Introduction
In contemporary India, the institution of caste seems to be one of the major factors that influence day-to-day politics in multifarious ways. It has reconstituted itself and taken newer forms in the course of its interaction with modern politics. In fact, caste and modern politics in India are entwined in such a way that both mould consistently with each other in relation to power. But most importantly the trajectory of the pattern of changes in caste relations vis-à-vis contemporary politics has not been uniform in different parts of India. Its changing pattern is very distinct in different Indian states depending on their specific histories of development. The question of how West Bengal, especially rural West Bengal, differs from other Indian states in terms of caste is answered by the long-held political myth (even among academics) that caste does not matter in West Bengal. Therefore, West Bengal is an appropriate field for the enquiry into this question, since the changes in village society in West Bengal have probably been more spectacular in the Indian context, particularly during the last three decades (1980–2010). During this period, according to Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya, ‘rural West Bengal has been subjected to extensive governmental intervention in the form of land reforms and democratic decentralization. This [has] made West Bengal's rural political economy. . .distinctly different from the rest of the country’.Footnote 1 This difference from the rest of the country is so much so in the social and political aspects of the state that, he argues, ‘political parties in rural West Bengal largely transcended caste, religion and ethnicity based organizations which have some relevance in other parts of the country’.Footnote 2 This argument undoubtedly deserves attention when Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, another renowned scholar, asserts that ‘by making some adjustments in form, the caste system in Bengal has managed to sustain its essence and in that sense Bengal is no exception to the general pan-Indian pattern’.Footnote 3 This paper explores, by ethnographic enquiry into everyday politics of two villages in West Bengal, how caste matters in rural politics and to what extent the traditional caste system has been transformed under the impact of socio-economic and political reforms, undertaken particularly during the last three decades of uninterrupted left front rule.
Other researchers have revealed that the institution of caste as a system is rapidly ‘dying’ but that individual castes are flourishing as a consequence of the spread of democratic politics in post-colonial India.Footnote 4 It is a truism that ‘the localized traditional system of production of food grains and other necessities based on caste-wise division of labour’Footnote 5 has changed a lot in recent times. The hierarchy based on ritual purity and pollution, which was an essential characteristic of the caste system, has also undergone profound changes under the impact of modernization and other socio-economic factors. But it does not follow that caste as a ‘system’ has disappeared; rather, it is functioning in different ways and ‘is being accepted in its new forms’.Footnote 6 This paper looks at the caste dynamics and caste politics of West Bengal, which has witnessed several significant changes in its countryside in the period under discussion, and reveals that caste relations and caste identity have overarching dimensions in the day-to-day politics of the study villages. The paper clearly divulges how caste adapts to the existing power structure, i.e., the political party and the panchayat Footnote 7 in a rural setting, and maintains in essence the system of social hierarchy.
Caste, occupations and land
Notwithstanding all the success stories in land reforms during the last three decades of left front government in West Bengal, the Bagdis, the Dules and the Muchis, i.e., Scheduled Caste communities (and the tribal communities as well) in two villages, Kalipur and KadampurFootnote 8, in general possessed either no land or only meagre amounts of land. They had to work mainly as agricultural labourers in the farm lands owned by the upper castes—the middle and higher castes of the villages. While in Kalipur the proportion of Scheduled Caste people in the total population of the village was 41 per cent, they possessed only 8.15 per cent of the village agricultural land. More than two-thirds of them (69 per cent) were landless. The Scheduled Caste families owned an average 0.07 acre of land, whilst the amount was 1.5 acres for the landed upper caste families. These figures demonstrate that the Scheduled Caste people of Kalipur were not only socially disadvantaged, but at the same time they represented the property-less and economically backward sections of the rural people. The Scheduled Caste communities were so much identified with manual labour that the upper caste people called their hamlets ‘labour para’ where para meant small habitations, in Bengali parlance, based usually on castes in rural areas.
In Kadampur while the proportion of the Bagdis (the only Scheduled Caste community in the village) was 42 per cent of the total population, they held only 20 per cent of the village agricultural land. Here 58 per cent of the Scheduled Caste families were landless and the remaining 42 per cent owned an average 0.2 acre per family. It could also be seen from the household survey that 73 per cent of the Scheduled Caste households (and 95 per cent of the tribal households) in Kalipur and 62 per cent Scheduled Caste households in Kadampur, depended primarily on agricultural labours for their livelihood. The rest of the Scheduled Caste households depended either on cultivation, livestock-rearing or non-farm work. The Scheduled Caste cultivators were mainly share-croppers,Footnote 9 or lessee cultivators, supplementing their income from the meagre amount of land they owned. The non-farm work on which the Scheduled Caste families depended was mostly agriculture-based, for instance, labouring in cold storage centres, and trading and transporting vegetables and other agricultural products. Contrary to the households in Kalipur, in Kadampur, a few Scheduled Caste families owned sizeable amounts of land (an average of two acres or more) and two families had government jobs.
It is obvious from the above figures that the primary dependence of the Scheduled Caste people on agricultural labour stemmed from their situation of landlessness. Moreover, these people did not have much access to a non-farm means of livelihood, so were forced to depend on labouring on the lands of the higher and middle caste people. These share-croppers (many of whom remain unregisteredFootnote 10 even though the left front government in West Bengal claimed it had been successful in registering them) suffered substantial losses through having to pay one-thirdFootnote 11 of their produce to the landowners. At a time when profits in agriculture took a downturn due to increasing costs in general, besides the normal risks involved in attaining high yields, this one-third share of the produce taken by the landowners had a negative impact on the earnings of the share-croppers with the result that they were hardly able to recuperate their labour costs or recover the cost of cultivation of certain crops. Nevertheless, they still had to pay the stipulated one-third share to the landowners, resulting in indebtedness.
