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NAME- SANGITA RUDRA

THE CURIOUS TRAJECTORY OF CASTE IN BENGAL POLITICS

INTRODUCTION
Caste, in its double sense of an occupational-endogamous community as well as rank-

ordered and ritually-legitimated varna, has come to be thought of in social science literature,

as the one and unique social reality of the sub-continent: India is caste and caste is India. Roland

Inden in his seminal work has pointed out that 'Caste is conceptualised as the peculiar Indian

essence that distinguishes the country from every other and particularly the Western', and again

'. Caste has become essentialised and turned into the substantialised agent of history'. When we

think of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In comparative sociology and in common parlance,

caste has become a central trope for India, metonymically indexing it as fundamentally

different from other places, synecdochically expressing its essence. A long history of writing,

from the grand treatise of the Abbé Dubois to the general anthropology of Louis Dumont, or

from the desultory observations of Portuguese adventurers in the sixteenth century to the eye-

catching headlines of the New York Times, has identified caste as the basic form and expression

of Indian society. Caste has been seen as always there in Indian history, and as one of the major

reasons why India has no history, or at least no sense of history. Caste defines the core of Indian

tradition, and caste is today the major threat to Indian modernity, even if we concede that it

helped pave the way for the modern or realize that it has been exacerbated by modern

institutions. Caste as a social institution in precolonial India was a complex and multifaceted

system that had a profound impact on society. It was characterized by its hierarchical nature,

with people divided into various caste groups, each with specific social, economic, and ritual

roles. While caste was relatively rigid, it also displayed certain degrees of fluidity and

complexity during this period. The origins of the caste system are not precisely known, but it

is believed to have evolved over thousands of years. The Rigveda, one of the oldest sacred texts

of Hinduism, mentions the division of society into four varnas (or classes) - The Brahmins were
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at the top, considered the priestly class, followed by Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas

(merchants and farmers), and Shudras (laborers and servants). Below these main categories

were numerous sub-castes and artisan groups. According to Dr.Babasahab Ambedkar, it is

mainly the custom of endogamy that has preserved the castes and prevented one caste from

fusing into another. In India, caste is a system of stratification based on institutional sanction

of the society, which ascribe the status for different caste based on their place in social

hierarchy. The network of economic, political and ritual relationship between castes outlines

the working of caste system. As a divisive force in Indian society, the potentiality of caste,

along with religion, was being gradually perceived by the colonial government since the Revolt

of 1857. One of the causes of the upsurge, as some of the officials suspected, was the fact that

the army was overwhelmingly composed of natives from the higher castes, e.g., the Brahmans

and Rajputs, who had greater social interaction. among themselves and wider loyalty networks

in the interior. The special commission appointed under Lord Peel to suggest reorganisation of

the army, therefore, recommended: "The Native Indian army should be composed of different

nationalities and castes as a general rule mixed promiscuously through each regiment. In The

Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote that "Almost everyone who knows anything at all

about India has heard of the caste system; almost every outsider and many people in India

condemn it or criticize it as a whole." Mainly Caste in its precolonial time were based on these

key aspects :- Endogamy and Occupation, Fluidity in Varna, Caste Mobility, Impact of

Religion and Social Reform , Imperial and Dynastic Influence and Interactions with foreign

culture. Nehru did not like the caste system any more than he admired the widely heralded

"spiritual" foundations of Indian civilization, but even he felt ambivalence about it. Although

he noted that caste had resisted "not only the powerful impact of Buddhism and many centuries

of Afghan and Mughal rule and the spread of Islam," as also "the strenuous efforts of

innumerable Hindu reformers who raised their voices against it," he felt that caste was finally
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beginning to come undone through the force of basic economic changes. And yet Nehru was

not sure what all this change would unleash. "The conflict is between two approaches to the

problem of social organisation, which are diametrically opposed to each other: the old Hindu

conception of the group being the basic unit of organisation, and the excessive individualism

of the west, emphasizing the individual above the group."

