
The Bengali bhadralok (literally gentlemen) emerged as a distinct group in the 19th-century colonial Bengal, dominating British administrative jobs, land resources and literary cultural production. This group distinguished itself from the rest of the society by its deportment, speech, dress, style of housing, eating habits, occupations, and cultural values (Broomfield, 1968, pp. 5-6). The reason this group was so successful in the immediate context of British colonial conquest, climbing the ranks of British bureaucracy, acquiring landed property in cities, towns and villages, producing literary geniuses like Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore and social reformers like Ram Mohan Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, was its class habitus.
So far, historians have attributed the success of the Bhadralok to their collaboration with the British masters, their conversion of landed property into urban wealth in the changed land relations of late 18th century, their higher caste status, and their ready adoption of English. However, the role of the Bhadralok’s class habitus, which the Bhadralok was able to successfully employ in the shifting colonial context of the 19th century, resulting in their monopolisation of jobs and the public sphere, has seldom been noted.
Bourdieu (1977) argues that the “structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions” (p. 80). What were the structures and material conditions of existence prior to the crystallisation of Bengali elite in the 19th century, which led to the creation of the Bhadralok habitus? The Bhadralok were drawn primarily from three higher castes in the region — Brahmin, Baidya and Kayastha (in descending order of their ritual status in the caste hierarchy), a fact that has been emphatically shown by Jawhar Sircar (2019). Sircar (2019) proves that when the East India Company dispensed with its merchant caste allies in 1753 with a new class of clerical assistants, the individuals it employed all hailed from the above-mentioned three castes (p. 1). The reason for this was that these castes were known for their literacy, knowledge production and scribal past, having served in the courts of Muslim and Hindu rulers in the precolonial times (Broomfield, 1966, p. 2). Since they were higher in the caste hierarchy and de facto landlords in the villages, they could command respect among the general populace and force British orders on the lower castes.
Adoption of English education
When serving for the Hindu and Muslim rulers, knowledge of Sanskrit and Persian respectively was paramount. When the power moved in the hands of the British, Western education and the knowledge of English became compulsory for entry into the colonial administration, a fact that was immediately grasped by the Bhadralok. But a question can be asked: Why didn’t the lower castes take to education similarly?
Bourdieu (1977) states that since the dispositions durably inculcated by objective conditions engender aspirations and practices objectively compatible with those objective requirements, the most improbable practices are excluded. Agents engage in conscious and subconscious evaluation of their potential moves, deciding which decisions or practices are likely to result in success and which will result in failure, or which ones are at all possible to undertake. At a deeper level, agents summon the “unconscious principles of the ethos,” their class habitus, to determine which conduct of theirs is a “reasonable ” or “unreasonable” endeavour (p. 85).
The Bengali lower caste masses who engaged in farmwork and other menial jobs and who had no history of literacy or schooling, could not convince themselves that English education and the clerical job it promised was for the likes of them. “If I have no money for travel, I have no need, i.e. no real and self-realizing need, to travel. If I have a vocation to study, but no money for it, I have no vocation to study, i.e. no real, true vocation,” Bourdieu (1977) quotes Marx as saying in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (p. 85). The fact that the schools were very few in number in Bengal in the early 19th century and the fees were unaffordable for the masses, meant that the Bengali lower castes had no need, i.e., no real and self-realising need, to study. Broomfield (1968) notes,
The educational system was costly and exclusive. It was controlled by the bhadralok primarily in the interest of the bhadralok. And for those non-bhadralok who did get the necessary education, there was still the formidable task of securing employment and reasonable promotion in offices under the regime of high-caste bara babus (chief clerks), for whom the exercise of patronage or outright nepotism was the accepted rule. (p. 9)
On the other hand, Bhadralok had consolidated their landed properties and become a rentier class drawing their income from the land as absentee landlords. Banking on their disposition towards learning, they flocked to elite educational institutions like the Hindu College and Sanskrit College in Calcutta, which guaranteed them plum posts in the British bureaucracy. This aristocratic class helped the less fortunate among their castes by offering them accommodation and food in their houses in the city and funding their education. The Bhadralok did not think that getting English education and landing a clerical job as a fantastical idea. Rather, it must have felt natural to them considering how many of their brethren had already achieved it or were on the way to doing so.
