The Politics of Caste in West Bengal

Uday Chandra, Geir Heierstad, Kenneth Bo Nielsen

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317414766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume offers for the first time a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the making and maintenance of a modern caste society in colonial and postcolonial West Bengal in India. Drawing on cutting-edge multidisciplinary scholarship, it explains why caste continues to be neglected in the politics of and scholarship on West Bengal, and how caste relations have permeated the politics of the region until today. The essays presented here dispel the myth that caste does not matter in Bengali society and politics, and make possible meaningful comparisons and contrasts with other regions in South Asia.

The work will interest scholars and researchers in sociology, social anthropology, politics, modern Indian history and cultural studies.

1
Kol, Coolie, Colonial Subject

A hidden history of caste and the making of modern Bengal

Uday Chandra

Historical anthropologists of modern India, such as Bernard Cohn (1996), Arjun Appadurai (1993), and Nicholas Dirks (2001), have argued forcefully that caste, as a modern social institution, came to be revived and reproduced by the colonial state via its classificatory and enumerative policies. Yet, this colonialism-centred perspective, though useful in many senses, obscures the everyday sociocultural and political-economic processes by which the colonised organised themselves under colonial overlordship. Insofar as caste is a system of organising labour on the basis of a hierarchical social logic, it is important to understand how distinctive ‘regional modernities’ (Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal 2003) were built, quite literally, on the backs of labouring groups assigned the lowest ritual and socio-economic status in these new regions.

This chapter uncovers a ‘hidden’ history of one such labouring group in 19th-century Bengal, who appear in the colonial archives as ‘Kols’, despised in caste terms by the Hindu bhadralok, yet categorised subsequently via ethnological accounts as ‘tribes’. The Kols, sometimes known as Dhangars, appear in the colonial records from the time they helped build the imperial capital of Calcutta from the neigh-bouring forest highlands of Chotanagpur in the first decade of the 19th century. Decried as dirty or impure but valued for their ability to perform hard physical labour, the Kols served as construction workers as well as sweepers and cleaners in Calcutta. By the middle of the century, colonial archives suggest that the Kols had turned into coolies for the indigo and tea plantations of modern Bengal. In the plantation economy, the lowly Kols – men and women alike – performed hard agricultural labour that other caste groups were deemed incapable of. Subsequently, as land had to be reclaimed and forests cleared in the Sunderban delta, the Kols were called upon to alter the natural and human ecology of the area. Even as they were classified as ‘tribes’ by anthropologist-administrators in Chotanagpur, the Kols became the labouring caste par excellence in modern Bengal. The sociocultural and political-economic processes by which this occurred have, nonetheless, been hidden from the gaze of later historians raised on the venerable caste/tribe dichotomy in Indian sociology. This chapter offers a preliminary sketch of this hidden history of labour, caste and subjecthood on which Bengali regional modernity came to rest by the end of the 19th century and which continues to pervade the postcolonial present.

‘Dirty Swines’ in the imperial capital

In Die Gossnersche Mission Unter den Kols (1874 – ‘The Gossner Mission among the Kols’), the Lutheran pastor Dr Alfred Nottrott describes the Kols as ‘the wanderers of Calcutta’. These ‘mountainous black children’, he proceeded to describe how he first met them, ‘were engaged in mean works like sweeping the roads and carrying the goods etc. in this world town’. ‘In that age’, he added, ‘it [Kols] meant “Dirty Swines”’ (cited in Mahto 1971: 21). Some of these Kols, as they were known throughout Bengal in the early 19th century, appear with shovels as the ‘scavengers of Calcutta’ in the lithographs of Colesworthy Grant¹ (1846) or the many paintings by Company School artists depicting the construction of Fort William in colonial Calcutta. Yet, we know exceedingly little about these men and women from Chotanagpur: what they did in the city, their everyday pursuits and their shifting position between the rural and urban worlds.

Our earliest encounters with the Kols or ‘Coles’ in the Bengal Presidency are in colonial records that view these labouring groups as different from other inhabitants of Bengal by virtue of their strength and tempermant, shaped apparently by the rugged environs in which they were raised. In the words of Major J. Sutherland, the Kols were ‘one family’, ‘wild’, ‘savages’, but ‘as free and independent as any people on the Earth’.² The Kols were also, in his opinion, ‘an industrious people, possessing a beauty and mostly a highly cultivated country’ in the highlands of Chotanagpur. Yet, colonial officials were unsure how to situate the Kols in their sociological understanding of Indian society. One military officer described them as:

A race distinct from the great Hindoo family both in manners, language, religion and appearance inferior in some respects to the common inhabitants of the hills in point of civilization, but superior to them in courage and industry, and possessing large and flourishing villages with extensive tracts of well cultivated land.³

A civilian official, however, saw the Kols as ‘the lowest kind of Hindoos’.⁴ Without the caste/tribe dichotomy that has dominated Indian sociology since the mid-19th century, such confusion in the colonial records over the Kols is understandable and, in fact, rather revealing.

