bhadralok

Why We Need to Speak of Caste in Bengal

Dr B.R. Ambedkar and Rabindranath Tagore never met. But their ideals overlap. There is no better place than Visva-Bharati to reignite discussions on caste.

The Department of Marathi and the Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and Other Backward Classes’ Welfare Association at Bengal’s Visva-Bharati University recently organised an international seminar titled ‘Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and 75 years of the Indian Constitution and Democracy’. It was to commemorate the 133rd birth anniversary of Dr. Ambedkar.

Many renowned Ambedkarite scholars, activists, and dignitaries from across the world and country participated in the celebrations. Many spoke about the need for revisiting Dr. Ambedkar’s writings and his contributions to the formation of a new and modern India – based on the ideals of human rights and constitutional values – as distinct from the old order dictated by hierarchical caste structures.

A resurgence of dialogue

The practice of celebrating Ambedkar Jayanti started in 2012 and has been organised continuously for the last 12 years. Even during the pandemic, the conference was organised online. However, when the lockdown was eased, the organisers had a different challenge from the then Vice-Chancellor Bidyut Chakraborty, who refused permission to hold the seminar in the Visva-Bharati premises on the eve of Ambedkar Jayanti. The Welfare Association was forced to find other means. The celebrations took place unhindered at another venue.

It is pertinent to mention that Chakraborty was also called for a hearing by the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (based on a complaint filed by an employee) for his remarks against the employees of SC, ST, and OBC communities.

The return of Ambedkar Jayanti celebrations again to the Lipika auditorium of Visva-Bharati with the help of the current acting vice chancellor marks a remarkable moment in resuming the dialogue on caste and the contributions of Ambedkar and Tagore at the university in particular and Bengal in general.

There is a popular discourse among the influential sections of Bengal (as well as the academia, perhaps) that denies the existence of caste and caste-based discrimination in the day-to-day functioning of the state.

However, surnames or caste names do not allow the invisibilisation of graded inequality of the caste structure and the privileges and discriminations that come with it. Caste operates differently in Bengal than the rest of the country, leading to the opinion that caste doesn’t exist in Bengal. This seems to be an accepted view, upheld consistently by the elite and ‘upper’ caste. This popular notion is further accentuated by the class discourse which subsumes and eclipses the prevalence of caste practices as a mere economic category of class, rather than understanding the intersectionality of class, caste, religion, and gender in the operation of caste.

The categorisation of people into badhralok (elite or decent people indicating the educated, wealthy, and ‘upper’ caste), chhotolok (uneducated, indecent, poor, and people from lower castes), and kajerlok (the working class) is very interesting. Can there be a population that is not required to work? And if so, whose labour they are exploiting? How can they survive without working? If caste doesn’t exist in Bengal, why do people insist on maintaining surnames or caste names?

Also read: Why Is Caste an ‘Absent-Present’ Category in Bengal Politics?

Suppression of ‘caste’

Harish S. Wankhede, professor at the Centre for Political Studies at JNU, who delivered a keynote speech as chief guest for the international seminar, pointed out how certain states operate to suppress Dalit assertion to bring Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s vision of attaining political power to life. Suppression is to deny the existence of caste to maintain the status quo associated with the social and cultural capital and the privileges of the bhadralok.

It is true that Dr Ambedkar and Tagore, being contemporaries, have never interacted and engaged with each other. Dr. Ambedkar, leading the movement and at constant war against the oppressive social order (which he called the ‘Hindu social order’) and its ritual sanctification of the caste system, envisioned ways to bring change in the social system. He wanted society to be guided by the constitutional values that guarantee universal human rights (which he called ‘free social order’ based on the inextricable link between liberty, equality, and fraternity) rather than an age-old caste system that is highly discriminative and exploitative.

Tagore, on the other hand, was a constant learner. In his versatility and espousal of humanism, he was heavily influenced by the works of Kabir, Guru Nanak, Santh Thukaram, and Lalan Fakir, who were speaking against the caste system and preaching humanity to society. Tagore’s notions of humanism, nationalism, internationalism, communal harmony, gender sensitivity, and caste have been highly influenced by these poets and social reformers who spoke about equality and social justice.

Tagore went on to vehemently speak against the caste system and its discriminative and exploitative nature in the later stages of his life. He also embraced Buddhist ideas and incorporated them into the warp of the Brahmo movement. It is evident that Tagore was engaging with the caste through his play Chandalika (about an ‘untouchable’ girl), and many of his writings reflect on the issues of ‘untouchables’ and the caste system.

Tagore was closely following the discussions of untouchability and the caste system through his dialogues with Gandhi. When Gandhi launched a hunger strike against the demand for a separate electorate by Dr. Ambedkar, Tagore wrote a telegram to Gandhi, which is also believed to have had an impact on his (Tagore’s) play Chandalika to the extent that he changed the climax of the play from its earliest conception.

A dress code and tradition

The ‘upper’ castes, which benefit from the preservation of the graded inequality of the caste system, refuse to acknowledge, engage, and change the existing hierarchical social order. In Bengal, unlike other parts of India, sustained denial of the existence of caste system, thus works to oppress.

This is also reflected in romanticising the aesthetic appreciations of Tagore and turning a blind eye to his social concerns. Tagore too has raised uncomfortable questions about the practice of untouchability and the caste system. This attitude is reflected in most academic engagements with abstract epistemological, metaphysical, and normative moral questions surrounding Tagore.

Given the general operative mechanism of caste and the denial of the very existence of caste in the society of Bengal, it becomes important to discuss caste, democracy, and constitutional values through the contributions of Dr. Ambedkar. However, this academic and very pivotal societal intervention does not go unchallenged. Anand Bazar Patrika published a news report in Bengali right after the seminar noting the ‘controversy’ over an alleged violation of the dress code when students in modern dress welcomed guests. This controversy seems to be nothing but an attack in disguise. Such forces that try to hide under the garb of protecting tradition and make issues out of nothing are, in fact, casteist. Tagore himself was not immune to such criticism – for taking female students on tour to with his plays and for raising funds for Visva-Bharati. Making an issue out of such trivial matters goes against the ideal of Tagore who was unconventional and encouraged students – especially women – to break away from the traditional hold.

Also read: West Bengal’s Landscape Is Shifting from ‘Party Society’ to ‘Caste Politics’

A resolve

The fact that this controversy has grabbed eyeballs rather than Visva-Bharati’s critical engagement with the theories and practices of Ambedkar is telling of the extent of resistance to progressive outlooks. Progressive knowledge discourses are subverted and distorted, by those having control over access to the apparatus of knowledge dissemination.

This highlights how social emancipatory and transformative political discourses on Dalit, Adivasi, and gender discriminations are a hard-fought struggle in a casteist and patriarchal society. As we have witnessed throughout the history of India, casteist and patriarchal gender norms and religious codifications try to control ‘untouchable’ communities and women.

In spite of 75 years of independence, such moral policing in the guise of a ‘dress code’ continues unabated. Thus tradition is used as a shield and camouflage to suppress the emergence of any emancipatory discourses towards the annihilation of Brahminical patriarchy.

Such instances bring to the fore the necessity to reinforce our unwavering commitment to constitutional values and intellectually engage with Dr. Ambedkar and Tagore’s visions.

Visva-Bharati’s idea was ‘Atra Visvam Bhavatieka Nidam’ which means that it is a place ‘where the whole world meets in a single nest.’

Sumedh Bhagwan Ranvir, M.P. Terence Samuel and Sipoy Sarveswar are assistant professors and Ambedkarites at Visva-Bharati. The authors acknowledge the assistance of Naina Das in preparing this article.

How West Bengal Halted the BJP’s Chariot

This left-liberal group decided to swing in Mamata Banerjee’s favour this time and its numbers surely helped supersede the negative anti-incumbency votes.

