Caste as ‘Cultural Community’ and Our Literary Studies

Mrinmoy Pramanick| January 01, 2022 | Published Online

Literary Studies in India is no mono-structural site, as there is no single language or literature as Indian language or literature. Even single Indian literature carries multiple traditions of thought. Moreover, there is a significant impression of syncretism of cultures even in a single literary tradition. The process of literary production, the definition of literature, and readership differ in literary concern from one linguistic area to another. Monolingual literary disciplines are also divided into canon and periphery, dominant literary culture and marginal literary culture. The literary study in various languages shows similar concern at the surface level but in the deeper structure they are significantly different from one another. Therefore, when I write caste in association with literary studies, I deal with mainly three disciplines of literature studied in India, those are Bengali, English, and Comparative Literature.

Significant class differences are visible in the academic study of different disciplines of literature. Even a considerable class difference may be observed among the established Bengali scholars in Humanities and Social Sciences. They are primarily from urban spaces with a visible educational and cultural legacy. The kind of training one needs from school days to become a recognised scholar in Humanities and Social Sciences, perhaps our non-Calcuttan/non-urban education and the rural classes cannot provide. The Bengali culture is predominantly associated with the city of Kolkata. It is hardly visible for other linguistic states that their culture is associated or dominated by one single urban space only. This is perhaps Kolkata’s history of origin and its development as a colonial city. More significantly, Kolkata as a space of ‘renaissance’, holds an authoritative position in Bengali culture. So imbalance in utterances causes a remarkable difference between the Bengalis living in Kolkata and Bengalis residing in other districts. 

Due to the above-mentioned situations, Bengali academia of Humanities and Social Sciences is mainly dominated by upper-caste Hindus, who naturally need field notes to talk about the greater Bengalis and to represent the Bengal. The disciplines such as English and Comparative Literature are also primarily dominated by the urban elites. However, Comparative Literature is a lesser-known discipline introduced in too few universities in India. From my experience teaching in a lesser-known literary discipline, I have observed student composition in such departments is primarily upper-caste, Hindus, with few students from the SCs, STs, OBCs, and religious minorities. Students among the marginal sections also mainly come from urban spaces or colleges situated in urban regions. 

In Comparative Literature, students from any literature and social science background can join the department. In the last eight years, my department has attracted more students from Kolkata and students with English backgrounds than Bengali. The majority of the students of Bengali literature are from rural Bengal, though a large number of them enrolled in the colleges of Kolkata. They are primarily from the lower-middle-class society, and their reason for doing a Master’s degree is to get a teaching profession in government or government-sponsored schools. Bengali and English departments across the state face comparatively lesser students taking admission in the undergraduate programs. Many admitted students are irregular in classes, but they do not cancel their entry to access different availing scholarships. Such deterioration in students’ attraction towards literary studies may be because of various social disillusionments. One of those may be the irregularity in the School Service Commission’s annual recruitment examination, held regularly between 1999 and 2010. 

Decreasing the number of PhD seats and vacant teaching positions in literary disciplines is one of the reasons for such disillusionments also. The students I am talking about are primarily from the generation who have to take responsibility for their parents and family. They have less cultural and social capital to find a new direction of academic study and job. This section of students comes from a so-called lower caste, backward classes, and rural spaces. They comprise the larger classroom area of any humanities and social science discipline in colleges across West Bengal but are gradually lost in the visionless economic and academic struggle.   

The entire process of canon formation in literary study is the systematic exclusion of lower caste and indigenous people. The literary canon is also a powerful mode to reestablish the hierarchy. The power may be the power of the state or economic policy or philosophical ideologies of the dominant class of a given society. As Ganesh Devy stated in his ‘ History and Literary History ‘, learned society defines what is to be learned, how to be learned, and the learning process. This defining power of the learned society, which is urban and upper caste, also makes literary studies in India more challenging to the students from deprived sections. As a teacher of Comparative Literature, I have rare opportunity to teach the students of English and Bengali departments also besides other Indian languages departments such as Urdu, Arabic, and Persian, I have observed that the English students from rural areas always complain against English curriculum or there is a lack of appreciation to it, that they did not offer any such courses whose origin is known to them. When they take a course from Indian Literature, they find some authority or comfortability to engage themselves in a discussion. Similarly, students of Bengali discipline from different castes also share their views about the absence of cultural components from their space of origin in the curriculum. 

