‘Caste in Bengal’ treats caste not as residual folklore but as a living structure of domination

In 1932, Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore endorsed a petition claiming Bengali caste Hindus deserved special political representation due to their “overwhelming cultural superiority” and “economic preponderance.” This apparent contradiction, coming from the humanist poet who had written against untouchability in Gitanjali, reveals something profound about caste’s operation in Bengal and the durability of Bengali exceptionalism myths.

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Tanika Sarkar’s formidable book Caste in Bengal: Histories of Hierarchy, Exclusion, and Resistance systematically dismantles one of modern Bengal’s most cherished self-images through rigorous historical and ethnographic evidence. This collection treats caste not as residual folklore but as a living structure of domination whose persistence reveals how power reconstitutes itself even under ostensibly progressive transformation.

The editors’ key insight is that the supposed “disappearance” from Bengal is itself a form of caste politics. Colonial Bengal’s diverse caste mechanisms, census classifications, temple restrictions, matrimonial negotiations, and occupational segregation weren’t eliminated by modernity, they were merely camouflaged beneath other categories: class, education, cultural refinement, and regional identity. Whilst caste violence elsewhere assumes spectacular forms, massacres, public humiliations, and forced labour, in Bengal it operates through what Maroona Murmu, professor of history, terms “quiet and non-physical violence” with equally devastating effects.

A quiet violence

The myth of castelessness gained currency through multiple reinforcing mechanisms documented across the volume’s 19 essays: the Left Front's insistence that “class, not caste” determined backwardness; former Chief Minister Jyoti Basu's 1980 testimony that only “rich and poor classes” existed in West Bengal; educated upper castes claiming ignorance of caste whilst monopolising power positions. These weren’t innocent misunderstandings but ideological projects serving concrete interests. The consistent monopolisation of political power by just three castes (Brahman, Kayastha, Baidya) since Independence, with every chief minister from this tiny ten per cent minority, provides a stark empirical refutation of exceptionalist claims.

The most revelatory sections trace what happened to those who physically built Bengali modernity. Uday Chandra uncovers the “hidden history” of Kols – forest-dwelling Adivasis who built imperial Calcutta, drained marshes, cleared forests, worked indigo and tea plantations. Classified as “tribes”, degraded castes, or “coolies,” they occupied the bottom of every labour hierarchy, revealing what Chandra calls a “labour theory of caste domination,” ritual impurity marking and justifying assignment of the hardest, most stigmatised work to groups.

Tanika Sarkar extends this analysis to Corporation Methars, sanitary workers cleaning Calcutta’s toilets and sewers. Drawn from Kol tribals and Dom/Hadi untouchables, they occupied an impossible position: domestic servants yet municipal employees, performing essential work yet so polluting that even other untouchables maintained distance. Their 1928 strikes brought the entire city to a standstill, representing an extraordinary level of working-class militancy. Yet Communist union leaders completely erased their caste identity from discourse, speaking only of wages and conditions, never untouchability or specific degradations.

Shahana Bhattacharya’s essay on Tangra leather tanneries completes this labour studies triptych. Migrant Chamar workers assigned to the most arduous operations simultaneously developed organisations, affirming both caste and class identities. Meanwhile, “scientific tanning” education claimed to modernise the industry whilst preserving caste-based task allocation, “expert” positions for upper castes who need not touch hides, and degrading manual work for Chamars. The pattern repeats with striking consistency: modernity doesn't eliminate caste but transforms it into forms that can be morally disavowed whilst remaining materially operative.

Post-1947 developments constitute the volume’s most chilling documentation of active upper-caste dominance reconsolidation. Partition removed the Muslim peasantry that had seriously challenged bhadralok hegemony in the 1930s-’40s, but created a refugee crisis that could have destabilised caste hierarchies. Instead, systematic discrimination emerged disguised as administrative necessity. Partha Chatterjee shows how educated upper-caste refugees occupied land near Calcutta, mobilised through the United Central Refugee Council, and won recognition with generous terms. Lower-caste refugees were herded into overcrowded camps, then forcibly dispersed to Dandakaranya and the Andamans – thousands of miles from Bengal, where their skills proved useless and they often lost Scheduled Caste recognition. When some attempted to return and settled at Marichjhapi in 1979, the Left Front government surrounded the island, cut off supplies, and massacred refugees in one of West Bengal’s darkest post-Independence episodes.

Dwaipayan Sen’s essay on Jogendranath Mandal provides the human face of this violence. Mandal, minister in undivided Bengal’s last government, instrumental in securing Ambedkar’s Constituent Assembly election, Pakistan cabinet member before returning to Calcutta, couldn’t win a single West Bengal election despite obvious Dalit popularity. The Communist Party promised 1967 support then secretly instructed upper-caste voters against him. In 1968, precisely when successfully reviving the Republican Party of India in Bengal, Mandal died under circumstances suggesting poisoning – foam from his mouth, blackened face, swollen body. His son wanted a post-mortem but was warned against retaliation. His death was quickly forgotten. No Calcutta monument bears his name; barely any public memory remains of his achievements. The systematic exclusion pattern remains unmistakable: suppression of autonomous Dalit politics, cynical instrumentalisation of Dalit voters for upper-caste party purposes.