With the spread of market economy, implementation of land reform measures to a certain extent, and above all the increasing assertion of the subaltern people in the countryside, rural labourers have been largely successful in severing some forms of bondage sustained by the traditional caste system. Today the labourers of rural Bengal are apparently free to negotiate the sale of their labour in the labour market. But this freedom is severely constrained by different factors. Firstly, the socially backward rural people have very little access to non-farm work, which is scarce in rural areas and not readily available to them in urban areas. Secondly, these poorly paid rural people who seek jobs in urban areas are very often engaged in the most insecure and risky jobs in the informal sector. In Kadampur, being located not far from the urban industrial areas, a number of people had opted for jobs here. But their experiences had not been pleasant and many of them had to return to agricultural work, which seemed to them a more reliable means of livelihood. Such people were seen to be actively participating in the recent anti-land acquisition movement. Thirdly, an abundance of labourers in rural Bengal means they have to remain idle for long periods in a year.Footnote 12 All these factors hamper the bargaining power of the labouring people and increase their dependence on the upper caste land-owning community.
In both the study villages, these three factors were evident, though in different degrees, pointing to the fact that the caste-wise division of labour had been in the main persisting in both the villages. This appears contrary to the observation of Srinivas that the system of production based on caste-wise division of labour was ‘fast breaking down’ in rural IndiaFootnote 13. Rather, the earlier observation of Srinivas that ‘the lower castes are tenants, servants, landless labourers, debtors and clients of the higher castes’Footnote 14 remained more relevant to the ground situation existing in rural Bengal. Though the strictures, based on Hindu Dharmashastra, on caste-wise division of labour have largely disappeared from the rural scene (except for rituals and ceremonies),Footnote 15 the traditional pattern of division of labour based on caste hierarchy had in the main remained under economic compulsions. Furthermore, the dependence of rural labourers on the upper caste landed community for their mere survival seems to seriously hinder the attainment of autonomy in economic relations. Landownership has always remained a pillar of caste division in the society. The Anthropological Survey of India recorded similar observations in its study of 4,635 communities/castes under its ‘People of India’ project where it noted ‘better control over land and other resources’ as one of the characteristic features of higher castes in India.Footnote 16
Modern education, preferably in English language, cultural values, and a sense of social propriety, as well as landownership, have been the characteristic features of higher castes in Bengal since the middle of the nineteenth century. Since then, the upper castes of Bengali Hindu society, mainly Brahmin, Baidya and Kayastha, in general called the bhadralok (the ‘respectable people’, the ‘gentle people’), ‘were accorded recognition as superior in social status’ to the mass of the people.Footnote 17 In fact, historically, ‘the bhadralok Footnote 18 status was not ascribable; it had to be achieved’ and ‘caste did not play an important role in selecting bhadralok’.Footnote 19 However, the upper castes were generally recognized as bhadralok because the educated section of people were mainly drawn from these higher castes.Footnote 20 This social categorization was actually defined in terms of attitude to manual labour rather than to caste itself—those who were educated and refrained from carrying out manual labour were known as the bhadralok. In reality, however, there was a caste dimension too: the bhadralok overwhelmingly belonged to the three upper castes, whilst the Scheduled Caste groups were predominantly involved in low-paid manual jobs and considered to be ‘chhotolok’. But it can be seen at present that a division of the society into chhotoloks and bhadraloks, based mainly on caste positions of different social groups, is prevalent in rural West Bengal. The terms chhotolok and bhadralok are now commonly used in Bengali parlance to mean people belonging to the lower castes and higher castes respectively. These terms are of course used by the educated higher caste people who regard themselves as bhadralok, or gentlemen, and others as chhotoloks in the derogatory sense. The term chhotolok is also used amongst higher castes to abuse somebody of their own caste. In the contemporary rural power structure, based on the practices of grass-roots democracy and caste-wise reservations, the traditional social hierarchical order seems to be largely continuing in new forms. But these social and political aspects of caste assume different shapes in different villages depending on the specific conditions of the particular villages. In Kalipur and Kadampur, socio-political developments did not follow similar patterns, resulting in different relationships amongst the different caste-groups. The next section focusses on the social aspects of caste that made the differences prominent between the two study villages.
Caste, status and stratification
In Kalipur the difference between the Scheduled Caste communities and the dominant Mahishya and other upper castes was quite evident from their separate habitations, situated not far from one another, but distinct in the shape and condition of the houses of their respective caste-based hamlets. While the upper caste houses were comparatively spacious and mostly brick-built, some of them two-storied with boundary walls, the Scheduled Caste habitations consisting of mud houses were very congested, with no fencing separating one house from another, no space for separate kitchen, toilet or cattle-keeping, humans and animals huddled in the same rooms, no separate space for bathing for the women, no household water supply and no sanitation facilities despite the assurance of providing core civic services like drinking water supply and sanitation to all citizens by the central government and the left front government of the state as well.Footnote 21 As the panchayat insisted that every rural household should avail itself of the subsidized toilet supplied by it, in most cases, the Scheduled Caste families constructed the toilets but used the space not for defecation but for other purposes such as the storage of fuel. In fact, these people had little space left for constructing such toilets and hence apprehended that these would further pollute the homestead rather than improve their sanitation, particularly when they did not have water facilities in their houses. Generally, each Scheduled Caste hamlet had only one hand pump, which was commonly used for all domestic purposes by all the households and therefore constantly in use.
