The National Question

Bengali Chauvinism and the Ethnic Tangle in North Bengal
Vaskar Nandy

Since its beginnings, the grand narrative of Bengali nationalism has been largely constructed with the weltanshauung ("the cosmologic conception of society and its institutions") and the desiderata of the upper caste Hindu bhadraloks of Bengal. The complex historical dialectic that continues to thrust this nationalism forward is not our concern in this essay. In view of the present fissiparous context in North Bengal and Paschimanchal (or what has come to be known as Jangalmahal) within which this nationalism finds itself, we would like here to note merely its great failure in the past to thwart fission and discuss the reasons why a stark future might await it in the near future.

Nationalism, wherever it has been successful, has always integrated within its territory diverse ethnicities defined by religion, speech community or other socio-cultural attributes such as segregation by caste or race. But the Bengali upper caste elite, unable to transcend its semi-feudal (permanent settlement) background and create its own haute bourgeoisie, could not create the economic and social dynamism that would have enabled it to transcend the ethnic differences with which it had to contend.

The feudal moorings of the proto-bourgeoisie that developed as functionaries of the colonial state can be best seen in the way the modern Bengali language was developed as a standard modern. It was moved from the common speech of the people as far as was possible and began leaning heavily on Sanskrit, the language with which this Brahminical elite (and hardly anyone else) was familiar. But it was not only in the construction of language but in every cultural and social sphere, the Muslim majority and the lower castes and tribes were excluded almost entirely from the signs and symbols of nationhood. This exclusion and the consequent socio-cultural marginalisation of the overwhelming majority created the dominating conditions required for garnering the surplus (rent) through extra-economic coercion. When colonial education and placements in the interstices of the colonial administration facilitated the penetration of European bourgeois modernity into these beneficiaries of the permanent settlement, there was a so-called renaissance, but that could not overwhelm and transcend the actual social relations of production. This touch of modernity and its combination with strong administrative and feudal power over the awed and marginalised gave rise to the characteristic flavour of upper caste chauvinism that prevails to this date. It maintained its social distance, not through private force and muscle, as is still the case in many parts of India, but through socio-cultural disdain and hauteur. Integration of diversities remained a far cry.

This chauvinism excluded from its inner circles all those who were not upper caste or who had clawed their way up to the accredited bhadralok status. Otherwise it is impossible to explain the pathetic job status and other parameters pertaining to, among other depressed groups, the Muslims in West Bengal under the bhadralok Left. Normally, if professions of proletarian values are taken seriously, the Muslims would be expected to do fairly well as the biggest chunk of the rural and urban proletariat. But in fact, the controversial grandson of Chitta Ranjan Das, as a Congress CM, did the poor and destitute Muslim proletarians a better turn than the self-described vanguard of the proletariat. Of course "a better turn" was not all that great, nothing like what the grandfather proposed for the Muslims through the Bengal Pact.

C R Das's great gesture was certainly the greatest attempt to integrate the Muslim majority into the Bengali nation. But bhadralok society, led by famous leaders such as Surendra Nath Banerjee and Bepin Chandra Pal, opposed the Pact vehemently and ultimately got it rejected by the Indian National Congress. On other issues that could have fostered further integration with the Muslims and the scheduled castes, such as money lending or rights for ryots and sharecroppers, the Bhadralok leadership remained firmly tied to the status quo. This lack of an integrationist approach became ultimately the foundation for the partition of Bengal in 1947, the greatest failure of Bengali nationalism. The present moment in West Bengal is pregnant with another historic defeat for Bengali nationalism. The battlefield is primarily here in North Bengal.

Of the six North Bengal Districts, all except Darjeeling is classified as Extremely Backward by the Union government. Darjeeling is an exception mainly because of the large populations in the urban sprawls of Siliguri and Darjeeling town and their brisk business (small and medium industries, transport centres, tourism etc), concentration of administrative activities, proliferation of educational institutions and fairly good infrastructure and human development. These make the population of Darjeeling as a whole score well along the parameters chosen to measure backwardness; but if one were to look at the state of infrastructure and human development in the villages (forest and revenue) and tea gardens of this district, then those areas which nestle the majority of the population of the district would appear to be just as backward as the rest of North Bengal. The linkages between this backwardness and the upper caste ruling elite's interest in the domination of the majority by tea planters and other capitalists in the area are palpable.

