‘Caste and Partition in Bengal’ ignores the work of Dalit scholars; here is how

In A staggering display of literary gymnastics, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury have managed to write a book ostensibly to address the “discursive absence of the caste question and the Dalit from the long history of Partition in Bengal”, using virtually no theoretical contribution from Dalit intellectuals.

This is not to say that the book does not quote Dalits. It does have interviews, speeches, newspaper articles, stories and references to empirical studies conducted by them.

The authors talk about the history of the anti-caste struggle in British India without so much as mentioning G Aloysius, a scholar-in-residence at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, whose 1997 book Nationalism Without a Nation in India is of direct relevance to the subject matter of this book, in that it painstakingly delineates, among other things, how partition was a compact between upper caste Hindus and Muslims against the interests of the lower castes in both religions.

BR Ambedkar is used only as a historical figure, as a politician who made speeches and conducted movements, and not once as an academic or intellectual.

To say that Ambedkar sought to politicise the structural violence of untouchability, they have quoted and referenced Anupama Rao, a professor of history at Barnard College, Columbia University. They did not even deign to quote Ambedkar’s academic work directly.

Another egregious oversight by Bandyopadhyay and Basu Ray Chaudhury is their treatment of the caste question as a Dalit problem.

Why is the book titled Caste and Partition in Bengal if it is just, as the subtitle says, The story of Dalit Refugees?

If one goes into the book expecting to read a caste analysis of partition, one will be sorely disappointed.

The book is merely an opinion piece about the misery of Dalit refugees which makes the “ground-breaking” argument that Dalits were not passive actors during partition but had their own complex relationship with it. Have Dalits not said this themselves a million times in countless stories, articles, autobiographies, speeches and, yes, theoretical treatises?

The authors’ lack of engagement with Dalit scholarship shows everywhere in the book and makes it about as relevant to read today as a two-week-old newspaper. Let me give an example to illustrate what I mean.

The authors correctly point out that protests in refugee camps in West Bengal began autonomously under Dalit leadership but were appropriated by mainstream upper caste-led political parties, both from the left and the right.

As the leadership passed from Dalits living in camps to upper castes living outside the camps, the authors tell us, the caste angle of the resistance movements was neutralised, and the “violent” and “radical” tendencies of the movement were controlled in favour of moderate and non-violent satyagraha type of protests.

The parties did this to preserve the status quo in Bengal in which upper castes ruled everything, from business to bureaucracy to legislature. So far, so good.

The problem is that the authors present this trajectory of events as if it was unique in post-British Bengal. If the authors had read Dalit scholarship (even just Ambedkar and Aloysius), they would have known that this was precisely the method adopted by upper castes everywhere, both in British India and post-British India.

In fact, this is precisely what MK Gandhi also did as he appropriated and finally suppressed autonomous peasant movements in order to preserve the power of upper caste landlords. The book could have benefitted from these connections.

Due to the authors’ complete misunderstanding of what caste analysis actually is (it is much more than recounting horrifying stories of Dalit lives while devoting some token sections to how they heroically coped with it all), they fail to ask even the most basic questions that have to arise when reading an account like this.

They say that the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha wanted partition while Dalits and Muslims did not, but the Congress fudged the narrative post facto to blame Dalits and Muslims for partition.

They fail to ask why the Congress succeeded in doing so — a question that would actually require a caste analysis of the Congress and of the entire discursive machinery (journalists, writers, academics) needed to achieve such a massive rewriting of such recent history.

Not only does the book manage to add absolutely nothing to our understanding of partition, it actually obfuscates matters further.

The authors also paint a narrative in which Muslims come across as the people who kick-start the cycle of violence and counter-violence which leads to the refugee crisis in West Bengal, which is far from the truth.

Additionally, a person reading this book would think that Dalits have never done a caste analysis of partition, which is also absolutely untrue.

This was first published in the 16-30 September, 2022 edition of Down To Earth