The election results in West Bengal are still coming in, and ‘leads’ are being replaced by ‘wins’ or otherwise. Even so, one is perhaps entitled to stick out one’s neck to try to make sense out the most spectacular drubbings that the BJP has been handed in seven years.

One had withstood the overwhelmingly dominating narrative of a sure-shot BJP tsunami in West Bengal that was manufactured in Delhi — and had said so in this online journal, to the derision of many. An integral part of the agenda that was repeatedly being told was that the ‘bhadraloks’ of Bengal would be wiped out in the ongoing, never-ending elections. Most people, including Bengalis, incidentally had/have only a hazy notion of what this term stands for.

Now that this force-fed narrative has been proved wrong, let us take a quick look at the possible reasons for Mamata Banerjee’s spectacular victory and the role played by the class that goes by this completely unofficial but widely used term ‘bhadralok’. There is no doubt that there was a strong anti-incumbency wave against Mamata’s Trinamool Congress for reasons not unjustified. So many field surveys by agencies and ground reports from media-persons were certainly not wrong but the exit polls failed to capture the ‘crouching dragon’ of the floating vote-block led by bhadraloks that was never associated with the TMC and the lady they were fond of lampooning.

This left-liberal group decided to swing in her favour this time and its numbers surely helped supersede the negative anti-incumbency votes. We may leave the confirmation or variation of this postulate to pundits once they generate more granular data and start analysing it region-wise and strata-wise. The fact that the TMC realised that it was indeed up against a strong anti-incumbency wave was clear from several extraordinary steps it took to make up for this with last-minute counter-planks. Banerjee’s brainwave called Duarey Sarkar actually brought many government assistance and welfare schemes to the doorsteps of citizens/voters, even though it is difficult to sustain such go-to-the-people initiatives for too long. Banerjee’s indefatigable energy in pursuing her favourite schemes to any extent certainly played a deciding role with beneficiaries. Her other credit lies in overruling hundreds of objections by her own party-men and to implement many (not all) the recommendations made by Prashant Kishor, after careful planning and applying management techniques.

Also read: Nandigram: After Confusion, BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari Tweets of Victory From Seat

Just as Pramod Mahajan’s sneering smile and the BJP’s highly-visible and expensive India Shining campaign of 2004 exuded over-confidence and antagonised voters, ending Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s rule, people in Bengal were similarly put off by the cocksure swagger of the BJP. This applied to both local and more so the ‘visiting leaders’ from other states. Bengal had never seen so much money flow during elections and it astonished everyone, including those who were repeatedly hammered in with messages like honesty in public life and a fakir leading this pack.

Wealthy merchants of the state committed to Shri Ram openly showered more funds on the BJP and this was also an irritant to many, some of who may have gladly partaken a bit of this splurge. To many, the scale of ostentatiousness appeared to overshadow the ill-gotten wrath made by local Trinamool leaders, who were the butt end of the anti-incumbency surge. As explained in an earlier article on this platform, as the TMC had no fabulously wealthy patrons like the BJP, nor mining mafias or mega-scale infrastructure projects to milk, local leaders resorted to ‘cuts’ which could not escape the eyes of voters but somewhere the tables turned a lot. Flashy and long entourages of expensive SUVs in which the BJP leaders arrived to address them amazed the politically conscious voters of Bengal, and obviously, they would hardly comment on these eyesores to field surveyors or the press, unless they were pointedly asked about this.

Over 200 chartered planes and helicopters reportedly flew in and out of Kolkata and Bagdogra (Siliguri) airports ferrying BJP leaders, as never seen before in the state’s history. Modi-Shah helped inadvertently to convert Mamata from an autocrat to an ‘underdog’ who was surrounded by bought-over defectors and back-stabbers. This image garnered unexpected sympathy for her in the state and outside, and her fight was seen as a David and Goliath struggle all over.

No job reservations for locals were announced or even discussed in Bengal, unlike some other states, nor did she rouse parochial sentiments. It was thus quite unfair to blame Mamata for stoking Bengali sub-nationalism — which the Delhi-based media was fed and led to write. What may have hurt the people here was the open and blatant ‘Hindi-fication’ of the discourse and that the emphasis that Hindi is the only language in which BJP leaders tolerate. The unabashed murder of the Hindi language by heavily-accepted, grammatically-erroneous Bengalis, especially by TMC defectors to the BJP camp, may have provided some comic relief to all-India BJP leaders. But everyone seemed to forget the fierce pride that Bengalis have in their language, for which they actually carved out their own state a few miles away, wading through blood and gore.

The fact that not a single local leader, not even if he had been a governor, was given any importance at all was noted and their absence in strategy-making was unmistakably conspicuous. Besides, Bengal’s BJP was crowded with members from different and often conflicting origins like ‘original RSS’, ‘old BJP’, imported outsiders, old defectors from other parties, new defectors from the TMC and these exacerbated inner party conflicts.

To cap it all, the publicly aggressive behaviour and the openly pro-BJP attitude of the former Chief Election Commissioner harmed the Commission and the BJP. He encouraged openly arrogant behaviour from his hand-picked Special Police Observer from another state, Vivek Dubey, whose attitude appeared very colonial indeed. The CEC appeared to think that he could bludgeon the state and its administration (that was also not always very fair) into submission.

At one point, some 1,30,000 central armed forces were posted here by the Election Commission, obviously with the active assistance of Amit Shah. The latter combined his role as home minister and as BJP’s merciless centre-forward, rather adroitly but quite unconstitutionally. Police are said to be trained to be overbearing anyway, but the manner in which the central forces were encouraged to behave was quite intolerable. In some pockets, they started acting like an ‘occupation force’. Nothing else can explain why a special armed section would suddenly land up in a polling booth in Cooch Behar on March 10 during polls and shoot four voters, all Muslims, in the chest and offer not a shred of proof or any evidence of injury on themselves to justify it. This incident that was clearly sponsored by the former CEC was widely condemned by all as Bengal is not habituated to tolerate such feudal bluster or unaccountability. This was a major landmark and a turning point for voters in the remaining four phases of elections.

Also read: DMK’s Convincing Win Is Proof that BJP’s Hindutva Has No Place in Tamil Nadu

One has repeatedly bemoaned the fact that by forming a’third front’ the Left and Congress ensured that secular forces and votes were split, in the darkest hour of crisis. The Left Front’s highly intellectual but completely wrong reading of reality brought it to join even with Abbas Siddiqui, an audacious 24-year-old scion of the family that is entrusted with the state’s oldest Muslim pilgrimage site. This Third Front kept attacking the Trinamool Congress with all its strength, especially through caricatures on the social media, behaving as if this party and not the BJP was its chief enemy. “Ram this time, baam (left) next time” was an oft-repeated slogan and the fact that this Third Front has been wiped out speaks volumes of the sagacity of the voters of Bengal.

Many voters who were traditionally supporters of the Left and the Congress judiciously decided not to waste their votes this time. So did the Muslims, who constitute 27%, and the complete defeat of the the two parties that had always received Muslim votes definitively indicates that most Muslims voted with the TMC. Even Abbas Siddiqi, who was suspected as a BJP ‘plant’ to divide Muslim votes, was roundly thrashed at the hustings even though his spiritual influence covers millions.

This surge against the BJP was led by a solid bloc of liberal and educated Bengalis, the much-discussed bhadralok (gentry). It is no more the centuries-old tripartite alliance between the educated sections of the three ‘highest’ castes of the region. It had opened its doors to meritocracy from other castes as well, decades ago, without much fuss. Incidentally, urban Bengal finds this business of caste to be quite messy and brands it as a trait of the backward BIMARU states. It is amusing to note that large sections of bhadraloks may know Pablo Neruda far better than their own castes and discussing caste is quite a taboo. It is not as if casteism does not exist at all, but it surely means far less in the lives of the people. For instance, caste does not decide postings at all. What are cherished are education, culture, liberal values and a historic freedom from orthodoxy.

