Tag Archives: Manish Thakur

Culture, Debates, Identities

Sahibs, Pandits and the Scholarship on Caste: Manish Thakur and Nabanipa Bhattacharjee

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Guest post by MANISH THAKUR and NABANIPA BHATTACHARJEE

Scholarship on caste has always been much more than merely about caste. At stake has been the very idea of India, and the production of knowledge about it. Expectedly, whenever academic knowledge on caste spills over in the public domain (and it does so often, as in the recent Ashis Nandy case), politically charged contestations about the idea of India inevitably follow. In the academy, the privileging of Brahmanical worldview in sociological discourses on India continues to be a source of deep-seated resentment. ‘Indian Critiques of Louis Dumont’s Contributions’ (Khare 2006) notwithstanding, the figure of ‘the learned Brahman’ (Alamgir 2006) looms large in the voluminous corpus of anthropological knowledge about India. So much so that Richard Burghart(1990) views modern anthropological knowledge primarily as a function of multiple dialogues between modern day anthropologists and the Brahmanical tradition of knowledge.

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Swami Sahajanand Saraswati – A Contested Legacy: Manish Thakur and Nabanipa Bhattacharjee

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Guest post by MANISH THAKUR and NABANIPA BHATTACHARJEE

Observers of the political scene in Bihar would have hardly failed to notice a renewed interest in the life and works of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati (1889-1950), the founder president of the All India Kisan Sabha, and arguably the most influential peasant leader of Bihar in the 1930s and 1940s. Over the last decade or so, his birth (22 February, 1889) and death (26 June, 1950) anniversaries have been celebrated with great pomp and show with full attendance of political luminaries of the state including Nitish Kumar, its present Chief Minister. Not only have glowing tributes been paid to his legacy but there has also been a spurt of writings on his life and times.

Swami Sahajanand Saraswati
Swami Sahajanand Saraswati

New biographiesi have been released, and his collected works been published in six volumesii. In fact, there is a Swami Sahajanand Saraswati Foundation based in New Delhi as well as a Swami Sahajanand Saraswati Forum on the internet. Curiously enough, Swami Sahajanand Saraswati figures prominently on the internet in the caste-specific web-portals such as www.bhumihar.com; www.bhumiharmahasangh.com and www.bhumihar.net where his name appears along with Bhagwan Parashuram, Chanakya, Mangal Pande, Sri Babu, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, C.P Thakur, and so forth in the long list of supposedly Bhumihar icons. Indeed, Saraswati’s legacy has always been the bone of contention between the Bhumihars and the communists. What needs explanation is the BJP’s concerted efforts in appropriating this iconic peasant leader as ‘samajik samrasta ke sant’.

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