Below the surface of the still waters of this backwardness there is a seething majority of the population identifying themselves as ethnicities or nationalities whose protests and demands have not, except in the case of the Gorkhas in the eighties of the last century, broken out in widespread violence, although sporadic violence is never very far away, as in the case of the short-lived violent campaign of the Kamatapur Liberation Organisation. This is a situation fraught with great danger for those who rule the state and the country and is thought by some to be in some ways an impediment to the development of the class struggle for a democratic, secular and socialist polity. These protests and demands are focused on the Bengali upper caste political class's developmental neglect, social hostility and cultural disdain for the subaltern communities which constitute the overwhelming majority of the population.

Broadly speaking, three large movements have come to the foreground in North Bengal: the movement of the Gorkhas for a state separated from Paschimbanga; the movement of the tea garden Adivasis; and, the Kamatapuri movement with its variant, the Greater Coochbehar movement.

Both our local ruling parties may console the faithful about not letting Bangla be divided, but both have in effect allowed the demarcation of a separate territory for the Gorkhas, in the form of a Hill Council as previously or the Gorkha Territorial Authority (GTA) now. This is a federal arrangement, although no one acknowledges it boldly. Ceteris paribus, it is only a matter of time before the new state of Gorkhaland comes into being. One hopes that precious social costs will not be exacted again in bringing the issue to a conclusion.

The Gorkha demand for a separate state in the three subdivisions of Darjeeling should have been conceded a long time ago. It is not as if India is a stranger to the reorganisation of states. There has been a continuous process of change in the internal map of India since the partition of the country. Even after the gobbling up of the native states into the all-India Union, there was no Kerala, Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Arunachal, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Mizoram at the time of the promulgation of the Republic! Those in the mainstream left who are now crying themselves hoarse about separatism should be reminded of their role in the bifurcation of Bombay into Maharashtra and Gujarat and in similar situations elsewhere. Those must have been past mistakes for which self-criticism will be offered as and when required. There were other such "mistakes" of course, but the worst naturally was committed at the dawn of the Gorkha movement when the CPI, with some revolutionary juices still flowing through its veins, was in favour of one of three solutions, subject to the approval of the Gorkha people: secession of the Darjeeling hills from India to constitute an independent country; merger with Nepal following such a secession; and, to constitute a separate state within India. The old ancestor in the Kremlin, as Mao once referred to Stalin, could not but have approved,  given his stand on the right of self-determination of nationalities to the full extant of secession.

But of course the old ancestor is now only an icon to decorate the party office. The call is now for "unity and integrity". When it comes to the Kashmir issue, it is for the unity and integrity of India, but when it comes to Gorkhaland as a state within India, how can that unity and integrity be jeopardised? Well, there's the rub. For both the main ruling parties of Bengal, it is a question of the unity and integrity of Bengal. "Banglake bhag hote debona!" We have descended from the high ground of Marxist universalism and pan-Indian nationalism to the abyss of Bengali chauvinism.

The three hill subdivisions of Darjeeling (as indeed the Darjeeling teral itself) have never been a part of historic Bengal till the British acquired them by war and stratagem during the late nineteenth century from the Chogyal of Sikkim and the King of Bhutan (Kalimpong). They were a part of Bengal in the same way as Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa and the old Goalpara district of Assam were, the result of British administrative fiat and convenience. In these latter places there were considerable numbers of Bengali settlers by the beginning of the twentieth century, whereas in the Darjeeling hills there are to date hardly any settled Bengalis. How these hills are Bangla either defies the imagination or bears proof of a colonial-chauvinist mindset.

