‘Caste in Bengal’ treats caste not as residual folklore but as a living structure of domination

In 1932, Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore endorsed a petition claiming Bengali caste Hindus deserved special political representation due to their “overwhelming cultural superiority” and “economic preponderance.” This apparent contradiction, coming from the humanist poet who had written against untouchability in Gitanjali , reveals something profound about caste’s operation in Bengal and the durability of Bengali exceptionalism myths.

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Tanika Sarkar’s formidable book Caste in Bengal: Histories of Hierarchy, Exclusion, and Resistance systematically dismantles one of modern Bengal’s most cherished self-images through rigorous historical and ethnographic evidence. This collection treats caste not as residual folklore but as a living structure of domination whose persistence reveals how power reconstitutes itself even under ostensibly progressive transformation.

The editors’ key insight is that the supposed “disappearance” from Bengal is itself a form of caste politics. Colonial Bengal’s diverse caste mechanisms, census classifications, temple restrictions, matrimonial negotiations, and occupational segregation weren’t eliminated by modernity, they were merely camouflaged beneath other categories: class, education, cultural refinement, and regional identity. Whilst caste violence elsewhere assumes spectacular forms, massacres, public humiliations, and forced labour, in Bengal it operates through what Maroona Murmu, professor of history, terms “quiet and non-physical violence” with equally devastating effects.

A quiet violence

The myth of castelessness gained currency through multiple reinforcing mechanisms documented across the volume’s 19 essays: the Left Front's insistence that “class, not caste” determined backwardness; former Chief Minister Jyoti Basu's 1980 testimony that only “rich and poor classes” existed in West Bengal; educated upper castes claiming ignorance of caste whilst monopolising power positions. These weren’t innocent misunderstandings but ideological projects serving concrete interests. The consistent monopolisation of political power by just three castes (Brahman, Kayastha, Baidya) since Independence, with every chief minister from this tiny ten per cent minority, provides a stark empirical refutation of exceptionalist claims.

The most revelatory sections trace what happened to those who physically built Bengali modernity. Uday Chandra uncovers the “hidden history” of Kols – forest-dwelling Adivasis who built imperial Calcutta, drained marshes, cleared forests, worked indigo and tea plantations. Classified as “tribes”, degraded castes, or “coolies,” they occupied the bottom of every labour hierarchy, revealing what Chandra calls a “labour theory of caste domination,” ritual impurity marking and justifying assignment of the hardest, most stigmatised work to groups.

Tanika Sarkar extends this analysis to Corporation Methars, sanitary workers cleaning Calcutta’s toilets and sewers. Drawn from Kol tribals and Dom/Hadi untouchables, they occupied an impossible position: domestic servants yet municipal employees, performing essential work yet so polluting that even other untouchables maintained distance. Their 1928 strikes brought the entire city to a standstill, representing an extraordinary level of working-class militancy. Yet Communist union leaders completely erased their caste identity from discourse, speaking only of wages and conditions, never untouchability or specific degradations.

Shahana Bhattacharya’s essay on Tangra leather tanneries completes this labour studies triptych. Migrant Chamar workers assigned to the most arduous operations simultaneously developed organisations, affirming both caste and class identities. Meanwhile, “scientific tanning” education claimed to modernise the industry whilst preserving caste-based task allocation, “expert” positions for upper castes who need not touch hides, and degrading manual work for Chamars. The pattern repeats with striking consistency: modernity doesn't eliminate caste but transforms it into forms that can be morally disavowed whilst remaining materially operative.

Post-1947 developments constitute the volume’s most chilling documentation of active upper-caste dominance reconsolidation. Partition removed the Muslim peasantry that had seriously challenged bhadralok hegemony in the 1930s-’40s, but created a refugee crisis that could have destabilised caste hierarchies. Instead, systematic discrimination emerged disguised as administrative necessity. Partha Chatterjee shows how educated upper-caste refugees occupied land near Calcutta, mobilised through the United Central Refugee Council, and won recognition with generous terms. Lower-caste refugees were herded into overcrowded camps, then forcibly dispersed to Dandakaranya and the Andamans – thousands of miles from Bengal, where their skills proved useless and they often lost Scheduled Caste recognition. When some attempted to return and settled at Marichjhapi in…