Abstract
Dwaipayan Sen, The Decline of the Caste Question: Jogendranath Mandal and the Defeat of the Dalit Politics in Bengal. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2018, xii + 305 pp., ₹7725.00 (Hardcover). ISBN: 9781108417761.
Sen’s The Decline of the Caste Question offers fresh insights on an under-researched domain—the political biography of Jogendranath Mandal and subsequent development of Dalit politics in the Bengal province. Mandal remains an elusive and obscure political figure, and Sen₹s book retrieves him from oblivion, providing new perspectives on politics of caste in Bengal. While it is ‘…commonly supposed that Bengal has no caste politics’ (p. 1), Dwaipayan Sen’s The Decline of the Caste Question: Jogendranath Mandal and the Defeat of the Dalit Politics in Bengal (2018) centrally places the caste question in both the undivided and divided Bengal and examines how the caste question can be contextualized in the backdrop of partition, alliance-politics, migration and identity politics. It engages with crucial inquiries that help in deciphering the evolution and expansion of Dalit politics in Bengal. This book also unpacks major factors that sustained and galvanized Dalit politics in the undivided Bengal province. Further, it also narrates the inception of the Bengal Schedule Caste Federation (1943) which evolved with the dynamic and active support of Jogendranath Mandal who mobilized the Namasudra community and other members of the Schedule Caste community to ‘secure the adequate representation of Dalit political opinion’ (p. 27). Subsequently, it chronicles the events that led to the need for coalitional and alliance politics jointly organized by the Schedule Castes and minority Muslims in undivided Bengal that caused a ‘possibility of Dalit and Muslim political unity’ (p. 95). By engaging with the voices of the marginalized people, Sen’s book unearths various threats and challenges to such attempts of subaltern coalition posed by both the National Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha during colonial Bengal. This book also demonstrates how all these challenges caused by both the mainstream political parties led to ‘the final extinguishing of Mandal’s struggle’ (p. 232) and subsequently this attempt declined and finally showed ‘the defeat of Dalit politics’ (p. 211) in Bengal. For the big mainstream players, as Sen rightfully observed, the strategy was, ‘No matter how, Jogendranath had to be defeated’ (p. 137). The core schemata of this book can be divided thematically into two broad categories—firstly, Mandal’s emergence as a prominent leader of Dalit politics who asserted Dalit rights in association with the Muslim League in pre-partition Bengal and secondly, the consequent defeat of Mandal and the decline of the Dalit politics in post-colonial Bengal.
The book is based on Sen’s PhD thesis which is divided into several chapters dealing with significant and relevant ‘questions of both recognition and redistribution’ (p. 63) of Dalit subjectivity, issues of Partition, agrarian crisis, caste, alliance-politics, migration and identity politics and many chapters of this book, as he mentions, were published previously in various reputed journals. It witnesses specific phases of Dalit politics in undivided Bengal—its birth, growth and consequent decline. He has categorically pointed out the reasons of the mainstream political regime’s strategic denial that gradually and finally caused the decline of the caste question in Bengal. It provides a comprehensive understanding of the caste questions in the context to Bengal politics—
Dalit politics in Bengal carries a number of implications for several historiographies and themes this book has brought into conversation, involving concerns not only of historical interpretation but pedagogy as well. (p. 272)
One can easily address this observation as a reading in the theoretical and epistemic understanding of Spivak’s A Critique of the Postcolonial Reason (1999), it helps in understanding of various caste related issues which were suppressed, silenced and muted. This book revisits Dalit politics in Bengal during the colonial period and through such a reading it wants to analyse its implications on contemporary political mobilizations for social justice. This book therefore is primarily a historicist project that revisits existing and unexplored archives to understand forces that determined policy formations on minorities and socially marginalized sections of society like Dalits and Muslims. It also engages with multiple primary case studies, political pamphlets, party literature and various personal narratives that witnessed massive socio-political mobilizations leading to the Round Table Conferences, Constituent Assembly debates, the Government of India Act 1935 and so on—events that constituted official postcolonial policies of social enfranchisement.
Sen also seeks to analyse various implications of contemporary political activities in the light of Jogendranath Mandal’s imagination and aspiration to mobilize the Namasudra or Matua, the Scheduled Castes and the Muslim community to build the Bengal Schedule Caste Federation. It was Mandal whose indomitable efforts to consolidate Dalit political self-determination witnessed the birth of the Federation as Bengal’s social counter-revolution in spite of stiff resistance from the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha.
Therefore, Sen traces the full political career of Jogendranath Mandal and how in colonial undivided Bengal, he spearheaded a movement to become a part of Ambedkar’s All India Schedule Castes Federation and finally how his gradual failure caused the decline of caste politics in the Bengal province. It also depicts the complexities of Bengal politics—the Hindu upper-caste association of the mainstream political regimes like the Indian National Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha and their joint efforts that subsequently suppressed and silenced Dalit aspirations in Bengal. Even the same attempt was made from various schools of Bengal historiography and Sen aptly concludes:
This book contributes a case study of the political activities and aspirations of one whom historians seem to have largely ignored in order to understand the curious decline of the caste question over the watershed of partition and freedom from colonial rule in Bengal. (p. 4)
In order to draw the dramatic upheavals in Bengal politics that ranges the time span from 1932 to 1968 covering the political career of Mandal, Sen divides this historical scholarship into seven distinct chapters that delineate anti-caste radicalism, communalism, nationalism, Partition, constitutional law, the refugee movement and various other silent revolutions. The first chapter introduces different historical contexts of the early 1930s and explores the upper-caste reaction against various reformative initiatives for the rights of the Dalit people. The second chapter focuses on Mandal’s struggle to establish a provincial autonomy in the context of the leaders of the Bengal Congress and Hindu Mahasabha. The third chapter analyses the emergence and development of Mandal’s ‘Bengal branch’ (p. 102) of the All India Scheduled Castes Federation ‘to consolidate Dalit political autonomy’ (p. 93) in Bengal and how it threw challenges towards the Hindu Mahasabha and the Indian Nationalist parties. The fourth chapter explores the crisis of this Federation and how the Congress’s constant attempt to marginalize this Federation and its ‘ideological refusal to “see” and “hear” caste’ (p. 239), gradually and finally signalled the toll of the death knell. The fifth chapter critically investigates Mandal’s failure in Bengal and how he became the most senior Dalit and Hindu minister in the Government of Pakistan. This period viewed Mandal’s attempts to galvanize the Dalit to assert and recognize their rights. The sixth chapter minutely portrays the Congress’s false promises that caused huge discontents and disappointments and finally resulted in various migration movements. Congress’s discriminatory actions towards the Dalit migrants are also reflected in this section. The final part of the book highlights Mandal’s grievances against the Congress’s attitude towards reservation policies. By delineating all these issues, this book recuperates the caste question in Bengal politics from ‘total amnesia’ (p. 62) and it also launches a scathing critique of existing historiography that underwrites the role of Jogendranath Mandal and thereby silences him as a political figure who fought for social justice.