SOUTH ASIA

RESEARCH
www.sagepublications.com
DOI: 10.1177/026272801103100305
Vol. 31(3): 265279
Copyright 2011
SAGE Publications
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London,
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BENGALI MASCULINITY AND THE
NATIONAL-MASCULINE: SOME
CONJECTURES FOR INTERPRETATION
Saayan Chattopadhyay
Baruipur College, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India
abstract This article examines how Bengali masculinity has been
negotiated between national and ethnic/local notions of identity and
suggests a new way of understanding this issue. Within the specic
historiography of Bengali masculinity, concerns regarding physical
strength, courage and virility of the Bengali male have been central
tropes, challenged by the colonially constructed stereotype of the
effeminate Bengali. The present article maps mainly nineteenth
century discourses regarding Bengali masculinity and focuses on
one particular strategy of three, namely, construction of a mode of
mythic-historical discourse to reclaim a supposedly more masculine
past for Bengali men. This suggests the notion of national-masculine
as a gendered materialisation of the compensatory agency of Bengali
masculinity. Shown to occur through the articulation of buddhibal in
contrast with bahubal that negotiates with the hegemonic national-
masculine, this throws new light on the emerging prominence of the
bhadralok concept of a sophisticated Bengali gentleman.
keywords: Bengal, bhadralok, colonialism, discourse, ethnicity, gender,
identity, India, masculinity, nationalism
Introduction
By his legs you shall know the Bengali The Bengalis leg is either skin and bone, the
same size all the way down, with knocking knobs for knees, or else it is very fat and
globular, also turning in at the knees, with round thighs like a womans. The Bengalis
leg is the leg of a slave.
G.W. Steevens (1905)
O Thou Lord of Gauri, O thou Mother of the Universe, vouchsafe manliness unto me!
O Mother of Strength, take away my weakness, take away my unmanliness, and make
me a Man!
Swami Vivekananda (1995 [1899])
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Scholarship on the identity of the Bengali male from the precolonial to the postcolonial
period constitutes a rich and illustrious oeuvre (Banerjee, 2005; Chowdhury, 2001;
Rosselli, 1980; Sinha, 1995). Such discourse often included a gendered perspective as
the copious texts on nationalist discourse recurrently revolved around the gentlemanly
notions of bhadramahila and bhadralok. As in colonial times, terms like nationality,
community, ethnicity and culture have continued to be negotiated with notions of
gendered subjectivity and sexuality in the post-independent period to recongure
Bengali identity. The construction of the Bengali masculine self, more importantly
here the self-perception of masculinity, is contingent upon discourses that implicitly
or explicitly constitute gender identity.
The present article articulates some rudimentary conceptions relating to Bengali male
identity. The interest lies, rst, in the specicity of the formation of Bengali bhadralok
masculinity in relation to the mutual constitution and historical contingencies of colonial
and nationalist ideologies. Second, focus is on the emergence of a compensatory discur-
sive formation of Bengali masculinity that offset the alleged and internalised Bengali
effeminacy and persisted as hegemonic masculinity in the immediate post-independence
period. Mapping the nineteenth century discourses regarding Bengali masculinity
broadly suggests three distinct trajectories: (a) a manner of self-ridicule and self-irony
(Kaviraj, 2000); (b) a mode of mythic-historical discourse about reclaiming a supposedly
more masculine past; and (c) a discourse centred on urban middle class bhadralok, who
came to seek out a more ambivalent masculine self than the mythic-historical manliness.
Focusing on the second trajectory, this article proposes the notion of national-masculine
as a gendered materialisation of the compensatory agency of Bengali masculinity. Shown
here to occur through the articulation of buddhibal, reliance on mental strength, in
contrast with bahubal, physical strength, that negotiates with the hegemonic national-
masculine, this suggests the emerging prominence of the quite culture-specic bhadralok
concept of a sophisticated Bengali gentleman.
Gender and Nationalism: Othering and the National-masculine
Anderson (1991) dened nations as imagined political communities, as both inherently
limited and sovereign, not because the reality of nations existence is an illusion,
but because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their
fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the
image of their communion (Anderson, 1991: 6). Using Andersons claim as a point
of departure, it is argued here that nationalism is a dialogic process intended towards
constituting and sustaining a certain social order and hierarchy, while discursively
forming a heteroglot collective identity by negotiating interpretations of the past and
reforming them for the present (Mayer, 2000).
The process of constituting specically the hierarchy of ethnic identity and national
identity is always connected with notions of forgetting, imagination and emotional
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Chattopadhyay: Bengali Masculinity and the National-masculine 267
legitimacy (Nandy, 1983). Consequently nationalism, in a reciprocal manner, discursively
constructs national identity, which can be far from legitimate and/or mutually agreed.
The cultural difference that a marginalised community may manifestor is supposed
to manifest in the eyes of othersis expected to sacrice its identity in such a situation
to assimilate to the so-called national mainstream which reects nothing more than the
dominant sections style of living (Oommen, 1999: 17). From a Bengali perspective,
once the imperial colonial centre had shifted outside Bengal, the rhetoric of nation
and nationalism became ever more contingent upon the process of systematically pri-
vileging a particular group over others along lines of class, religion, ethnicity or gender.