Though electricity had been provided in the village as far back as 1984, and the electric posts were located very close to the Scheduled Caste hamlets, almost none of the Scheduled Caste households were connected. Government has pumped major funding into primary school education through its literacy campaign, and the present generation of children are mostly enrolled in village primary schools (though their attendance is intermittent), but still progress in education seems abysmally low. I have witnessed that some children of class IV standard remain incapable of writing their own names legibly in the vernacular language. In particular seasons, the children of Scheduled Caste families have to engage in cultivation works, apart from their day-to-day involvement in various domestic labours like cattle grazing. A visit to the village primary school immediately reveals the stark disparity between the children of the upper castes and those from the Scheduled Caste background, distinct not only by their attire and appearance, but also by the pattern of their sitting in the classrooms. The upper caste children generally occupy the front seats and respond the most in class lessons. Most of the children from Scheduled Caste families fail to continue their studies beyond the primary level.
In Kalipur, of the total of 37 people who passed the secondary examination, only two belonged to the Scheduled Caste communities. Interestingly, both the Scheduled Caste and the higher castes of the village had the same number of government jobs. But such government jobs held by a few Scheduled Castes did not change the status of these communities. Rather, the two job-holder families became somewhat detached from the rest of their communities, by constructing concrete houses away from their caste habitats, and through their efforts to upgrade their status and be accepted into the bhadralok category. This phenomenon might be an instance of aspiration of upward mobility of some individual families belonging to the lower caste. But whether this aspiration of upward mobility of a few individual families of the backward communities can be fulfilled, or can initiate a process of upward mobility of the communities as a whole, probably depends upon certain other factors which will be examined below in the case of Kadampur.
The three lower castes of Kalipur, namely the Bagdis, the Dules and the Muchis, belong to the antyaj caste, as defined by Sanyal.Footnote 22 The antyaj castes constitute the lowest strata of the caste hierarchy. They include the Untouchables whose touch is capable of polluting persons belonging to the caste ranking above.Footnote 23 They are presumed to be members of the non-Brahminical social groups who do not follow the Brahminical ritual and cultural pattern. That means they are ranked below the nabasakha castes (like the Sodgopes, Mahishyas, Goalas and Napits) who follow the Brahminical ceremonial activities, rituals, customs, commensalities, behavioural patterns and values. Separate priests who are considered lower or unclean varna Brahmins among the Brahmins oversee ritual ceremonies and worshipping for these lower castes. But it was not the fact that the people of lower castes in Kalipur were constrained to remain at the most disadvantageous position in the gathering or festival as described by Sanyal,Footnote 24 rather both the upper and lower castes of Kalipur were seen to be participating almost with equal jubilation in the main festival of the village on the occasion of Kali puja (worshipping the goddess Kali). This had been the sholo ana Footnote 25 festival of the neighbouring villages of Kalipur and Madhupur which a few Mahishyas had initiated about 15 years previously and were key in its organization. But as the puja, or festival, began to attract larger crowds amounting to a few thousand from neighbouring villages, the Youth Club of Kalipur (being the only organized body besides the party in these villages) took over. As the club became dominated by Scheduled Caste-tribal youth, the pioneering upper caste people slowly relinquished their hold in organizing the festival and, interestingly, they ceased to make any further donations. Thus the Mahishyas of Madhupur were denied their leading role in the festival that eventually turned into a sholo ana festival of Kalipur, a village numerically dominated by the lower castes and tribal people.
Active participation in this festival therefore might indicate a movement in the social mobility of lower castes in the socio-religious hierarchy where they assumed a key role in organizing a sholo ana puja, which had previously been the exclusive domain of the upper castes. In fact, ‘social mobility was ultimately conceived in terms of acquiring [a] greater degree of purity’. Here the lower caste people were aiming for a greater degree of ritual purity ‘for socially validating the position of eminence earned by them’.Footnote 26 Recently, a few Scheduled Caste families were performing Saraswati Puja (worship of a Hindu Goddess) in their own houses by employing the services of Brahmin priests who usually performed pujas in upper caste households and who were not supposed to attend rituals in the lower caste households in the village. In fact, the Brahmin who is supposed to serve the upper castes along with the clean sudra is usually called clean Brahmin and would pollute his caste if he acts as priest to the antyaj.Footnote 27 The clean Brahmin here was serving the antyaj, indicating that society in general is gradually approving their claim to upward social mobility and might be another marker in the efforts of the lower castes ‘to move up in the ritual hierarchy’.Footnote 28
There is still disparity, however, between the upper castes and the Scheduled Caste communities. There remains an aberration in the stratified rural society where the bhadralok-chhotolok division has persisted with considerable vigour, even though the lower castes continue to play increasingly important roles in a social function. I have found it common that the upper caste people of the village look down upon the Scheduled Caste people as chhotoloks. The Scheduled Caste people also address the higher caste people as babus or bhadraloks. These socially significant terminologies somehow reflect the existence of the traditional elite-subaltern relationship on the basis of domination-subordination in the contemporary period.
Upper caste people are reluctant to visit Scheduled Caste-tribal hamlets and generally do not accept food in lower caste houses. Higher caste women never visit Scheduled Caste-tribal paras and avoid close contact with the lower castes and tribal people. The labouring Scheduled Caste-tribal people wash their dishes after taking food and drink in the upper caste households while the economically and socially established lower caste persons (such as school teachers) are not usually required to do so. The children of upper caste families are reluctant to eat a meal alongside Scheduled Caste children, as served in the village Integrated Child Development Scheme Centre,Footnote 29 though surprisingly, parents often come to the centre to collect the nutritious food meant for children, particularly on egg-day.Footnote 30 Children of upper caste families mostly take midday meals in the village primary school, usually sitting separately from Scheduled Caste children. This is not an isolated observation in West Bengal, as is shown by the survey report of Pratichi (India) Trust as mentioned by Ghosh.Footnote 31
Upper caste people, even young ones, rarely have friends within the Scheduled Caste and tribal communities. The friend-circles in the village were constituted largely on the basis of caste groups. The people of higher castes (Brahmins and Kayasthas) seem not to have any prejudice in mingling with the Mahishyas, the dominant middle caste people, in the village, and vice versa, though generally in the addas (chatting centres) people of the same caste were seen to flock together. Even though on the surface all seems well, there exists a strong undercurrent of caste feeling where the erstwhile dominating caste Kayasthas look down upon the Mahishyas terming them chashas (the cultivators) in a derogatory sense, and the Mahishyas undermine the Kayasthas as lazy and worthless. These people are reluctant to allow inter-caste marital relationships. When a Kayastha unemployed youth married a girl from a neo-rich Mahishya family, the parents of the girl vehemently opposed the marriage.