The bhadralok class has, of course, an underlying dash of snootiness, but it is directed at those who do not share its values and priorities. Most members of this intellectual and argumentative class have historically been aligned to left philosophies and liberal, secular parties. This strata was openly disgusted at the crass philistinism of the BJP and the obviously uneducated approach of its leaders. They felt shocked at the manner in which the PM catcalled a lady, however aggressive, as “Dideeee O Dideeee!” Many women have surely expressed their disgust at the polling stations.

A section of ‘civil society’ came out with an untiring campaign at every nook and corner pleading “No vote to BJP” and this also paid dividends. As did Modi’s disastrous image as a classic blundering boaster who is responsible for the uncontrollable second wave of COVID-19. But this matured into an issue, to some extent, only during the last two phases of polling, which together counted for 71 of 294 seats.

Bengal has several shortcomings and the work ethic remains a problem, as is the far higher sense of rights over duties. But its people have surely done liberal, secular and democratic India proud. It was almost unimaginable till the day before that the people would rise up unitedly in such an unequivocal manner to ward off the most dangerous, well-organised threat to its core values. It is surely a beacon of hope to millions of beleaguered liberal democrats and proves that Modi can be defeated roundly.

Jawhar Sircar is a former culture secretary, Government of India. He tweets at @jawharsircar.

The Supreme Court’s Question About Reservations Is the Wrong One to Ask

Bengal is an example of how the bhadralok treated the chotolok, but Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu show that reservations work very well.

“For how many generations will reservations continue?”

The five-judge bench that is meant to examine whether the 13% Maratha reservation is valid or not, will also examine the 50% cap on reservations the Mandal Commission judgment.

This question only indicates that the Indian judiciary – in its present mode of thinking – is suspicious of the positive role of reservations in changing the caste-cultural inequality.

But so far, no Supreme Court judge has asked, “For how many generations will caste inequality continue?” from a sitting bench.

Let us see the conditions of Shudras or OBCs in places where reservations were treated as anti-meritocracy and also as going against socialist equality, for instance in Bengal.

Bengal in general and West Bengal after Partition, in particular, produced several leading intellectuals of India. Three castes –Brahmins, Kayasthas and Baidyas – were the most educated, giving rise to what is known as the Bengal Renaissance.

In the process of their nationalist renaissance, they designated themselves as ‘bhadralok’ (great and gentle people). The rest of the Shudras and Nama Shudras were designated ‘chotolok‘ (or ‘chotalok’, small or low people, meaning ‘lower’ or ‘mean’ castes). This division of ‘bhadra‘ and ‘choto‘ further adds to the humiliation and oppression of the caste system, but the Bengal Brahminic renaissance accepted it as normal.

When Tamil Nadu initiated the reservation battle, the Bengali bhadralok intellectuals saw that as anti-modernist and anti-merit. No anti-Brahmin consciousness was allowed to emerge from Bengal. The Bengali bhadralok of all ideologies (that state was mainly divided into liberal and communist) hated the reservation ideology coming from the South.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

The chotolok never told the bhadralok that they, who were historically assigned the job of doing agriculture and artisanal tasks needed reservation in education and employment. The bhadralok, even now, does not put a hand to the plough. The bhadraloks‘ socialist and liberal ideologies did not change the caste-based work division.

The Bengali bhadralok was among the most educated in Sanskrit and Persian (during the Muslim rule) by the time British arrived in India. After the Raj was established by the English, they were the earliest English-educated Indians, starting with Raja Rammohan Roy. They were also first to cross the seas violating the Brahmin dictum never to doit. Roy was perhaps the first modern Brahmin to die in England.

Also read: West Bengal’s Landscape Is Shifting from ‘Party Society’ to ‘Caste Politics’

No chotolok man or woman could become the chief minister of Bengal so far.

Bengal is the state which has given the least number of reserved jobs to Shudras, OBCs, SCs, STs following its own cardinal principle that reservations will destroy the sacrosanct ‘Bengali merit’.

The Mahishya community, which is the largest Shudra agrarian group, is for reservations and is tilting towards the BJP. The party has made a Shudra, Dilip Ghosh, the state party president and chief ministerial candidate.

Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu

Against Bengal, the Maharashtra experiment shows a different way. In that too the Brahmins, Banias but also Shudras and Ati-Shudras got early English education and produced the likes of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, V.D. Savarkar and also Mahatma Jyothirao and Savitribai Phule.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

There was also an early reservation and preferential treatment demand for Shudras and Ati-Shudras.

Chattrapati Shahu Maharaj, the ruler of Kolhapur, initiated the early reservation process which helped B.R. Ambedkar emerged from the Dalit community to give voice to multi-caste ambition. Today, the Marathas who were not for reservation in 1990 see the need for it. Now even Shahu Maharaj’s grandchildren are demanding it. A strong middle class and educationally ambitious social force has risen from all castes in Maharashtra because of reservation and others want to be part of it.

Similarly the Tamil Nadu experiment with reservations has improved the conditions of all castes. The Brahmins and Chettiars who are outside the reservation ambit did not get pushed down to the labour markets. They invented new ways of living a better life.

The Indian judiciary must see reservation in the light of the successful Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu mode of accommodation and diversification in every field of life by all castes and communities. On the other hand, West Bengal is a negative example of social stagnation because of lack of a drive towards reservation and educational motivation.

In a stagnant state, without much middle class formation among Nama Shudras and Shudras, the BJP seems to be attracting the Shudras and OBCs. The left-liberal ‘no caste in Bengal’ theory is seen as a most regressive ideological step.

BJP supporters during Prime Minister Narendra Modis public meeting ahead of West Bengal Assembly Polls, at Brigade Parade Ground in Kolkata, Sunday, March 7, 2021. Photo: PTI/Swapan Mahapatra

The anti-identity politics of this bhadralok stream of thought is now paying a heavy price. Reserved candidates in every institution have brought the identity of community and its social status into focus and that played a transforming role. But the left-liberals of Bengal missed Ambedkar’s bus and were busy studying Marx and Tagore.

The left bhadralok intellectuals held a strong view that reservations will undo socialist and democratic equal opportunities for all.

But no chotolok was allowed to think about the very fact that they were called “chotolok” which is insulting and dehumanising. Such a status does not allow the chotolok to sit with the bhadralok in any institution. The English-educated chotolok men and women less in number compared to Bengali bhadralok intellectual in any major central university or IIT and IIM.

Jyoti Basu famously said, “There is no caste in Bengal” when the question of implementation of the Mandal reservation arose. We do not see a single visible OBC leader or intellectual on the national map from that state.

Bengal hardly has an equal, competing, educated middle class that could emerge from the chotolok. By and large, Shudra Indians still need reservations across the country.

Now the rightwing bhadralok of India joins the chorus of the left bhadralok and asks for how many generations the chotolok of India will enjoy reservations.

Also read: At IITs, PhD Applicants from Marginalised Communities Have Much Lower Acceptance Rate

But they do not ask for how many generations the chotolok should till the land and feed the bhadralok without being equal in any field of modern, capitalist India. They do not ask for how long the bhadralok will keep away from production of food and teach theories of merit outside that domain. Or why colleges and universities do not talk about the merit of production, and just marks in the exam.

The Indian judiciary’s mindset comes from this bhadralok view of education, employment and caste blindness.

A view of the School of Physical Sciences building, JNU. Photo: JNU

The Indian Supreme Court never asks how many Jats, Kurmis and Yadavs, leave alone the artisanal listed OBC communities, who till the lands around Delhi, have became professors in JNU, Delhi University, the IITs, and IIMs. How many top bureaucrats from those communities are sitting in the central secretariat?

