This paper that deals with the issues relating to the Kamatapur Movement in Assam and North Bengal was published in Protocol: Journal of Translation, Creative and Critical Writings, Vol I, No 1. Readers are requested to post their comments.
Dr. jyotirmoy prodhani
Ethnic Persistence in the Adjuncts: Organic Intellectuals,
Steve Biko and the Kamatapur Question
“Ancient civilizations were destroyed
by imported barbarians”
Dean Inges
I
The sky of the Northeast of India is distinctively marked by the overarching rainbow that features the united colours of multiethnic shades . In recent times we witness the sharp resurgence of the respective hues of ethnic entities saliently protruding from the point of forced disfiguration in the wake of supposed homogenizing politics at the behest of the representatives of the macro-cultural discourses. Saliencies of ethnicities abidingly seem to have surpassed all logic of homogeneous re-formation of identities in terms of the exigencies of integrated territorial nationality.
In Assam we see the emphatic emergence of the Rabha Hasongs, the Karbis, the Dimasas, the Mikirs, the Thengal Kacharis as well as, inter alia, the Rajbanshis as distinctive nations challenging the well formulated processes of assimilation and their consequent submerging into the larger spectrum of the dominant, what we can call, Assasmesehood. When most of the ethnic groups are for transforming their specific constituencies into exclusive territories of self rule, the Rajbanshis are for the retrieval of their lost land – the Kamatapur- the echoes of which percolates down to the other side of the state border –West Bengal- where happened to be the historically endorsed address of their lost kingdom’s Royal capital- Coochbehar.
There is a sustained persistence of ethnic identities in rejecting, in no equivocal terms, the processes of interpelations strategically adopted by the dominant ruling groups as in the case both in Assam and West Bengal. This persistence on the part of the ethnic nations seems apparently disturbing, politically irrelevant and logically irrational as well as unnecessary quite at times. Yet we cannot avoid this reality, for it forces our engagement. The received logic of enlightenment is inadequate and problematic in understanding the phenomenon, for the enlightenment logic is essentially macro-culturally biased and trains us with the idioms of denial when it comes to the question of the cultural and the racial other. Ethnicity is to be understood in terms of the experiential subjective forces underlying the ethnic identity and its maintenance, observes Lola Romanucci Ross and George A De Vos in their introduction to Ethnic Identity: Creation, Conflict and Accommodation (1996). They underline the need to prioritize the emotional, even the irrational psychological features that are involved with the issues relating to the social identity formation of the ethnic groups.
The consequential imperative is to address the question as to whether ethnic assertions are sui generically conflictual? What are the interrelationships between the processes of recording social and cultural history and ethnic defiance? What impact does it make the manipulations of the instruments of raciality, territory, religion, culture, language and history on the subsequent resurgence of ethnic assertions? Is the growing ethnic saliency a valid proposition?
Ethnicity is defined as a “self perceived inclusion of a group who hold a common set of traditions not shared by others with whom they are in contact” (De Vos in “Ethnic Pluralism…”,18). He explains that the urgency for ethnic resistance occurs in a situation of forced assimilation where the ethnic entity has two options open for possible acceptance: (a) adopting a future oriented religious, cultural or political ideology and the aspiration to gain an entry in the territory of the larger cultural group; (b) to emphasize their ethnic past and exert pressure to change their collective group status.
De- Vos, like Steve Bantu Biko, the precursor of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, emphatically argues that ethnic conflict is not a result of any class struggle. The dialectic class equation becomes an inadequate premise to understand and interpret the issues of ethnicity. It arises out of racial politics. If ethnicity seems conflictual, it is the dominant racial group that invariably starts the conflict forcing the ethnic entities to resist and retaliate. Against the backdrop of acculturation of the ethnic group and the formation of negative definition by dominant group to establish the ethnic other as genetically inferior, opens up the third alternative for the ethnic entity: that is to accept the inferior caste status, their basic inferiority, both social and genetic, as part of their self definition and initiate a process of ethnic solidarity from that vantage of supposed inferiority.
