THERE WAS A particular kind of grief performed by English-speaking Bengali liberals on social media in the aftermath of the recent West Bengal election results, which delivered victory to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)and, with it, the first right-wing government in the Indian state’s history. It is an anguished, almost theatrical mourning, the kind that arrives wrapped in quotes from Rabindranath Tagore and accompanied by questions like: How could this happen here, of all places? The implication is clear: Bengal is different. Bengal is cultured. Bengal produced the Bengal Renaissance. Bengal has always been, at its civilisational core, secular and humane.
This grief is worth taking seriously not because the underlying narrative is correct but because it is revealing. It tells us less about what West Bengal has become and far more about a self-image that has never been adequately interrogated. To understand the current political moment, one must first understand the mirror the bhadralok – Bengal’s “gentlefolk” elite – has been holding up to itself for nearly two centuries, and the face it has consistently refused to see staring back.
BEFORE WE CAN mourn what Bengal has supposedly lost, we must ask who, precisely, we are speaking about when we invoke “Bengal” and “Bengali”. The question seems almost impertinent in its simplicity, yet the terms splinter immediately under any serious pressure.
Bengaliness, as Rizwana Shamshad has argued in her study of Bengali ethnicity and Bangladeshi migrants in West Bengal, is built on the basis of what the sociologist Anthony D Smith would call an ethnie – a named human population with shared ancestry myths, historical memories, a common language and an association with a specific homeland. By this framework, the Bengali ethnie spans the international border between West Bengal and Bangladesh, encompassing both Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority populations on either side who share language, folklore, culinary culture, kinship ties and more. Shamshad’s fieldwork found that this shared Bengaliness – linguistic, territorial and historical – frequently overrides religious difference in determining how West Bengalis perceive their Bangladeshi counterparts – a finding that complicates both the Hindu nationalist framing of Muslim Bangladeshis as “infiltrators” and the bhadralok’s assumption that Bengal’s secular identity is rooted exclusively in Hindu cultural production.