CASTE IN COLONIAL SOCIOLOGY

The rapid expansion of the empire in India forced upon the British the task of

developing an administrative system capable of exerting greater social control. This required a

clear knowledge of the composition of the subject society and its belief system. At that time

the Christian missionaries were critical of the system, for it was, first of all, the social basis of

Hinduism which they were out to destroy. And then, it was an impediment to social interaction

between the native converts and the larger Indian society, thereby restricting the expansion of

Christianity. The Orientalists, on the other hand, saw stability and order in the theory of caste

and, therefore, respected it. But in the late nineteenth century, administrative exigencies

demanded a deeper analysis . At that point of time, the European civil servants were more

prone to look at Indian society in terms of its primordial social categories. Hence both the

colonial administration and its civilian-turned- ethnographers felt attracted to the caste system,

an institution they considered most uniquely Indian of all. One primary reason being that the

demise of the little kings; those who had survived at all had done so as zamindars or landlords

with little particular claim to histories of their own) Temple histories continued to be important,

but they were considered to be relevant by the colonial state only insofar as they could be used

to decide disputes over temple control, management, and honours . But for a variety of reasons

caste histories were considered to be particularly important, and caste became increasingly the

only relevant social site for the textualization of Indian identity. In the first half of the century,

the emphasis on caste was consistent with the change from revenue settlements with landlords
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to settlements with village headmen and individual cultivators, providing a ready means to

evaluate the authoritative claims and social positions of the individuals to be granted revenue

titles. The ethnological researches which undertook in the late nineteenth century were their

attempts to understand this intricate social formation. The tradition of official studies that had

started with Francis Buchanon's survey of Bengal and Bihar in the early nineteenth century,

therefore, developed further through the decennial census reports and the publications of the

civilian-turned-ethnographers-a tradition that was started in the mid- nineteenth century by

Dalton and Sherring, and developed in the late nineteenth by Wise. Hunter and Risley, was

completed in the early twentieth century by O'Malley, Hutton and Blunt. These official studies

on caste, it is true, reflected anthropological interest and theories of the period and the

anthropometric data which were collected were partly to satisfy such purely academic interest.

The colonial ethnographers also, as a result, looked at Indian society through this

administrative prism. They ignored the functional and normative aspects of caste and

overstressed only its structural implications. To them-caste appeared to be a distinct structural

entity, concrete and measurable, with definable characteristics. They overlooked the important

fact that all these units were once tied to each other through inter-dependent relationship and

thus constituted an organic whole. On the contrary they represented Hindu society as a motley

collection of such discrete social groups which could be quantified and classified for

administrative purposes. In this multiethnic society they detected a central polarity, with the

privileged higher castes at the one end and the vast multitude of backward communities at the

other. This particular tradition of colonial ethnography had started in the days immediately

following the Revolt of 1857. It was formalised in the last three decades of the nineteenth

century and the first two decades of the twentieth. When political developments necessitated a

more concrete caste policy around this time, it was from this perception that such state policies

emanated.
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HOW CASTE PREVAILED IN THE WEST?

The agreement in the West about the centrality of caste has not meant that there has

been agreement about what is meant by the term, or about the moral valuation of it. The Abbé

Dubois wrote in 1815 that the institution of caste was the only reason accounting for why

Hindus did not fall into "the same state of barbarism as their neighbors and as almost all nations

inhabiting the torrid zone." Theories of caste are not only about society but about politics and

history as well. Weber, Marx, Henry Maine, and now Louis Dumont have all held that in India,

in marked contrast to China, the state was epiphenomenal. Caste, not the state, held society

with its constituent village republics and communities- together. In a more general sense, caste

is seen as the foundation and core of Indian civilization; it is responsible for the transmission

and reproduction of society in India. And caste, like India itself, has been seen as based on

religious rather than political principles. With the publication of Homo Hierarchicus in 1966,

Dumont gave canonical formulation to this view of the caste system, setting many of the terms

of discourse and debate about Indian society that continue to the present day. Dumont holds

that the political and economic domains of social life in India are encompassed by the religious

domain, which is articulated in terms of an opposition between, purity and pollution: For

Dumont, the Brahman represents the religious principle, in as much as the Brahman represents

the highest form of purity attainable, by Hindus. The king, while important and powerful,

represents the political domain, and is accordingly inferior to, and encompassed by, the

Brahman. The overarching value accorded to the religious domain is the central feature of the

ideology of caste, which Dumont characterizes with the single word hierarchy. Dumont argues

that the sociological significance of hierarchy has been systematically missed by modern

writers obsessed with the ideology of equality, and he hopes instead to "distinguish

fundamental values and ideas from everything else, the ideological from the non-ideological,
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or rather the more conscious or more valorized from the less conscious or valorized" with this

concept .

