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| Sudeshna Banerjee expounds on Bengali middle-class fears in late colonial Calcutta. |
On the afteroon March 7, Sudeshna Banerjee, Associate Professor of History at Jadavpur University, Calcuutta, India, gave a special lecture entitled "Food, Frailty and "Fake Brahmins": Bengali Middle-Class Fears of Failed Hegemony in Late Colonial Calcutta.
Dr. Banerjee discussed the ways in which a dominant class, in the grips of a fear that its hegemony is failing, comes to perceive numerous ‘others’ along all imaginable ethnic divides. According to Banerjee, the class perceives its rightful space as usurped and its body invaded or ‘polluted’ by the ethnic ‘other’. And this perception may be reinforced if the hegemonic drive of the dominant group is in any way rendered vulnerable by its own self-perception of frailty.
During her talk, Dr. Banerjee referred to the Bengali Hindu middle class and its discourse of the ‘non-Bengali’ in relation to the city of Calcutta. According to Dr. Banerjee, this group had expected to hegemonize the rest of people in India in its professed role as the natural leaders of the (anti-colonial) nation. However, the developments of the period from the mid-1910s to the 1940s somehow bred a premonition among the class that this hegemony was failing.
Dr. Banerjee’s talk explained the way this premonition reflected in the class’s feeling of being spatially dislodged by the ‘non-Bengali’, even while it somehow translated into the representation of certain specific ‘non-Bengali’ occupational groups as invading, enfeebling and ‘polluting’ the Bengali middle-class body.
Dr. Banerjee discussed the ways in which a dominant class, in the grips of a fear that its hegemony is failing, comes to perceive numerous ‘others’ along all imaginable ethnic divides. According to Banerjee, the class perceives its rightful space as usurped and its body invaded or ‘polluted’ by the ethnic ‘other’. And this perception may be reinforced if the hegemonic drive of the dominant group is in any way rendered vulnerable by its own self-perception of frailty.
During her talk, Dr. Banerjee referred to the Bengali Hindu middle class and its discourse of the ‘non-Bengali’ in relation to the city of Calcutta. According to Dr. Banerjee, this group had expected to hegemonize the rest of people in India in its professed role as the natural leaders of the (anti-colonial) nation. However, the developments of the period from the mid-1910s to the 1940s somehow bred a premonition among the class that this hegemony was failing.
Dr. Banerjee’s talk explained the way this premonition reflected in the class’s feeling of being spatially dislodged by the ‘non-Bengali’, even while it somehow translated into the representation of certain specific ‘non-Bengali’ occupational groups as invading, enfeebling and ‘polluting’ the Bengali middle-class body.
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