“The class habitus is nothing but [the] experience (in its most usual sense) which immediately reveals a hope or an ambition as reasonable or unreasonable, a particular commodity as accessible or inaccessible, a particular action as suitable or unsuitable,” argues Bourdieu (1990, p. 5). Sumit Sarkar (2009) says that the Bengali middle class took to Western (aka English) education in a big way since such education had become indispensable for the respectable professions of lawyer, doctor, teacher, journalist, writer, government official, or clerk (p. 169). By the end of the 19th century, Bhadralok had made a great progress in English education, practically monopolising all administrative jobs available to the indigenous population (the top tier was occupied by the Europeans and Eurasians). According to the 1901 census of India, while the average male literacy in English was less than one percent in general population, the same figure for the Brahmins was 15.7 percent, for Baidyas 30.3 percent and 14.7 percent for Kayasthas. The census also notes that “amongst the lower castes, who form the great bulk of the population, there are practically none who are acquainted with English” (Broomfield, 1968, p. 9). The same census also states that the triumvirate of Brahmins, Baidyas and Kayasthas, which had a population of 5.2 percent in Bengal, held 80.2 percent of the high government appointments (Broomfield, 1968, p. 10).
Separation from the masses
As the number of printing presses grew in Calcutta in the first half of the 19th century, the Bhadralok started publishing pamphlets and periodicals. It was in these early stages of print culture that the term Bhadralok emerged as a self-ascriptive label. Thus, we find the word Bhadralok appearing in all three Bengali newspapers of the 1820s — Samachar Darpan, Sambad Kaumudi and Samachar Chandrika (Mukherjee, 1975, p. 230). The crystallisation of Bhadralok identity simultaneously points to the recognition by the group of its common class habitus as well as its need to differentiate itself from the masses to maintain its class distinction. This distinction was again achieved by deploying two complementary strategies: (a) pursuing white-collar jobs, English education, and literary production; and (b) keeping the masses away from these fields and developing a ‘taste’ separate from them.
Bourdieu (2010) argues that social identity is defined and asserted through difference (p. 167). The one key way the Bhadralok separated themselves from the masses was by their contempt for manual labour. Even though they owned land, they themselves did not work on it. Their ideal occupation was a white-collar job in the British administration and if that was not attainable, they would earn income on land by delegating agricultural tasks to their lower caste farmhands, limiting themselves to supervisory role. “The basic and most rigidly maintained distinction between bhadra and abhadra, between high and low, the respectable and the others, was the bhadralok’s abstention from manual labor and their belief in the inferiority of manual occupations,” opines Broomfield (1968, p. 6). Ghosh (2016) corroborates saying that the bhadralok was taken to be one who did not do manual work but was otherwise engaged in the landlord’s office, in government service, or earned his living as a teacher, lawyer or as an office-worker (p. 13).
The Bhadralok further distinguished themselves by their education and ‘superior’ literary taste. The British government in the 19th century spent a large amount of money on higher education, the beneficiary of which were the Bhadralok. When the British bureaucrats tried to democratise education by allocating more funds for primary education, they faced immense opposition from the Bhadralok (Acharya, 1995, p. 670). Surprisingly, one of the detractors of the British efforts was Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, one of the greatest social reformers of Bengal who fought for widow remarriage and set up several schools across the region to educate the masses.
“An impression appears to have gained ground both here and in England, that enough has been done for the education of the higher classes and that attention should now be directed towards the education of the masses… An enquiry into the matter will however show a very different state of things. As the best, if not the only practicable means of promoting education in Bengal, the government should, in my humble opinion, confine to the education of the higher classes on a comprehensive scale,” he wrote in response to the government’s proposed policy. (Acharya, 1995, p. 671)
Acharya also mentions that the schools set up by Vidyasagar were Anglo-vernacular schools, which were more suited for Bhadralok children than the lower castes.
Bourdieu, in his most celebrated work, Distinction (2010), writes:
Whenever the attempts of the initially most disadvantaged groups to come into possession of the assets previously possessed by groups immediately above them in the social hierarchy or immediately ahead of them in the race are more or less counterbalanced, at all levels, by the efforts of better-placed groups to maintain the scarcity and distinctiveness of their assets. (p. 157)
It was not enough for the Bhadralok to acquire college education and proficiency in English, they also had to make sure the lower castes did not catch up with them in order to maintain their hold on white-collar jobs and other spheres of dominance. As Bourdieu (1977) argues, the cultural capital in the form of language and education that the Bhadralok possessed could easily be converted into economic capital (p. 195). This cultural capital was fortified by literary production by more distinguished among the Bhadralok who not only made available a large quantity of Bengali literature for the consumption of the literate masses but also shaped their literary taste.
