Paper short abstract:

While caste is underexplored in studies of Bengali middle class, contemporary life narratives establish the opposite. Here I demonstrate that the presence of caste in the public sphere is not due to interventions by marginalised castes but is woven into ways in which middle classness is constituted.

Paper long abstract:

Caste remains underexplored in Bengal especially in relation to the post-Partition middle class. Yet, from the late 19th century till the Partition in 1947 caste in Bengal had a strong visibility particularly in middle class spaces. The question therefore naturally arises is what could have happened to caste in post-Partition West Bengal. Did Partition and communist mobilisations 'resolve' the question of caste in Bengal as has been argued by Bandyopadhyay (2011) and Chatterjee (1997) for instance? Contemporary middle class life narratives I have taken provide contested understandings of middle class and middle classness. These contestations not only facilitate the 'casteing' of Bengali middle class; they help us locate practices of caste and their intersections with other hierarchies and forms of distinction. They thereby allow us to study the production and reproduction of the middle class, the meanings attributed to becoming middle class and the different registers on which middle class identifications take place. In this paper I contend that the process(es) of becoming middle class is simultaneously a story of becoming caste/d. Description and analysis generated from contemporary data are mapped onto questions of history, the ways in which caste in public space gets to be positioned and articulated and the content that is given to it. Through these I attend to a historical and systematic exclusion of caste as a vector of analysis for Bengal. Such mappings make us look afresh at larger processes of history as well as everyday and systemic aspects of being middle class.