Despite their confusion, British officialdom soldiered on and divided the Kols into two groups, ‘Lurka Coles’ and ‘Dhanger Coles’, better known from later colonial ethnological works as Hos and Mundas, respectively. The Lurka Kols, so called for their reputation as fearless fighters (lurka literally means ‘fighter’), resided on the southern edge of the Ranchi plateau in Singhbhum. Major Edward Roughsedge described them during his military expedition in Singhbhum in 1820 as follows:

Not having any of the feelings of veneration for Bramins Cows which pervade Hindoos of every description they make no scruple of putting to death any man of respectable caste who presumes to enter their Territory, nor is there… a single Bramin Rajpoot or Mussulman in any one of the numerous and well inhabited villages, they possess. A traveller would as soon think of visiting into a Tiger’s den, as of traversing any part of Lurka Cole.

To compare the Lurkas to the Dhangers, Roughsedge wrote, ‘they [the Lurkas] are as much superior in size and form to the tame Danghers, if I may use the expression of Chota Nagpore, though of one common origin, as wild Buffaloes are to the village Herds’.⁵ In Major Sutherland’s view, the Dhanger Coles of the Chotanagpur plateau were ‘a remarkably industrious and peaceable people and who have a character for truth and honesty beyond that of many of the people of India’. The Dhangers were hitherto subjects of the Nagbanshi rajas of Chotangpur in ‘nearly 4,000 inhabited villages’ in the five Parganas (‘Paanch Pergunnah’) of Rai, Bundu, Silli, Tori, and Tamar.⁶ As the Collector S. T. Cuthbert noted after his extensive tour of the Chotanagpur countryside in 1826–27, the Dhangers were seen to ‘emigrate in great number annually during the agricultural off-season in search of employment’ to Calcutta as well as other districts in rural Bengal. ‘They are’, he wrote, ‘generally preferred to the labourers of other parts of the Country on account of their performing more work and at a lower rate’. That meant, typically, that ‘in a family consisting of four or five persons, two are left at home to take care of the family affairs and cultivation and the rest go abroad to seek service’.⁷

This is how the Kols came to be regarded in early colonial Bengal as labourers par excellence. Deemed to be a lowly caste by the British and their upper-caste collaborators, the Kols went about building Calcutta’s new ‘white town’, keeping its streets clean and drains unclogged, and digging the banks of canals. It is here that Christian missionaries ‘discovered’ them. In November 1845, when the first batch of German Lutheran evangelists arrived in Calcutta, ‘strolling one morning in the narrow streets… by the bank of the river Hooghly… they saw some natives with dark skin’. Curious, they asked the wife of Anglican Bishop Hoeberlin, ‘Who are these people we saw, so low and so degraded?’ Mrs Hoeberlin replied, ‘They are Cols from West Bengal’. From these Kols, the missionaries learned that they were migrants from Chotanagpur, located (in those days) 15 days west of Calcutta. Their home, the Kol migrants reported, ‘was full of green forests, high mountains and a large number of big and small rivers flowing under the clear blue sky’. They had come to ‘the din and bustle of a metropolitan city like Calcutta in order to earn some “Paise” [cash] which could improve their material conditions at home’ (cited in Mahto 1971: 19–22). In a similar vein, Eyre Chatterton (1901: 5), an Anglican priest who spent five decades in Chotanagpur, recalled in his memoirs how, as ‘young missionaries’, they ‘were at once struck by these dark-skinned, bright, merry-faced people’ labouring on the streets of imperial Calcutta. It was in the same circumstances that the Belgian Jesuit priest Constant Lievens, too, encountered ‘these people [who] are rather dark, but not negroes… [with] thick lips, a flat nose, a round face, long black hair and are almost beardless’, proceeding thereafter to the Chotanagpur ‘Mission in the West’ (cited in Clarysse 1985: 68–72, 128). It is at the margins of missionary narratives, therefore, that we learn of the common sight of Kol labourers on the streets of the imperial capital of Calcutta.