II
The question of ethnic survival necessitates the formation of its own intellectuals as the dominant intellectuals belonging to the ruling regime and race perpetually dilute the aspirations of self articulation of the ethnic communities. The ethnic nations need to create counter ‘organic intellectuals to take on the powerful intellectual onslaught belonging to the contending class.
Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks informs about the organic formation of intellectuals in every social group. Gramsci links intellectuals with that of people as well as political goals and popular desires. He interrelates feelings, understanding and knowledge as the inseparable attributes for an intellectual to establish a relationship with people nation. Benedetto Croce, on the other hand, in support of the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals, advocated the role of intellectuals to serve a disinterested scientific function. “To go beyond the assigned role by mixing politics with literature and science is an error” (Croce). But for Gramsci intellectuals must come down off the ivory towers. For him intellectuals must share the feelings and the elementary passion of the people, must understand them and should have the knowledge to coherently elaborate it. Without it the relationship between the people and intellectuals becomes bureaucratic and purely of formal order. For him:
“the relationship between intellectuals and people nation, between the leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by the an organic cohesion in which feelings, passion become understanding and knowledge …then and only then is the relationship one of representation.” (1978)
Steve Bantu Biko of the Black consciousness movement in South Africa and Bongshi Badan Ray of the Greater Cochebehar movement in Kamatapur (presently called North Bengal), as representatives of two ethnic communities, the Blacks and the Rajbanshis respectivly, made effective intervention in the history of their respective people-nations that inform us how ethnic entities form themselves their own organic intellectuals. Eventually the success of the respective groups largely depends on the expansion and elaboration of their intellectuals.
III
The Blacks in South Africa and the Rajbanshis, especially in communist Bengal, are omitted people-nations. Both groups are indigenous natives of their specific geo-cultural territories but the communities have been internally displaced in their respective native lands through the politics of apartheid and the subversive policies of the ruling left. Against this backdrop evolved the Black Consciousness movement under Steve Bantu Biko in South Africa and the Kamatapur consciousness in the form of Greater Coochbehar movement under the leaders like Bongshi Badan Ray in Bengal.
One of the greatest resurgences of ethnic identity in recent history took place in the form of Black Consciousness movement in South Africa in the late seventies under the leadership of Steve Bantu Biko. He was the founder of the South African Students Organisation (SASO) as well as the Black Consciousness movement. Born in 1946 and was killed by the white police in custody within six days of arrest in 1977. He had deliberately inserted the term ‘Banto’ in his name to underline the White attitude against the Blacks. This Black term used by the Whites to refer to the Blacks in derogatory term. ‘Banto’ reminded the White hatred of the Blacks. Interestingly the Rajbanshis in Bengal are called by the ruling race and a section of Bengali intellectuals, as ‘Bahè’ people. The term in fact is the truncated form of the vaishnavite address –Baap Hè-meaning “hello father” or “hello my son”. The Bengali intelligentsia refer to the Rajbanshis as Bahè people in a pejorative sense with the intention to underline the supposed backwardness/ inferiority of the Rajbanshis in terms of the mainstream, dominant Bengali cultural identity.
In his ‘Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity’ speech Biko exhorts all his Black compatriots to investigate whether the condition of the Black is a creation of God or “an artificial fabrication of the truth by the power hungry people”. He asserts, “An anomalous situation is a deliberate creation of man”
Ethnic resurgence too is a direct response to incessant anomalies deliberately created by man. The inability of the Blacks to assume modern professional skills is the result of the system. Similarly, the inability of the ethnic entities to come to terms with the dominant counterpart is the result of subtle subjugations prompted by the deep seated racial hatred in Indian context.