Bhabanicharan Bandyopadhyay writes in his Kalikata Kamalalaya (1823),
One is a weaver, all his life he has spun his wheel and amassed a huge fortune. You think he is a bhadralok and you offer him a printed copy of the Hitopdesh [a classical Sanskrit text], what can he say to that? (Cited in Bhattacharya, 2005, p. 39)
For Bandyopadhay, a Brahmin, it was not enough that a man was rich, he should also have a certain kind of literary disposition. The fact that the author chose a weaver, someone who worked with his hand and someone who was most likely to come from a lower caste in 19th-century Bengal, as an example, cannot be dismissed as incidental. It shows the author’s awareness of which class possessed the habitus that disposed it towards engaging with high-brow literary texts.
Ghosh (2002) informs that in 1857, there were a total of 46 Bengali presses operating in Calcutta which accounted for 5,71,670 books printed for sale that year (p. 4334). However, this output included many cheaply produced copies of almanacs, mythological tales, novels, plays, and songs — the kind of literature that was suspect in the eyes of the Bhadralok and was often derided by them. The Bhadralok also developed a stylized form of Bengali through their literary production, which clearly marked their status as an elite group. Mukherjee (1975) states that the “Bengali literature was about the bhadralok —it was written by them and for them” (p. 228) and the language they evolved was highly stylized and divorced from the experiences of the masses. The bhadralok intellectuals refashioned Bengali as a rich literary language by borrowing forms and techniques from English to keep up with the changing times. The production of prose essays, histories, novels, short stories, dramas and new styles of poetry complemented the existing body of religious poetry (Broomfield, 1968, p. 10). As literacy increased among the lower castes at the turn of the century, Bhandralok distinguished themselves by their ‘superior’ Bengali dialect and ‘superior’ literary taste.
Bourdieu (2010) writes,
The dialectic of downclassing and upclassing which underlies a whole set of social processes presupposes and entails that all the groups concerned run in the same direction, toward the same objectives, the same properties, those which are designated by the leading group and which, by definition, are unavailable to the groups following, since, whatever these properties may be intrinsically, they are modified and qualified by their distinctive rarity and will no longer be what they are once they are multiplied and made available to groups lower down. (p. 159)
In conclusion, it can be seen that the Bengali Bhadralok, endowed with a distinctive class habitus, managed to monopolise higher education, which allowed it to dominate white-collar jobs as well as literary production. It further distinguished itself as an elite group by developing a stylized dialect of Bengali and a distinctive literary taste. It actively thwarted efforts to democratise education, thus limiting the chances of lower castes to compete with it for white-collar jobs. It also marked its separation from the rest of the society by staying away from menial labour and showing contempt for the ones who did. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and how it is deployed by the dominating class to distinguish itself from the dominated, helps us understand the rise of Bengali Bhadralok in relation to the lower castes in 19th-century Bengal.
References:
Acharya, P. (1995). Bengali “Bhadralok” and Educational Development in 19th Century Bengal. Economic and Political Weekly, 30(13), 670–673.
Bhattacharya, T. (2005). The sentinels of culture: Class, education, and the colonial intellectual in Bengal (1848-85). Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice (R. Nice, Trans.; 1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511812507
Bourdieu, P. (2010). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Routledge.
Broomfield, J. H. (1966). The regional elites: A theory of modern Indian history. The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 3(3), 279–291.
Broomfield, J. H. (1968). Elite conflict in a plural society; twentieth-century Bengal. University of California Press. //catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001253334
Ghosh, A. (2002). Revisiting the ’Bengal Renaissance’: Literary Bengali and Low-Life Print in Colonial Calcutta. Economic and Political Weekly, 4329–4338.
Mukherjee, S. (1975). Bhadralok in Bengali language and literature: An essay on the language of class and status. Bengal Past and Present, 95(2), 225–237.
Sarkar, S. (2009). Writing social history (8. impr). Oxford Univ. Press.
Sircar, J. (2019). The Company’s Policy & the Consolidation of the Bhadralok Castes. https://www.jawharsircar.com/images/pdf/academic-articles/02-jawhar-sircar-history-bhadralok-itihas-samiti.pdf