Dumont thus identifies the politico-economic aspects of caste as relatively secondary

and isolated In assessing recent changes in the caste system, he notes that the British

government's policy of "not meddling in the domain of religion and the traditional social order,

while introducing the minimum of reforms and novelties on the politico-economic plane"

(234), significantly reduced the extent of change and conflict under colonial rule. Only with

the introduction of modern democratic politics has caste begun to undergo the major

transformation of "substantialization," which for Dumont constitutes an important breakdown

of the structural relations of parts to wholes and an essential challenge to the ideology of

hierarchy. Caste not only subordinates the political; it also reduces the individual to a position

of relative unimportance. The individual only has ideological significance when placed outside

society, becoming in Dumont's terms "the individual- outside-the-world.

When H. H. Risley adopted a procedure to establish precedence in the 1901 Census,

caste became politicized all over again. Caste associations sprang up to contest their assigned

position in the official hierarchy, holding meetings, writing petitions, and organizing protests.

By 1931 some caste groups were distributing handbills to their fellow caste members to tell

them how to answer questions about their religious and sectarian affiliations, as also their race,

language, and caste status. After 1931 the British could no longer ignore the political effects of

the census, and they abandoned the use of caste for census counting altogether." The rise of

caste as the single most important trope for colonial Indian society, and the complicity of Indian

anthropology in the project of colonial state formation, is documented in a great many texts,

perhaps nowhere more fully. though complexly, than in Risley's classic work The People of

India. In Risley's view, caste has an ambivalent status. It is both a religious institution and a

social or civil one. It is anarchic, yet it encourages the development of monarchy. Risley also
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wrote that "the caste system itself, with its singularly perfect communal organization, is a

machinery admirably fitted for the diffusion of new ideas; that castes may in course of time

group themselves into classes representing the different strata of society; and that India may

thus attain, by the agency of these indigenous corporations, the results which have been arrived

at elsewhere through the fusion of individual types". Risley thus holds out a kind of limited but

realistic hope for national development in India, measured by his sense that caste ideas and

institutions will stand In the way, though he is optimistic that a steady (and English) pragmatism

on the part of Indian leaders can sow the seeds of a new mentality. But Risley's liberalism is

complicit in the general project of British colonialism as it supports the notion that caste is

simultaneously a barrier to national development and an inevitable reality for Indian society in

the foreseeable future.

Indian society, indeed caste itself, was shaped by political struggles and processes.

Moreover, caste was not a single category or even logic of categorization. Regional, village, or

residential communities; kinship groups; factional parties; chiefly retinues, and so on could

both supersede caste as a rubric for identity and reconstitute the ways caste was organized.

Social identity was importantly political, as too were the contexts in which different units

became formed, represented, and mobilized. And politics took on its shape and meaning in

relation to local and regional systems of power in/ which headmen (of lineages, temples,

villages), gurus (leaders of sects and monasteries), warrior leaders, chiefs, and kings were

figures of central importance with authority over constituencies that from certain perspectives

could look and act like caste groups. Brahmanic texts, both vedic origin stories and the much

later dharma texts of Hinduism's puranic period, provided transregional and metahistorical

modes of understanding Indian society that clearly appeal led to British colonial interests and

attitudes.
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Casting India as a whole

The assumption that the colonial state could manipulate and invent Indian tradition at

will, creating a new form of caste and reconstituting the social, and that a study of its own

writings and discourse is sufficient to argue such a case, is clearly inadequate and largely

wrong. The politicization of invented forms of caste in the census as well as in the communally

based franchises of early electoral reform, in the development and implementation of legal

codes, in the introduction and elaboration of revenue systems and policies predicated on a

colonial sociology of India, and in the textualization and professional appropriation and

reinterpretation of Indian traditions and social forms. And all of these historical processes

themselves rest on a thick historical base, for caste achieved its critical colonial position only

because the British state was successful in separating caste as a social form from its dependence

on precolonial political processes.