In respect to the White subjugation of the Blacks in South Africa, the stance of the White intellectual institutions have been shamelessly hypocritical. Biko writes “A journalist from a liberal newspaper like The Sunday Times of Johannesburg describes a Black student- who is only telling the truth-as a “militant, impatient young man.” On the other hand the so called liberal face of the Left regime, Mr. Buddhadev Bhattacharya, called the ten thousand strong villagers who took on to the street demanding a state of their own-Greater Coochbehar-as militants, misguided, secessionists and called these assertion which was the first people’s movement in the post independent Bengal an act instigated by the militant outfits like the ULFA and the KLO, (Bartaman, 25 sept./2005, Siliguri edition). Like the Whites in Africa who “do not believe that Blacks can formulate thoughts without white guidance and trusteeship” (Biko); the ruling race of Bengal too can never believe that the subjugated Rajbanshi ethnic people could ever think by themselves without being tutored by the comrades of the party office.
Steve Biko evolved the Black Conscious discourse as a philosophy of life for the Blacks. He had called for the re-appropriation of the negative elements imposed by the Whites as the starting point for the assertion of identity instead of taking a future oriented move for absorption within the precincts of the White world. He identifies subversion of the native religion, history and imposition of state controlled education as the effective tools of oppression.
De Vos points out how the imposition of the religion on the conquered people lead to the wide spread loss of morale, individual and collective identity and their collective anomie. (ibid). Biko called Christianity, imposed by the Whites in South Africa as a cruel religious invasion that had tempered the native values, morality and the sense of human dignity that used to inform the mores of the native social values of the Blacks.
The Black Consciousness philosophy of Biko advocates obviation of the education system that turned the Anglo-Boer Whites as the all powerful, all knowing eternal moral supervisors over the Blacks. He underlines the factual disfiguration of the Black past in the official history prepared by the Anglo-Boers, which painted the brave Xhosa warriors as thieves; the heroes like Makana a superstitious trouble maker; the great Black nation builder like Shaka a tyrant. He calls for the destruction of the history that taught them that their history started in 1652, the year of Van Reinbeck’s landing at the Cape. Biko roars’ “We are repressed because we are Black. We must use that very concept to uniteourselves. We must realize the prophetic cry of Black students ‘Black man, you are on your own’.”
IV
The September march for the Greater Coochbehar, demanding back the territory forcibly annexed by the Bengal regime through the cunning political moves of the then Chief Minister of Bengal Dr. Bidhan Chandra Ray in 1950, turns out to be one of the greatest events of people’s movement in post-independent Bengal and Bongshi Badan Ray, the young school teacher who was one of the chief organizers of the movement, appeared as the only leader of Bengal that had actually led a movement that is truly a people’s movement by being a leader produced by its own ethnic imperatives. Some of the picketers were greeted by communist bullets, many of them were dumped in communist jails of Bengal for mindless custodian atrocities. Two police personnel were lynched by the irate mass as a symbolic ritual of expressing displaced anger against the repressive communist regime. Thousands of picketers were on fast unto death. Mr. Buddhadev Bhattacharya, the communist CM of Bengal with his inherited Brahminical flare for cuningness , called this movement as an act by the people who did not know history nor did understand they constitution (Bartaman. 25 Sept/ 2005, Siliguri edn.). The representative of the repressive communist regime, Mr. Bhatatacharya, asserted his greater truth telling warrant over the native ethnic people. But the history of Coochbehar betrays the lies that formed the truth of the official version. Dr. B.C. Roy argued for the annexure of Coochbehar in 1949 with Bengal because that would help his Congress party win elections (Letter to Patel, 11 May, 1949).
The urgency of the Rajbanshis to form a Kamatapur Consciousness is a social imperative to resist further disfiguration of their identity and culture. The systematic displacement of the Rajbanshis was affected through the typical processes of subjugation mastered, in theory and practice, by the comrades for the cold blooded butchering of the indigenous natives with brutal accuracy. The recent incidents of Singoor land loot and the Nandigram massacre by the communist comrades, backed by the current communist regime, are two of the glaring examples of the extent of brutality the communists are capable of executing on behalf of the corporate powerhouses.
The Rajbanshis in communist Bengal are forcefully evicted from their traditional homestead through the notorious land looting programme of the left regime they euphemistically called ‘Land Reform’, which turned the native Rajbanshis into virtual beggars overnight. Through the loss of land they had lost their most intimate connection with their own geography. The land snatched from them was mostly redistributed among the illegal Bengali Bangladeshi immigrants and the workers of the ruling party. This completes the task of subjugation prompted by racial disdain.
