced effectively by a dialogic formation, like the bahujan samaj practised by the lower castes in West Bengal, today in the critical times of transformation. If that happens, there will be really a sociopolitical revolution in Bengal. Or, will there be a combination and interface of the two?
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