The Construction of Caste in Colonial India
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay
Each issue we are inviting Board Members, Fellows and Associates of the Asian Studies Institute to write about books they have just had published. In this issue Sekhar Bandyopadhyay describes his book about the Namasudras in India.
My book Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India deals with the history of an untouchable caste of India, the Namasudras, over the seventy-five year period, 1872 to 1947. Writing the history of untouchables is a difficult task, particularly because of the paucity of source materials that might unfold for us the mentalities of such people. Untouchables do not usually leave diaries or written accounts of their daily lives and struggles, to be read and analysed by professional historians. Official and other conventional literary sources, on the other hand, are often prejudiced and fragmented, giving only partial accounts of 'events' affecting untouchables, and offering hardly any information about their daily lives, consciousness or mentality.
However, while working on my doctoral dissertation on the caste system in the Bengal region during the late colonial period, I discovered that this particular group, the Namasudras, left a huge amount of written and printed materials about their organised social protests against the caste system in general and the political domination of the Hindu upper castes in particular. There was also a vast repertoire of folk songs, popular myths and local anecdotes which could be fruitfully used to unveil their 'mindset' and write a meaningful social history of this articulate untouchable caste, a caste that left an unmistakable mark on the political life of Bengal and of India. I decided to take the plunge.
Mine is not, of course, the first book on a movement organised by a low caste Hindu group in India, or on such groups' struggles for social and political justice. Still, the Namasudras in this context represent an important case. In a real sense, they have been a creation of colonial ethnography, as in pre-colonial medieval Bengali literature there is no evidence of their existence. What this literary evidence does clearly suggest is that the term 'Chandala' was traditionally used as a generic term to identify all the low caste people in Bengal, with differentiated ritual ranks. Colonial ethnographers then mistook it for the name of a particular caste. The people so identified in census reports protested, claimed for themselves a new, more respectable caste name, 'Namasudra' (in place of the despised term 'Chandala') and through their protest movement constructed a new community identity.
Naturally, the Namasudras constituted a large caste - the second largest caste in colonial Bengal and the largest group among the Hindu agriculturists in its eastern districts (which eventually came to constitute modern Bangladesh). Now more conscious of their social status and political rights, they moved away from mainstream Indian nationalism, as it was dominated by the upper caste Hindus, and remained alienated from it till about the end of the 1930s. Then around the time of the transfer of power and the Partition of India, their movement gradually disintegrated and merged into the other dominant political streams in the country, represented by such organisations as the Indian National Congress, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Kisan Sabhas (peasant organisations under communist leadership).
The case of the Namasudras thus raises some important questions about the essentialist argument that 'caste identity' has always been a given feature of Indian social reality. I have tried to show that contrary to common assumptions, castes in colonial India were often highly differentiated, and caste movements often resulted from a convergence of various streams of consciousness reflecting the plurality of the participating group. Caste identities were not given, therefore, but results of historical processes. Again, convergence did not preclude the possibility of divergence or fissuring within the community at a subsequent stage. Caste identity coexisted and interacted with other competing religious, class and national identities. At a particular historical juncture one identity might take precedence over others as a focal point for political mobilisation; but this did not mean that other identities were completely displaced or eliminated. It is the differentiation and complex trajectories of caste movements, rather than their assumed homogeneity and unilinear progress, which the book brings into focus.
The caste question in recent years has once again become prominent in India's national political agenda. The backward castes' demand for affirmative action, and the upper caste backlash against it, have raised legitimate apprehensions about the divisive impact of articulated caste consciousness on the integrity of the Indian nation. Although based on a particular case study, the book revisits the question of caste identity in general and takes a fresh look at the problems of Indian nationalism. It is the history of identity formation and the political construction of untouchability in the late colonial period, the book argues, that can tell us how the caste problem in contemporary India can be effectively resolved, if there is any political will to resolve it.
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is a Member of the Asian Studies Board and a Senior Lecturer in History at Victoria University. Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872-1947 was published by Curzon Press, London, 1997 as no. 15 in the SOAS London Studies on South Asia series
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