Does The Caste System Really Not Exist In Bengal.docx

Does the caste system really not exist in Bengal? Sarbani Bandyopadhyay Bengali middle class society is seen as casteless because caste violence lacks visibility. The story of a Dalit woman shows how caste intersects with other hierarchies, in particular of gender, to reproduce aggressive and discriminatory practices. In both academic and popular domains the castelessness of Bengali (especially) middle class society is considered to be an established fact particularly in comparison with other Indian states where caste violence and caste-based political parties have a high visibility. This is notwithstanding works of Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Dwaipayan Sen, Uditi Sen who have in

Commented [RG1]: for international readersa sentence about how Bengal has always considered itself to be the cultural avant garde of India would help to contextualise this piece. Also as our analytical pieces are usually hung on recent news items, I wonder if you could weave Rohith's suicide into the intro - maybe along the lines of the pervasiveness of caste prejudice in India even where it appears to be submerged likein Bengal.

different ways argued against such a position. I submit that the absence of visible forms of violence and of caste-based parties do not necessarily indicate the casteless nature of Bengali society. Such an absence has been produced by everyday/‘trivial’ forms of aggression; it has rendered caste violence (including institutionalised forms) invisible. This politics of repression has allowed caste to be insidiously reproduced in both public and private domains with little resistance. Contrary to received knowledge, Lata Biswas, a Scheduled Caste (SC)person claimed that she did not experience caste in her village where her caste the Namasudras formed the majority of the population. She experienced it in urban spaces. Drawing from her narrative I propose that it is not just urban ones but what counts as middle class space is where Lata encountered caste. Lata passed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Bengali literature with excellent grades, completed her degree for school teaching and joined a school in 1992. The school is located in an interior village of Burdwan district. She was the only dalit teacher there. Her first day in school was uneventful. From the second day however she started coming across the term ‘schedule’ too frequently in conversations. Interestingly these conversations were carried out by Lata’s women colleagues while Lata was kept out of it. Here is a snippet of that conversation: Each time I entered the staff room I would hear this word. At first I did not understand. Then such remarks became routine and kept increasing. Some were like ‘she is schedule you know, like the maid we have’, someone would reply ‘even my mother’s maid is schedule and now we have a schedule here again’. When I did not pay any attention to all these remarks they 1

Commented [RG2]: embed a URL explaining this

started saying new things. ‘Now the last one fled, but this one seems to be staying, more schedules will come, santhals [an advisasi group] will come, all those who eat rats, snakes, frogs will start coming and we’ll have these items for food as well. We should not drink water from the same jug but now we will have to, oh what has this world come to’. It was very humiliating because I never had to face these things when I was a student.

e Lata faced other forms of discrimination which clearly told her that she did not belong to these middle class spaces. She was given a chair and a separate table to sit at apparently because there was no space for her onthe long bench on which teachers normally sat in the common room. The next day the cloth on the table went missing, the newspaper that Lata used in place of the cloth had a similar fate. Within a couple of days her chair too disappeared. Finally getting angry Lata squeezed herself on to the common bench. That forced an open reaction from her high caste colleagues. One of them instructed her to sit on the floor. What led to such animosity toward Lata? Middle class /bhadralok (gentlefolk) society has certain imageryabout non-bhadralok beings, in particular the ‘lowly’ people, popularly known as chhotolok. They are seen as uneducated, lacking in culture, consciousness and agency, as docile and in need of bhadralok assistance.The bhadralok self is constructed and asserted through its other, in this case the marginalised castes. Lata disrupted this imagery. She “did not look or behave like an SC” was another of the remarks that gained ground within a few days ofLata joining the school. She was assertive and argumentative. In disputes with the school administration,she often became the spokesperson for the teachers. She hardly lost her temper.Above all she was a good teacher and students were fond of her. Lata thus posed a danger: she was the liminal figure that threatened to disrupt boundaries between the bhadralok

Commented [RG3]: too academic

and the chhotolokand the assertion of middle classness by the local bhadralok teachers in the school. In an interior village school the need for policing and reproducing the boundaries of middle classness was felt more by this small segmentof the population. Unlike the earlier incumbent she asserted her ‘rights’, as a woman and as a Scheduled Caste person.Lata never felt the need to allow (high caste) men to speak on her behalf or along with her unlike her high caste women colleagues. Lata was therefore an anomaly: she did not exhibit ‘feminine’ qualities, or those of her ‘caste’.She seemed to have done violence to every understanding of bhadralok/middle class self in terms of her caste as well as gender.

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Commented [RG4]: who do you mean?

Lata was tall, not “too dark-skinned” and was on average “good-looking”. In short,she did not have the typical attributesof a scheduled caste person. These remarks made Lata wonder how the previous incumbent looked. Through remarks and conversations she gained an understanding that her predecessor was “quite ugly” and “docile”. She, unlike Lata, had fitted into both the caste and gender stereotypes that bhadralok society produced in terms of appearance and disposition and so did not displace middle class commonsense and sensibilities. Since the Durban Conference on Racism in 2000 there has been much academic debate on seeing caste as a racial category. Regardless of such debates, in the everyday perceptions of people caste is seen to have a racial basis. It is important to take cognisance of such perceptions. The everyday life is a fuzzy domain that does not abide by neatness of analytical categories developed by academics. When Lata claimed that she “did not fit into the Scheduled Caste category” because her physical features set her apart from the average figure of the Scheduled Caste person she was basing her statement on the commonly held perception that people’s castes could to an extent be marked out in terms of their physical features Besides these, Lata, as mentioned earlier would rarely get angry. She could argue using what is known as the language of reason and rationality. In a casted and masculine space like the school,

Commented [RG5]: feels academic. Can you find a substitute?

upper caste men are supposed to deploy the language of reason and marginalised castes and women to be emotional. Bengali society had been remarkably successful in not having much

Commented [RG6]: again too academic.

meaningful engagement with caste, gender, or even class. Bhadralok/middle class Left politics has considerably aided this disengagement. Lata’s narrative not only shows the process of becoming middle class and of becoming casted; it also shows how the allegedly uncasted category asserts its castedness. The very practice and means of separating themselves from the ‘schedule’ Lata was in itself an articulation of themselves as casted beings. Moreover upper caste men went off the handle in tackling Lata and in preserving the boundaries of spaces from where dalits were historically excluded. Upper casteness and masculinity that together went into the making of middle classness and which for long maintained its stability suddenly faced a major challenge from Lata, a dalit woman, who seemed to trespass into forbidden territory. Being a ‘meritorious’ student Lata never needed her caste certificate for admission. In the university her “intelligence and grades” shielded her from forms of prejudice and discrimination. But in this workspace despite her grades Lata was taken in not as a General category candidate 3

Commented [RG7]: as before

but in the reserved post for Scheduled Castes. What we see in the workspace is that caste while it cannot be articulated is nonetheless incessantly articulated in conjunction with that of gender and local hierarchies. Here the rest of the castes have to pretend that they are uncasted as part of the General category; whereas the Scheduled Castes come in through a different category of caste. Therefore, Lata was not a person, she was only a caste, marked and categorised as inferior and inadequate to the rest.Everyday aggression is the central aspect of this articulation of gendered caste. Considered as trivial such aggression normalises institutionalised violence. These apparently inconsequential forms of violence considerably affect the sense of self among dalits aspiring to be a part of the middle class. Author bio:Author is a doctoral fellow with the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and teaches Sociology in St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta.

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Commented [RG8]: rephrase