The instances from Kalipur are quite revealing to understand the degree of caste feeling prevailing in rural West Bengal, even among the supporters and activists of the principal ruling party of the state, the Communist Party of India (Marxist). I met Jiban PalFootnote 32 of a rich landed Mahishya family whilst travelling the village road to visit the panchayat pradhan (chief) and village Scheduled Caste leader Khagen Malik. He advised me to meet other party leaders of the upper castes instead, labelling Khagen as faltu (worthless) who did not know anything about the village. This showed his contempt for the Scheduled Caste representative in the panchayat. It is worthy of note that Jiban Pal is a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the largest left party in India. Jiban's words about Khagen reflect the caste prejudice of an upper caste person that debarred him accepting a Scheduled Caste person as leader of the village. The alignment of power in the locality seems also to have a bearing on his attitude towards the Scheduled Caste pradhan who was crucially dependent on the higher caste party leaders both in managing village affairs and running the panchayat, discussed in more detail below
Another instance was the attitude expressed by Madhabi, wife of the village party leader Manoj Dutta, who ridiculed the Scheduled Caste-tribal assertion attained during the left front rule of the last couple of decades. I met her just before the state Assembly elections in 2006, and commenting on the impending elections she said:
My husband was saying that in the coming elections the government could fall. Indeed, a change is needed. It might seem an unusual comment from me, but I must say that the chhotoloks would be cut to size once the government is changed. These people have become so adamant that they don't care [about] anyone. They can't be taken to task even if they don't work in the field properly. You must realize what happens if the shoe is placed on the head. One should be kept in the arena earmarked for him/her in the society. Anyhow all the mental works have still to be done by us. Can they do such works? Do they have the brains? The persons from Scheduled Caste-tribal communities are now becoming panchayat members and even panchayat pradhan, but who are performing the real works of panchayat other than people like us?
Though Madhabi was active in the mahila samiti (women's front of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)), she even hailed the possibility of a defeat of the party in the impending elections in the expectation that ‘the chhotoloks would be cut to size’. She reflected the general upper caste viewpoint that the Scheduled Caste-tribal people were unable to do mental or intellectual work such as running the panchayat, which had to be run practically by upper caste people. Here, by mentioning the position of a person in the society, she obviously meant the caste position stipulated by the Varna or jati system of the Hindu religion. This showed the existence of caste consciousness entrenched in a lady so closely associated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
Even one landless agricultural labourer, Kesta of the Mahishya caste, differentiated himself from the Scheduled Caste and tribal labourers he used to toil with. According to him, the lower caste people did not know any manner and hence he could not find a friend amongst them. In this instance, the caste feeling in him was strong enough to deter him to integrate with his class brethren. Among the Scheduled Caste communities of Kalipur, there were three caste groups, Bagdis, Dules and Muchis. The Bagdis were more dependent on share-cropping in the lands of the babus, for example, the upper caste Kayasthas. They were accused by the tribal people of being close to the babus traditionally, not supporting the struggles against the landed gentry unequivocally in the 1960s and 1970s, and of enjoying more benefits from the panchayat and the party. Noticeably, many of the bagdi share-croppers had not registered as bargadars even though they were close to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) during the left front regime. Ruud also observed that a certain caste from the Scheduled Caste category was favoured in the process of consolidation of political power by the dominant party whilst another caste in the same category was derided for striving for social mobilityFootnote 33. The Dules were also dependent on share-cropping and agricultural labour, but felt marginalized in the power structure, not having representation in the party and the panchayat. The Muchis, who were principally dependent on agricultural labour, were literally the marginal people segregated in the village away from all social and political activities. Very recently they affirmed allegiance to the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
In Kadampur also the conditions of houses varied widely according to caste habitations. The Scheduled Caste hamlets, though situated in close vicinity to the general caste habitations, were distinct by the wretched condition of their houses. Here occasional floods caused the Scheduled Caste habitation to be more dilapidated. In comparison, the Mahishyas and Gowalas of Kadampur generally had well built concrete houses, some of them having two storeys. The Gowalas were traditionally dependent on milk trading and had lately flourished in other businesses. They were less dependent on land though their average land holding (0.8 acre) was higher than the Mahishyas (0.53 acre) betraying the caste-specific occupational preferences still prevalent in Hindu society. It should be noted that in this village, while a few Scheduled Caste families were solvent and possessing concrete houses, a considerable section of the Mahishyas lived in poor conditions. Similar to Kalipur, here also the Scheduled Caste families in general suffered from a lack of sanitation, education, electricity and access to safe drinking water. But, contrary to Kalipur, some of the Scheduled Caste families in Kadampur enjoyed some amount of social prestige perhaps due to their better economic conditions having landed property, government jobs and better educational background.