The original Gorkha demand for the Dooars and the Terai, including Siliguri, was an expansionist, chauvinist one because the Gorkhas are a small minority in these areas and were never the "sons of the soil" there. The recent GTA negotiations have whittled that demand down to a few hundred moujas. *A committee has been formed to ascertain whether those moujas have Gorkha majorities. The state government has presumably committed itself to including into the GTA moujas that have Gorkha majorities and have contiguity with the hill subdivisions of Darjeeling. There is nothing untoward in this commitment. There are precedents to such a type of settlement. At the time of the division of Punjab and Haryana, Abohar and Fazilka were disputed between Punjabi speakers and Hindi speakers. Resolution came when both sides agreed to determine majorities on the basis of "village as the unit and contiguity as the principle".1

Egged on by Bengali chauvinists and provoked by persistent and barbarous Gorkha provocations, a very strong resistance is being built up to such a resolution for the territorial limits of the GTA. The main force behind this resistance is an organisation of tea garden Adivasis called the Adivasi Vikas Parishad (henceforth AVP). The AVP is an old, well-financed non-government organisation headquartered outside West Bengal. Until the recent Gorkha agitation for the inclusion of the Dooars and the Terai in Gorkhaland, the AVP was an almost unknown entity in North Bengal. It shot into prominence by claiming the Dooars and the Terai as a homeland for the adivasis and making a case for autonomy under the Sixth Schedule of the constitution for the Adivasis, opposing the Gorkha demand for the same area. This organisation fomented serious communal tension and its local leaders indulged in the intimidation of the Gorkha population and took part in serious communal violence.

At present, a committee is examining the Gorkha claim to include a large number of moujas (more than 170) in the Dooars and the Terai under the GTA. The AVP is committed to physically creating barriers so that no ground level survey can take place. The AVP is being backed openly by several Bengali chauvinist organisations most of which have been tailor made to oppose Gorkhaland in any of its possible manifestations. From the supporters that some of these Bengali organisations have fielded during their own programmes, it would appear that supporters of all mainstream parties are among them on the basis of a shared Bengali chauvinism.

In popular, journalistic parlance, the AVP's sudden ascendancy in North Bengal politics has been explained in various ways: resistance to Gorkha dominance and chauvinism; conspiracies by a certain mainstream party and its very powerful leader providing both money and cadre for the AVP so that the Gorkha movement can be stopped in its tracks; the effect of the rise of an adivasi consciousness throughout the central Indian hill-forest region up to and including West Bengal's Jangalmahal, etc. While there is some truth in many of these speculative exercises, they cannot fully explain the sudden explosive rise of the tea garden adivasi workers. For such an explanation, one will have to delve, however briefly, into the recent history of the tea garden workers of the Dooars and the Terai.

The first matter that has to be noted is that more than 1200 workers and members of their families are feared to have died of acute malnutrition caused by persistent lack of food in these tea gardens between 2003 and 2007. The number of such deaths is always disputed vehemently by both the government (along with the governing parties) and the management associations because it reflects badly on them.

There is the added problem that the doctors do not usually deviate from writing down "cardio-respiratory failure" as the cause of death in such cases, which is like saying death was caused by death. One doctor who had dared to write in the death register that "Cardio-respiratory failure due to acute malnutrition" was the cause of death was chased out of the garden by the trade union goondas of the ruling parties when a reporter from Tehelka went to see him about his entries.

In contrast to the official denials, a people's tribunal, headed by a retired Bombay High Court Judge and constituted by a retired top tea industry manager, a senior counsel of the Bombay High Court, a retired Chief Secretary, one emeritus professor specialising in North Bengal's economy and its tea industry, a leading local lawyer and several eminent university professors, which visited six closed tea gardens where large jan sunuais were held and met, in public session, trade unionists, tea management personnel, legislators, NGOs and many members of the public who wanted to depose before it. Top layers of the Jalpaiguri administration also met the Tribunal in camera. The Tribunal came to the conclusion that "more than eight hundred people had died" due to malnutrition caused by hunger by March 2004.

