Caste, Culture and Hegemony: Social Dominance in Colonial Bengal
By Sekhar Bandyopadhay, Sage, Rs 550

Caste and the women?s question engaged the interest of social reformers in colonial Bengal. By using empirical data from Bengal, Sekhar Bandyopadhay explores how Hindu society sought to maintain its cultural hegemony and structural cohesion during the colonial period by frustrating reformist endeavours, coopting challenges from the untouchables and marginalizing dissidence. Bandyopadhay offers case studies of early cultural encounters between Brahmins and the egalitarian popular religious cults of the lower castes. He examines the Hindu ?partition? campaign, which tended to appropriate autonomous Dalit politics and made Hinduism the basis of an emergent Indian identity.

The author sets the discussion in context by unravelling the power structure of Hindu society in pre-colonial and colonial Bengal and its cultural manifestations. He shows that neither the orthodox nor the reformist discourses ever properly challenged the notion of hierarchy or the hegemony of the higher castes, which was maintained by both consent and coercion. Bandyopadhay notes that in traditional Hindu society, women and Sudras were the two lowest categories, since both were denied access to Vedic religious rites.

The author dwells at length on the modernist reform movement to introduce widow remarriage in the mid-nineteenth century. He shows how it failed in Bengal because of the popular fear of losing caste. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the prohibition on widow remarriage had gained in strength among the Dalit and backward castes as a result of Sanskritization ? the process through which Brahminical culture was universalized.

Bandyopadhay examines the role of Vidyasagar as a crusader for widow remarriage which brought him into conflict with the traditionalist elite. For the latter, the issue had become a ?fight for a symbol of authority and domination against rationalist modernity?. To lose the battle would mean the destruction of that ?massive chain? which had ensured their hegemony.

The author argues that the ideological ambivalence of the reforms, which stood at the crossroads between modernity and tradition, weakened them. Vidyasagar operated within the ideological and functional boundaries imposed by the dominant power structure of Hindu society. ?Herein lay the roots of his tragedy, his ideological or we might say the reasons for the unavoidable defeat of his reform movement.?

Not many, however, would subscribe to such a view. Vidyasagar?s pioneering role in the area of social and educational reforms ? he stood up against child marriage, polygamy and untouchability and was an ardent promoter of female education ? cannot be ignored.

Bandyopadhay analyzes the reactionary customs and practices prevalent among Hindus in colonial and pre-colonial Bengal. The growing popularity of dowry had a contrary effect on the age of marriage for women. As the demand for dowry increased, girls remained unmarried until a comparatively late age, bringing ritual infamy and social disgrace on their families. Some caste journals even reported an increase in the number of suicides among young women.