As I entered Kadampur at the height of the recent anti-land acquisition movement,Footnote 34 the caste relations seemed to have become fuzzy under the impact of the land movement. Most of the people in the village community initially responded in united defiance of the land acquisition movement by the government. They organized as a body to save the village agricultural land on which people of all castes depended crucially for their livelihood. The landless Scheduled Caste people were also affected because they lived off the land as agricultural labourers, share-croppers or bargadars (registered or not) and cultivators on lease-rent. So the lower caste Bagdis of the village united with the dominant caste Mahishyas to serve on the ‘Save Agricultural Land Committee’. Not only had the Scheduled Caste people joined the movement en masse, the village panchayat member belonging to the Bagdi caste also became one of its main leaders. Subsequently, a rift appeared among the village people as some of the landed persons agreed to offer their land for the Tata project and some, mainly from the Scheduled Caste communities, joined the construction work in the project area as day labourers. In this situation, caste consciousness seems to have been superseded by economic considerations. Contrary to the case of village Kalipur, here Mahishya caste people praised the Scheduled Caste panchayat member, Dhiren, and had confidence in him. In fact, the two main leaders of the land movement in Kadampur were respectively Jagannath, from the dominant Mahishya caste group, and Dhiren, from the Bagdi caste group. Obviously Jagannath played a greater role in mobilizing the Mahishya people in the land movement, whilst Dhiren persuaded the Bagdi people to participate in it. But as mobilization in the land movement cut across the caste line and was based on the solidarity of the village people, the emphasis in the social life of the village was on inter-caste unity.
It seemed that, due to several factors, in Kadampur caste antagonism was not as sharp as in Kalipur. In the village club of Kadampur, Mahishyas closely mingled with the Scheduled Caste youths and people from both castes took equal part in the day-to-day activities of the club. Even before becoming a panchayat member, Dhiren, a graduate and a private tutor by profession, was all along active in the club and played a leading role in its activities. He wrote jatra playsFootnote 35 and club members acted in them. The jatra plays were acclaimed in different places and the club received a number of prizes for good performance in drama competitions. Another Scheduled Caste person, Pradip Bag, the only doctor hailing from the village who was engaged in a government job as a Block Medical officer in East Medinipur district, played a significant role in patronizing the club in all its activities. Both Dhiren and Pradip held long-term executive positions in the club. Had there been substantial caste animosity in the village, they probably would not have been accepted as patrons. It should be noted that the club was the main place for social gathering in the village and often even elderly persons joined the adda (chatting) in the club. Beside the road near the club, the elders of the village gathered morning and evening to exchange pleasantries and discuss politics and such like. Here also both Mahishya and Bagdi people gathered regularly. Such open-air addas are very commonplace in both the rural and urban areas of West Bengal. As we have seen in Kalipur, people belonging to different castes had their own addas and they rarely befriended the people of other castes. In particular, mingling of upper caste people with Scheduled Caste people seemed quite unusual there. The only exception was a Kayastha youth in Kalipur, who played a leading role in organizing the Youth Club, which comprised members mainly from the Scheduled Caste-tribal communities.
The absence of explicit caste prejudice in Kadampur might be due to both economic and social reasons. All the Scheduled Caste people in the village were not landless and some Scheduled Caste families had both agricultural land and jobs. But unlike in Kalipur, such families had not detached themselves from their own community and social life of the village. Rather these families were very much identified with the joys and sorrows of village life. The case of Dr Pradip Bag might be the revealing example in this regard. Though he worked outside the village and earned a good salary, he could not stay aloof from the new events of the village in the wake of the land acquisition movement. He supported it and on occasion was tortured by the police and implicated with criminal charges. Such roles on the part of an educated and well-established person help cement inter-caste bonds in the strife-torn village. It seemed that the social involvement by Scheduled Caste persons, who had a higher educational background and economic solvency, played a definite role in giving the Bagdi caste their social dignity. On the other hand, the Mahishyas in Kadampur were neither traditional landowner nor could they gather substantial agricultural land in the post-land reform period, as was the case of Mahishyas in Kalipur. But it is evident that in the recent past in Kadampur a tiny section of Mahishyas (and Bagdis) could uplift their status by improving their economic conditions, while most of the families from both castes remained miserably dependent on a small amount of land or on share-cropping or labouring on another's land. Since most of the families of both castes remained economically depressed, ‘the upward mobility of middle castes and sometimes lower castes as well due to their economic uplift and imitation of the upper caste rituals and customs’ as observed by Shah, was not the case in Kadampur.Footnote 36
The Ghosh families of Beraberi, a neighbouring village, had owned most of the village land of Kadampur since the colonial days and both the Mahishyas and the Bagdis had share-cropped in their lands for a considerable period, some for generations. It is noteworthy that among the 51 share-croppers in the village, 28 belonged to the Scheduled Caste communities, 20 to the Mahishya and three to the Gowalas. Most of the Mahishya families in the village were marginal farmers with an average landholding of 0.5 acres. Only four Mahishya families owned land covering more than one hectare and that too was acquired by purchase of land in the last 15–20 years. In brief, the economic uplift of the Mahishyas of Kadampur was a recent phenomenon and they were yet to emerge as a dominant caste in the village. All these factors combined to give some semblance of common interest amongst the Mahishyas and Bagdis even before the government's land acquisition drive had begun in the area. So it did not seem unnatural for these two communities to readily join hands in the land movement to save their village agricultural land.
Caste and politics
An 80-year-old person from the Kayastha caste of Kalipur, whilst narrating the social changes that had taken place in the village, said that:
Previously when the Kayasthas were at the helm of the village affairs, there was amity between the upper and the lower castes in the village. An understanding existed between the haves and the have-nots resulting in peaceful co-existence. Since caste was associated with politics, those days had gone. Now the upper and the lower castes are always at loggerheads with each other. [The] [M]ore the village society is imbibed with politics, [the] more the conflicts between the haves and the have-nots are increasing.
The old man reminisced about the past when the dominant Kayasthas enjoyed social and political power and the lower castes submitted to their dominance without question. He correctly assessed that ‘politics’ had been the cause of all the changes in the caste and power relationship in the village. By saying ‘politics’ he obviously meant leftist politics, as opposed to the erstwhile domination of Congress politics in the village.
