The Limits of Cultural-Economic Explanations of Ethnic Phenomenon: The Case of West Bengal

Abstract

At the crossroad of seventy-five years of India’s experiment with Democracy, several expressions of ethnic identity politics have bloomed in various parts of the nation. The discontent around the notion of Development being ‘unequal’ and ‘unfair’ to some, demands of separate statehood remain visible with varied strength of organisation. West Bengal was no far from the currents of such demands of smaller states based on the rationale of deprivation on cultural and economic grounds. However, the history of West Bengal depicts that the cosmopolitan development of cultural milieu since 19th Century Bengal Renaissance has been much accommodative and on the contrary on political frontiers Bengal has always unique to stand aside the mainstream politics of nationalism in pre-independence period and in conceiving a provincial government not in political alignment to the political party in the power of the Central Government, that caused major deprivations on economic allocations between the Centre and the State. Therefore, any demand of separate state from West Bengal can be refuted on the essential rationale of cultural cosmopolitanism and economic deprivation of West Bengal by the Central Government. The present paper analyses both these rationale with elaborate reference to scholastic explanations already approached.