Keywords in South Asian Studies, ed. Rachel M. Dwyer

Author: Parama Roy

Bhadralok/bhadramahila

Our understanding of the history and the sociology of nineteenth-century Bengal has been dominated by the figure/category of the bhadralok, and the related but by no means identical figure of the bhadramahila. Of all the Indian provinces Bengal, whose largest city, Calcutta, was the British imperial capital until 1911, had the longest and most sustained encounter with colonial rule and modernity. Tapan Raychaudhuri notes that Athe Bengali intelligentsia was the first Asian social group of any size whose mental world was transformed through its interactions with the West@ (Raychaudhuri, ix). An important product therefore of colonialism and its relations of production, the term bhadralok has nonetheless been somewhat difficult of definition, encompassing as it does a considerable heterogeneity with respect to social (including caste) position, relationship to commercial enterprise and bureaucracy, and intellectual and cultural values. Derived from the Sanskrit word bhadra, which has been glossed severally as refined, privileged, and propertied, bhadralok (Arespectable men,@ Agentlemen,@ generally

Hindu) were distinguished from chhotolok, or the lower orders. They were broadly divided into the abhijat bhadralok, who had acquired their fortunes in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as business agents of the British, and the grihasta or madhyabitta bhadralok, a middle- income group characterized by English education, professional occupations, and salaried (rather than entrepreneurial) status. It is the latter group that has come to be associated most powerfully with the term bhadralok. Sumit Sarkar describes them thus: AThe creators of the >new,=

>modern,= eventually >renaissance,= culture would be overwhelmingly upper caste, even if on

1 2 occasion reformist or iconoclastic. This, in its own perception, was a middle-class

(madhyasreni, madhyabitta), bhadralok world which situated itself below the aristocracy of dewans and banians but above the lesser folk who had to soil their hands with manual labour in countryside or town, and who tended to be lower caste or Muslim@ (S. Sarkar, 169).

It is important in a consideration of the bhadralok to be attentive both to the considerable heterogeneity (in terms of occupation, assets, religion, and education) of its subjects as well as to the changes in this constituency over the course of a nineteenth century marked by notable educational, economic, and juridico-political transformations. In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Calcutta, the principal trading partners of the British were a class of men who made considerable fortunes in their capacity as dewans or banians to British agency houses and the East India Company administration. A class of factors, financiers, speculators, and entrepreneurs of intermediate-caste and upper-caste (rather than exclusively upper-caste) origin, they were given to extraordinary displays of conspicuous consumption; these practices were ridiculed by Bhabanicharan Bandyopadhyay, who dubbed them the nabya (new) bhadralok in

Kalikatar Kamalalay (1823). Among the men who founded family fortunes (and the concomitant social authority) in this period that would sustain them over the course of the nineteenth century were Dwarkanath Tagore, Pearychand Mitra, and Ramcomul Sen (Keshab

Sen=s forebear). The meteoric rise of this class of Acomprador-rajas@ (Pradip Sinha, 17) could not be sustained, however, beyond the 1830s and 1840s. The financial crises of these decades, involving the collapse of the agency houses and of the Union Bank, combined with the infusion of British finance capital, had deleterious effects on Bengali financiers, and several forfeited their fortunes. In the countryside, on the other hand, Cornwallis= Permanent Settlement of 1793

3 had inaugurated a new order of landholding that would have profound implications for the one- time dewans and banians. The Permanent Settlement was a reform in the system of land taxation through which erstwhile Bengali tax collectors were created as allies of the colonial system by being named absolute proprietors of landed property whose revenues were fixed in perpetuity though without concomitant restrictions on the rent they could charge peasants/raiyats, who now became their tenants. Rural and prices rose, partly in response to this and partly as a result of the cultivation of cash crops for an export market. (Absentee landlordism, rack-renting, and disincentives to agricultural improvement were the other results of the Permanent Settlement.)

The profitability of zamindari and the decreasing opportunities for commerce in the urban areas led the more astute leading Bengali families of Calcutta to become rentiers on a substantial scale.

These were the families that would come to be known be known as the abhijat bhadralok.