The history of discourses on caste cannot be separated from the full institutional history

of British colonialism. But if colonial discourse and the documentation apparatus that provided

the evidence and the ground for the colonial caste of mind was not totally and autonomously

constitutive, neither was it epiphenomenal. Orientalist versions of India's essence and

anthropological representations of the centrality of caste have conspired to deny Indians their

history and their historicity simultaneously; their failure to have history was all their own fault.

History belonged to the colonizers, not the colonized. The potential subjectivity of Indian

subjects was not suppressed outright but shifted into the cultural logic of reproduction implied

by terms such as custom and tradition, which in India meant "caste." At the same time, under

colonialism caste became a specifically Indian form of civil society, the most critical site for

the textualization of social identity but also for the specification of public and private domains,

the rights and responsibilities of the colonial state, the legitimating conceits of social freedom
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and societal control, and the development of the documentation and certification regimes of

the bureaucratic state.

It seems clear in the Indian case that the forms of casteism and communalism that

continue to work against the imagined community of the nascent nation state have been

imagined as well." However, they have been imagined precisely through and within the same

historical mechanisms that in the colonizing nations of Europe and America were far more

securely harnessed to the project of state formation.

Social Mobility in Bengal

If one looks at histories and literatures of caste mobilisations during the colonial period

in Bengal one would be obliged to confront and rethink the alleged lack of significance of caste

in Bengal. In this period we find a hyper-visibility of caste. Although these movements began

seeking higher varna status for their respective castes they soon began to claim special

treatment from the colonial government arguing that their current economic and political

oppression was inseparable from their caste oppression. Compilations of comprehensive

accounts of the castes of Bengal is a modern phenomenon dating from the seventies of the

nineteenth century. But there are at least six texts composed between the thirteenth-fourteenth

century and the eighteenth century which contain information on the castes prevalent in Bengal.

The two upapuranas, namely, Brihaddharmapuranam and the Brahmavaivarttapuranam. which

may have been composed in Bengal in the thirteenth-fourteenth century are the earliest among

these sources. There are several castes which are common in all the sources mentioned above.

Apart from the Brahmins , the Baidyas , Kayasthas (Karanas), Gandhabaniks, Tambulis and

Sankhabaniks occur in all accounts dating from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. But

many other castes are less fortunate. The Toulikas (betel-nut traders). Sutas. Rajaputras and

Takshakas (sculp- tors) mentioned in the Brihaddharmapuranam and the Attalikakaras (mason-
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architects) and Kotas (house-builders) mentioned in the Brahmavaivarttapuranam do not

appear in any of the lists compiled since the sixteenth century. Similarly, the Manibaniks who

dealt in precious stones do not occur in any of the nineteenth century sources. Apparently the

Toulikas. Sutas. Takshakas, Attalikakaras and Kotas had disappeared as distinct castes before

the middle of the sixteenth century. The Manibanik caste appears to have been defunct by the

second half of the nineteenth century. The occupations of the defunct castes appear to have

been taken over by other castes who were occupationally closer to them. Thus the Tambulis,

who were traders in betel leaf only according to the Brihaddharmapuranam, had by the time of

Mukundaram taken over the Toulika's betel-nut trade. Similarly, the o ccupations of the

Attalikakaras. Kotas and Takshakas had come to be combined with carpentry as the occupation

of the Sutradharas.On the contrary, groups of individuals had broken away from certain castes

to form new castes with occupations different from those of the parent castes. There had been

changes in the ritual rank of some of the new castes.

These are a few instances of social mobility between the thirteenth- fourteenth and the

nineteenth-twentieth centuries. The first type of mobility occurred within the individual jatis,

i.c., castes. These are the cases of movements from a less respectable hypergamous section

such as the mauliks to the more respectable one of the. kulins. The formation of the

hypergamous kulin section among the Mairas is a case in point." No doubt it is usually difficult

to identify the mobile units once they are absorbed within the higher rank of the kulins.

However, there are certain indications by which the comparatively new entrants may be

distinguished.