For History, the Bengal regime produces texts only to reinforce the Brahminical and racial supremacy of the ruling race at the cost of all the other micro nations. This history obliterates all traces of the Rajbanhsis rendering the entire claim of their past and history veritably provisional and seemingly unauthentic. Language wise the Rajbanshis are forced to acquire the alien Bengali language and culture making the politics of ethnic subjugation an accomplished task.
Ethnic resurgence is not a mere misguided fair, as the ruling race terms it as in the case of the Black revival as well as in the case of the Kamatapur consciousness. Nor is it a class struggle as the left rhetoricians would try to explain. This is essentially a racial conflict. Biko asks the dialectic interpreters to go to the van lenders in the Free State and drum it up into an example of class struggle. If at all we need to use the Marxist term, Biko explains, the thesis is the White racism, the anti thesis is the strong solidarity of the blacks and the synthesis is the emergence of a balanced humanity. In case of the Rajbanshi, the thesis is the Bengal racism under communist regime, the antithesis is the strong solidarity of the Rajbanshis while the synthesis is the re-emergence of Kamatapur.
v
In concluding, we have a theoretical problem. Beneditto Croce, while speaking of the position of intellectuals, shifted from his earlier position of ivory tower vantage to preach for the participation of intellectuals as organizers of cultural aspects of the given society for he realized that the Renaissance man was no longer possible in modern times “when enormous human masses actively and directly participate in history” (qtd. in Sassoon,1999). Croce in fact suggests an effective mode of appropriation at intellectual level. This is the strategy adopted by the ruling race to limit the revolutionary potential of the masses.
Against such politics of appropriation, the ethnic natives, the ethnic groups are in the urgency of creating its own intellectuals. One would ask how the subordinated ethnic group can afford to create its own intellectual forces against the backdrop of alien education, forced displacement from the homestead, distortion of culture, obliteration of history, eradication of language and disfiguration of identity. If we take a cue from Gramsci, he informs how being alienated from the native geo-cultural space, the subordinated entity ends up by being in the trade of manual labour. But no amount of subordination, however, can ever completely erase the subjugated masses. They gradually obtain mastery over their manual trade and form the basis for economic opportunities. Through this terrain of repression they gain the strength to invent their own representatives to give vent to their voices and organize their collective will for regaining their basic human dignity.
Steve Biko and Bongshi Badan Ray are a historical necessity to defeat racial politics cleverly packaged in the elusive wrappers of rhetoric.
Works Cited
Barth, Frederick. Ethnic Group and Boundaries. Boston: Little Brown, 1969
Biko ,Steve (Bantu). Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity
Special Project InterNet Material 2002
Das, Naren. “Coochbeharer Bhabishyat bhebe dekhar agé atiter kathagulo bhebé neowa bhalo”. Bartaman 9 Nov./2005
Ghosh, Pabitra Kumar. “Coochbehar diyese jharer sanket”. Bartaman. 25 Sept./2005
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections form the Prison Notebooks. London:Lawrence and Wishart, 1971
Romanucci- Ross, Lola and George A. De Vos. (Ed). Ethnic Identity: Creation, Conflict and Accomodation. London, New Delhi: Almitra Press. 1996
Sassoon, Anne Showstack. Gramsci and Contemporary Politics: Beyond Pessimism of the Intellect. London and NY: Routledge, 1999
Dr. jyotirmoy prodhani
Ethnic Persistence in the Adjuncts: Organic Intellectuals,
Steve Biko and the Kamatapur Question
“Ancient civilizations were destroyed
by imported barbarians”
Dean Inges
I
The sky of the Northeast of India is distinctively marked by the overarching rainbow that features the united colours of multiethnic shades . In recent times we witness the sharp resurgence of the respective hues of ethnic entities saliently protruding from the point of forced disfiguration in the wake of supposed homogenizing politics at the behest of the representatives of the macro-cultural discourses. Saliencies of ethnicities abidingly seem to have surpassed all logic of homogeneous re-formation of identities in terms of the exigencies of integrated territorial nationality.