The economic crisis of the second quarter of the nineteenth century led to a significant reconstellation in the constitution of the bhadralok, as well as to an expansion of its numbers. As

Asok Sen has demonstrated, colonial conditions created the bhadralok as a group that was markedly distinct from the European industrial and commercial bourgeoisie to whom they occasionally compared themselves. A colonial system of deindustrialization, a feudalized agrarian system, a dearth of institutions for technical education, discriminatory state support that disfavoured indigenous enterprise, and the dominance of British finance capital ensured the insulation of the bhadralok from many of the usual spheres of bourgeois activity and social transformation; Vidyasagar, Sen notes, was rare in his capacity to combine success in free enterprise (the publication and sale of textbooks) with intellectual pre-eminence and social reformist visibility (Sen, 133). This disjunction between its aspirations to social leadership and

4 its distance from the dynamic forms of economic production was to give a distinctively anxious and unsettled character to the bhadralok=s conception of its powers and its entitlements.

By mid-century the majority of the bhadralok had turned to bureaucratic, intellectual, and professional occupations rather than to capitalist enterprise. While a fair number of them enjoyed some rentier income through intermediate tenure holdings, these incomes (except in the case of the abhijat bhadralok) were usually too meagre to sustain respectable living standards.

Hence they turned to English education (a category that could encompass a colonial approximation of a western liberal education, complete with English-language instruction, especially at the higher levels, as well as forms that imparted only a rudimentary knowledge of

English to students), the requisite first step to the practice of bhadra (respectable) professions such as the law, teaching, medicine, journalism; it even came to be a requirement for clerical work in government and mercantile offices. The growth of positions in the bureaucratic and commercial service sectors, especially in the Asecond city of the British empire,@ also contributed to the urgency with which English education was acquired. Tales are told of the herculean efforts made by impoverished but high-caste Hindu boys to gain admission to David

Hare=s school, which was free, unlike most other schools of this ilk, which charged not inconsiderable fees. Institutions like Hare=s school and Hindu College (also founded by Hare) were to assume near-legendary status among the bhadralok of the period. Numerous other private schools and colleges were also started by them to meet this need for English education; intellectual, affective, and material investment in these educational institutions was to constitute one of the distinguishing features of the nineteenth-century bhadralok. This education, it is important to note, was more than the route to respectable employment in an environment where

5 other forms of employment were increasingly scarce. It was also a significant vehicle for the remaking of a masculine Bengali identity seeking to come to terms with a new order that was both colonial and modern.

In the course of a few decades, however, the number of bhadralok males with such an education outstripped the employment opportunities available. Wages, especially for clerical positions, fell; on the other hand of the bhadralok spectrum there were strong racial barriers to the employment of Indians in higher ranks. There was widespread anxiety about the phenomenon of educated unemployed bhadralok youth from the 1880s onward. Even as gifted a young man as Vivekananda experienced considerable difficulty in securing employment after his father=s death in 1884, notwithstanding his degree from Scottish Church College. Sumit Sarkar usefully reminds us that a scholarly focus on the best-known and most successful of the bhadralok men of the nineteenth century--those most identified with modern culture and social reform--has deflected our attention from the much larger numbers of high-caste yet far less successful members of this fraternity: Adeclining traditional literati, school or college drop-outs, obscure hack-writers, humble school-teachers, and, above all, clerks (kerani) in government and mercantile offices@ (S. Sarkar, 172). He notes moreover that office work, one of the defining features of bhadralok masculinity in Calcutta and other urban centres, was frequently described as an unfulfilling and even degrading experience, marked as it was by racist humiliation, inadequate pay, limited mobility, and the still unfamiliar and exhausting routines of office discipline. Even the well-established among the bhadralok were not immune, though, in the colonial milieu, to the clerk=s sense of combined indignity and inadequacy; the kerani became, much as the governess had for a mid-nineteenth century Britain characterized by a string of

6 middle-class bankruptcies, a symbolically freighted figure of classed uncertainty and colonial abasement for much of the bhadralok.

