India - West Bengal: Swapan Dasgupta on the explosion of political Hindutva, as personified by the Ram Navami celebrations

The Telegraph, April 05, 2018

Discernible shifts: The popularity of Ram Navami can be attributed to larger cultural changes
Swapan Dasgupta

Many observers, particularly those dependant on the media for their sources of information, may have been completely taken aback by the sectarian clashes in West Bengal that ensued in the wake of the Ram Navami celebrations on March 25. Although the scale of the violence and the loss of life were not staggering - judged by the permissive yardstick of riots in northern and western India - the mere fact that they took place in West Bengal has occasioned surprise for two reasons.

First, there is a stereotype of West Bengal as a region marked by inter-religious harmony. Political violence is endemic in the state but clashes involving different religious communities, though not entirely absent, are infrequent. Indeed, although Bengal was the scene of some of the worst communal rioting prior to Independence, including the massacres that followed the Muslim League's Direct Action Day in August 1946, the nature of political violence changed significantly in recent decades. One of the most significant achievements of the Left Front in its three decades of political dominance was to put a lid on old-style Hindu-Muslim violence. In her second term, Mamata Banerjee appears to have presided over a regression.

Secondly, while Ram Navami is an important festival in the Ganga belt, it has traditionally not been an important Hindu festival— except among some Hindi-speaking communities in urban clusters - in West Bengal. Indeed, it was only in 2017 that there were reports of Ram Navami being widely celebrated as a street festival. There were expectations that this year's celebrations would be on an even larger scale - an idea that was pooh-poohed by those who have taken it upon themselves to interpret Bengali culture to the outside world. Indeed, Ram Navami last month was quite widely celebrated in the mofussil and the smaller towns of West Bengal. Although the celebrations may have had a measure of religiosity, they also involved the mobilization and participation by political parties, notably the ruling Trinamul Congress and its foremost challenger, the Bharatiya Janata Party. Indeed, it would seem that in many cases, the political dimension - involving both parties - overrode the veneration for Lord Ram.

Whether it is politics or faith, the sudden explosion of Ram Navami celebrations in West Bengal over the past two years, including in district towns where there is no significant community of Hindi-speaking people from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, has been seen as contrived. A retired bureaucrat with a deep interest in Bengal's indigenous traditions has, for example, found it interesting - although he probably meant curious - "to note how gods from the 'rest of India'- a typically regional parlance - are being imported and pressed into service in Bengal to heat up the sweltering month of Chaitra." To him, "under threat is the traditional Bengali worship of the benign Basanti Durga and the beautiful local Annapurna and even the powerful folk goddess, Shitala Ma, as their festivals are overshadowed by aggressive gods from the upper reaches of the Ganga."

While the bid to project the growing popularity of Ram Navami - and its attendant worship of weapons - as a facet of a conflict between 'little' and 'great' traditions of the Hindu inheritance is interesting, it assumes that the forms of worship and even the marketplace of deities are unchanging. Such a presumption seems historically questionable, considering that the Hindu faith is non-doctrinaire and prone to the vicissitudes of an unstated marketplace where devotees call the shots. In Bengal, the biggest shift has been witnessed in the celebration of Durga Puja in the past 150 years. What was once the preserve of rich zamindars and merchants in their private thakurdalan has evolved into the bustling community pujas, marked by corporate sponsorship and political patronage, of today. Likewise, many of the old minor deities such as Shitala have been edged out and even public festivals such as charak— which the British rulers found gruesome and abhorrent - are now a rarity.

Bengal is not the only state to have seen the eclipse of little traditions and the rise of 'manufactured' traditions. In Maharashtra, for example, Lokmanya Tilak sought to popularize the Ganesh festival as a form of Hindu solidarity and consolidation towards the beginning of the 20th century. His objectives were explicitly political. In the process, however, the worship of exclusively Maharashtrian deities such as Vitthal got overshadowed.

To attribute such contemporary shifts in West Bengal to political developments alone may fit a narrative that projects the state as a syncretic - and, by implication, accommodative - citadel resisting the tide of Hindu narrow-mindedness and exclusivist attitudes and has a political logic. It might even correspond to the subtext of Banerjee's plank that West Bengal must resist alien encroachments in its political and cultural life, encroachments that are being masterminded by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. However, if there are greater influences from the north and west of India on Bengal, some of the responsibility must lie with Bollywood and the electronic media.

There is absolutely no doubt that everything, from fashion and food to worship, is experiencing a large measure of homogenization. Never mind the fact that Hindu traditions are largely localized, the past five decades have, for example, seen the emergence of Ganesh as a pan-Indian deity, especially among the upwardly mobile and the aspirational. Likewise, women's fashion has undergone big shifts, mostly influenced by Bollywood. The hold of Ram Navami on the popular imagination cannot be detached from the larger cultural changes that 21st-century India is experiencing. Insisting on regional authenticity in the face of market forces is touching but a shade too romantic.

At the same, there is a definite political dimension to the explosion of political Hindutva, as personified by the Ram Navami celebrations. Over the past three decades or so, there has been a steady - and relatively unacknowledged - growth in Bengali Hindu disquiet. Many factors have contributed to it -the perception of uninterrupted and organized illegal immigration from Bangladesh being a major one. The recent murmurings against the organized influx of Rohingyas from Myanmar, via Bangladesh, is significant in this context too. Overall, there has been a steady rise in what some academics call 'quiet communalism' that sees the state's minorities as being too brash, assertive and demanding.

Under the Left Front, political control was firmly vested in the CPI(M) local committees that exercised a combination of social control and petty tyranny. However, the charge that the Left had handed over political control to assertive minorities was rare. Under the Mamata Banerjee dispensation, control is not so regimented. There has been a fragmentation of power to fractious groupings within the Trinamul Congress - the rival syndicates - and, in places, to belligerent minorities. The riots in Kaliachak, Basirhat and other places over the past two years have shaken West Bengal and created an unstructured demand for local Hindu consolidation. This may explain why, despite the complete lack of any organizational structures, the BJP has occupied second place in most of the recent by-elections, edging the once mighty Communist Party of India (Marxist) into third place.

The BJP is still a long way from posing a direct challenge to Banerjee's stranglehold over political power in West Bengal. However, the fact that in both 2017 and 2018, the chief minister sought to counter the Ram Navami challenge by trying to establish her Hindu credentials is revealing. It suggests that even in the minds of those trying to forge a national, 'secular' alternative to Modi, there is an awareness that a distinctive Hindu vote bank is haphazardly emerging. It can of course be countered politically but the cultural challenge is more formidable.