Volume-XI, Issue-I, January 2025 |
In search of a forgotten martial Society: Group rivalry and class conflict in Bengal, 1900-1910 Debraj Ghatak, Research Scholar, Department of History, Jadunath Sarkar School of Social Sciences, Assam University Silchar, Assam, India |
Received: 01.01.2025 | Accepted: 20.01.2025 | Published Online: 31.01.2025 | Page No: 80-92 | ||||
DOI: 10.29032/ijhsss.vol.11.issue.01W.010 | |||||||
ABSTRACT | ||
On July 19th 1905, Lord Curzon, the then Viceroy of India, announced the scheme to divide the Bengal province into two parts. Of course, the alibi was entirely administrative, but historians say the government’s real intention was to cut the throat of the growing revolution in Bengal. Three years later, on November 4th, 1908, one fine morning, the neighbours of 50 Uari, Dacca experienced a person named Pulin Bihari Das was arrested by a few red caped constables and two IB officers of the His Majesty’s Government. After searching his house, officers from the detective department were surprised and the chargesheet observed that Pulin Bihari Das had set up a foolproof army of Bengali youths who were very capable of fighting with lathi (Indian sticks). The British officers also observed how, over the six years, Das had formed a revolutionary samiti which was on the backdrop of akhra , modelled on the Maniktala Bomb case. The discourse of the history of physical culture in Bengal started with the work of John Rosselli, who understood the popularisation of physical cultures as a concerted effort by the Bengali babu to reinvent his ‘lost valour’ and respond to allegations of effeminacy. Mrinalini Sinha has shown in her Colonial Masculinity (1995), the contestation between the coloniser and the colonised was also a psychological conflict, Ashis Nandy has shown in his discussion of the construction of ‘Kshatriya hood’- in his famous work The Intimate Enemy (1983). However, their work had paid limited attention to the Dacca Anushilan Samity and the initiatives of East Bengal and Assam’s revolutionaries. So, this paper will try to fill the lacuna with the narrative of Pulin Bihari Das as a lesser-known revolutionary of Agnijug and also this paper proposes to re-interpret the history of conflict between elites and non-elites of colonial Bengal during the swadeshi Movement and by exploring how class hierarchy, politics of religion and revolutionary nationalism seeks to contribute to the creation of an alternative narrative of martial cultures in colonial Bengal. Keywords: Class-conflict, Lathi-play, bhadralok, dakaat, physical culture, bodybuilding, group-rivalry. |