It is worth noting that this bhadralok anxiety about its own inadequacies, compromises, and humiliations was a marked feature of its self-definition from its earliest moments; the babu, says Sumanta Banerjee, Ahad been a perennial butt of ridicule in the farces written by the bhadraloks all thorough the nineteenth century@ (Banerjee, 180). The term Ababu@ (an honorific traditionally reserved for Bengali males of bhadra origin) itself came to be invested at this time with a new array of denotative associations, being used by English bosses as well as by cynically inclined bhadralok commentators as shorthand for second-rateness and pomposity. Some of the most caustic satires of the nineteenth centuryBBhabanicharan Bandyopadhyay=s Kalikata

Kamalalay, Naba Babu Bilash (1825), Naba Bibi Bilash (1832), Pearychand Mitra=s Alaler

Gharer Dulal (1858), Kaliprasanna Sinha=s Hutom Pechar Naksha (1868), Michael

Madhusudan Dutt=s Ekei Ki Boley Sabhyata (1860), and, perhaps most importantly,

Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Kamalakanta (1885) and Lok Rahasya (1888), all written by bhadralok males, some of whom were scholars of European literatures and civilizationBwere directed against the more privileged members of the English-educated bhadralok and their habits of servility to the British, subservience to their wives, disregard of traditional duties, and ostentatiously Anglicized modes of deportment and consumption. These subjects also attracted the acerbic attention of the cheap presses at Bat-tala in north Calcutta, which published (in addition to a number of other kinds of texts) satirical sketches of contemporary topics. The absurd antics of the babu (and of the bibi) were favoured topics of this genre, which combined bhadralok authorship with a heterogeneous audience that included not only other bhadralok

7 subjects but also a less literate constituency of artisans and urban industrial workers. For Anglo-

Indian writers, tooBRudyard Kipling most notablyBthe babu was a contemptible (though not entirely innocuous) figure.

Notwithstanding this male bhadralok anxiety about his inferiorization there is considerable evidence of the vigorous character of male bhadralok activism in the nineteenth century. It is not possible to overlook the remarkable efflorescence in this period of new cultural forms, especially the novel, the theatre, and vernacular journalism, all conducted in a lively and eloquent though increasingly Sanskritized Bengali. In addition, bhadralok males, who prided themselves on being members of an enlightened and reforming intellectual class, applied themselves to a number of projects of social reform, many of which focused on the amelioration of the lives of high-caste Hindu women. These were often (but not invariably) significantly allied, as in the case of the religious reformist Brahmo Samaj organization, with the espousal of modern, rationalist, and at least nominally egalitarian modes of religious worship and religious congregation. (The Brahmo SabhaBlater renamed the Brahmo SamajBwas founded in 1828 by

Rammohun Roy amidst the debates on sati.) They also became among the earliest critics of what seemed to them the failed promises of British liberalism in the colonies; this culminated in the formation in 1885 of the Indian National Congress, which represented at the moment of its founding bhadralok aspirations for a more equitable dispensation for educated, modern Indians under the aegis of the British empire. Of course not all bhadralok were reformist in their orientation, notwithstanding the significant commonalities of their intellectual outlook and their sense of their economic and political interests. In fact, by the end of the century, the impetus to

8 reform had come to be trumped by a variety of nationalist and Hindu revivalist movements.

Besides, the reform movements were themselves marked in many ways by intellectual and ethical limits. Caste for instance remained obdurately entrenched among those of high-caste

Hindu origin, even those who professed Brahmoism, as did a significant residue of anti-Muslim sentiment; the lower orders were frequently associated with indecency, waywardness, and pollution; and, in the arena of gendered reform, new forms of patriarchy sometimes replaced older ones.