It is on the Jat lands of Haryana that the top private universities like Ashoka, Amity and OP Jindal exist. How many of their children are sitting in the classrooms of those universities?

In fact their youth, for many generations, were driving bullock ploughs and tractors. How many bhadralok children in and around Delhi till the land for food production?

This is where the social justice angle in judiciary matters.

If bhadralok judges do not feel for the chotolok as much as the white judges in America feel for the blacks, India will crack. The questions that the judiciary asks plays a very critical role in shaping the consciousness of educated Indians. An anti-social justice question from a court bench will be perceived as the eventual judgment in the making.

The question ‘for how many generations will reservations continue’ is exactly like the question, ‘for how many years will Muslim appeasement continue’. The merit theory of the bhadralok does not appear to treat the Shudra, Dalit and Adivasi as an Indian. And this despite their deep roots in this soil which date back to ancient times.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is political theorist, social activist. His latest book is The Shudras: Vision For a New Path, co-edited with Karthik Raja Karuppusamy.

BJP Names Candidates for Third, Fourth Phases of Bengal Assembly Polls

The BJP has fielded a Union minister, three sitting MPs, a noted economist and several film personalities for the high-stakes battle in the state.

New Delhi/Kolkata: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Sunday came out with the names of 63 candidates for the third and fourth phases of assembly polls in West Bengal, nominating four MPs including Union minister Babul Supriyo and several new faces, triggering protests and resignations in various parts of the state.

In a surprise move, the party nominated Trinamool Congress (TMC) turncoat and octogenarian sitting MLA of Singur, Rabindranath Bhattacharya. Of late, the BJP has not been nominating such elderly persons as poll candidates.

Addressing a press conference at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi, party general secretary Arun Singh and Union ministers Supriyo and Debasree Chaudhuri released the names of 63 candidates for West Bengal assembly polls.

For the high-stakes battle in the state, the BJP has fielded a Union minister, three sitting MPs, a noted economist and several film personalities. The list also has seven women candidates and eight turncoats, including former state minister and TMC leader Rajib Banerjee, who had recently quit the party to join the saffron camp. The list does not feature any candidate from the minority community.

Also read: Rakesh Tikait, Medha Patkar Share Stage in Nandigram, Ask People to Defeat BJP

While Supriyo, the Union minister of state for environment, forest and climate change, was nominated from the Tollygunge seat in Kolkata, Lok Sabha MPs Nisith Pramanik and Locket Chatterjee have been selected for Dinhata and Chunchura constituencies respectively.

Pramanik and Chatterjee, a former actor, have been fielded from assembly constituencies that come under their respective Lok Sabha seats. However, Supriyo has been nominated for a seat far away from his Lok Sabha constituency Asansol in Paschim Bardhaman district. He is pitted against senior TMC leader and minister Aroop Biswas.

Senior journalist and Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta is the BJP’s nominee for the Tarakeshwar assembly segment. Outgoing MLA of Singur and octogenarian leader Rabindranath Bhattacharya, who had crossed over from the Trinamool Congress after it denied him the ticket due to age factor, has been fielded from the same seat by the BJP.

Besides Chatterjee, the party has given a ticket to film actors such as Tanushree Chakraborty from Shyampur in Howrah district and Payel Sarkar from Behala Purba in Kolkata. Actor Yash Dasgupta has also been nominated from Chanditala in Hooghly district.

Also read: Former BJP Leader Yashwant Sinha Joins TMC Ahead of West Bengal Assembly Polls

The BJP also nominated former chief economic advisor to the government, Ashok Lahiri, from the Alipurduar seat in North Bengal. He has also served as the chairman of the Kolkata-based Bandhan Bank and was a member of the Finance Commission from 2017 to 2020.

By fielding columnist Dasgupta and the economist Lahiri, the BJP has sought to impress the sophisticated Bhadralok community of the eastern state, political observers said, noting the Bengali intelligentsia refrained from backing the saffron party in 2019 Lok Sabha polls despite a large consolidation of Hindu votes around it.

Hours after the candidates’ names were announced, the rift between old-timers and newcomers in West Bengal BJP came out in the open as several aspirants voiced their anguish against the party and resigned after they were denied tickets, while protests were held across the state.

BJP leader and TMC turncoat Sovan Chattopadhyay along with his friend Baisakhi Bandyopadhyay quit the party after both of them were denied tickets. Chatterjee’s constituency for several decades, Behala Purba, was given to actor-turned-politician Payel Sarkar, who joined the party a few days back. In his resignation letter to the party’s state president Dilip Ghosh, Chattopadhyay accused the saffron camp of humiliating him.

Also read: ‘Conspiracy by BJP’: TMC’s Memorandum to EC Seeks Probe into ‘Attack’ on Mamata Banerjee

The nomination of Ashok Lahiri from the Alipurduar seat and Gorkha Janmukti Morcha turncoat Bishal Lama from Kalchini triggered a wave of protests in North Bengal with the local leadership hitting the streets. In Hooghly district’s Singur assembly constituency, BJP supporters locked up party functionaries over the nomination of TMC turncoat and sitting MLA Rabindranath Bhattacharya. Angry BJP workers ransacked a party office in Panchla seat in Howrah district, where TMC turncoat Mohitlal Ghati was given the poll ticket.

Rantideb Sengupta, who was fielded from Howrah Dakshin seat, declined to contest after the list was announced, citing personal reasons. However, the central leadership of the party intervened and persuaded him to contest from the constituency.

Protests were also held in various other constituencies after ticket aspirants didn’t find their names in the list. Shyampur is one such constituency where actor Tanushree Chakraborty, a newcomer in the BJP, was nominated. Several district-level leaders also resigned from the party after failing to get tickets.

The BJP’s Bengal leadership said that they would look into the matter and the issues would be resolved through discussions.

Elections to the 294-member West Bengal Assembly will be conducted in eight phases between March 27, 2021 and April 29, 2021. The counting of votes will take place on May 2, 2021.

Collective Caste Hatred Stuns Bengal Academia, Support Pours in for JU Prof Maroona Murmu

The abuse that the Jadavpur University professor has faced exposes the deep-rooted culture of identity politics based on caste that exists in the upper class mindset.

Kolkata: Days after Jadavpur University associate professor Maroona Murmu was attacked on Facebook with casteist slurs, academics across disciplines have expressed their solidarity with her and unequivocally condemned the comments made by the student of a prominent city college. They also expressed deep shock at the racial hatred revealed by the support received by the student, mostly from the student community.

More than 80 faculty members of Presidency University on Monday put out a signed statement in support of Murmu, even as the incident sparked a heated debate on social media on the boons and banes of reservation and a deluge of casteist abuses targeted at the teacher.

“Given the historical exclusion of tribal communities from the mainstream Indian society, Dr Murmu’s impeccable academic success is a matter of pride for all of us. If an accomplished academician like her is targeted due to her identity, then we shudder to think of the depth of suffering of the bulk of Adivasi people who struggle to be part of our academic space,” the statement, signed by senior academics like professors Pradip Basu of political science, Shanta Dutta of English and Zakir Husain of economics, stated. The full statement can be read here.

Professor Maroona Murmu. Photo: Facebook

The attack on Murmu

As The Wire reported on Saturday, Maroona Murmu, who is known for her social activism, had written on her friend’s Facebook wall that students’ lives were being put to risk by holding examinations amidst the COVID-19 crisis. A final year undergraduate student from the Bengali department of Bethune College, who is not known to the professor, responded by using words like ‘incompetent’ and ‘worthless’ (‘jogyotaheen’, ‘opodartho’) to describe Murmu, and indirectly claiming she was taking undue advantage of her identity. Egged on by support pouring in for her and the online abuse of Murmu, the girl posted the following morning that she had only politely ‘reminded a santhal Murmu that she was an Adivasi’.