A report on malnutrition and death by a special officer appointed by the Right to Food Bench of the Supreme Court was such that the Court ordered (2004) the state government to supply sufficient quantities of grains at drastically reduced prices, guaranteed public works for at least 15 days each month, free medical care at the garden, payment of a small dole to unemployed workers, etc. The state government procrastinated about the implementation of the order over months and when it did start to implement it in good measure but not fully, years had gone by. My own estimate of hunger deaths after the Supreme Court order would be around four hundred. When that numbers added to the finding of the People's Tribunal, it comes to a figure around twelve hundred.

That a state government did nothing to dam the tide of hunger deaths until a court ordered it to do so and when it did something it was in fits and starts until around 2007, says a lot about the chauvinist political culture of the state.

What was even worse than this tardy relief was the way the state and central governments treated the main culprits in this near-famine situation. Most of the thirty-two gardens that were closed had been illegally abandoned. The owners of these gardens had acquired, if that is the right word, huge arrears in workers' wages, both in cash and kind (publicised erroneously as rations, giving the impression of great largesse on the part of the planters), gratuity, Provident Fund, etc. They had also defaulted on loans from the government and the banks by simply selling their tea off-factory in an unaccounted manner instead of through the auctions so that they could claim their enterprises as sick.

The Tea Act empowers the central government to punish these owners summarily for all such infringements to the maximum extent of seizing the gardens without compensation. But no one seems to have even contemplated such action. The state government could also have prosecuted these owners for breach of trust and misappropriation because they had deducted crores from workers' wages as contribution to the provident fund and insurance fund but never did get around to depositing the contribution in those funds. But no government moved. In fact when these gardens reopened, the arrears were never paid except as promises that were breached. The workers were forced to accept such a state of affairs because of the fear of another spate of abandonment during which they cannot expect any succour from either the state government or the central one.

The way these tribal workers are treated is a scandal. The Plantation Labour Act (1951) which regulates the welfare provisions such as housing, health, sanitation, drinking water, etc of the workers has been more or less abandoned by the planters and no one in the state government seems to care. But the greatest scandal is the wages.

The present wage stands at Rs 67 for the plains and Rs 90 for the hills. Let us first see what these numbers amount to because there is an in-kind component in the wages. One pile of firewood for the whole year, bought cheaply from a very obliging state forest department, costs the planters between Rs 300 and Rs 500. Each worker gets 400 grams of made tea per month. Then there are the "rations". Women workers—and they are more than half the workforce —do not get any ration for their husbands while the husbands get it for their wives. This is of course a clear violation of the law for equal remuneration. But the Bengali chauvinist horizon of our women's movement has never contested this blatant discrimination against lakhs of women. If unmarried, then both male and female workers get only a fourth of the maximum entitlement. And if a worker is married then s/he had better have two children to get the ration augmented by one more unit. One could write a whole paper on this, but the point is that very few receive the full entitlement. But if we calculate the cost of ration for the maximum entitlement at the rate they receive the grains from the PDS—here's another wonderful arrangement between the planters and the state government wherein all tea garden managers are ration dealers—then the total cost of the wages in kind comes to less than Rs 20 per daily wage packet. That makes the daily wage in the hills less than Rs 110 and for the plains less than Rs 87. Both of these values come to less than the Rs 130, the daily minimum wage for agricultural workers.2
Against this dismal picture, consider the question of the minimum wage. The 1948 law on minimum wage has the tea industry on its schedule. It is well-known that almost nothing moved on the implementation of this law until the 15th All India Labour Conference in 1956. At that meeting, attended by the grandees of the capitalist sector, the trade unions and the government, the exact modalities of minimum wage fixation were decided. Soon after that, minimum wages for all scheduled industry have been declared from time to time in all states. In large tea growing states such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, minimum wages in tea are declared regularly at statutory intervals. But West Bengal has yet to declare a minimum wage in the tea industry over the last half century. The reason is interesting. In 1974, the West Bengal tea unions, dominated by pro-business groups (mainly the Congress) and Bengali leaders of leftist unions, came to a tripartite agreement whereby the government was no longer obliged by law to declare a minimum wage in tea. Whatever actual wage was agreed to in periodic wage negotiations would be taken to be the minimum wage! It is therefore no surprise that all major tea-growing states have wages that are higher than what obtains in the Terai and the Dooars. Only after the AVP explosion and its demand for a minimum wage have the state government and the union leaders waken up to the necessity for it.