The second type of mobility movements were confined to the acquisition of greater

respectability by individual castes without a corresponding change in the existing ceremonial

rank of the castes. For instance, the Nabasakh Gandhabaniks (conventionally the spice and

herb-selling druggist and grocer caste) and the Tambulibaniks (conventionally traders in betel
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and also in betel-nuts at least from the middle of the sixteenth century) had succeeded in

promoting themselves to comparatively higher positions than those of such Nabasakh castes as

the Baruis (growers of betel-leaf and also traders in their own pro- duce), the confectioner

Mairas, the smiths who are known as Karmakars and the Napits who are barbers.The third type

of mobility consisted in the formation of a dissident group and adoption by the aspiring group

of a new name which is indicative of comparatively higher social position. The dissident groups

from the Napit. Dhoba and Sunri castes are the cases in point. The most important of the

mobility movements resulted in the emergence of new castes with higher ritual rank. Evidences

of such mobility are provided by the breakaway groups from the Gops, Telis and Bhumiis.

They had separated themselves from the parent castes and formed themselves into new castes

with new names and higher positions both in the secular and ritual contexts.

All the cases of major mobility movements included in the third and the fourth types

are known to have begun with the change in occupation. Occupation being the most important

factor in determin- ing the position of a group of people in the society, the relative purity and

impurity of occupations identified the different castes with one or the other rank in the

hierarchy of castes. The process of social mobility beginning with the change in occupation up

to the formation of new castes with higher social rank, both in the ritual and secular contexts,

was completed by only a few groups which initiated and carried on the fourth type of mobility

movements.

Therefore in Bengal also, as in many other parts of India, the individual members of

the same caste "played different economic roles of potentially differentiated ranks and varied

accordingly in the evaluation or prestige dimension." The recognised indices of prestige

included the elegance of ceremonial performance and social services. But in a society

dominated by traditional values, the most important component of prestige was perhaps the

caste ranking and individuals could rise in prestige dimension only if their castes could rise as
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corporations. So the changes in the distribution of productive resources and political power that

altered the patterns of economic and secular social interaction between groups and individuals,

often sought expression through attempts at achieving a higher ritual rank. Generally, the

discrepancies between the secular status and the ritual rank of a particular caste were sought to

be resolved through 'Sanskritization' or 'symbolic justification'. Most of these agitations for

caste mobility. that we come across not only in Bengal but in other parts of India as well, during

the early twentieth century, were in the shape of "attempt to change the group name to one

more hallowed in Hinduism".

Child-marriage was another such social custom of the respectable castes. Along with

these marriage customs of the higher castes, seclusion of women both before and after marriage

was also being more enthusiastically enforced by these aspirants for social respectability.

Although a small section, better educated and more prosperous had started relaxing the rigours

of the purdah system during the early twentieth century, the middle and lower castes, both in

towns and villages, began to enforce it among themselves more vigorously than ever. It is,

however, interesting to note that although 'Sanskritization' was the dominant trend, it was not

certainly the only one. Parallel to this, signs of "Westernization' or secularization were also

visible in the behaviour of these mobile caste groups. Their goal remained the same, only their

reference category now was educated liberal bhadralok, instead of one of the three classical

varnas. Caste thus became a focus for political mobilization and hence it was now more

significant in a secular rather than ritual context. The colonial discourse of differentiation in

this way gradually began to influence and determine the actual social relations among the

Bengali Hindus.

Conclusion
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A study of the organised caste movements in Bengal in the late nineteenth and the early

twentieth centuries inevitably suggests that caste was always an important factor in the socio-

political life of this province. Bengal was no exception to the general rule, although problems

of untouchability or social disability were not that acute here. The colonial policies in a

significant way con- tributed to a rejuvenation of caste-sentiments which were eventually

articulated in political life. But at the same time, the very forms of expression of such

sentiments led to an erosion of the traditional society as well.The political and economic

changes of this period led to a disintegration of the old, hierarchical, interdependent

relationships between castes. On the one hand, the intrusion of foreign rule corroded the local

power base that maintained social discipline and punished the errant. On the other, a market

economy delinked caste from the system of distribution of economic opportunities and

rewards; for no occupation was now a monopoly of any particular caste. The result was a higher

degree of social mobility. But this did not threaten the existence of caste as a social institution.