Murmu, whose family originally hails from Muransole village in the Jangal Mahal area of south Bengal, has been teaching history at Jadavpur University since 2005. She completed her undergraduate studies at the then Presidency College, Kolkata, and then went to Jawaharlal Nehru University for obtaining her MA, MPhil and PhD degrees. Her book, Words of Her Own: Women Authors in Nineteenth-Century Bengal has been published by the Oxford University Press. Her father, the late Gurucharan Murmu, was an IPS officer. He was the first person from the Santhal community to join the Union Civil Services in 1972 and went on to become an inspector general of police.

Also Read: Jadavpur University Professor Faces Casteist Abuse For Commenting on Exams During COVID

On Tuesday, Murmu told The Wire that it has been an agonising few days for her. “I am traumatised. This is no longer a debate, but a series of dreadful personal attacks using my pictures and details of personal life. I have been hounded by over 1,800 online trolls with nasty memes and comments making fun of me or the backward classes in general. I can’t let my mother suffer this, so I had to shift to a different accommodation. I want this to end.”

The girl in question has put out a 10-minute video message claiming she exercised her freedom of speech, and never attacked Murmu. She accused the head of the Bengali department of her college of spreading lies about her, and added that the HOD and Bethune College would be responsible for any ‘extreme steps’ she may take. She did not apologise and instead said Murmu should ‘not be embarrassed’ about her identity.

Jadavpur University. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Gourav Ghosh CC BY SA 3.0

Several groups express shock

Apart from the teachers of Presidency University, the Jadavpur University Teachers’ Association, the All Bengal University Teachers’ Association, students of various departments of JU, the Bethune College Students’ Committee and the Adivasi Students’ Forum of TISS, Mumbai, have also issued statements condemning the attack on Murmu. Professor Sumita Mukhopadhyay, the head of Bengali department of Bethune College, reached out to Murmu and regretted the student’s comments. However, things came to such a passé that Mukhopadhyay had to take down her Facebook post in support of Murmu, after being constantly heckled online.

The entire episode reiterates one of the worst kept secrets of the Bengali society – that a deep-rooted culture of identity politics based on caste exists in the upper class mindset, and even if an Adivasi person manages to join the mainstream, s/he continues to live as the ‘other’. However progressive and liberal the urban Bengali bhadralok may appear on the surface, he still swears by surnames.

This attitude often spills out in public discourse in the form of debates on reservation. Successive governments have had their own ways to keep such debates alive to save their own backs on questions of joblessness and lack of social security. In this case also, most youngsters who have supported the student’s highly objectionable comments have brought in questions of ‘quota’ and ‘merit’, and valorised the student’s ‘fight’ against the quota system. The girl’s mother also backed her daughter’s stance.

Mahitosh Mandal of Presidency University, a well-known anti-caste activist, points out that the collective attack against Murmu shows an ignorance about the logic of reservation. “In a country where 85% of the population belongs to SC, ST, and OBC communities, their presence in the public sector is less than negligible. This is best demonstrated by their underrepresentation in academia. In a survey published in 2018, not a single OBC professor was found in the faculties of any of the Central universities. If we want a democratic academic space, we must include people from every community,” Mandal told The Wire.

Responding to the argument that reservation should be economic and not caste-based, he said, “In India, wealth and knowledge were mostly the monopolies of Brahmins and upper-caste people for thousands of years. Since the bulk of the poor belong to the ‘lower’ castes, even an economic reservation would end up being a caste-based reservation. It is a good thing that EWS has been created as a separate category rather than merging it with the scheduled castes and tribes.”

The corridor of the Presidency University’s main building. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/ Taritwan Pal CC0

‘Shocked angry and disappointed’

Eminent academic Supriya Chaudhuri told The Wire she was shocked, angry and disappointed at the attacks on Murmu. Describing her as a fine scholar and wonderful human being, Chaudhuri said, “The abuses posted by the student would not be significant in themselves and not worth responding to. What is very disturbing is the volume of online abuse provoked by any support for Murmu, faced, for example, by the head of the Bengali department at Bethune College, or by other friends and colleagues. The army of hate-filled trolls behind such campaigns indicates the extent of caste bias in our society. We have to stand with Murmu and others like her to fight against such hatred and prejudice.”

Also Read: In Bengal, Colourism Hides Behind the Veneer of Bhadralok Culture

Presidency University faculty members Rajat Roy and Priyanka Das, who took a leading role in framing the solidarity statement, agreed that it was not about one remark by one young girl. “First of all, the comment was made on social media, which plays a key role in forming public opinion. And then, the fact that the girl’s comment got endorsed by so many others and subsequently Murmu’s quality as a scholar and teacher became a subject of social media trial show the generic pattern of attacking successful persons from socially backward classes,” Das, who teaches English, said.

Roy, an assistant professor of political science, felt the saddest part of the whole episode was that Murmu’s worth as an academic was being measured by her position in the caste-based, hierarchical social order. “Most of the persons abusing her don’t know her at all. Actually, in the bhodralok-dominated Bengali society, the caste question remains invisible as long as things follow the established pattern of caste politics. The likes of Murmu destabilise that pattern, and hence the outpouring of hatred. The views in support of the abusive student also reflect a right-wing mindset of dominating the lower castes,” he told The Wire.

Indradeep Bhattacharyya teaches literature and is a former journalist based in Kolkata.

In a Country That Worshipped Tigers, Whence the Idea of ‘Man-Eater’?

The storied trajectory of the ‘man-eating tiger’ in the colonial imagination shows how the names we use, and the stories we tell to breathe life into these names, matter.

Shortly after the first anniversary of the killing of tigress T1, a.k.a. Avni, the National Tiger Conservation Authority decided to drop the colonial category of ‘man-eater’. Tigers suspected of attacks on humans will instead be called ‘dangerous’.

How is a dangerous tiger different from a man-eater? How will the change help, and just what makes the category of ‘man-eater’ so irksome? The answers lie in the accounts of British colonial sportsmen and officials. In the colonial imagination, the ‘man-eater’ morphed from a metaphor of Oriental despotism into a metonym for the alleged criminality of big cats. By casting tigers as man-eaters, colonial officials sought to legitimise their control over the subcontinent’s wildness.

In the court of Tipu Sultan, the tiger was a complex symbol of kingship where plural faiths converged. In Mysore, close to Tipu’s capital, the idol of Durga as Chamundi rides a tiger. Residents of the surrounding villages venerated, Huliamma, the tiger goddess, while the worship of martial pirs invoked the forest. Such worship has been alternately described as shakti and barakat, both of which were thought to embody the tiger. But the British erased this symbolism and turned the tiger into an exemplar of depravity.

The story of Tipu’s tiger is a good example. Tipu’s tiger was displayed in a museum in the imperial metropole and featured widely in early 19th century guidebooks. His playful mechanical tiger, shown devouring a British soldier, was used to instruct visitors about alleged viciousness of the East. Playing with the contraption allowed English visitors to vicariously participate in empire-building. They could even operate a crank that produced moaning sounds (for the human) and roars.

The man-eater as criminal

The man-eater haunted the colonial imagination well after the lore of Tipu’s tiger died down. The story of a man-eater in Bengal, first reported in 1793, became a classic in the genre. A tiger attacked a party of soldiers of the East India Company while they were hunting deer on Sagar Island, and the son of Major Hector Munro was mauled to death. An English captain who witnessed the event wrote:

The human mind cannot form an idea of the scene; it turned my very soul within me. The beast was about four and a half feet high and nine feet long. His head appeared as large as that of an ox, his eyes darting fire, and his roar when he first seized his prey will never be out of my recollection.”

