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1 Keywords in South Asian Studies, Ed. Rachel M. Dwyer Author 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
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