In Assam we see the emphatic emergence of the Rabha Hasongs, the Karbis, the Dimasas, the Mikirs, the Thengal Kacharis as well as, inter alia, the Rajbanshis as distinctive nations challenging the well formulated processes of assimilation and their consequent submerging into the larger spectrum of the dominant, what we can call, Assasmesehood. When most of the ethnic groups are for transforming their specific constituencies into exclusive territories of self rule, the Rajbanshis are for the retrieval of their lost land – the Kamatapur- the echoes of which percolates down to the other side of the state border –West Bengal- where happened to be the historically endorsed address of their lost kingdom’s Royal capital- Coochbehar.
There is a sustained persistence of ethnic identities in rejecting, in no equivocal terms, the processes of interpelations strategically adopted by the dominant ruling groups as in the case both in Assam and West Bengal. This persistence on the part of the ethnic nations seems apparently disturbing, politically irrelevant and logically irrational as well as unnecessary quite at times. Yet we cannot avoid this reality, for it forces our engagement. The received logic of enlightenment is inadequate and problematic in understanding the phenomenon, for the enlightenment logic is essentially macro-culturally biased and trains us with the idioms of denial when it comes to the question of the cultural and the racial other. Ethnicity is to be understood in terms of the experiential subjective forces underlying the ethnic identity and its maintenance, observes Lola Romanucci Ross and George A De Vos in their introduction to Ethnic Identity: Creation, Conflict and Accommodation (1996). They underline the need to prioritize the emotional, even the irrational psychological features that are involved with the issues relating to the social identity formation of the ethnic groups.
The consequential imperative is to address the question as to whether ethnic assertions are sui generically conflictual? What are the interrelationships between the processes of recording social and cultural history and ethnic defiance? What impact does it make the manipulations of the instruments of raciality, territory, religion, culture, language and history on the subsequent resurgence of ethnic assertions? Is the growing ethnic saliency a valid proposition?
Ethnicity is defined as a “self perceived inclusion of a group who hold a common set of traditions not shared by others with whom they are in contact” (De Vos in “Ethnic Pluralism…”,18). He explains that the urgency for ethnic resistance occurs in a situation of forced assimilation where the ethnic entity has two options open for possible acceptance: (a) adopting a future oriented religious, cultural or political ideology and the aspiration to gain an entry in the territory of the larger cultural group; (b) to emphasize their ethnic past and exert pressure to change their collective group status.
De- Vos, like Steve Bantu Biko, the precursor of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, emphatically argues that ethnic conflict is not a result of any class struggle. The dialectic class equation becomes an inadequate premise to understand and interpret the issues of ethnicity. It arises out of racial politics. If ethnicity seems conflictual, it is the dominant racial group that invariably starts the conflict forcing the ethnic entities to resist and retaliate. Against the backdrop of acculturation of the ethnic group and the formation of negative definition by dominant group to establish the ethnic other as genetically inferior, opens up the third alternative for the ethnic entity: that is to accept the inferior caste status, their basic inferiority, both social and genetic, as part of their self definition and initiate a process of ethnic solidarity from that vantage of supposed inferiority.
II
The question of ethnic survival necessitates the formation of its own intellectuals as the dominant intellectuals belonging to the ruling regime and race perpetually dilute the aspirations of self articulation of the ethnic communities. The ethnic nations need to create counter ‘organic intellectuals to take on the powerful intellectual onslaught belonging to the contending class.
Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks informs about the organic formation of intellectuals in every social group. Gramsci links intellectuals with that of people as well as political goals and popular desires. He interrelates feelings, understanding and knowledge as the inseparable attributes for an intellectual to establish a relationship with people nation. Benedetto Croce, on the other hand, in support of the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals, advocated the role of intellectuals to serve a disinterested scientific function. “To go beyond the assigned role by mixing politics with literature and science is an error” (Croce). But for Gramsci intellectuals must come down off the ivory towers. For him intellectuals must share the feelings and the elementary passion of the people, must understand them and should have the knowledge to coherently elaborate it. Without it the relationship between the people and intellectuals becomes bureaucratic and purely of formal order. For him:
“the relationship between intellectuals and people nation, between the leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by the an organic cohesion in which feelings, passion become understanding and knowledge …then and only then is the relationship one of representation.” (1978)
Steve Bantu Biko of the Black consciousness movement in South Africa and Bongshi Badan Ray of the Greater Cochebehar movement in Kamatapur (presently called North Bengal), as representatives of two ethnic communities, the Blacks and the Rajbanshis respectivly, made effective intervention in the history of their respective people-nations that inform us how ethnic entities form themselves their own organic intellectuals. Eventually the success of the respective groups largely depends on the expansion and elaboration of their intellectuals.
III
The Blacks in South Africa and the Rajbanshis, especially in communist Bengal, are omitted people-nations. Both groups are indigenous natives of their specific geo-cultural territories but the communities have been internally displaced in their respective native lands through the politics of apartheid and the subversive policies of the ruling left. Against this backdrop evolved the Black Consciousness movement under Steve Bantu Biko in South Africa and the Kamatapur consciousness in the form of Greater Coochbehar movement under the leaders like Bongshi Badan Ray in Bengal.
One of the greatest resurgences of ethnic identity in recent history took place in the form of Black Consciousness movement in South Africa in the late seventies under the leadership of Steve Bantu Biko. He was the founder of the South African Students Organisation (SASO) as well as the Black Consciousness movement. Born in 1946 and was killed by the white police in custody within six days of arrest in 1977. He had deliberately inserted the term ‘Banto’ in his name to underline the White attitude against the Blacks. This Black term used by the Whites to refer to the Blacks in derogatory term. ‘Banto’ reminded the White hatred of the Blacks. Interestingly the Rajbanshis in Bengal are called by the ruling race and a section of Bengali intellectuals, as ‘Bahè’ people. The term in fact is the truncated form of the vaishnavite address –Baap Hè-meaning “hello father” or “hello my son”. The Bengali intelligentsia refer to the Rajbanshis as Bahè people in a pejorative sense with the intention to underline the supposed backwardness/ inferiority of the Rajbanshis in terms of the mainstream, dominant Bengali cultural identity.
In his ‘Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity’ speech Biko exhorts all his Black compatriots to investigate whether the condition of the Black is a creation of God or “an artificial fabrication of the truth by the power hungry people”. He asserts, “An anomalous situation is a deliberate creation of man”
Ethnic resurgence too is a direct response to incessant anomalies deliberately created by man. The inability of the Blacks to assume modern professional skills is the result of the system. Similarly, the inability of the ethnic entities to come to terms with the dominant counterpart is the result of subtle subjugations prompted by the deep seated racial hatred in Indian context.
In respect to the White subjugation of the Blacks in South Africa, the stance of the White intellectual institutions have been shamelessly hypocritical. Biko writes “A journalist from a liberal newspaper like The Sunday Times of Johannesburg describes a Black student- who is only telling the truth-as a “militant, impatient young man.” On the other hand the so called liberal face of the Left regime, Mr. Buddhadev Bhattacharya, called the ten thousand strong villagers who took on to the street demanding a state of their own-Greater Coochbehar-as militants, misguided, secessionists and called these assertion which was the first people’s movement in the post independent Bengal an act instigated by the militant outfits like the ULFA and the KLO, (Bartaman, 25 sept./2005, Siliguri edition). Like the Whites in Africa who “do not believe that Blacks can formulate thoughts without white guidance and trusteeship” (Biko); the ruling race of Bengal too can never believe that the subjugated Rajbanshi ethnic people could ever think by themselves without being tutored by the comrades of the party office.
