Return of the Bhadralok: the Agrarian Environment and the Nation

Abstract

Historians of modern Bengal have tended to settle the bhadralok squarely in the urban milieu, implying a gradual decline of their rural connections in the late colonial period. This attenuated position of the bhadralok in the historiography of agrarian Bengal — East Bengal in particular — is qualified by the discourse of the ‘rich peasant’. These better-off peasants are considered to have formed the dominant group in the countryside by virtue of a peasant ‘autonomy’, which was too strong for the bhadralok to break.1 It is suggested that this trend strengthened following the mobilization of the bhadralok into anticolonial resistance in the mofussals, particularly after the first partition of Bengal in 1905. Some of those who were supposed to have remained in the countryside also made their way to the towns following the depression of the 1930s, others followed in 1947.2