Ethnicization of the Rajbangsi Community in West Bengal, India

Abstract

This article traces the historical path of ethnicization of the Rajbangsi people of North Bengal from a caste-based reform movement to an ethnically aware political movement. Grounded in the theoretical model of ethnicization and Sanskritization, the research investigates how colonial categorization, ritual reinterpretation and post-colonial marginalization conditioned the Rajbangsi identity. The twentieth century Kshatriyaization movement led by Thakur Panchanan Barma was a conscious attempt at reconstituting identity through religious reform, cultural revivalism and institutional organization. Social assertion gradually developed into political mobilization, evident in the Scheduled Caste movements, the Kamatapur demand and the Greater Cooch Behar Movement-each with changing strategies of asserting legitimacy, autonomy and development within the Indian federal structure. By a qualitative historical approach, the essays argues that Rajbangsi experience is representing the cyclical process of assertion, marginalization and re-ethnicization as the defining characteristic of subaltern mobilization in eastern India. It also represents how ritual reform, caste mobility and regional nationalism came together to make a marginal group an engaged political constituency, which has far-reaching implications for grasping ethnicity, caste politics and regionalism in contemporary India.