One important feature of life in tea gardens is the enclave nature of its society and economy. The workers here were brought in from far off places by a mid-nineteenth century plantation system that was only a modified version of slavery. At one time they were forcibly kept apart from the local population through draconian colonial laws that allowed managements to whip and jail workers under the protection of armed forces officered by the managers and their British lackeys. Those laws and those armed forces have not been there for some time, but the enclave nature of the tea gardens remains. Apart from the Bengali chauvinist disdain and hostility that keeps the workers separated from the adjoining social environment, the main reason for the workers' separation is their lack of education.

It is not that there are not many schools in the tea garden areas. There are and with the mid-day meal served there, attendance is quite impressive. But do these children learn anything? By the time the matriculation examinations arrive, most of them have dropped out. Very few manage to pass the final exam. Why? Because in the primary school, the young children are taught in incomprehensible languages, either Bengali or Hindi, that cannot penetrate their world. These children, like children all over the world, can only comprehend that world through their home language, Sadri. Many educationists have suggested and some workers have agitated demanding what is basically the Kothari Commission recommendations for schooling in the mother tongue for the first three years at primary and then to link up with a language of administration in the fourth year before which the children will have learnt the disciplines of learning. As a result of this lack of education, not enough social capital can be built up to divert the population into skilled professions and administration. Born into tea worker families, they become tea workers for their working life. The enclave remains. The largest group in North Bengal, the Kamatapuris, about whom more presently, also suffer this linguistic deprivation, resulting in the same sort of lack of social capital. One should imagine that the adivasi explosion was long overdue.

The third major locus of ethnic tensions in North Bengal centres on the Kamatapuris. The Bengali establishment abjures this term to describe the concerned people and their language. The mainstream press uses the term only when it requires to describe separatist politics and movement. It is worthwhile to look into this nomenclature.

There are a very large number of people in North Bengal who may in fact constitute its absolute majority; they are certainly the largest group. They are a historically formed language community. Both Hindus and Muslims beiong to it. The local Muslims other than those mainly in Malda district are known as Nashya and they share the language and culture of their Hindu neighbours. The Rajbangshis and Paliyas together constitute the largest Hindu, peasant caste in this community. But this community also has many professional caste groups including Brahmins.

The nature of their language has provoked various unnecessary and ill-informed controversies. The Bengali establishment, especially its left variety, has been propagating the view that this speech is nothing but a dialect of Bengali. But the problem is that the vast majority of this community is not satisfied with this dialectal status. The debate that has ensued as a result of this controversy would have been quite unnecessary if people were well informed about socio-linguistics. All vernaculars are equally languages. Those vernaculars which, for reasons of state and geography, become the language of administration become standard modern languages. The vernacular of the lower Ganga, in and around Kolkata, became the basis of the standard modern when that city became the British capital. Speakers of all other vernaculars in Bengal which shared some degree of intelligibility with the standard had the choice of adopting the standard for their public discourse. The standard then penetrates the private spaces of the adopting vernaculars. Such adoption turns the vernaculars into the dialects of the standard.

For reasons that are historically complex and into which we will not enter now, the majority of the people we have described above refuse to go through with such adoption as it would convert their language into a dialect of Bengali. They resent the imposition of Bengali as the language of administration and seek their autonomous political space where their own language will grow into a standard modern in much the same way that Assamese grew beyond the British imposed Bengali.

The battle for such an autonomous space is necessarily political, as it was in Assam. Lexical and syntactical affinity between this language and Bengali is not a very strong argument, as was also seen in Assam's case.