In the predominantly Scheduled Caste-tribal inhabited village of Kalipur, the Kayasthas held most of the village agricultural land and enjoyed social authority until the 1960s. They were the proponents of Congress politics in the village when the Scheduled Caste-tribal people at large were indifferent to party-politics. The uprising of the Scheduled Caste-tribal communities of Kalipur had almost been organically linked with the rise of leftist politics in the state. In the late 1960s, as the state witnessed the first non-Congress governments in the form of two brief United Front regimes of which the leftist parties were the main constituents, the village Kalipur saw a phenomenal rise in the peasant movement that initiated like never before a process of deep-rooted changes in the caste-power relationship. As the Communist Party of India (Marxist) entered the village political scene with its call of mobilization of landless and marginal peasants for unearthing and grabbing of above-ceiling lands from the landed gentry,Footnote 37 along with hiking of labour wages, the tribal people of the village were the first to be mobilized in the struggles. The ensuing period saw a sharp division in the village polity between the landless belonging to the Scheduled Caste-tribal communities and the landed gentry of the higher castes. The middle caste Mahishyas of the village, notwithstanding their traditional support of Congress politics did not enter into open conflict with the rising leftist politics. Rather, they were narrowly subjected to Kayastha domination, and yet to gather substantial land in their hands. The peasant movement of that period built the foundation of leftist politics in the village, though astonishingly the present Communist Party of India (Marxist) leadership in the area seldom remembered those days.
The second phase of the Scheduled Caste-tribal uprising in Kalipur started with the advent of left front rule in the year 1977. Also at that time, the tribal people were at the forefront of peasant struggles that also involved the Scheduled Caste people. In the meantime, the Mahishyas of Kalipur and MadhupurFootnote 38 emerged as the most prosperous caste in the twin villages as some of them purchased substantial agricultural land from the erstwhile Kayastha landlords and utilized the ‘green revolution’ technology along with commercial farming and agro-based business activities to advance their economic capabilities. As a result they enhanced their status from marginal peasant to small, semi-medium and medium (only one family) landholding categories.Footnote 39 They occupied the social position of a dominant caste, particularly after the erstwhile dominant Kayastha families mostly migrated to the cities or towns. So, in the post-1977 period the prosperous Mahishya families became the target of the peasant movement. But, unlike the Kayasthas, they subsequently built up a rapport with the Communist Party of India (Marxist)and strategically utilized their relationship with institutional politics to further their own interests.
In the meantime, the rejuvenation of the panchayati raj system in 1978 enhanced the importance of the Scheduled Caste-tribal communities in village politics, and particularly as the Kalipur panchayat seat has been reserved for the Scheduled Caste-tribal people since then. Undoubtedly the Scheduled Caste-tribal population initially turned into a strong support base for the Communist Party of India (Marxist) principally due to the support the party provided to these communities in their struggles against the landed gentry. This symbiotic relationship between the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Scheduled Caste-tribal people of the village changed with the entrenchment of the party in state power, and its subsequent change in policy from struggle to reform. Thus the trajectory of the changing relationship between caste and power traversed a zigzag path after 1978.
After 1977 the tribal community ceased to be the main support-base of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and gave way to the Bagdis who became the politically more favoured caste by virtue of its closer relationship with the ruling party. The tribal community fell apart from the party as the latter withdrew its support to a continuous agricultural labour strike for a wage-hike in 1984, and indeed assaulted the recalcitrant tribal leader in its bid to break the strike. Local leaders of the party, who hailed from the upper caste landed families, were reluctant to advance the strike which went against their own class interest as well. After that incident the labouring people, consisting of the Scheduled Caste-tribal communities, began to lose their political rising to the landed Mahishyas who gained dominance through their strategic relationship with the ruling party. There was simmering discontent amongst the Scheduled Caste-tribal people over corruption in the public distribution system, but they did not dare protest against the local ration dealer, a landed Brahmin, who was also one of the main party leaders of the locality.Footnote 40
As the Communist Party of India (Marxist) shifted its focus from struggle to reform, the earlier relationship between the party and the Scheduled Caste-tribal communities of the village underwent important changes. While the tribal community tried to seek some other ally in the wake of their disenchantment with the ruling party, the Scheduled Caste communities, particularly the Bagdis, seemed to embrace the new policies of the party, which was based mainly on benefit distribution through the panchayat. As most of these benefits were meant for the Scheduled Caste-tribal people, the Bagdis tried to garner the best of the panchayat benefits by dint of their rapport with the ruling party. Because of their numerous presences in the village population, this caste received more attention in electoral politics, became closer to the ruling party and finally assumed the coveted position of panchayat pradhan. It was alleged by other Scheduled Caste groups and tribal people that almost all the Bagdi families had received loans from the panchayat after Khagen Malik became the panchayat pradhan. It seemed that the welfare politics of the state for the uplift of the so-called backward sections resulted in competition among the lower castes and tribal people to garner more benefits for their respective communities. Both the tribal people and the Dules from the Scheduled Caste community complained of irregularities in the distribution of panchayat benefits in favour of the Bagdis. The tribal people expressed grievances over the comparatively passive role of the Bagdis during the period of struggle and their subsequent cornering of benefits that seemed disproportionately more than they deserved. Pakhi Murmu, the veteran tribal leader, regretted that the old solidarity among the Scheduled Caste communities and the tribal people in the village on the basis of which once the labouring people of these communities could assert themselves was spoiled due to the politics of benefit distribution. Institutional politics seemed to have a role in the declining rebellion of the Scheduled Caste-tribal communities vis-à-vis the upper caste domination.
