Why Is Caste an 'Absent-Present' Category in Bengal Politics?

In 15 years of my long journey studying the changing dynamics in West Bengal politics, I traveled the most across the state during 2008-12 and 2014-21. In the first phase, I was working on my thesis, and in the second phase, I was working on my second monograph. During these times, I witnessed ideological battles in Jungle Mahal resulting in bloodshed, bombs being thrown, dead bodies, middlemen in the farming sector turning violent, rising corruption, and religious polarisation. And, the political leaders who either killed their rivals or themselves got murdered in the political violence were from across castes.

Lately, Bengal violence is more about communal sentiment and not about caste. As I was reading scholars, no one really talked much about caste as a category of political relevance in West Bengal except for Praskanva Sinharay. In his writings for the Economic and Political Weekly, Sinharay attempted to put forward an argument that the historically ignored category of caste in the state is making an unprecedented upsurge, carrying the potential to influence politics.

Citing the examples of Matuas’ assertion and the responses of political parties – most conspicuously the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the rising Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – Sinharay argued that there is not only a rise of caste politics but also a rise of Dalit assertion. However, without problematising such terms as caste politics, and Dalit assertion and its implications to the existing context, claiming a role of caste in Bengal politics seemed a premature assumption and methodologically problematic.

Caste in Bengal politics 

The 2021 assembly election results didn’t really show caste as an emerging category. Matua issue, however, remained important and intriguing, but quite localised. To my surprise, Ayan Guha came out with a book-length endeavour to deal with the caste issue to effectively dismantle the carefully orchestrated conceptualisation of caste as a political category in West Bengal. Before I go into Guha’s latest book, The Curious Trajectory of Caste in West Bengal Politics, I would like to pose some of the key general questions that one needs to ask to deal with the caste issue in Bengal.

Also read: Bengal’s Matuas Are Caught Between BJP’s Identity Politics and the Citizenship Concern

First, what does it mean to be an upper caste or lower caste in West Bengal if one compares it with any other state where caste is perceived to be an important category? Second, what does it mean to be oppressed because of being lower caste in West Bengal? And finally, how far and in what ways dominant political discourse revolves around the issues of caste in West Bengal? Can one attempt to use the same formula of caste in Bengal politics like one can in places like Karnataka?

Perhaps not. Instead of trying to find out where is caste in politics, the important question should therefore be, why caste is not found in politics in West Bengal? For that, we have a range of answers. For example, Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya explains it with the help of his theoretical formulation of ‘party society’. The author of this article, Suman Nath, used ‘systemic’ and ‘cultural misrecognition’ to address the issue of overarching party and then the rise of religious identity in Bengal politics.

The book by Guha does not give a straightforward answer to these pressing questions, rather it gracefully deals with the nuances of the caste puzzle in West Bengal. Guha addresses caste in West Bengal in a way that can be seen as studying an absent-present category. He rightly argues that caste is present as a social category and, surprisingly, absent as a political category and this is precisely where the whole idea of West Bengal’s exceptionalism arises.

Using certain accounts – including the writings of Manoranjan Byapari – Guha shows that caste-based oppression is not uncommon in West Bengal. Referring to the theoretical explanations of ‘structuring structure’ by Bourdieu, Guha poses his central problem as the curious absence of caste. Since caste has been a constant social factor in West Bengal, Guha argues, it might have shaped certain political aspects that might have been overlooked by scholars.

As one reads the book, it gives more concrete evidence that goes against the caste mobilisation thesis. The chapter on political representation shows that there is hardly any mobilisation of lower caste groups since 2011 when Trinamool Congress (TMC) defeated the 34-year-long Left Front rule. In fact, a comparative analysis of the demographic nature of Left Front and TMC doesn’t really show much of a difference. Guha emphatically argues, on page 95, “The ‘rise of caste thesis’ while making a sweeping generalisation has not bothered to make a comparison between the trends of lower caste political representation during the Left rule and the same during the post- Left era.”

As this clears his stand for the entire work, he meticulously discusses the question of ‘absent-present’ by looking at the demographic, economic, and political culture. In each of the sections, the book provides a structural explanation of two things: first, what is it that is an exception in Bengal, and second, why it is an exception. For those questions, he cites examples of the demographic veracity of the castes and diverse arrays of interests which are difficult to culminate into any singular demand forming what has happened as ‘Mandalisation’ elsewhere.

Similarly, while rural belts do have a few land-holding castes, this is quite unique in West Bengal that lower caste groups are not necessarily poor or landless – a fact which Harriss-White, Nath and Chakrabarti, and Nath have cited through their ethnographic works over the years. In dealing with the domains of political culture, the book shows in what ways the Bhadralok culture template is still pervasive enough to withstand caste identity mobilisation in the state.

As the book addresses structural issues based on secondary sources with a great deal of compilation works, Guha’s snapshot ethnography on caste in everyday life opens up new potential for future works. Here, the book talks about the relative autonomy of the village leaders under TMC where the party diktat on everyday village matters is less if one compares it to the Left Front. This in part, according to Guha, paved the way for caste identity assertion. While, theoretically, this goes well with the existing literature on TMC’s regime of politics of ‘misrecognition’ alongside party society, the work being a snapshot ethnography is limited in its scope of mapping the village narrative to the wider caste assertion.

Perhaps the most original contribution towards the understanding of identity (and not caste) issue is to be located in the chapter on ‘politics of memory’. Here, Guha shows how the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its Hindutva brigade have used Matuas’ critical position related to the citizenship issue on the one hand and their insecurity and painful memories of partition-related exodus because of Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh on the other.

From this chapter onwards, most of the book revolves around finding out the structural reasons for the ‘absent-present’ phenomenon of caste in West Bengal. As one arrives at the conclusions, the book recaps the fact that if there is indeed an identity assertion happening in West Bengal, it is happening along the line of religion. The BJP has successfully made “political mobilisation of the Matuas… from a caste conscious activity into a process of Hinduisation of Dalits”, Guha concludes on page 263.

The Curious Trajectory of Caste in Bengal takes up an almost forgotten issue of caste in West Bengal and does meticulous work to show: a) Why it is structurally difficult for the caste issue to get prominence in the state and b) How an identity-based assertion was mistaken as the rise of caste. The book engages itself with a great deal of existing literature which also makes it quite ‘fat’ considering the issue that it addresses.

While Guha must be praised for writing a book-length piece on the issue, his excessive engagement with the existing literature on caste elsewhere is both intriguing and sometime distracting. Understandably this is linked to the lack of available materials on caste issues in West Bengal which pushed him to use examples of studies and theories developed elsewhere.

The answer to this methodological problem is more ethnographic works and a scholar further looking into the caste issue in West Bengal, who can think of conducting intense ethnographic works to find out micro reasons for caste being present as a social category and absent as a political category. Guha’s work should be treated as a treasure to anyone looking for an understanding of existing scholarship on caste in India in general and a curious case of absent-present in West Bengal in particular.

Suman Nath teaches anthropology at Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Government College, Kolkata, India. He has written extensively on Bengal politics in the recent past.