In the political struggle for the standard modern and in its development the Assamese emerged inevitably as a strong modern nation. For many who are fighting for their language in North Bengal today, this nascent national question is accepted implicitly but not always explicitly. This has given rise to a controversy regarding the name of this language. Along with Bengali chauvinists who hate the national connexion in this language issue, there is a section of the native speakers of this language who have named it the Rajbangshi language. For the latter this is a measure of safety because it takes out the national dimension and the hostility that it provokes. Some activists say that there is an element of Rajbangshi casteism in this naming, but we have some doubts on that score. The fact is that although Rajbangshis constitute the largest numbers in this linguistic community, the others together are also quite considerable in number.

The alternative name for this language is Kamatapuri, derived from the medieval Kingdom of Kamata whose large capital complex is being excavated near Dinhata in Coochbehar district. Interestingly, the Kamata kings were not Rajbangshis but Khens, a sanskritised Bodo people of the plains, while in Eastern Bhutan, the Khens still lead their old Bodo tribal lives, speaking a Tibeto-Burman language. The presence of a political process signified by the absorption of a past homeland in the naming of the language is important.
This name is also inclusive and has attracted wide support not only among the Rajbangshis but all other native speakers, especially the large number of Muslims. Many scholars have begun to use this name, but the important thing is that lakhs of people have voted with their feet on the naming as they march in hundreds of places demanding the recognition of Kamatapuri. This question of the state's recognition for the language is important, but the Bengali chauvinist ambience of our political classes will have none of it. In fact the state's refusal so far to the long and persistent demand for the use of the home language for the Adivasis and these people in accordance with the Kothari recommendations shows that it does not wish to yield even an inch on the language issue.

"Banglake bhag hote debona" expresses a real fear, but fear is not a suitable instrument for statecraft. Recognition of the Gorkhas, the Adivasis and the Kamatapuris as nations in the process of becoming, however unpalatable for the upper caste Bengali mindset, is a must if those seething masses are not provoked into violent solutions. Accommodating these peoples and the people of West Medinipur, Bankura and Purulia (Paschimanchal) in a federalised state polity may be the only solution which avoids violent confrontation and perhaps the actual division of Bengal. Much as we admire the cultural vibrancy of Bangladesh, we must remember that the same upper caste mindset which divided Bengal in 1947 is still with us and is still as ignorant of historical consequences as then.

Some Marxists think of such ethnic or national struggles as distractions for the class struggle. Consider the plight of the tea and forest workers of North Bengal—the Gorkhas and the Adivasis. Here's a thought experiment. Imagine that instead of these minority nationalities, these workers were Bengalis living within their own societies. Will the wildest imagination conjure up such blatant violations of just laws in that instance? Or would the state have been allowed to callously watch as they starved to death? Similarly, the marginalised Kamatapuri peasants could not be coerced into receiving ridiculous prices for the wonderfully high quality of their raw jute if they had not been dominated into extreme marginalisation. Dominated nationalities, like the lower castes and the minorities, just like the Africans in the capitalist but slave-owning southern states of the US, always mean greater profits through the extra-economic coercion made possible by a system of discrimination and domination. The struggle of these dominated ethnicities is therefore partly a necessary form of the class struggle.

Noises about the development of North Bengal continued to emanate from the power centres of the last regime. The present regime has also followed with more extravagant promises of development, whatever that word means in the present neo-liberal context. But without a democratic and accommodative solution to ethnic and national demands, either development will not happen or even if it does, it will invite greater strife. And that strife should be flagged as an impending disaster for the very survival of the Bengali nation. 

[*Written before the publication of the recommendations of the Shyamal Sen Committee regarding Gorkha majority areas in the Dooars and Terai region]

1.    The latest developments in the Gorkha-Adivasi relations have become surprisingly fluid and full of internal contradictions within the Adivasi community. As these developments emerged after the seminar, we merely take note of them.

• The latest wage fixations have increased the wages from what they were at the time of the seminar, but they are still less than the agricultural minimum wage.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 27, 13-19, 2013

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