Empowerment
The question of empowerment of the lower or antyaj castes through reservation of panchayat seats and posts,Footnote 41 and mandatory inclusion of representatives of the socially deprived sections in various village level committees like the Village Education CommitteeFootnote 42 and the Village Development Committee (Gram Unnayan Committee),Footnote 43 may be examined in the background of these politics. The lower caste representative of Kalipur had assumed the coveted seat of the panchayat pradhan only to find himself to be a ‘fish out of water’ in the existing power structure essentially managed by the rural elite. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) considered him to be a ‘dummy’ in the position of power rather than a real authority of the local panchayat. Indeed it arranged for upper caste persons who had been in charge of the panchayat earlier to carry on running it. It was quite explicit that the actual power of the panchayat, including the decision-making authority, rested mainly on Bidhan Mandal, the zonal secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and his wife, both having acted as panchayat chiefs earlier while the latter being the upa-pradhan in the present panchayat. The panchayat members and the officials generally approached party leader Bidhan Mandal who was a primary school teacher but regularly attended the panchayat office after school hours to look after its functioning. The villagers approached the upa-pradhan, ignoring the presence of the pradhan in the panchayat office to redress their problems or with pleas for help. The pradhan attended the office only to sign on the dotted lines as and when required as if the party was doing a favour by managing the works of the pradhan that Khagen Malik might find difficult to manage.
Khagen Malik, the lower caste pradhan, had mixed reactions to this state of affairs. On the one hand, he accepted the situation from his mentality of subordination to the upper caste and remained somewhat grateful to the upper caste leadership for the support rendered by them in running the panchayat. On the other hand, he felt disgusted to act merely as an appendage to the leadership and expressed his grievances by saying,
People might regard the Communist Party of India (Marxist) as a party of the poor and the disadvantaged, and the Left Front government a government of the same, but in actuality that is not the case. Both the party and the government belong to the rich. It was a party of the riches, the rajas.
He realized from his experience that only those who had wealth and education could run the panchayat and that persons like him, having none of the two, were incapable to act in the position of power. His sense of incapability seemed to arise from the intervention of party leaders belonging to the higher castes who presumably accepted a Scheduled Caste person in the position of panchayat pradhan under the compulsion of the reservation regime, but in actuality undermined his authority by allowing him to play only second fiddle in running the panchayat. In fact, Khagen was rendered worthless (‘faltu’ in local Bengali language) by none other than the upper caste leadership of the party he belonged to. It seemed that for all practical purposes it was Bidhan Mandal who acted as the main power centre in the so-called local self-government and became the de facto panchayat pradhan. Thus it appeared that the caste-power relationship had not essentially changed despite reservation of the post of pradhan to the Scheduled Caste community due to the upper caste leaders’ reluctance to relinquish the power they had enjoyed for long (Bidhan had been the pradhan of the panchayat for three terms—15 years—and his wife for one term). Moreover, the lower caste pradhan was not in a position to assert his authority as head of the panchayat. Though reservation had at least been instrumental in instilling an aspiration for political power among the lower caste people, the real transfer of power to the backward section could not possibly be achieved without a further uprising of the Scheduled Caste people in the political sphere.
In village politics as well, Khagen seemed not to hold real power even though he was the panchayat representative and a branch committeeFootnote 44 member of the ruling party. The two upper caste leaders from the neighbouring village Manoj Dutta and Naru Chatterjee exercised actual power in the village affairs though they held the same position in the ruling party like Khagen, but were not elected as members of the panchayat. How could they exercise superior power than Khagen Malik, a leader of the largest caste group of the village? It seemed that the upper caste background of Manoj and Naru had facilitated their rise to the superior position in the power structure of the village. For example, Manoj Dutta did not have a much advanced level of formal education in comparison to Khagen and was junior to him in the party. As we found in the conversation of one Mahishya party activist, the upper caste party functionaries did not regard their lower caste ‘comrade’ Khagen as equal to them, as a knowledgeable and able person. This attitude of denigrating the lower caste person, even when he was in formal power, reflected the existence of a sense of caste prejudice even in a party that claimed to represent the most downtrodden in the society.
Thus it appeared that in both the panchayat and the party, the two principal power centres in rural Bengal as argued by Bhattacharya,Footnote 45 the upper caste leadership was not set specifically to accept a person belonging to lower castes in the structure of power. The ideological overtone of caste seems to be reflected in the rural polity based on the division of chhotoloks and bhadraloks. As mentioned earlier, the chhotolok-bhadralok division in the village based mainly on the caste hierarchy seemed to be so strong that neither the upper castes were ready to accept a lower caste person as their leader, nor the lower castes were in a position to assert their authority over village affairs, in spite of their numerical superiority in the village. Whilst the upper castes considered themselves far superior to the lower castes in all spheres of life, the lower castes also seemed reluctantly to accept their subordinate position in the caste hierarchy, or not in a position to challenge the same in the field of politics.
Earlier, during the 1960s and post-1977 period, the Scheduled Caste-tribal communities attained a dignified status in the village society by dint of their struggles against the Kayasthya landed gentry in the first phase and the Mahishya rich peasants in the second. But in the subsequent period of administrative reform they achieved little in terms of social dignity to the upper castes, notwithstanding the fact that the village panchayat seat was all along reserved for the Scheduled Caste-tribal communities. Other institutions of the village like the Village Educational Committee and the Village Development Committee in Kalipur consisted of Scheduled Caste-tribal representatives as per the statute, but both were still run essentially by upper-caste party leaders as observed by Bhattacharyya.Footnote 46 For example, the Village Education Committee meeting that should be compulsorily held in the village school was called by the party leader Bidhan Mandal (who was not even a resident of the village) and held in the party office far away from the village.