Steve Biko evolved the Black Conscious discourse as a philosophy of life for the Blacks. He had called for the re-appropriation of the negative elements imposed by the Whites as the starting point for the assertion of identity instead of taking a future oriented move for absorption within the precincts of the White world. He identifies subversion of the native religion, history and imposition of state controlled education as the effective tools of oppression.
De Vos points out how the imposition of the religion on the conquered people lead to the wide spread loss of morale, individual and collective identity and their collective anomie. (ibid). Biko called Christianity, imposed by the Whites in South Africa as a cruel religious invasion that had tempered the native values, morality and the sense of human dignity that used to inform the mores of the native social values of the Blacks.
The Black Consciousness philosophy of Biko advocates obviation of the education system that turned the Anglo-Boer Whites as the all powerful, all knowing eternal moral supervisors over the Blacks. He underlines the factual disfiguration of the Black past in the official history prepared by the Anglo-Boers, which painted the brave Xhosa warriors as thieves; the heroes like Makana a superstitious trouble maker; the great Black nation builder like Shaka a tyrant. He calls for the destruction of the history that taught them that their history started in 1652, the year of Van Reinbeck’s landing at the Cape. Biko roars’ “We are repressed because we are Black. We must use that very concept to uniteourselves. We must realize the prophetic cry of Black students ‘Black man, you are on your own’.”
IV
The September march for the Greater Coochbehar, demanding back the territory forcibly annexed by the Bengal regime through the cunning political moves of the then Chief Minister of Bengal Dr. Bidhan Chandra Ray in 1950, turns out to be one of the greatest events of people’s movement in post-independent Bengal and Bongshi Badan Ray, the young school teacher who was one of the chief organizers of the movement, appeared as the only leader of Bengal that had actually led a movement that is truly a people’s movement by being a leader produced by its own ethnic imperatives. Some of the picketers were greeted by communist bullets, many of them were dumped in communist jails of Bengal for mindless custodian atrocities. Two police personnel were lynched by the irate mass as a symbolic ritual of expressing displaced anger against the repressive communist regime. Thousands of picketers were on fast unto death. Mr. Buddhadev Bhattacharya, the communist CM of Bengal with his inherited Brahminical flare for cuningness , called this movement as an act by the people who did not know history nor did understand they constitution (Bartaman. 25 Sept/ 2005, Siliguri edn.). The representative of the repressive communist regime, Mr. Bhatatacharya, asserted his greater truth telling warrant over the native ethnic people. But the history of Coochbehar betrays the lies that formed the truth of the official version. Dr. B.C. Roy argued for the annexure of Coochbehar in 1949 with Bengal because that would help his Congress party win elections (Letter to Patel, 11 May, 1949).
The urgency of the Rajbanshis to form a Kamatapur Consciousness is a social imperative to resist further disfiguration of their identity and culture. The systematic displacement of the Rajbanshis was affected through the typical processes of subjugation mastered, in theory and practice, by the comrades for the cold blooded butchering of the indigenous natives with brutal accuracy. The recent incidents of Singoor land loot and the Nandigram massacre by the communist comrades, backed by the current communist regime, are two of the glaring examples of the extent of brutality the communists are capable of executing on behalf of the corporate powerhouses.
The Rajbanshis in communist Bengal are forcefully evicted from their traditional homestead through the notorious land looting programme of the left regime they euphemistically called ‘Land Reform’, which turned the native Rajbanshis into virtual beggars overnight. Through the loss of land they had lost their most intimate connection with their own geography. The land snatched from them was mostly redistributed among the illegal Bengali Bangladeshi immigrants and the workers of the ruling party. This completes the task of subjugation prompted by racial disdain.
For History, the Bengal regime produces texts only to reinforce the Brahminical and racial supremacy of the ruling race at the cost of all the other micro nations. This history obliterates all traces of the Rajbanhsis rendering the entire claim of their past and history veritably provisional and seemingly unauthentic. Language wise the Rajbanshis are forced to acquire the alien Bengali language and culture making the politics of ethnic subjugation an accomplished task.
