Caste and West Bengal has been an unfamiliar juxtaposition. Caste rarely makes it to the news in the state. However, in March this year, the plight of around 130 Dalit families who were denied entry to a local temple was widely reported. Discrimination based on caste is not that rare in many other parts of India; however, West Bengal was long considered as an exception. This perceived exceptionality was built upon several factors. To understand the contours of caste in West Bengal one has to look back to the history of the region.

In undivided Bengal under colonial rule, dominated caste or so-called lower caste communities like Namasudra and Rajbanshi tried to battle social constraints and economic deprivations through organized movements. But partition and concomitant communal conflict threw asunder – both spatially and politically – the lives of a large number of depressed class people. In a volatile communal environment, the primacy of caste identity was overshadowed by the quest for religious solidarity.

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In search of safety and shelter, dominated-caste Hindus – largely peasants and landless agriculture workers – migrated to the Indian part of Bengal from Muslim-dominated East Bengal. Displaced from their land, they became refugees struggling to rebuild their life. The battle for survival and rehabilitation was centred on their new found refugee identity. Refugee was not a homogenous category. A caste hierarchy often determined, as a recent work like Caste and Partition in Bengal shows, the degree of struggle they faced in the new land. However, during that turbulent period, refugee was the identity that mattered most. Political parties of Bengal, particularly the communists, played an important role in organizing the refugees, who were numerically strong, yet socially and economically vulnerable.

In the communist worldview, society was divided into two classes – rich and poor; oppressed and oppressor. Refugees naturally belonged to the oppressed class. When the communists came to power in the state, the ‘politics of class’ became more pronounced and pervasive. Oppressed caste was lumped into oppressed class. Barring class, all other identities became inconsequential. Riding their popularity among poor and marginalised sections, communist parties built a strong network of supporters. In lieu of electoral support, the party distributed resources and rewards to its loyal supporters. Gradually, political loyalty emerged as the most important identity in the state.

As a result, invocation of caste or religion has become a far less rewarding electoral motif for the parties as well as the people. But that does not mean electoral politics of the state has been blind to caste and religious equations. At a subterranean level, both caste and religion played important roles in shaping the politics of Bengal, however, the apparent distance between caste and politics created a perception of irrelevance of caste. Bengal’s image of ‘castelessness’ was strengthened by the absence of incidents of physical violence against dominated castes. Unlike other casteridden societies, Bengal never witnessed regular acts of physical violence against dominated caste people.

Even the notoriously violent elections of Bengal are mainly the result of intense political rivalry between party loyalists. The lower rate of atrocities against Dalits is also regularly substantiated by National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) data. However, NCRB data cannot be taken at face-value, as appropriate sections of law are not always rigorously applied while documenting crimes. Moreover, when looked at beyond the violent aspect of caste-domination, regional specificities also offer an explanation of how caste is perceived in Bengal. Bengali society never experienced deep ideological penetration of Brahmanism that is observed in many caste-conscious societies.

In post-colonial West Bengal, the badge of dominant caste is shared by three different castes, namely Brahmin, Baidya and Kayastha. Therefore, casteism in the form of strong Brahminical control over society has been missing in Bengal. However, Bengal has always been under the grip of a unique and apparently caste-agnostic social category called bhadralok. From colonial times, bhadralok were characterised by their cultural refinement and educational achievement. Another defining feature of bhadralok has been abstinence from physical labour.

Access to education and abstention from physical labour, especially in colonial Bengal, were privileges afforded mostly by upper-class and upper-caste Bengalis. However, the bhadralok identity was crafted in a way that achievements rather than ancestry became the locus of all attention. Culture became the camouflage that masked the caste and class privileges of bhadralok. Progressive bhadralok discourse, dominated by communism and class-struggle, almost made it a taboo to talk about caste in West Bengal. Many observers, however, contended that caste raised its ugly head in West Bengal only after the fall of the bhadralok regime with the defeat and decline of the communist parties.

But it would be a mistake to suggest that during decades-long communist rule, caste-consciousness was completely erased from the minds of ordinary Bengalis or that the Dalits of Bengal, by virtue of being part of the oppressed class, got incredibly empowered. On the contrary, communist leadership had always been firmly in the hands of bhadralok – dominated by the trinity of Brahmin, Baidya and Kayastha. It was also one of the reasons that Bengal, notwithstanding its huge Dalit population, failed to produce any popular leader from the community.

Absence of caste in popular discourse is certainly not proof of its irrelevance or non-existence. Similarly, absence of violence does not indicate a society is free of caste-induced discrimination. It only implies, particularly in the case of Bengal, that stranglehold of dominant castes has been so deeply entrenched that it does not require violent reprisal to tame the dominated caste.

When a large number of Dalits are made to ‘accept’ their social position according to their caste, it cannot be claimed that caste is irrelevant in that society. It must be acknowledged that caste still plays a decisive role in everyday life of ordinary Bengalis. In rural Bengal, it has been a common practice to identify a cluster or a ‘para’ by the caste name of its inhabitants. Such spatial segregation, though not always imposed coercively, shows how caste informs quotidian social interactions. Caste-consciousness of the urban Bengalis is often reflected, for instance, in their preference for bride or groom in matrimonial classifieds. Therefore, it would be unwise to pretend that for progressive Bengalis, caste does not matter. When caste exists and it matters, then instead of seeing caste as a relic of regressive society to be swept under the carpet, it should be used as an idiom of social justice. The demand for temple-entry is one such act.

(The writer is Assistant Professor, Department of Social Work, Bankura University and is writing a book on ‘History of Caste in West Bengal’ as a New India Foundation Fellow.)