It is impossible to understand the bhadralok without recourse to the experience of urbanization in the nineteenth century. But the reach of the colonial administrative in smaller towns and rural areas ensured the dissemination of a bhadralok population across large parts of provincial Bengal. Some of the less well-to-do among those employed in the large cities lived in suburban towns (S. Sarkar, 170). Even in the case of bhadralok living in the big cities, there were consequential ties to the countryside. Often first-generation residents in Calcutta and

Dacca, they were bound to their villages through rentier incomes and family connections; in some cases, their family members, especially female ones, remained in the countryside. These female relatives of the bhadralok, whether resident in Calcutta or in the provinces, were the bhadramahila, and they constituted an important locus of intellectual and ethical enquiry and bhadralok reform in the nineteenth century. Spurred to a sense of crisis by the criticisms of

Utilitarian, Evangelical, and missionary commentators, who saw the degraded condition of bhadra women as symptomatic of Indian civilizational backwardness, many of the bhadralok came to re-evaluate the gendered norms of their own society. While some of the bhadralok reacted with confusion and defensiveness to colonial criticisms of the gendered arrangements of

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Bengali society, comparing the nabina (the woman of the new dispensation) unfavourably with the prachina (the woman of the old dispensation), many others--Rammohun Roy and the

Brahmo Samaj, the members of the Young Bengal group, and Vidyasagar being only the most prominent among them--insisted on the necessity for the reform of the bhadramahila=s condition. For the better part of the nineteenth century they dedicated themselves to the abolition of sati, child marriage, purdah, and kulin polygamy and to the promotion of widow remarriage, female education, sartorial reforms for women, and new norms of conjugality. But most social reforms were not put into practice in a sustained way until the second half of the century. Not surprisingly, the reformers= theoretical (and often fiercely sincere) commitment to reform was not always matched in practice, in part because of the fierce opposition of Hindu orthodox elements and in part because of their own ambivalences about reform. Their efforts at domestic reform and uplift involved some changes in familial arrangements, though generally without abrogating the bhadramahila=s subordination to and primary duty to her husband; these changes prioritized companionate marriage, restraint in the discussion of sexual matters, modern modes of housekeeping and child-rearing, gender-specific education, and a modicum of exposure to the world outside the antahpur (women=s quarters). These efforts were combined with a commitment to redefining the role of the bhadramahila, and to making her into the suitably refined and enlightened helpmate of the bhadralok male and the informed, efficient mother of his children. The bhadramahila in her current state was not simply an object of compassion; she was also superstitious, quarrelsome, ignorant, and vulgar. Thus her re-definition entailed not just the positive modes of educational instruction and increased mobility in non-domestic arenas, but also her sequestration from the women of the lower orders and their culture, now perceived to be

10 disreputable, even obscene. The bhadramahila was thus targeted by a host of domestic manuals, women=s journals (such as Bamabodhini Patrika and Abalabandhab), and other inspirational and pedagogical material (some authored by women) made available by a cheap, popular, and newly available Bengali print culture.

While bhadralok reformers regarded women as the unresisting objects of affirmative action, the bhadramahila themselves had a variety of responses to the changes to which they were introduced. Some resented what they saw as their forced induction into new forms of servitude. Others among them took the initiative in pressing for reforms and seized whatever educational opportunities were available, though they did not necessarily have the investment in modernization or in civilizational uplift that was characteristic of bhadralok males. Meredith

Borthwick draws attention to the fact that the bhadramahila=s commitment to reform was usually a far riskier proposition than that of her male partner sinceBunlike him--she had no means of escape from the orthodox environs in which she lived (Borthwick, 44). Among the bhadramahila, reform came earliest and easiest to Brahmo women, since in important ways bhadramahila norms were initiated by Brahmo reformers and identified with Brahmo women

(Borthwick, 54). Brahmos took the lead in moderating female seclusion and raising the marriage age for girls and boys; they came eventually to permit a limited degree of choice in selecting marriage partners. These freedoms were coupled with Areformed,@ modest forms of dress and a puritanical code of behaviour that marked the superiority of Brahmo women to an unreformed and sexually indelicate orthodox Hindu sorority. Brahmo women were among the first to avail themselves of new educational opportunities for their sex; the first graduates of Calcutta

University were Brahmo and Christian women; one of them was Kadambini Ganguly, the first

11 woman to receive a medical degree from Calcutta University. While there was considerable debate about the instructional systemsBhome education, zenana education, or education in schools (missionary and secular)Band curricula that were suitable for the education of girls and women, female education itself came to be endorsed by both liberal and conservative factions among bhadralok intellectuals. Most of these reforms and debates sought to produce the bhadramahila as an idealized figure of a fundamentally Indian/Bengali rather than European modernity.