The fundamental unique identity of a community is associated with their indigenous culture. Such communities hereafter will be recognised as ‘cultural communities’. I mean diverse groups of people in a greater linguistic community by the phrase cultural community. For example, Bengalis in different regions have survived with various cultural elements and codes. These communities are so distinct in their articulation that sometimes if they do not inherit mainstream language diction, they may not be communicated to the ‘Bengali’. Bengalis in Rarh Bengal, such as districts of Purulia, Bankura, West Burdwan, Jhargram, and West Midnapore; Bengalis of North Bengal, such as districts of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Jalpaiguri, Coochbehar, Alipurduar, Dinajpur, Malda or the students from Sundarban have their rich heritage of literature and culture what represents their geographical location, life and knowledge tradition. The canonisation of their mind with the knowledge of canonical literature gradually displaces them from their culture and knowledge of origin. 

Therefore, they inherit new cultural elements by having a dialogue with other communities or an imposition of a more robust culture happened to them. The class migration of individuals from a cultural community to the centre is a process of forceful canonisation of culture. Canon is dominated, centred and defined by the urban cultural spaces and utterances. In the class migration, individuals left their indigenous cultural baggages and aspirations behind. Sometimes this happens due to individual improvisation to be accommodated in the canonical spaces and sometimes due to the displacement happened from the indigenous cultural structure. The definition of learning and knowledge as defined by the canon as the general cultural identity of a greater linguistic community pushed the non-urban and non-canonical culture as ‘folk’ or ‘regional’. This continuous contestation of the marginal cultural communities with the more significant cultural imageries of the linguistic community provokes them to improvise their culture. This provocation also makes them not to recognise the indigenous culture of the cultural community as the subject of knowledge and learning. Therefore in our academic study of literature, the culture of origin of the people appear as a special area of studies as ‘folk culture’. This process of recognising cultural diversity as ‘folk’ and cultural homogeneity as the ‘culture’, is a gradual depreciation of knowledge, learning and tradition of thought with which a cultural community grew up and kept their knowledge from past to present for future images of the community. 

Something known as folk or regional is associated with means of production. The music, dance, literature, oral texts of the cultural communities come from the productive classes. These productive classes are primarily untouchables or other lower castes. As they are many in number in a given linguistic community and comprise multiple dictions of culture, they are very much complex to read by the canon. Occasional field notes taken by the authority of the canon works to some extent. But in return, canon or the academic institutions in the urban centres take the cultural communities away from the cultural codes and utterances of origin. The curriculum in Bengali Language and Literature discipline, like many others, is so urban, so canonical, so Calcuttan that the majority of the subscribers of this discipline have to struggle to be associated with their curriculum. In many regions of Bengal students of Bengali literature fail to write or pronounce the so-called standard Bangla and get the meaning of the standard vocabulary of Bangla. Many of them call their academic curriculum as urban, as they can associate neither with the standard language nor with the content of the texts offered to them. 

Only the research degrees allowed them to talk about their cultural communities in a minimal number. Therefore, bringing the caste content into the academic curriculum is not the only way for building general consciousness for making a better society, because that can be done any time by the centre or canon of literary studies in the price of shadowing the cultural communities. But what we need to do is restructure the literary history, which is necessarily a product of literary canon, and include the texts of cultural codes and utterances by the cultural communities in the academic curriculum.

Due to insufficient funds for literary studies and research, courses are also becoming difficult to pursue by the people of lower-income groups. Moreover, West Bengal, the state which fought for a long to not entertain the private investment into higher education, observes significant privatisation in the education sector, causing the closure of government or municipality schools in substantial numbers, even in the city spaces. Some government-sponsored universities even charge forty thousand rupees for admission in a research degree, whereas some of the old universities in the state charge only thousand to five thousand rupees for admission in a PhD course. Such a huge investment in PhD, without fellowship, made many literary scholars unable to work on the field-based subject, and they chose some armchair research areas. Therefore, the voice from within the cultural communities remains unheard.    