Anthropological theories of caste and tribe do not explain very well where the labouring Kols of Chotanagpur fit into the overall sociology of South Asia. If we follow the dominant wisdom since colonial times, the Kols are simply ‘tribes’, and hence, the colonial and missionary records cited above merely misrecognise this fact by referring to them as a lowly labouring caste. The problem with this reading is that it relies on a colonial ideology of ‘primitivism’ (Chandra 2013a), which ascribes a permanent ontological reality to a racialised notion of tribe (Fried 1975; Béteille 1986). Even today, when the colonial notion of tribe is under attack, even from many of those placed in the ‘savage slot’ (Trouillot 2003; Chandra 2013b), colonial ideas of the primitive Other continue to haunt the postcolonial present (Kuper 2005; Chat-terjee 2013). So, we turn then to the other side of the caste/tribe binary, namely, caste. Since it is no longer held that caste is entirely a ritual matter of purity and pollution in the Dumontian sense, it has become axiomatic among South Asianists that the modern caste order is a function of post-1858 colonial governmentality in British India (Cohn 1987; Appadurai 1993; Dirks 2001). But if caste is taken to be a by-product of colonial state-making processes, then it must be pointed out that colonial censuses, surveys and ethnographic experiments did not produce the Kols out of thin air. We thus face a conundrum: the conventional academic wisdom on the much-vaunted caste/tribe dichotomy fails us here. The next section seeks to unravel this conundrum.

Kols as coolies

It would be wrong to conclude from the evidence presented so far that only the new British capital of Calcutta relied on Kol labour to function. The Bengal countryside relied on Kol labour too. Indeed, the Kols were treated by higher caste landowners in the south-western frontier of Bengal as forest-clearers, above all. The zamindars on this jungli frontier, as in other forested regions in India, typically enlarged their estates since at least the 15th century by sending out bands of forest-clearers deeper and deeper into the most deciduous forests of the subcontinent.⁸ Accordingly, the American anthropologist Richard Fox (1969) labelled these forest-clearing bands ‘professional primitives’ to rescue them from the colonial discourses of primitivism in which they were enmeshed. In exchange for their labour in clearing forests and expanding the arable frontier in Bengal and beyond, Kols and other professional primitives received either rent-free lands or lands at nominal quit rents. Early modern state formation in South Asia, as Sumit Guha (1996) has shown so brilliantly, relied precisely on such forest-clearing labour.

The onset of colonialism, as I have argued elsewhere,⁹ deepened and hastened the early modern processes of regional state-making and the development of land markets in eastern India. The progressive breakdown of social order in jungle zamindaris from the 1780s onwards, owing to increasing subinfeudation and rent burdens on those previously paying little or no rents, released massive flows of labour into the rest of early colonial Bengal, including Calcutta. As social structures were reorganised across Bengal, the Kols of Chotanagpur came to occupy their lowly status at the bottom of new hierarchies of life and labour. The term ‘Kol’ was, as the opening quotation from Father Reverend Nottrott about ‘dirty swines’ suggested earlier, a common ‘epithet of abuse, applied by the Brahminical race’ (Dalton 1866: 144) or those claiming superior caste status in early 19th-century Bengal. This usage, steadily adopted by colonial officialdom too, referred to dark-skinned migrants from forest zamindaris on the western frontier of colonial Bengal, who performed degrading and demanding physical labour in rural and urban settings. Without the later ethnological names given by anthropologist-administrators to newly discovered ‘tribes’ such as Munda, Oraon or Santal, the term ‘Kol’ acted as a catch-all term for migrants from the forest highlands of Chotanagpur.

The Kols went to every corner of the Bengal Presidency: the indigo farms in the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Kol, coolie, colonial subject: a hidden history of caste and the making of modern Bengal
• 2 Another history: Bhadralok responses to Dalit political assertion in colonial Bengal
• 3 Partition, displacement, and the decline of the Scheduled Caste movement in West Bengal
• 4 Partition and the mysterious disappearance of caste in Bengal
• 5 An absent-minded casteism?
• 6 The politics of caste and class in Singur’s anti-land acquisition struggle
• 7 Building up the Harichand-Guruchand movement: the politics of the Matua Mahasangha
• 8 Transformative politics: the imaginary of the Mulnibasi in West Bengal
• 9 From client to supporter: economic change and the slow change of social identity in rural West Bengal
• 10 Craft, identity, hierarchy: the Kumbhakars of Bengal
• 11 The commodification of caste and politics in Kolkata’s Kumartuli
• Glossary
• Index