The upwardly mobile people, though conscious of their new secular status and aware

of the existence of a market system, instead of demanding a levelling of the society, went for

'Sanskritization' and demanded higher ritual ranks, thus consciously endorsing the caste

system. But the way they expressed their sentiments also weakened the structure of the

traditional society and its behaviour pattern. The large scale appropriation of symbols of higher

ritual status signified a protest against the institution of caste, for it used to make those symbols

an exclusive monopoly of the higher castes alone. Above all, the very idea of organising

movements for caste mobility, and that too by such a large number of castes at a time,

threatened the hierarchical structure itself and challenged by implication the ideology of caste

that made ritual ranking theoretically unchangeable in the upward direction.

The colonial ethnographers in the late nineteenth century discovered two central

contradictions in the pluralist society of Bengal: one between the Hindus and the Muslims and
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the other among the Hindus themselves, between the more advanced high caste bhadralok at

the one end and the under-privileged lower castes, eventually known as the 'depressed classes'

at the other. This stereotype began to influence the colonial policy when the bhadralok began

to question the legitimacy of the Raj at the turn of the century. In order to weaken their

movement the British first tried to rally the Muslims and then, with equal consistency, sought

to mobilize the 'depressed classes' in support of the Raj. This they did by evolving a policy of

'protective discrimination', that sought to grant special favour in matters of education,

employment and constitutional rights, first to the Muslims and, then to the 'depressed classes',

later called the 'Scheduled Castes'.

In around the 1930's, we find a growing divergence between the aspirations of the elites

and the grievances of the masses belonging to these 'depressed' communities. This led to a

transformation of these caste movements from social protest to what may be called the politics

for reservation. Now the elite leaders of the back- ward castes made use of the depressed

condition of the majority of their caste brothers as a political capital in their bid for power and

patronage in institutional politics. For that very reason, of course, they could not totally neglect

the masses who, viewed from an institutional angle, formed their constituency.

The way these caste movements had developed till the middle of the 1930's under the

leadership of an upwardly mobile elite group, shows that these were based on a different

ideological construction on the nature of colonial rule and on a different perspective on what

should properly constitute a 'jati'.

But subsequently, the dominant streams sought to capture them, and this 'river capture'

process picked up momentum in the 1940's, when the transfer of power became an imminent

possibility. As some of their major demands, i.e., for institutional concessions and

constitutional rights, had by now been more or less fulfilled, the leaders of these caste
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associations found it more convenient to come to terms with the dominant political force in the

country, i.e., the Congress. On the other hand, the protesting spirit of the masses at this juncture

began to be channelised into the other more class-oriented movements or mass organisations.

This shifting of the flow from the tributaries into the major streams thus reduced the lesser

parallel streams into 'beheaded rivers'. It is this hydrographic analogy that can perhaps explain

the complexities of nationalist politics in Bengal, arising out of the multiplicity of responses to

colonial rule and their subsequent intertwining during the last years of struggle against it.

From my perspective, Caste should no longer be disavowed, however, or critiques of

colonial his- tory licensed to wish it away. I would suggest that caste might even provide an

ambivalent vehicle for charting out new ways of thinking about Indian modernity, secularism,

and nationalism. Caste has the dubious advantage of signaling class privilege, highlighting

sociohistorically determined modes of access to and exclusion from resources and

opportunities, and calling attention to the differentiated and particularistic forms of relationship

to other social collectivities and religious beliefs and practices. In many ways like the category

of gender, caste both interrogates and acknowledges difference. The genealogy of caste politics

(in its modern form) in the agitations over rank and status around the census need not

compromise contemporary possibilities for political mobilization that work to transform the

postcolonial relations of state and society. Caste in its present form may indeed be a colonial

hangover, but the challenge of the postcolonial predicament is to find other ways to transform

history, while always acknowledging the barbaric hold it has on us all.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works cited :-
*Bandopadhyay,Shekhar,”Caste Politics and the Raj:Bengal “1872-1937.Web.95-206
*Dirks,Nicholas,”Castes of Mind”2001.3-34