Sarbani Bandyopadhyay’s essay provides the crucial ideological mechanism neutralising Dalit radicalism: systematic cultivation of anti-Muslim sentiment, rendering “Hindu” identity primary and “caste” secondary. The Bharat Sevashram Sangha propagated selective histories emphasising Namasudra “bravery against Muslims” whilst erasing longer traditions of Namasudra-Muslim alliance against upper-caste exploitation. The “Hindu dividend” – material and symbolic benefits accruing to lowest-caste Hindus from a common front against Muslims – prevented Dalit-Muslim political alliances. Partition was systematically weaponised in building Hindu sangathan (unity). Memories of 1940s violence were endlessly rehearsed; earlier cooperation histories were suppressed. Dalit refugees learnt quickly: identifying as “Hindu refugee” brought more sympathy than emphasising caste-specific grievances.

Triumphs against the odds

Yet the volume doesn’t present only defeat narratives. Neha Chatterji’s remarkable essay on vernacular Dalit intellectuals – amateur archaeologists researching ancient “Gangaridae” civilisation – reveals alternative knowledge communities operating outside professional academia whilst producing serious scholarship challenging colonial and nationalist historiography. Their concept of “transitive critique,” where Gangaridae simultaneously evokes Dalit, bhumisantan (sons of soil), folk-syncretic religious traditions, peasant, and labourer identities, enables broader front-building than narrow caste mobilisation.

This has created a “people’s archive” documenting collective educational initiatives, alternative Tebhaga movement accounts, and systematic land grabs affecting lower castes. Rajat Roy’s analysis of contemporary Dalit reinterpretations shows similar creativity. Where early twentieth-century Matua texts performed “subversion” by claiming Brahmanical ancestry whilst inverting some values, contemporary writers like Manoranjan Byapari assert complete separation from Hinduism, rejecting accommodation for creating genuinely new social possibilities.

The volume’s theoretical incoherence proves problematic. Individual essays deploy incompatible frameworks – sanskritisation models, Ambedkarite rejection, Gramscian hegemony analysis – pointing towards radically different political conclusions never adequately reconciled. Contemporary developments receive surprisingly muted treatment. After the BJP won 77 Bengal Lok Sabha seats in 2019, Hindutva mobilisation analysis feels cursory.

The structural violence proves systematic rather than exceptional. Murmu’s testimony about being told, “Being a tribal, you want to work on high culture? You are not even an insider,” echoes 19th-century restrictions. The professor refusing to supervise Dalit students, colleges where Scheduled Caste lecturers couldn’t share staff rooms, Brahmins refusing to sit beside Adivasi colleagues – these reveal how little has fundamentally changed. Kumar Rana’s ethnographic observations illuminate this through lived experience. His account of place names like “Lodha-Ludhni” – naming both man and wife together – reveals deeply egalitarian gender values that mainstream Bengali society has systematically destroyed through “development.”

What should we make of this massive evidence accumulation spanning six centuries? The volume succeeds brilliantly in demonstrating that caste has been central to Bengali society throughout recorded history, that exceptionalism claims serve transparent upper-caste interests, and that castelessness myths represent particularly insidious caste politics by rendering domination invisible. Most valuably, the volume demonstrates that caste domination requires constant labour to reproduce itself. It doesn’t persist through inertia but must be actively maintained through evolving institutional mechanisms, updated ideological justifications, and adapted violence forms.

This means caste hierarchies can also be actively challenged and potentially dismantled – not easily, as the sobering defeat record demonstrates, but not impossibly either. The structures maintaining Brahman-Kayastha-Baidya political monopoly; the pervasive “quiet violence” driving Adivasi professors from academia; the systematic reservation policy violations; the weaponisation of Partition memories – none represent eternal social reality features. All were fashioned through human action under specific conditions and can therefore be unfashioned through different action under different conditions.

In documenting the transformation of caste under colonial and postcolonial modernity, Bandyopadhyay and Sarkar have produced an indispensable resource for understanding how domination maintains itself whilst claiming to promote equality. This makes Caste in Bengal more than historical documentation – it’s a direct intervention into living politics, a fundamental common-sense challenge, an insistence that what has been hidden can be uncovered, what has been naturalised can be denaturalised, what has been made can be unmade.

Ankush Pal is a sociologist researching the epistemology of caste, urban spatiality, and temporality.

Caste in Bengal: Histories of Hierarchy, Exclusion, and Resistance, edited by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Tanika Sarkar, Permanent Black.