We need to restructure the literary studies in India to make it gradually more and more inclusive. First, of course, some general structural development is required. One of those is more government investment in education, which many educationists, activists, and left political parties have suggested/claimed for decades. The government’s investment in literary studies can benefit the nation in many ways. Literary studies can preserve the culture and cultural knowledge of diverse cultural communities. It can maintain language with its vocabularies, create an educated class from different communities across the country, make a shared space for dialogue among other linguistic communities in India, and last but most importantly, help nation-building more competently. The curriculum for literary study even in a single literature discipline, also should not be uniform across the departments in universities and colleges. The curriculum of literary studies should be moulded as per the requirement of the inclusion of cultural communities of the institution’s location. More people and content from deprived castes may be included into the literary studies as practitioners, if we can do so. Such initiative can develop the culture, community and knowledge as a site to breathe peacefully. 

A more secondary known discipline shows the lesser scope of the job and naturally lesser example of success is publicly known. As a result disciplines like Comparative Literature or any other interdisciplinary studies, due to lack of their ‘public life’ cannot extend beyond the boundary of urban elites. The economic support and certainty one needs to pursue courses in lesser known discipline is barely accessible by the people of lower social order. People requires growing skills and art of expression in English in different capacity to acquire a space, if not survive, in Humanities, Social Sciences, English and any other Interdisciplinary studies. Infrastructural limitations in primary and secondary education and the economic struggle of the students does not offer them a luxury of investing more time and receiving support of tools for sharping their skills in any particular subject of study in Humanities and Social Sciences. However, a good laboratory in a school and college can prepare a good student of science. Therefore, a significant number of Bengalis, as students and researchers, from rural or semi-urban lower income group are found in national level institutions. Whereas, Bengalis in Humanities and Social Sciences in the institutes of national importance are mainly from Kolkata or neighbouring urban spaces. 

Once a student, when asked by me, why she did not read the novel prescribed to the class, she replied with her daily routine, and I found it difficult to get a longer and continuous time for reading for her. She emphasizes about hostel facility, if she would have offered, might not face such problems. I do not generalise her situation, but her experience is only a symptom of many such infrastructural limitations. During lockdown in 2020, I met quite a few research scholars of state universities, who informed about their everyday struggle for livelihood, as they had not been receiving their state fellowship for long. Even with the state fellowship, our researchers in Humanities and Social Sciences more specifically can not bear regular cost of living. They go with research and simultenouesly they find other means of livelihood. The students I am talking about are mostly from lower income group or from lower castes. 

In India, there are lesser scope of getting fellowships other than UGC-JRF, for a researcher in literature. Such economic difficulties faced by our researchers, shadowed their academic visions. Although they represent different cultural communities and have/had greater possibilities to contribute more adequetly in knowledge system to strengthen polyphony of Indian culture.  

As I teach in a lesser known, interdisciplinary discipline of literary studies, we face several questions before the yearly post-graduate admission: what one can do after studying in this literature discipline. My answer is that getting a government job other than teaching is as difficult to you as to the students of other literature disciplines. But you have to fight a lot if you want to get a job as a teacher at any level. Gradual uncertainty in getting a government job and a gradual decrease in the conduct of examinations for the government job is also one of the reasons people are getting disillusioned about literary studies, particularly and humanities and social sciences in general. Most of the students in Bengali and English disciplines come from lower-middle-class families or families without a member working as government employee. This group of students target government employment and sincerely do their literary studies inside and outside the academic discipline till their post-graduation. They target few government jobs and teaching as a profession. But in the last decade or so, as teachers, many of us have observed detachment of this class from outside academic practices like writing and discussing newly published books or articles in little magazines. When we talk to the students from such groups, they often express their disillusionment about literary studies as they cannot find any structural destination about what to do after completing the course. If private sectors appear as only future site of employment, we should stop behaving as popular nationalist and should begin celebrating the capitalist individual both in our academic and public spaces. We also should stop feeling proud about something called plurality of Indian culture, as it may be perished very soon by replacing the concern of representation of cultural communities in public life by the concern of economic goals and achievements in the terms and idioms of the private investments.   

Before arguing with the system and power, I was thinking if we can work now to reshape our literary studies from within! In our existing structure of literary studies, we can introduce courses like creative writing where students can write or talk about their situations and as a representative of cultural communities. Many of the Dalit and tribal communities are yet to write their words. If such courses are introduced and offer the freedom to write about themselves, the literary study can be inclusive and produce new knowledge and vocabulary every day. PodCast, as a mode of expression and broadcasting, can also be introduced in schools, colleges, and universities as a community radio to offer different cultural communities a space of their authority.  

About Author

Dr Mrinmoy Pramanick is a faculty at the Department of Comparative Indian Language and Literature, University of Calcutta