Dalits' Fight to Enter Temple Gives Rare Glimpse of Bengal's Invisible Casteism

A group of Dalits' struggle to enter a temple has now brought the caste conflict in West Bengal into the spotlight.

Dalits' fight to enter Shiva temple in Gidhagram gives a rare glimpse of Bengal's invisible casteism.

(Photo: PTI/Altered by The Quint)

"Only Muslims and families with the Das surname were prohibited from entering the temple premises. We are also not allowed to attend the Charak fair that takes place on the ground adjacent to the temple."

Ekkori Das, a resident of Gidhagram village, West Bengal

“In Bengal, there is a caste cancer without diagnosis,” Dalit scholar-activist Kanchha Ilaiah Shepherd had remarked in Kolkata in 2018.

Some may disagree, as West Bengal has traditionally not appeared on the list of states reporting caste-based violence or discrimination.

Of the 158,773 cases filed in India between 2020 and 2022 under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, only 321 (or one in 500) were from West Bengal, India’s fourth most populous state.

While West Bengal has India’s second-largest Scheduled Caste population, after Uttar Pradesh, caste-based oppression has rarely become a political issue, let alone an electoral one.

However, this absence of overt casteist displays does not imply the absence of caste segregation, as became evident recently.

A Long Fight for Temple Entry

Ekkori Das, a resident of Daspara within the Gidhagram panchayat area of southern West Bengal, has lived through the experiences of “caste cancer.”

He was among the roughly 550 people from 130 families of the Scheduled Muchi (cobbler) caste who were not allowed to enter the local Gidheshwar Shiva temple until this week.

“Only Muslims and families with the Das surname were prohibited from entering the temple premises. We are also not allowed to attend the Charak fair that takes place on the ground adjacent to the temple,” said Das.

This practice had been ongoing for generations. The existing temple is several decades old, and the original structure is believed to be over two centuries old.

Controversy arose in February when members of the Dalit Das community wrote to the administration ahead of Shiv Ratri (24 February), requesting their assistance in allowing them to enter the temple and offer puja.

The administration, however, was unable to help.

Another meeting with all communities was held on 28 February, where the administration informed all participants that caste-based discrimination is illegal.

Nevertheless, the Das community members were still unable to enter the temple on 1 March. Clashes broke out among villagers on 7 and 8 March.

Finally, after prolonged discussions with middle and upper-caste families, the administration facilitated their entry to the temple on 12 March.

Senior administrative officials, including the sub-divisional officer, block development officer, and the inspector-in-charge of the Katwa police station, were present at the premises.

The Das community members now seek an end to the prohibition on their entry to the Charak fair, which takes place in mid-April. “The administration has asked us to be patient and trust them. We’ll see,” Das said.

Gidhagram Not an Anomaly

Gidhagram-like incidents of prohibition have been reported on a few occasions in the past, such as in Goghat in the Hooghly district. Still, such overt discrimination is rather uncommon. However, the lack of overt presence does not mean its absence.

In a 2004 study report by the Pratichi Trust, author-researcher Kumar Rana wrote of “some evidence of discrimination based on caste and religion” around the mid-day meal programme at schools.

In two of the 15 villages under the study, upper-caste Hindu children did not take food in the school, as the cook was a Muslim woman in one school and a Dalit in the other.

In one school, children from caste Hindu families told the researchers that they wanted to take the food, but their parents forbade them from doing so. They would have to bathe before entering their homes should they eat the meal offered in school, parents told them.

Speaking to The Quint, Rana said that the state’s two largest Scheduled Caste (SC) groups, the Rajbanshis and the Namasudras, thanks to their socio-historical and geographical positioning, could organise in a way that somewhat mitigated caste-based violence and discrimination. However, Bagdis, the third-largest SC group, are socio-economically less empowered.

They sometimes face discrimination, including untouchability, in pockets of Hooghly, Bardhaman, Birbhum, and Bankura districts of southern Bengal.

Bagdis are predominantly agricultural labourers. Bagdis and castes considered even lower in status, such as Muchis, often face such discrimination from middle-caste peasants, whose history of social construction tends to make them inclined toward a religio-economic system based on caste discrimination.

“We noticed such discrimination in mid-day meal practices in parts of Bankura and Bardhaman districts. Such practices are part of maintaining the socio-economic hierarchical control in those villages.”

Kumar Rana, Researcher

In the case of Gidhagram, most of the villagers seem to be middle-caste cultivators, whereas the Dalit population is comparatively marginal, he pointed out.

Though the Namasudra movement was essentially an anti-caste, anti-Brahmin movement during its inception in the nineteenth century, the recent political mobilisation of the Namasudras is primarily based on citizenship questions, as most of them are refugees or migrants from eastern Bengal (East Pakistan-turned-Bangladesh). Caste-based oppression is not part of their large electoral mobilisation behind the BJP.

