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Although caste is a crucial reality in West Bengal, a declining Dalit movement post partition, the neglect of caste questions by the Left Front, and the failure of forging a broader Dalit solidarity due to fragmented Dalit constituencies have led to the invisibility of caste in the politics of the state. “Bengalis have no understanding of caste,” Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd once said in an interview in Kolkata (Bhattacharya 2018). Although caste has an important role in the social and political domain of West Bengal, the Bengali bhadralok does not seem to have any understanding of the role of caste. Apart from Shepherd, several other scholars have also doubted the dominant narrative of the absence of caste in West Bengal’s politics. Ashok Mitra wrote, “there must be something odd about a state which, professedly so secular and anti-sectarian, has yet not produced a single Jagjivan Ram, Kamraj, Buta Singh or Rafi Ahmed Kidwai to hold major portfolio” (Sen 2018b). ....
A. Raghuramaraju | | Published 04.01.21, 01:05 AM Institutions like the Asiatic Society of India, set up by the British in the eighteenth century, played an important role in generating knowledge about India. Unlike the traditional knowledge available in gurukuls, on palm-leaf manuscripts and other pre-printing forms, this new knowledge was modern and used modern technology. Several new educational institutions were established around this time, imparting modern knowledge with an aim to revive interest in India. More importantly, new institutions with new norms were defining how from what perspective India would be represented through the selected content. This new branch of knowledge, labelled Orientalism, later came under the careful scrutiny of postcolonial scholars like Edward Said who detected an underlying political agenda. ....