The telling and retelling of stories like this one sanctioned the official classification of the tiger as a scourge.

In fact, the implicit correlation of tigers with man-eating laid the groundwork for colonial hunting policies. The British effort to exterminate tigers was driven partly by a desire to push the forest back and enhance agrarian revenues. Mahesh Rangarajan has argued that after the Bengal famine (1770), when large tracts of land lay uncultivated, “fewer tigers meant more cultivation and more revenue, their elimination a blessing of imperium after the elimination of an Oriental despot’.”

In the writings of Thomas Webber, a forest officer in the mid to late 19th century, a slew of derogatory epithets cloaked the tiger: “terrible destroyer”, “scourge of mankind”, “ravenous monarch”, “terrible in his nature”, “cunning” and “guileful”. Webber went so far as to suggest man-eaters were a subcaste of tigers in general. In his reckoning, lazy tigers began by hunting cattle and then turned to man as a “smaller victim more easily slain and tasty, and light enough to carry off as a cat does a mouse”. He contended there were sub-castes of man-eaters among tigers, showing how attitudes towards the tiger echoed the racial logic of colonial law. “Recalcitrant wild animals” were thus classified much like criminal tribes, thugs and dacoits.

After criminalising the tiger, the initial vulnerability of English soldiers in the Indian forest gave way to large-scale hunting operations. The colonial hunt was staged as a performance with three actors: the tiger as criminal, the native as victim and the colonial sportsman as heroic saviour.

Sometimes, this script was gendered in humorous ways. In a rare account of a European party’s encounter with a tiger in the Sundarbans, Thomas Pennant commended the steely character of an English lady who “observed a tiger preparing to take its fatal spring and with amazing presence of mind laid hold of an umbrella, and furling it full in the animal’s face, terrified it so that it instantly retired”. In the coolly executed act of unfurling her umbrella, the Englishwoman reversed the roles of terrorised and terroriser. Whereas the “weak and timid” Bengali peasant supposedly fled in cowardice, Englishwomen could stand their ground while only the Englishman was brave enough to reduce the hunter into the hunted.

The man-eater as errant gentleman

In the early 20th century, Jim Corbett reframed the tiger as the sportsman’s counterpart in nature. He argued that “the jungle folk, in their natural surroundings, do not kill wantonly”. In his first work, the Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1944), Corbett even described the tiger as “a large-hearted gentleman with boundless courage”, and cautioned that if “he is exterminated, as exterminated he will be unless public opinion rallies to his support, India will be the poorer by having lost the finest of her fauna.”

In Corbett’s account, man-eating was explained as a disease with a personal history. So the human loss inflicted by man-eaters didn’t keep Corbett from sympathising with the vulnerability of an old tiger blinded by a porcupine attack or a maimed tigress having cubs to fend for. Personifying the tiger in this manner allowed Corbett to rationalise man-eating and encouraged him to face the tiger as a worthy opponent. Comparing the tiger to a “gentleman” seemed to have allowed him to enact both meanings of the word ‘sportsman’: a hunter as well as someone who engages in fair-play.

However, Corbett’s evaluation significantly obscured how colonial forestry had changed the nature of human-animal interactions in the subcontinent. By the early 20th century, the field/forest demarcation and large-scale hunting had transformed India’s socioecological world.

In the Himalayan foothills, for example, deforestation accelerated during the second half of the 19th century with the rising demand for railways. Successive Forest Acts in 1865 and 1878 empowered the state to appropriate and manage timber. The government prohibited local communities from hunting and collecting produce in state-protected forests. The effects of state forestry were also visible in an increasing incidence of attacks by wild animals.

These policies prompted uprisings in Kumaon and Garhwal in the early 20th century. Politically engineered ecological disruptions were not lost on anti-colonial activists. The 1921 report of the forest grievances committee in Kumaon complained that official restrictions on local techniques of hunting and denying gun licenses to villagers was leading to increasing attacks on people and livestock.

Moreover, the colonial assault on ‘wild vermin’ had resulted in the loss of over 80,000 tigers and 150,000 leopards between 1875 and 1925. Corbett point out causal connections between the increase in tiger attacks and the increase in bounty hunting. He further rallied to establish a separate game reserve in the region. While his stance marked a departure from late 19th century calls to hire paid tiger-killers, his approach continued to have much in common with older notions of paternalistic colonial control over nature. He was deeply suspicious of independent India’s ability to protect the tiger.

Addressing his ‘friends’ in independent India, Corbett wrote, “A country’s fauna is a sacred trust and I appeal to you not to betray this trust.”

* * *

The storied trajectory of the ‘man-eating tiger’ in the colonial imagination shows how the names we use, and the stories we tell to breathe life into these names, matter. For this reason, we shouldn’t stop with rejecting the colonial category of man-eater nor should we uncritically extol the animal-loving instincts of the subcontinent’s precolonial past. Upper-caste love for nature has long coexisted with – if it hasn’t complemented – the hateful treatment of fellow human beings.

Consider Annu Jalais’s insightful study of Scheduled Caste partition refugees’ accounts of ‘man-eaters’ in the Sunderbans. Bengali refugees in the islands affirmed that tigers became man-eaters following brutal police firings at Morichjhanpi in 1979, which killed 36 people. To the refugees, the massacre proved that the government and Bengal’s upper-caste elite were more concerned with tigers than with nimnoborger lives. “Islanders believed that they had become ‘just tiger-food’ for Kolkata’s bhadralok,” Jalais writes. To make room for both tigers and humans, beyond doing away with the category of ‘man-eater’, it matters whose stories about animals we choose to tell.

Nivedita is interested in the politics of the past and the promise of the future. She would like to thank the community of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is pursuing a PhD in history, for their encouragement.

Can Vidyasagar Be the Substance of Our Resistance to BJP?

There have been two distinct sets of response to the violence in Amit Shah’s rally, neither adequately express political opposition to the BJP.

The scenes of rabid violence and organised goondaism that flashed through the streets of Kolkata on May 14 do not call for much shock. That Amit Shah’s election rally would aim at something like this – unleashing hordes of hired BJP ‘supporters’ on a college campus and outside a university’s gates – is not paranormal activity. The past five years have stitched up enough of these spectacles for us to feel any trace of renewed moral angst.

Let us begin by rejecting the fake surprise therefore. The BJP’s is, accurately, a politics of desecration in the name of the sacred. We have seen the everydayness with which this desecration has extended across and beyond the domains of education, history, culture, political rhetoric and of course constitutional governance. Bengal is definitely not a stranger to such tendencies, though the BJP’s electoral romance with the ‘cultured’ bhadralok Bengali might have just begun.

What then does one make of Tuesday’s mayhem? Have the responses on public and social media – as well as of the ruling party in the state – been adequate to what it demands? Has there been an attempt to articulate a political opposition to the incident – whether from a prominently non-BJP state leadership or from the ‘cultured’ bhadralok left?

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee pays tribute to Vidyasagar, whose statue was vandalised during political violence in Kolkata. Credit: PTI

A politics of hurt

Plainly put, there have been two distinct sets of paranoiac response that one would have encountered in the immediate aftermath.

The first is what unites the TMC with varying shades of the Bengali left, from the liberal to the radical. It angrily asks: how dare ‘they’ touch Vidyasagar? ‘They’ refers to the non-Bengali interloper, with no respect for the hallowed heritage of a 19th century Bengal renaissance and its glorious intellectual traditions of reform. Also, there is a hint that touching a Lenin or a Gandhi bust would have provoked grossly different quantities of rage or outrage, owing to their ‘outsiderness’ to a pan-Bengali cultural conscience. This makes a monument out of community pride, and uses the broken pieces of Vidyasagar’s statue to level out an unequally-shared modernity.