The Rajbanshi mobilisation, too, is ethnic rather than caste-oriented, and the Rajbanshis also speak a different language—Rajbanshi—and fight for political-cultural empowerment rather than opposing caste-based discrimination.

The Bhodrolok's Denial 

The menace of caste-based discrimination has often been claimed to be absent in West Bengal, especially by the social elites and left-wing politicians – the so-called 'bhodrolok'.

As the rickshaw-puller-turned-award-winning-author Manoranjan Byapari pointed out during a 2020 controversy surrounding the West Bengal government’s establishment of a Dalit Sahitya Academy, the influence of the nineteenth-century Bengal Renaissance and the 20th-century Left movement led to social disapproval of the public expression of caste-based discriminatory beliefs; but not the eradication of the belief in superiority.

“Upper-caste people would eat the food I cook, would share a table for an adda over coffee, but would also feel threatened to see people from our communities entering their leagues."

Manoranjan Byapari

It is, indeed, uncommon to directly ask someone their caste, but many do discuss and speculate about one’s caste behind their backs.

Caste-based discrimination had become a major subject of discussion in undivided Bengal during the late 19th century, when reports from the censuses of 1871, 1881, and 1891 showed a large number of Dalits from the eastern districts (now in Bangladesh) embracing Islam.

From the novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay to early Hindutva proponent Chandranath Basu and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, most of the significant social personalities of the time spoke about it.

During the early decades of the 20th century, Bengal saw the rise of Dalit-based politics and famously elected BR Ambedkar from Jessore (in eastern Bengal) to make his way into the Constituent Assembly, which he subsequently chaired.

However, caste-based political mobilisation vanished in the post-colonial period, partly due to the pre-Independence Dalit movement’s association with the pro-Partition Muslim League and partly because of the rise of the Left in post-Partition West Bengal.

The Left focused on class or economic identity and overlooked the social identity that often determined one’s economic opportunities. Caste-based mobilisation could divide and harm working-class mobilisation, communists feared.

Caste in Contemporary Bengal

The opposing views on caste in West Bengal became quite clear in the Mandal Commission Report of 1980. The two communist parliamentarians who met the commission – Jyotirmoy Basu and Geeta Mukherjee – denied the relevance of caste in the state.

CPI(M)’s Basu, who represented Diamond Harbour in the Lok Sabha from 1967 to 1982, told the commission that “caste was a legacy of the feudal system and viewing the social scene from the casteist angle was no longer relevant for West Bengal.”

Mukherjee, the CPI’s Panskura MP, was quoted as saying that caste-based discrimination “was a thing of the past” in the state. Old occupational patterns had changed, and no single caste followed any single hereditary occupation, she had said.

However, AN Saha, secretary of the West Bengal Backward Classes Federation, had asserted that casteism did exist in West Bengal and that inter-caste marriages did not take place.

He also contended that over the past 25 years, the living conditions of the 105 communities listed as backward by the Kaka Kalelkar Commission had seen little improvement.

Gour Mohan Shar, general secretary of the West Bengal Swarnakar Sabha, had affirmed that the caste system was “as deeply entrenched in West Bengal as in the rest of the country.”

Some data show that the communist leaders’ claims were likely based on their incorrect assessment of the composition and functioning of the state’s societal hierarchies.

A 2016 paper by Aparnita Bhattacharjee, an Associate Professor of History at Midnapore College, a study of matrimonial columns published in Anandabazar Patrika, the leading daily from Kolkata, revealed that people of the two higher castes in Bengal, ie, Brahmans and Baidyas, still give preference to caste identity and favour prospective endogamous marital negotiations.

A 2018 paper revealed that among the five metro cities – Chennai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Kolkata – the West Bengal capital has the least SC population at 5.38 percent. This is despite SCs making up 23.5 percent of the state’s population, as of the 2011 census.

In rural and suburban areas, para or localities are often segregated along caste and religious lines.

“The invisibility of the caste system in Bengal is so firmly ingrained in the psyche of the upper-caste Bengali Hindu population that any acknowledgment of the same by the bhadralok class appears to be a pipe dream,” wrote Manas Patra in a 2024 paper titled ‘The Visible ‘Caste Gaps’ amid an ‘Invisible’ Caste System in West Bengal, India: A Study of Discrimination in Bengali Society.’

It said that this moral high ground of the bhadralok for the apparent absence of caste-based discrimination “directly stands antithetical to the rampant cases of caste-based discrimination.”

(Snigdhendu Bhattacharya is a journalist who writes on politics, history, culture, environment and climate change. He has authored books on leftwing insurgency and Hindu nationalism. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the authors' own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)