Ethnic resurgence is not a mere misguided fair, as the ruling race terms it as in the case of the Black revival as well as in the case of the Kamatapur consciousness. Nor is it a class struggle as the left rhetoricians would try to explain. This is essentially a racial conflict. Biko asks the dialectic interpreters to go to the van lenders in the Free State and drum it up into an example of class struggle. If at all we need to use the Marxist term, Biko explains, the thesis is the White racism, the anti thesis is the strong solidarity of the blacks and the synthesis is the emergence of a balanced humanity. In case of the Rajbanshi, the thesis is the Bengal racism under communist regime, the antithesis is the strong solidarity of the Rajbanshis while the synthesis is the re-emergence of Kamatapur.
v
In concluding, we have a theoretical problem. Beneditto Croce, while speaking of the position of intellectuals, shifted from his earlier position of ivory tower vantage to preach for the participation of intellectuals as organizers of cultural aspects of the given society for he realized that the Renaissance man was no longer possible in modern times “when enormous human masses actively and directly participate in history” (qtd. in Sassoon,1999). Croce in fact suggests an effective mode of appropriation at intellectual level. This is the strategy adopted by the ruling race to limit the revolutionary potential of the masses.
Against such politics of appropriation, the ethnic natives, the ethnic groups are in the urgency of creating its own intellectuals. One would ask how the subordinated ethnic group can afford to create its own intellectual forces against the backdrop of alien education, forced displacement from the homestead, distortion of culture, obliteration of history, eradication of language and disfiguration of identity. If we take a cue from Gramsci, he informs how being alienated from the native geo-cultural space, the subordinated entity ends up by being in the trade of manual labour. But no amount of subordination, however, can ever completely erase the subjugated masses. They gradually obtain mastery over their manual trade and form the basis for economic opportunities. Through this terrain of repression they gain the strength to invent their own representatives to give vent to their voices and organize their collective will for regaining their basic human dignity.
Steve Biko and Bongshi Badan Ray are a historical necessity to defeat racial politics cleverly packaged in the elusive wrappers of rhetoric.
Works Cited
Barth, Frederick. Ethnic Group and Boundaries. Boston: Little Brown, 1969
Biko ,Steve (Bantu). Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity
Special Project InterNet Material 2002
Das, Naren. “Coochbeharer Bhabishyat bhebe dekhar agé atiter kathagulo bhebé neowa bhalo”. Bartaman 9 Nov./2005
Ghosh, Pabitra Kumar. “Coochbehar diyese jharer sanket”. Bartaman. 25 Sept./2005
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections form the Prison Notebooks. London:Lawrence and Wishart, 1971
Romanucci- Ross, Lola and George A. De Vos. (Ed). Ethnic Identity: Creation, Conflict and Accomodation. London, New Delhi: Almitra Press. 1996
Sassoon, Anne Showstack. Gramsci and Contemporary Politics: Beyond Pessimism of the Intellect. London and NY: Routledge, 1999
2 comments:
Dear Sir,
Thanks very much for such a wonderful article. I congratulate you.
I am a student of JNu, new Delhi and am pretty interested in the social movements going on in india especially Dalit and other marginalized groups. I came to your website as i am trying to read more on Ray panchanan saheb and rajbanshis movement.
I will be very happy to interact with you more on this. Pls do email me at anoopkheri@gmail.com
Dear Anoop
There seems to be some trouble with your email id hence I could not send you the mail. Nevertheless, thanks for your kind comments. I am glad to know about your area of interest, specially for the subaltern voices. I teach English at North-Eastern Hill University and the Kamatapur issues are my current area of research interest. I am not sure whether you can read Bengali. If you can, I should be pleased to send you some materials on Rai Saheb Panchanan Burma. Moreover, we are publishing a journal- Protocol-from the Dept. of English. I would be glad to get your paper for the journal on Dalit movements.
With warm regards
Jyotirmoy Prodhani
Reader
Dept. of English
NEHU, Tura Campus
Chandmari-794002
Tura, Meghalaya.
Ph 09436315650
email- rajaprodhani@gmail.com
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