Also Read: Vidyasagar is Rooted in the Bengali Soul, Desecrating His Statue Will Cost BJP Politically

As a calculated campaign strategy, most Trinamool leaders in the state changed their social media profile pictures to an image of Vidyasagar’s face soon after. The irony in this must not be missed, insofar as the student wing of the TMC has had a history of rounding up teachers on college campuses or harassing them for preventing cheating-practices in university examinations.

The state government’s love for the ‘educationist’ in Vidyasagar cannot however go uncontested by the Bengali left’s ownership claims over all that passes for ‘culture’. The latter’s many hues went equally red in their faces, and nursed their wounds by joining in the chorus.

In all the jingoistic raking up of Bengali self-pride and community belonging, what this variety of response has overlooked is the political advantage it provides to the BJP instead. A heightened Bengali sub-nationalism – with its obvious elitist overtones – feeds into the same structures of sentiment that mandate a National Register of Citizens (NRC). It references a demand for ethnic authentication, by weeding out the ‘uncultured’ immigrant and then creating a no-trespass canon of literate ‘insiders’. The nation is re-erected in raw provincialism, while citizenship is reduced to cultural membership and rites of passage through official documents/monuments of knowledge. In condemning the BJP, we manufacture a ground ripe for its potential conquests. If the middle-class Bengali parent can no longer bequeath a knowledge of her mother-tongue (standardised by Vidyasagar in the primer Borno-Parichay) without a trace of shame, must she displace that shame to all ‘other’ tongues and bodies?

Standing by statues

The second cluster of responses to the BJP-led vandalism is qualitatively not very different, though it cloaks its resistance in a liberal framework. This group of naysayers has in fact questioned the very politics of breaking statues. Using references from the Hindutva brigade’s favoured pastime of vandalising monumental installations – from the Babri Masjid to Ambedkar-Periyar’s statues – liberals from the civil society have asked: why must ‘they’ touch statues at all? Interestingly, many among these had even witnessed the Naxalite moment in 1970 when student leaders went about the city of Calcutta, pulling down statues of Ashutosh Mukherjee, Vivekananda, Tagore and Vidyasagar.

Moni Guha, an impassioned Marxist-Leninist dissident, wrote in the Frontier Weekly of 28 November 1970:

The attack on dead heroes and on their statues did not begin in West Bengal, nor was it initiated by the ‘anti-social Naxalites’. The attack on dead heroes began from the very rostrum of the 20th Congress of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union). The statues of Stalin were razed to the ground, demolished, defiled in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and the USSR. The Stalin statues faced the same fate as those of Vidyasagar, Netaji and others. The bourgeois Press, at that time, reported gleefully that these events were the expression of the just and spontaneous hatred against the Stalinist totalitarianism. But now in West Bengal, statue breaking is the act of a ‘few vandals and miscreants’ against progressivism!

From Guha’s historical reflections on the iconoclastic “uses” of statues, it is clear that attacks on memorials and monuments that distil official memory has long been part of progressive political practice. Does that mean that the Naxal students’ attack on Vidyasagar in 1970 carries the same political significance as that of the BJP now? No, and emphatically so.

Also Read: Recent Spate of Statue Vandalism Gives Us a Perspective on Iconoclasm

The act of demolishing a statue is replete with a deep symbolism in the first case – where, as Ashok Rudra maintains in another Frontier edition of May 1970, the attempt is to place a finger on the “absurdity” of the social order and its writing of a commissioned history. In its rejection of literality, such an event is by default within the realm of discourse.

With a mob forcibly entering a college campus and wreaking its muscular aggression on a bust of Vidyasagar, the violence carries no symbolic import. It is real and visceral; Vidyasagar, for the BJP workers, is just another physical ‘body’ and the only one they had access to at that moment. Had there been a woman student hiding behind the stone structure, she would have been assaulted in much the same way.

Kolkata: A shoe lies in the foreground as policeman investigates the area near Vidyasagar College where clashes broke out during a roadshow of BJP President Amit Shah, in Kolkata, Wednesday, May 15, 2019. Credit: PTI Photo/Ashok Bhaumik

Is a cultural defence enough?

Unfortunately, the BJP is that idea of violence as nothing but literal. And its politics of desecration therefore spares neither the letter of the Constitution nor the body of an Akhlaq or Najeeb. It is this idea of violence – whether vigilante or genocidal – that has parasitically eaten into the soul of our political culture and has become the minimal condition of democratic functioning. If the BJP is a disease, the TMC is not far from internalising its symptoms either. And better still, it only prescribes the disease for its cure. The mainstream left, blind to the sins of its past, must stand in the wings and add the ghee of ‘sanskriti’ to the fire.

It is time to structure a political response to the BJP’s political onslaught – and, not one seeped in the anxieties of bad cultural ‘touch’. Bengali protectionism need not defend a spectral Vidyasagar. It would do better to save its culture from felling other victims to NRCs and suchlike, long after these Lok Sabha elections are done.

Review: ‘Landless’ Disrupts the Popular Understanding of Caste and Land Relations

The film is not a mundane truth-telling exercise and does not take a moral high-ground. It is a complex telling of the struggles of landless Dalit mazdoors in Punjab.

There is the failure of a film, and then there is the failure of an audience. Landless, directed by first-time filmmaker Randeep Maddoke uncovered the profound naïveté and ignorance of an audience at the Kolkata People’s Film Festival 2019 (KPFF), where it was screened alongside many others, made by the people or claimed to represent the people.

Landless powerfully disrupts how we understand the question of caste and land relations (in the specific context of Punjab). Yet, it invoked responses filled with suspicion and disbelief towards the claims of truth and reality that it is expected to represent.

The KPFF is quite an impressive initiative in terms of how it is able to mobilise political films from all over the country. An association with the festival, even as an audience member, grants unquestioned cultural capital and the progressive credential that comes with being a habitual spectator of niche cinema.

Progressive political circles in Kolkata believe that the caste question has been resolved by virtue of Bengal’s glorious communist past. They believe it continues to be a malady of only the North and South of India. No wonder, so little work is produced on the nexus of the Bengali bhadrolok, communist politics and the deliberate erasure of anti-caste politics that once upon a time was being asserted by Jogendranath Mondal.

The displacement of one’s own and community’s casteism on to others (Landless is after all a story about Punjab) is symptomatic of bhadrolok and bhadrolok-abiding progressive politics. To be able to say, “I am not as casteist as the next person”, or to legitimise an individual’s political credibility in terms of who their father or grandfather is or to treat Dalit art, cinema, literature and activism as a marker of one’s own casteless-ness is as self-serving and elite as it gets. Kolkata academia, semi-academia and mainstream left politics is full of it. And therein perhaps lies the success of a film such as Landless, which is able to expose these faultlines in a society whose casteism is apparently different from the rest of India and therefore beyond discussion.

A complex telling

As a complex telling of the struggles of Dalit landless mazdoors of Punjab, Randeep’s film displays an economical organisation of footage that he has collected over at least the past five years. Landless is not a mundane truth-telling exercise, news-reeling its way through the objects of its depiction. Its moral high ground, if any at all, comes from the sustained compulsion to tell the story with a certain degree of aesthetic sensibility. Therefore, it uses shots that are heavy with metaphoric significance, whether of resting birds that suddenly fly away or that of a lost kite trapped in electric wiring.

The long takes of fields, drenched blades of grass, a speeding train, the moon amidst dark wispy clouds are quite the aberration to the usual documentary style in India, especially ones claiming to depict the plight of the poor and the subaltern. In fact to spectators of popular cinema, Landless is an illustration of the reality behind the romantic mustard fields of Bollywood.