It was not until early in the twentieth century that the term bhadralok came to be applied to an educated Muslim middle class; in the nineteenth century Muslim elites had been denominated as ashraf. Sonia Amin links the question of nomenclature to the complicated question of elite Bengali Muslim identity (Amin, 6). The modernization of this sector of the

Bengali Muslim community in the twentieth century involved a process of indigenization, a turn from a North Indian-identified education in Urdu or Persian to the use of a newly Sanskritized

Bengali as the language of polite discourse. The Muslim gentlewoman, earlier described as

Abegum sahib@or Abibi saheba,@ became a bhadramahila under this new indigenist turn. Like their Brahmo and Hindu counterparts, Muslim bhadralok at the turn of the century were the recipients of English education and drawn from the ranks of administrative, educational, and judicial service personnel and the intermediate ranks of landholders. What is known as the

Muslim Awakening was influenced profoundly both by Brahmo developments and by the language of a rationalist and liberal Islam that emanated from Aligarh. Its modes of modernization had a substantial gendered component, and its reformist impulses were deployed against polygamy, child marriage, and extreme forms of purdah and in favour of women=s

12 education. Perhaps even more than in the case of the Brahmos, education and literature were the privileged sites for the staging of the AWoman Question@ among the Bengali Muslim bhadralok.

Sometimes the same figures were associated with both endeavours. The most redoubtable of these figures was of course Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a writer, educationist, and social theorist of rare gifts. But there were others such as Nawab Faizunessa Chaudhurani, who was both a pioneer in establishing schools for girls in Comilla and the author of Rupjalal (1876), the first full-length book by a Bengali Muslim woman (Amin, xiii).

The movement from ashraf to bhadralok/bhadramahila status of an educated, salaried, and professional Muslim community in Bengal can be said to marked a signal moment in the normalization of what was at least as much an ethos or a world-view as it was a class/status position. While bhadralok values permeate Bengali society today, the histories of that odd couple, the bhadralok and the bhadramahila, are primarily nineteenth- and early-twentieth century histories. In the current moment they feature as leading figures not in any domain of public culture but as an object of continuing critical fascination and critique, especially for scholars of Bengal (to the point that the Subaltern Studies project has been named as ABankim and bhadralok studies@ by one exasperated critic). Might it be exaggerating too much to suggest that the bhadralok, as a figure of simultaneous privilege and subordination, assimilation and discontent, has come to be the secret sharer of a post-colonial scholarship uneasily negotiating its ties with east and west?

Select Bibliography

Sonia Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876-1939 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996)

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Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth- Century Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull, 1989) Swapna Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics: Articulating Middle-Class Identity in Colonial Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) Tithi Bhattacharya, AIn the Name of Culture: Rethinking the Political Economy of the Bhadralok in Bengal,@ South Asia Research 21.2 (2001) Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849-1905 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) John Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth-Century Bengal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968) Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) Malavika Karlekar, Voices From Within: Early Personal Narratives of Bengali Women (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991) Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995) David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979) John McGuire, The Making of a Colonial Mind : A Quantitative Study of the Bhadralok in Calcutta, 1857-1885 (Canberra: Australian National University, 1983) S.N. Mukherjee, ABhadralok and Theirs DalsBPolitics of Social Factions in Calcutta, c. 1820- 1856,@ in The Urban ExperienceBCalcutta, ed. Pradip Sinha (Calcutta: Riddhi-India, 1987), 39- 58. Ghulam Murshid, Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Women to Modernization, 1849- 1905 (Rajshahi: Rajshahi University, 1983) Bharati Ray, ed. From the Seams of History: Essays on Indian Women (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995) Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth-Century Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988) Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997) Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001) Sibnath Sastri, Ramtanu Lahiri, Brahman and reformer: a history of the renaissance in Bengal; from the Bengali of Pandit Sivanath Sastri, ed. Sir Roper Lethbridge (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1907) Asok Sen, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and His Elusive Milestones (Calcutta: Riddhi-India, 1977) Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The AManly Englishman@ and the AEffeminate Bengali@ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995) Pradip Sinha, Calcutta in Urban History (Calcutta: Firma KLM Private Ltd., 1978)