Beth Roy

Some Trouble with Cows


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story. First of all, caste is a paradox. It describes crystal-clear distinctions, and also a strong generic unity. At one and the same time it defines social distance and religious association. Almost everything about daily life signifies distinctions of caste identity: names (most surnames are caste identifiers); adornment (Brahmin men, for instance, wear a thread around their chests; certain painted marks on faces, or bracelets, or styles of draping clothing connote caste membership); food habits (what people eat and with whom); protocols of touch and proximity. The number of these signposts to membership in a caste testifies to the seriousness with which caste identity is taken.

      But caste is more than distinction. It is also hierarchy. Caste is an endless ranking of status, Brahmins at the top, Untouchables (renamed harijans, or “children of god,” by Gandhi, but more commonly known by their post-Independence bureaucratic designation, Scheduled Caste) at the bottom. When Mr. Ghosh separated himself from the plans of the Namasudras, he not only distinguished activities suitable for his caste from theirs but also implied some disapproval.

      Nonetheless, there is also a strong sense of an overarching bond among castes. Even as Mr. Ghosh disassociated himself (in the plural, “we”), he expressed a strong bias in favor of a fellow Hindu done wrong.

      The second characteristic of the caste system significant in the Panipur drama is status mobility. As fixed as caste delineation is, as infinitely often described and thoroughly legislated by myriad details of ritual and universally understood distinctions, it is also changeable. Castes have throughout the centuries sought to upgrade their status. Western stereotypes of fatalistic Hindus passively accepting their plight in the lower reaches of an oppressive status map are simply untrue.

      Finally, caste continues to have strong associations with economic privilege, even if it does not coincide with precise occupations. In East Bengal until 1947, when the British left and Pakistan was formed, landlords, moneylenders, professionals, educated people in generala category know as bhadralok, literally “gentlefolk,” an ill-defined word which every Bengali understands precisely-tended to be upper-caste Hindus, whereas peasants, artisans, serving people were Muslims or low-caste Hindus. To be sure, the correspondence was not one to one: “In East Bengal, the landlords…consisted of a few big zamindars and numerous petty talukdars. Most of them belonged to the upper Hindu castes, but there were also a handful of Muslims”4 In his autobiography the East Bengali writer Nirad Choudhury mentions a Muslim za-mindar and a low-caste Hindu zamindar who figured large in his turn-of-the-century rural world.5 Nor were these relationships static. Throughout the twentieth century changes were afoot as the upper classes were threatened by economic reversals and Muslims campaigned for improvements in their status. But the majority of big landlords continued to be upper-caste Hindus, and the majority of poor cultivators were Muslims and Namasudras.

      The coincidence of caste and class produces an overdetermined set of social relationships. The gulf between poor, low-caste cultivators and economically advantaged, high-caste Hindus is enormous. The latter constitute a little world of their own. In a village they enjoy an easy social familiarity, even though they may individually belong to different castes or occupations. Mr. Ghosh is a Kayashtha; Basantibala's family, the Majumdars, are Brahmins. The Majumdars are small landlords and schoolteachers, the Ghoshes small landlords and merchants. They are near neighbors and are in and out of each other's houses-witness Mr. Ghosh's arrival during my visit. The friendliness of the two caste-Hindu families is bounded by the many ways in which they maintain caste distinction. I do not know the Majumdars' practices specifically, but Brahmin families commonly keep separate cups and silverware for other-caste visitors, and it would not be unusual for a Brahmin woman like Basantibala to refuse food and drink in Mr. Ghosh's house even though she serves him freely in her own.

       Social Location

      This endless delineation of relations and distinctions among groups of people reflects a very important aspect of an agricultural society like Bengal. Knowing exactly how your group, be it caste or community or class, is expected to behave vis-a-vis every other group establishes your own social location, a process which in the industrialized world is to a much larger extent left to each individual to accomplish. Indeed, the defining social transformation wrought by industrialization is precisely this dislocation of working individuals from their groups, their “liberation” into a wage economy. Each one, with an emphasis on the word one, must establish her own status and interactions with others, and the field on which that happens is believed to be primarily economic

      But in an agricultural society economic position is far more fixed-although, as I've commented, not exactly cemented. The process of determining where people fit in is therefore given over to a much greater extent to groups. There is a common understanding of where any given group stands in relation to every other, and once an individual's membership in a group or a series of groups is ascertained, so also is her place in society. When changes happen, often they are group changes, not individual ones. Of course, individual lives do change, sometimes every bit as dramatically as in American mythology. Rags-to-riches stories are not unknown, and twentieth-century upward mobility has become a prospect in the consciousness of modern-day citizens of the Indian subcontinent, if not a very common event. But the more usual and historic route to change, both economic and social, is through the group. One's group identity, the group that claims one and with which the world identifies one, is therefore very central to one's sense of self and treatment in the world. People in every agricultural society experience some variation on this same theme, however different the particularities may be.

      The group defines for an individual not only how to behave, as the Panipur story well illustrates, but often how to feel and think as well. If life is to improve, the group as a whole must participate both in the process of gain and in the fruits thereof. It is in the nature of societies newly industrializing that this group-based mobility mixes with an individualized derivative. In Bengal during the 1950s the newly won independence of the country, combined with the formation of the entirely new nation-concept of Pakistan, unsettled old economic and power relations and opened up unfamiliar prospects. But people at one and the same time attended to their personal fortunes and experienced change in terms of their place in a group. Caste was an element in the definition, but the Panipur riot demonstrated how it intersected other identities, both economic and religious.

       Bias and Loyalty

      When the gauntlet was down, for instance, Mr. Ghosh's allegiance to his fellow Hindus won out over any class or caste estrangements. Even from a distance, he unselfconsciously revealed his affinities:

      So many people gathered that each party had about two or three thousand people. The Muslims said, “We won't allow any Hindus to stay here” The Hindus were also saying, “We won't let any Muslims stay on this side of the river. We'll push them to the other side of the river.”…

      The Namasudras were greater in number, and they were more courageous. They had a lot of food. But the Muslims, they didn't have much—only some chal [uncooked rice]. They would eat a handful of chal and some water. Since the Namasudras had plenty of food, they had plenty of courage.

      Food weighs heavily in the scales of significance in many cultures, and especially in South Asia. Over and over, people expressed distinctions of status and nuances of respect through food, not to mention using it as a material demarcation of position. To eat uncooked rice is unthinkable to a Hindu. From Mr. Ghosh's tone of voice, I inferred that the Muslims eating it were, to him, inferior beings, a theme he elaborated as he continued his story:

      The Muslims fell back a little, and the Namasudras advanced. Then Raghu Nandan [a Hindu police officer] said to the S.D.O. [subdivisional officer, a civil official], Raghubabu said, “Sir, this is the time to give the order to fire. Otherwise there will be a lot of bloodshed.”

      So the S.D.O. said, “Inform both sides, if they don't stop, we'll fire.” Then Raghu Nandan rode his horse and went to both sides and told them of the S.D.O's decision, and said, “I'll raise a flag, and as soon as I raise it, you all leave this place. Otherwise we will fire.” As soon as the flag was raised, the Namasudras left. But the Muslims attacked. And the police fired. One or two-I'm not sure how many-were killed.

      Not