India's first bastion of gentility

The period between 1848 and 1885 in Bengal was marked by an upheaval that led to significant social changes. In less than forty years, the quality of public discourse saw a dramatic transformation.

For instance, the debate on the status of women in society changed from whether they should be burnt as widows to whether a widow could be remarried and on how much stress should be laid on women's education.

The spread of education in any case was rapid. And this process was undoubtedly aided by the Indian Railways and the Indian postal service, which started during this period and spread to other regions of the sub-continent.

Tithi Bhattacharya chooses this period to explore the class identity of the Hindu bhadraloks of Bengal who rose to provide intellectual leadership to this movement for change.

Who are the bhadraloks of Bengal? What is their class composition? And what drove them to play a central role in nationalist mobilisation and struggle for independence? These are some of the questions Bhattacharya tries to answer.

Her answers may not satisfy you all the time, but she has made valuable contribution to understanding the class identity of bhadraloks and their role in India's nationalist movement.

Her explanation for choosing the period covered in the book is significant. "The two dates (1848 and 1885) are not in themselves absolute historical benchmarks. They are merely more dramatic sequential points of a broader process of historical development," she writes.

In 1848, the Union Bank collapsed, in which most prominent families of Calcutta lost their wealth. This prompted a further shift in their future investment pattern.

This also gave rise to the bhadraloks - as a class of professionals involved in businesses such as printing and education. And in 1885, she notes, the Indian National Congress was formed.

The formation of the Congress was an expression of an ideological process that was spurred by the bhadraloks and eventually led to the country's liberation about 60 years later.

Bhadraloks have often been seen as a mix of a landed rentier class and the petty bourgeoisie. According to such belief, the bhadraloks accorded great importance to education and yet indulging in education or literary occupations for them was not a matter of necessity. Education was not meant to get them a job, but to help them assert their social identity. A subtle reference is often made to the bhadralok's lack of control over the means of production.

They may not have exercised control over investment and resource allocation, but certainly enjoyed "operational control", which essentially meant that the bhadraloks could influence "decisions within a framework laid down by those with strategic control".

Yet, Bhattacharya argues that bhadraloks were not "incipient bourgeoisie". This is a different take on the class identity of the bhadraloks in Bengal. Post-colonial theorists have argued that the bhadraloks used culture as an instrument of protest against the colonial state power.

Marxist historians, on the other hand, have contended that the bhadraloks were a bourgeoisie, but lacked the kind of economic power that could have helped them challenge the colonialists.

According to Bhattacharya, the bhadraloks belonged to rural Bengal and their occupation ranged from lawyers, doctors, government officials, to teachers.

In villages, the bhadraloks wielded considerable influence, but colonialist policies gradually undermined those powers which prompted them to migrate to Calcutta.

But this gave rise to an even more complex problem for the bhadraloks. Even though their education and deep understanding of the political economy helped them come out with powerful critiques of colonial power, they had no instruments of direct and effective action at their disposal.

Since they had no control or influence over any production processes, their protests remained confined only to their speeches and writings.

It is here that Bhattacharya seeks to establish a close connection between the rural agrarian economy and the bhadraloks. In the absence of a substantial working class in the cities, the bhadraloks depended on the peasantry in their movements against colonialism.

It is important to bear in mind that the bhadraloks even after migration to urban centres maintained close links with villages. The bhadraloks used peasants and the threat of immobilising the rural economy as an instrument of protest against colonialism.

This is a new dimension that Bhattacharya brings to light in the evolution of bhadraloks as an instrument of change and protest against colonialism.

The book has an interesting section on the age-old conflict between Chalit Bangla (spoken Bangla) and Sadhu Bangla (erudite Bangla). The birth of Bangladesh as an independent nation has by now established the efficacy of language and culture as a protest movement to wrest political power.

But even as early as the late nineteenth century, Bengal was witness to a tussle over language. The established literary giants were in favour of retaining the use of Sanskritised Bangla for education and even literature.

But the bhadraloks launched a successful movement against the heavily Sanskitised Sadhu Bangla. It was obvious that such a movement further strengthened the bhadraloks' position as harbingers of social change in nineteenth century Bengal.

The only problem with the book is that this is an expanded and modified form of the author's Ph D dissertation""a fact that becomes a major obstacle to its readability.

Numbered footnotes on almost every printed page of the book may have enhanced its authenticity as a Ph D thesis, but is a major distraction for a reader.

The author could have easily placed all the footnotes at the end of the book in a special section, or judicious editing could have rendered most of them redundant.

The Sentinels of Culture
Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal

Tithi Bhattacharya
Oxford University Press
Price: Rs 595;
Pages: xiii+272