Also Read: A Belief in Meritocracy Is Not Only False: It’s Bad for You

Maddoke’s work reveals an important aspect of the current understanding of ‘farmer suicides’ and what is erased by the narrative of farmer victimhood at its centre. It looks at the prevailing caste structures and the systemic oppression of Dalit landless laborers by dominant caste farmers, some of whom may also take their lives.

“If 80% of farmers commit suicide from the burden of debt, 60% of landless Dalit laborers commit suicide from the lack of access to debt”. The issue of access is present in the film at several levels. It depicts how caste determines who can own land and who is owned by the land and the landlord, through the ways in which religious institutions, the police and the government are complicit in socially boycotting Dalits by blocking their rightful access to public land, food, healthcare and the right to protest against caste violence. It also speaks of the sense of entitlement that dominant caste men exercise towards Dalit women with impunity from the state and caste society.

Question of access in cinema

But the question of access is one that is also important for practitioners of cinema, if a truthful representation of things and the relations between them is to be expected. And Randeep stressed upon this in the post-screening discussion with the festival audience. The fact that he has for years been an activist with the Punjab Khet Mazdoor Union (PKMU), a trained photographer and is part of the same community of Dalit landless labourers that the film is attempting to narrativise gives him the advantage of historical as well as experiential knowledge of the humiliation, indignity and exclusion that his people encounter.

The ability to access good or high-end technology is not enough to make a good film. The so-called neutrality or scientific nature of technology has its limitations. There are, after all, people, subjectivities and knowledge on either side of technological mediation. The history of the evolution of cinematic technology and who can optimally own/use it is fraught with racial, gender and other political implications.

Landless incorporates music and language as everyday sites of expression of the sexism, arrogance and moral perversion that is integral to caste dominance. Protests, slogans and mournings appear as spaces where Dalits mobilise in their shared anger and assertion.

Dominant caste people, whether victims in their own right or oppressors, are rather unconcerned about the licence they impose on the lives and bodies of others. They are also impervious to how they perceive the constitutional rights of reservations and scholarship meant for Dalits as a form of privilege. All the while, they remain uncritical of how the prerogatives of their own caste superiority prevents caste Hindu women from making their onw livelihood.

Landless is in many ways about how privilege kills both the dominant caste as well as the Dalit, albeit in different ways and to different degrees. It says that victimhood does not presuppose the impossibility of oppression by the victim.

Ria De is a scholar of popular cinema and is currently a research associate at the Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata.

A Tea-Hued Existential Crisis in Kolkata

What happens when a two-decade old tea stall has to make way for real estate ambitions?

For several years now, ever since my family and I have relocated to Kolkata, the makeshift tea stall at the corner where our street meets the key city artery, eastern bypass connector, has become an important part of my life. At the end of my early morning walk I spend around half an hour there sipping down with enormous relish not one but two glasses of near divine tea priced at an unbelievable (considering the quality) Rs 6 per glass.

The tea stall is my ear to the ground. While I down my tea I have a free access to what moves, mostly men, at the ground level – petty operatives of all kind of micro businesses, cycle rickshaw pullers, do-nothing hangers on and the odd retired folk like me. I have realised how important a role IPL or any kind of top competitive cricket or football plays in their lives, brought to virtually every doorstep by dish TV.

There is also a steady dose of readily formed opinion, freely dished out, on the latest scandal or local or state level political development currently agitating them. Over time I have found that this dipstick opinion sampling of mine did quite well compared to formal opinion or exit polls whose fare newspapers and TV news channels dished out.

Then one day this placid life was shaken by the sound of workmen’s hammers breaking down the sturdy home behind the boundary wall against which rested out a tea stall, a barber’s two-seater shop and a little corner one selling cigarettes, cheaper biscuits and packaged snacks which FMCG firms take such pains to peddle.

The home, built well over a decade ago, had been sold and the developer was obviously going to build something which would encash the value of the location – a corner plot on a key city artery that linked with the airport. Up in the air was the future of all those unauthorised stalls like the one that sold tea, omelettes made the local way, with or without toast buttered and sprinkled with sugar, and ghugni (can’t translate that) with muri (murmura).

The tea stall, in particular, had become a local institution, having been around for maybe two decades and witness to the transformation of the area – from low semi jungle that was the hangout of the riff-raff and petty criminals to planned urban development. The government at some point realised the value of its land lying idle, put up apartment blocks which brought in folks like me whose means put them a peg or two below the level catered to by private developers. Also came the kothiwalas who put up impressive homes on individual plots.

The fortunes of the middle-aged tea stall owner had grown over the years, largely because he knew how to deal with whom. He was contemptuous of the lowly, just about tolerant to the Hindustani speaking, respectful to the bhadralok and absolutely ingratiating to any policeman, irrespective of rank, who happened to come by.

Initially no one talked about the impending existential crisis, but slowly, I picked up what I knew was bound to happen. The local young men with the right political association had dropped by. For background, a one-room CPI(M) party office down our street had a few years ago changed colours to those of Trinamool Congress but the boys who hung out there remained the same. Except that with every passing year the number and price tags of the motorbikes parked before the party office kept rising.

The shops knew they had to relocate as the developer who was putting up a commercial structure had asked the young men to help out. For this is how encumbrances on land in the city are removed, a city that otherwise swore by its hawkers who has long ago gobbled up pavements and in key shopping areas like the New Market threatened to swallow up the carriageway too.

In a city and state where proper jobs are difficult to come by hawkers have over decades gained their own legitimacy, helped by the value system of the earlier Left-inclined rulers. The middle class complained in newspapers but hawker eviction got nowhere because the bottomline was: if you push away the stall of a successful hawker, then that will take one more family straight into destitution. My own position has been equally ambivalent. I loved my tea and my people connect but realised this is no way to run a city or solve its problem of thousands and thousands of squatting hawkers.

Then, as the old building was demolished and an elaborate concrete framework of columns quickly came up in its place, one fine morning the cigarette shop was gone, banished to the other side of the city artery to rest against the boundary wall of a large government tax office. And the tea shop? Reduced to a shadow of its former self, it was having to make do on the narrow pavement on the other side of the street that, with the big road, made up the street corner.

How long it would remain perched against the boundary wall of the government promoted apartment block (like the one we lived in) I did not know. Only, often there was no place to sit on the two little benches even very early in the morning. The smoothness with which custom flowed, bringing with it all the issues that made tongues wag, was gone. My listening post was almost destroyed. And worst of all, the tea now came in a khullar, not a glass as there was barely any water to wash used glasses.

The last to go will be the barber’s shop, to be relocated next to the cigarette shop on the other side of the big road. I will miss the young barber the most. He was my window to the world of semi urban Bengal. He lives half an hour’s commuter train journey away and the game between us is, whoever comes first has the right to tell the other in mock seriousness, ‘You overslept’.

The day before the tea stall crossed the smaller road the local corporation councillor came by, inspected the new configuration and presumably gave his blessings. He has the ownership rights to the pavements and has, in his own way, had the right approach. A couple of years ago the open drains on either side of the entire connector were covered up and nice tiled pavements laid out. The hawkers’ shops that had fully gobbled up the entire pavement were pushed back, thus rescuing for walkers a small strip of the pavement. Not that you can really walk there but it is the thought that counts.

If there is a redeeming feature to the councillor the local boys are another matter. The developer must have paid them off handsomely to get rid of the hawkers impeding the view of the shops that would come up at the street level in the new construction. The boys would have in turn paid off the hawkers far more modestly. They are the true rent seekers, with an astronomical hourly wage rate.

Through all that has happened at out street corner, no policeman has showed his face. In this scheme of things there is the obvious rule by power and money but hardly any rule of law.

Subir Roy is a senior journalist and the author of Made in India: A study of emerging competitiveness (Tata Mcgraw Hill, 2005) and Ujjivan: Transforming With Technology (OUP, 2018).