At least half-a-dozen learned papers have been written on the subject, in respected journals like The Economic and Political Weekly. There are a dozen different opinions about caste politics in Bengal. There are no easy conclusions. The Mahasabha was founded in the s in Faridpur, now Bangladesh, to oppose Brahminical oppression. Soon enough, it fractured into many groups: after Partition, Namoshudras crossed the border and were warmly received by Congress and Left regimes as captive vote banks.
None of this explains why east of Jharkhand there is no caste-based political party. Ray has a few interesting things to say about caste in Bengal. One, the Aryan caste Hindu system did not travel to Bengal till very late, probably around the 13th century.
Two, the tale about Bengali Brahmins being descendants of Kannauj is rubbish. The surname of our current chief minister is derived from the village called Bandya. Only three of eight chief ministers were Brahmins.
The longest-serving chief minister, Jyoti Basu — who ruled for 23 years and days — was an upper Kayasth called Vaidya, a caste that exists only in Bengal, associated with medicine and healing. Parenthetically, Amartya Sen, more admired than read or understood by Bengalis, is also Vaidya.
A very wicked politician called Atulya Ghosh called the shots in Bengal Congress for a very long time. Let that pass. As Niharranjan Ray says it, by the time Aryans reached Bengal, they were probably exhausted and out of steam.
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Related articles in Google Scholar. Citing articles via Google Scholar. Instantly, there is a rush of transcontinental and transgenerational biradari that rivals the camaraderie of the Scottish clans. Such esprit de corps is probably what inspired an indefatigable Boddi, Tribhanga Mohan Sen Sharma, to compile a genealogical tree of all Baidyas, calling it Kuladarpanam.
Listed in painstaking detail was every Boddi and ancestral village up to the s. That cleaned him out and the other manuscripts were consigned, it is believed, to a trunk for another day. But that day never came and the manuscripts have apparently disintegrated in the ensuing decades, so only the Sengupta volume survives —that too, very few copies. As there are only four main surnames, and specific places in Bengal — east and west —where they settled, every Baidya family married a Sengupta at some point in the innumerable generations since the legendary Baidya king Ballal Sen ruled Bengal in the 11th century.
So, with some assiduous digging, it is possible for intrepid Boddis to find common ancestors — if they get hold a copy of Kuladarpanam, that is. Trust three other genealogically inclined, NRI Baidyas — probably unrelated, but it cannot be certain — to make it their minor mission to preserve the tome for posterity and enable wider dissemination among interested Boddis.
One got his family volume photographed page by page.
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