Namasudra Literature and the Politics of Castein West Bengal

Abstract

There have been many changes in the last decade in the politics of West Bengal. One of the crucial changes has been the decline of the left parties and the rise of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in power in 2011 state assembly elections. There has been another change with regard to caste, which attracted many scholars’ attention. Compared to other states, West Bengal politics was described as ‘unique’ both by academicians and political leaders; and this uniqueness lies in the absence of a visible electoral mobilization along caste lines. However, in present times, electoral mobilization in Bengal is quite frequently seeing caste as a ‘visible’ idiom in politics. Scholars like Praskanva Sinharay reads this assertion as a ‘new’ idiom of politics shaped with the TMC leader and the present Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s active participation in the ‘Matua Mahasangha’ (the foremost Matua religious organization) (Sinharay 26). Moreover, this castebased political activism seems to be multiplied with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) becoming the main opposition to the TMC. It is the BJP, in the present period, which successfully bifurcated the Matua vote by its decisive stand on the refugee question and its appropriative politics on the issue of caste (Bagchi), (X).1 Whereas, scholars like Partha Chatterjee, Uday Chandra and Kenneth Bo Nielsen etc., argued that there has been a continuous relevance of caste as an idiom of political and social organization at the ‘local’ level in Bengal. It is worth noting that most of the scholars consider the reason behind the dearth of successful caste-based mobilizations to be rooted in the history of partition of Bengal. The ‘unique’ nature of politics in West Bengal lies in the fact that politics (as ‘party structure’) is dominant vis-à-vis the question of the social (structure) (Chatterjee, Historicising Caste in Bengal politics). As Ranabir Samaddar argues, the focus of the governmental practices on developmental and anti-poverty programs, cemented the party structures at the local level which were nonetheless dominated by upper caste leaders (Samaddar 79). Thus, continuous functioning of caste discrimination could never get translated into political mobilization at the formal domain of politics in Bengal. Therefore, these second set of scholars are skeptical about the ‘new’ nature of electoral politics as claimed by scholars like Sinharay. Even if TMC as the ruling party did polarize the Matua support in West Bengal in the 2011 state assembly election, as Partha Chatterjee argued, it had not “... as yet— meant a reassertion of the autonomy of local social institutions. Rather, the Trinamool Congress, in the districts of Southern Bengal where it is now dominant, appears to be keen to adopt the Left Front model of the dominance of the political over the social and exclude the Communist Party of India— CPI(M) from local power” (Chatterjee, Historicising Caste in Bengal politics 69).