In contrast to Kalipur, the village Kadampur witnessed the ascendancy of lower caste Bagdis in the echelons of local power though only as a recent phenomenon, in the wake of land movement. The village had not witnessed much caste antagonism during the contemporary period and the Mahishyas did not turn into a dominant caste as it was in Kalipur. The caste-power relationship had also traversed an entirely different course in Kadampur. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) could never mobilize the lower caste people of the village on economic and other issues in its favour. As a result, there was always a mixed response of different caste-groups to different parties. Although the rise of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in the village had the support of both Mahishyas and Bagdis of Kadampur, some of the Mahishya as well as Bagdi families had always been associated with the Congress party. Notably, some prosperous Mahishyas of Kadampur had associated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) since the 1960s, though the landless Scheduled Caste people formed its main support base. But a few Bagdi people had emerged as leader of the Scheduled Caste community in Kadampur both before and after 1977. After the chief Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader from the Mahishya caste was accused in a corruption case during his tenure as the panchayat pradhan in the later half of the 1980s, support for the party eroded considerably among the village people of both castes, and in 1993 a Congress candidate was elected from the village panchayat seat. In the 1998 panchayat elections, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) regained the village seat only to lose it again to the Trinamool Congress partyFootnote 47 candidate, Dhiren Dhara, in the 2003 panchayat elections. Finally, during the anti-land acquisition movement, the Bagdis belonging to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) mostly switched over to the Save Agricultural Land movement and subsequently became supporters of the Trinamool Congress party.
Dhiren was the first Scheduled Caste person to be appointed as leader of the village Kadampur, not merely as the panchayat member, but more as a social activist and subsequently as an organizer of the anti-land acquisition movement. Though Dhiren was elected as a panchayat member by virtue of reservation, he did not remain merely a leader of the Bagdis, rather he turned into a representative for the whole village, particularly in the wake of the land movement. His reputation as a village leader, even to the Mahishyas, was possible not only due to his formal education and social activities and the prevailing non-antagonistic relation between the two categories of castes in Kadampur, but also due to his crucial role in the land movement. Though the bhadralok-chhotolok division between the Mahishyas and the Bagdis might implicitly be present in the village, it did not deter the emergence of a Bagdi youth as an efficient leader of the village in its distress.
Conclusion
It can be summed up that, although in the economic field caste almost ceases to operate based on structural principles of the caste system, the division of labour largely coincides with the caste division under economic compulsion and ‘in ideological terms the categories of caste have continued to provide many of the basic signifying terms through which collective identities and social relations are still perceived’.Footnote 48 Caste still seems to be a major dynamic reason in rural areas by which everyday politics revolves. The aspiration of upward mobility on the part of lower castes is also evident in the two villages. But the upward mobility of lower castes in the recent phase was more in Kadampur than in Kalipur for several reasons. But there was no single phenomenon that can explain the difference. In both villages, it can be said that the election of Scheduled Caste candidates through reservation of posts in the panchayat bodies might just be a starting point of decentralization of power or empowerment of the so-called ‘backward castes’ and not an end in itself. This has been coupled in Kadampur with a number of other effects, such as minimum economic capabilities, educational background, social activities and political assertion (through the recent land movement) which facilitated a lower caste person to emerge as an actual leader of the village. In Kalipur, this had not been possible, as the formal Scheduled Caste representation had not been supported by other factors. But things had not been static in Kalipur either. The initial achievements of the Scheduled Caste-tribal communities attained through political movements could not be sustained, but were not lost altogether. While the ‘dependence’ of the lower caste people on the upper castes was in the main continuing in the economic field, the party was dominating the legal-political field with its upper caste leadership pretending to defend the interests of the lower castes. In the cultural-ideological field, the sense of caste hierarchy was prevailing both in the political party and in society. But there was simmering discontent of deprivation, particularly amongst the younger generation of the Scheduled Caste-tribal communities who were organized in the Youth Club of Kalipur which had been emerging as a social force independent of the organized political parties.
Hence, it seemed that the ‘vertical social system’ based on caste hierarchy in rural West Bengal was diminishing, if not decaying. But the change in the age-old system had been ushered in by the social movements of the lower caste labouring people to achieve their demands and rights even before the idea of ‘empowerment’ was enshrined in the Indian Constitution. It appears from this ethnographic study that institutional or formal decentralization of power could not eliminate caste-based hierarchy from the social and cultural body of society if not accompanied by the upward mobility of the backward communities and a social-political movement to fulfil the objective. The two courses of mobility, espoused by Bose, seemed to be simultaneously operating in the study villages: one, by consolidating the social status of a caste after improving their economic position and maintaining their separation from equivalent castes whose economic status was lower, and two, by ‘mobility movements’ representing ‘economic grievances and deprivation.’ Whilst the Mahishyas in Kalipur had consolidated their social status following the first course of mobility, the Scheduled Caste-tribal communities had tried the second course of mobility movement, ‘a movement of assertion’ in ‘association with other equivalent caste groups’.Footnote 49. In Kadampur, on the other hand, the movement against ‘economic grievances and deprivation’, though not a typical mobility movement, had unified two non-equivalent social groups, the Mahishyas and the Bagdis.
In the rural polity of West Bengal, party-politics seems to have a vital role to play in the ‘movement of assertion’ of the lower castes as it may facilitate in some situations the movement of the lower castes and oppose the same in another situation. The effective functioning of panchayati raj institutions has a dual effect on the social mobility of the lower castes in rural Bengal. On the one hand, it has augmented political aspiration amongst the lower castes to a certain extent through reservation of panchayat seats and posts; and on the other hand, it has created discrepancies and competition amongst equivalent lower caste groups by inculcating the politics of benefit distribution in them. However, the irreversible process of democratization seems to be continuing to awaken the lower castes, increasing their aspirations and enhancing their assertion.
