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Plebeian Mamata Banerjee ousting the patrician Marxist regime set off a chain reaction that has destroyed the bhadralok belief systems It is widely accepted now that society in the state of West Bengal has moved from bhadralok to the post-bhadralok phase in the third decade of the 21st century. And while this may raise eyebrows and evoke vigorous denials from the remnants of that aforementioned construct—mostly resident outside the state now if not India itself—it may not be as much a doomsayer’s prognostication as a timely pivot and refocus to a more realistic picture of today’s West Bengal. Take the number of much beloved shibboleths that have been given the go-by in recent decades.
The latest is the about-turn on the belief that Lord Ram is a regressive god of the uncultured “Hindi heartland" who never had a place in Bengal’s feminist Shakta motherland. As recently as 2021, UNESCO recognising Durga Puja as an intangible heritage of Bengal was posited as another assertion of that truism, stopping a resurgent ‘northern’ Ram at the state’s border. Yet this year, the same state government and its proxy goons who had done their best to stop Ram Navami processions before and loudly assert those were the handiwork of “outsiders", not only did not set the police on the processionists, but took part in the celebrations! The ruling party, officials, police and the other arms of the state government finally acknowledged what the presence of countless Ram temples in the state proved: He has always been in Bengali hearts.
The question is, why was their argument of Ram being the lord of outsiders allowed to dominate the discourse for so long, ignoring the faith of millions who flock to those temples dedicated to him in nearly every village in the state? In a way, it is a bit like Tamil Nadu, whose current party in power officially peddles an anti-Hindu line while the grand temples in the state continue to attract devotees unabated. The answer lies in who had controlled the narrative thus far. And to get to the bottom of that, it is necessary to go back to the era before independence, if not further.
While the old aphorism of ‘divide and rule’ may beget sarcastic chuckles today, the fact that it was a tremendously successful project rings true with every such chortling derision. Much of India’s ‘educated’ elite believed—and still believe—India is not a nation but a hotchpotch of different identities and preferences from language to food and more. It was so convenient for the British to formulate and disseminate a hierarchy of culture and practices, identify and highlight differences and gloss over common beliefs and customs.
And they found a receptive audience first among the upper-class (not always caste) Bengalis in the city from where they ruled India: Calcutta. They also stoked the Bengali assumption of intellectual and cultural superiority by virtue of their access to English education and Western thought. Even after the British colonisers had departed, many ‘modern’ Indian leaders consistently refused to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the silent binding force of Sanatan Dharma, the Hindu—Indian—way of life and its adaptable belief systems.
They preferred to ignore not only ancient and new Ram, Shiva and Durga temples across India, but the diversity of practice and customs having a resilient and, yes, liberal, ‘broad church’ principle as the unifier. So, it was in Bengal too, with Durga worship gaining primacy among urban and upper classes and other deities from Shiva and Ram to Manasa, Shashti and ‘gram devatas’ dominating in the hinterland. But the English-educated bhadralok that emerged in the 19th century, concentrated in the urban centres conducive to their professions, developed a not-very-surprising distaste for those beliefs of the “great unwashed", like the British elite they modelled themselves on.
While their adoption of education as a prime accomplishment was welcome, the bhadralok disdain for rooted cultural practices led to distortions. Many of them affected a careful duality, keeping long-standing beliefs confined to quarters while advocating ‘modern’ views in public. As the western philosophies of Marxism and socialism captured the intellectual sphere, the bhadralok took to them eagerly, pushing older beliefs further into the shadows but not into oblivion.
Epitomising the success of Thomas Macaulay’s project to create a class of indoctrinated agents, the Bengali bhadralok—living in Ground Zero of this colonial initiative—pushed the British line of ameliorating India’s “regressive" religious and social landscape, beginning with Bengal. Sati, a cruel custom but confined to the rich and landed, was thus triumphantly abolished and touted as a major step towards ‘reforming’ a barbaric, backward Hindu society. Inevitably, the Bengali elite founded the Brahmo Samaj, posited as ‘reformist’, whereas the Arya Samaj movement was cast as ‘revivalist’.
Brahmoism was assiduously promoted by the 19th century’s Anglicised (in thought if not externally) “enlightened" urban Bengalis. Even the bhadralok who were not Brahmo converts professed open disdain for the populist manifestations of the Hindu faith that the ‘chhoto lok’ (small or inferior folk) preferred. That the “reformist" Brahmo movement of Bengal never gained very many followers is in direct contrast to the spread of the “revivalist" Arya Samaj in north and west India that began 50 years later.
The Arya Samaj was firmly rooted in Vedic philosophy and empathetic to local beliefs, even as it advocated a casteless society, modern education, and the uplift of women and oppressed segments—all issues that had hindered the forging of a unified, modern Hindu society. In the 20th century, the preponderance of bhadralok in West Bengal’s government, politics (think of the patrician dhoti-clad Communists who controlled the levers of power for decades) academia, art and culture and even business, ensured that their discomfort with ‘populist’ beliefs dominated the narrative although they made common cause with ‘chhoto lok’ during the freedom struggle. But anyone who wanted to move up the social ladder had to espouse bhadralok norms.
Esoteric Upanishadic precepts thus became aspirational for wannabe bhadralok. The feeling of intellectual and cultural superiority among the bhadralok was in no small measure due to the Bengal Renaissance, a term with favourable allusions to a coveted preceding period of European progress. The irony of a ‘renaissance’ actually happening from the headquarters of an unabashedly exploitative colonial regime clearly eluded the supposedly intellectually evolved bhadralok.
Did this renaissance really have no ulterior agenda? Did Macaulay’s precepts not get seared into bhadralok consciousness, with an ingrained horror of “regressive" Hinduism masked as a modern outlook? The fact is, bhadralok remain coconuts (brown on the outside, white on the inside) even as they opted for a higher Hinduism than the simple bhakti of the non-bhadralok. So, as long as they held sway, disdain for Ram as a god from the ‘backward’ Hindi belt persisted. One of the little publicised aspects of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement—for reasons not difficult to understand—is that it received the most enthusiastic support from “other backward classes" (OBCs) and Dalits.
The movement shone a spotlight on leaders from those communities, like Uma Bharti, Kalyan Singh—and Kameshwar Chaupal, the Dalit who laid the first brick for the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya and was a member of the temple’s first group of trustees. Ram began emerging as an accessible god during the Bhakti movement, aided by the 14th-century reformist thinker Ramananda, and later among others, Tulsidas, whose accessible retelling of the Ramayana as Ramcharitmanas in the popular Avadhi dialect made devotion the cornerstone of common faith rather than Sanskritic ritualism. That simplicity would certainly not have found favour with the bhadralok, who gravitated towards rarified Upanishadic Hinduism.
Piquantly, a last bastion of the elitist bhadralok was breached when the self-proclaimed plebeian politician Mamata Banerjee ousted the Marxist patricians and their cadres from their perch. Unwittingly, she set off a chain reaction that saw the rise of huge segments of non-bhadralok, inevitably mostly Hindus. Their gaining confidence to assert themselves has pitched West Bengal into this current post-bhadralok phase—thereby setting the stage for Ram’s return too.
The author is a freelance writer. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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