Bengal was the first region of British India to be colonised and modernised. The opportunities colonial rule opened up were taken advantage of by the bhadralok (gentlefolk) who were mostly upper caste. One of the leaders of the Indian Independence movement Gokhale said “what Bengal thinks today India thinks tomorrow” which captured this avant garde position of Bengal. In such a vision a ‘backward’ institution like caste was claimed to have no significant presence. Consequently, in most academic and popular domains the castelessness of Bengali (especially) middle class society became an established fact particularly in comparison with other Indian states where caste violence and caste-based political parties have a high visibility. However, the absence of visible forms of violence and of caste-based parties does not necessarily indicate the casteless nature of Bengali society. The recent ‘suicide’ of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit student of Hyderabad Central University, brought to focus the naked face of caste discrimination in higher education in many regions of India. However, the pervasiveness of caste is no less significant in Bengal. The politics of repression has allowed caste to be insidiously reproduced in both public and private domains with little resistance.
The story of Lata Biswas, a Scheduled Caste (SC) person, demonstrates the insidious ways in which caste prejudice operates in Bengal. Despite evidence to the contrary, Lata claimed that she did not experience caste in her village where her caste, the Namasudras, formed the majority of the population. Based on her narrative I would argue that caste is encountered in Bengal in mostly middle class spaces such as educational institutions, urban and non-urban. 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 and kept overhearing terms like ‘schedule’ in staffroom conversations between her women colleagues:
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 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.