Naturally there can be divergent versions of potential national identities reected
through the various ethnic, linguistic or other communities, but Bengalis must have
begun to feel sidelined.
As Oommen (1999: 15) explains, a large number of nation-states in Asia encapsulate
within themselves several nations. The formation of the nation-state is neither entirely
complete nor stable, primarily because of the various forms of multinational com-
position. Plurality, as an increasingly strong literature on this trope suggests, is simply
a fact and needs to be constantly remembered (Donlan, 2011). Hence, it becomes
inherently perilous to declare ones identity in terms of language, region, religion, and
so on. Identications of difference spell dangers to the integrity of the nation-state and
are often viewed as communal, parochial and even anti-national. Continuing struggles
over using the term ethnic are a strong indication of such tensions.
1
The national identity which gradually emerges as hegemonic in any particular case
will almost certainly project and defend a particular self-image, reinforcing it in more
or less coercive rather than consensual manners. National identity commonly claims
a hegemonic authority over individual personhoods that interlace ethnicity, gender,
sexuality, class, caste and religion. This hegemonic authority is exercised through the
ideological state apparatus and particularly through mass media (Althusser, 1989).
This potentially exclusionary process takes the shape of internal cultural imperialism.
Young (1990: 193) remarks that to experience cultural imperialism means to experience
how the dominant meanings of a society render the particular perspective of ones
own group invisible at the same time as they stereotype ones group and mark it out
as the Other.
The broad question in what ways gender intervenes in the functioning of forms of
nationalism is too wide for the present enquiry. Commonly, the notion of gendered
nationalism underlines socially constructed ideas of masculinity and femininity that
govern female and male involvement in nation-building, in addition to how the
nation is embodied in the imagination of leading nationalists. Various scholars have
discussed gendered aspects of nationalism, articulating notions of the Other (Alter,
1994a; Chatterjee, 1997; Nandy, 1983; Sarkar, 1998). However, the gendered nature of
imagined political identities seems to have been uncovered in more depth only after the
emergence of feminist analysis (Banerjee, 2005; Mayer, 2000; McClintock, 1993).
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It has become a truism to concede that gender is critical to the patriarchal politics
of nationalism and the legitimation of social and political relations. This explains
why the interpretation and reinterpretation of gender roles are a crucial endeavour of
nationalism as a discourse (see Sarkar, 2001). But exclusionary gendered politics of
national identity do not only relegate women as the Other, various ethnic and religious
groups experience this othering as well. Usually such strategies posit a specic other
that functions to buttress communal unity. Hence, a coherent community is imagined
to exist because we are ethnically, linguistically, religiously and/or ideologically distinct
from them.
As noted, in colonial times, the Hindu male in general, and the Bengali in particu-
lar, was constructed, and ultimately widely perceived, as effeminate (Banerjee, 2005).
Hindu males were thus othered in comparison with British and Muslim males, and
Bengali males in comparison with both of them and all other martial races, especially
certain North Indians. Hence, while the notion of national identity wields hegemonic
inuence, also in a colonial context, ethnic identity becomes subordinated. As a corollary,
Bengali masculinity became subordinated to the Indian national-masculine.
But what constitutes this national-masculine? What are the trajectories of its
formation? How does the national-masculine negotiate with ethnic self-representations,
especially keeping in mind the cultural temporality of the nation? How does one tackle
the subjective homogeneity of national-masculine in contrast to the objective plurality
of masculinities? This article offers certain conjectures, but before dealing more speci-
cally with the notion of national-masculine, the notions of heteroglossia and ethnic
identity need to be explained.
Ethnic Identity as Heteroglossia
Since ethnicity and national identity are so closely related to each other, nationalism
can also be considered as a form of ethnicity, specically through institutionalisation of
a specic ethnicity by associating it with the nation-state. As Wosely (quoted in Danda,
1999: 247) observes: Ethnic groups do not necessarily act together except when they
have special interest to secure. When those interests are to obtain a state of its own
(or part of a state) the group becomes a nationality.
In conventional analysis, ethnicity is conceptualised in ve different senses, rst, as
a moderately small linguistic group which shares a common culture and traces descent
to a common ancestor; second, as a subjectively perceived self-dened group, with a
selective history and present existential conditions. The selection of such cultural traits
facilitates the creation and maintenance of a sociocultural boundary vis--vis other
ethnic groups with whom they interact. Third, interest groups compete for benets
from the welfare states; fourth, ethnicity can be a ploy for negotiating identity by the
peoples of multiracial and multicultural societies; and fth, it can be a device through
which people seek a profound psychological unity, often based on common origin,
actual or ctitious (Bhabha et al., 1998).
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Chattopadhyay: Bengali Masculinity and the National-masculine 269
Notwithstanding the focus on primordial afliation in parts of the concept of
ethnicity, neither ethnicity nor nationality is ever entirely reducible to the notion of
common territory or ancestry. Rather, it involves a sense of heteroglossia. As Bakhtin
(1984: 291) remarks in reference to language and world views, this represents the
coexistence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past,
between different epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in
the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form.
Such languages of heteroglossia intersect with each other in a variety of ways, forming
new socially typifying languages and discourses, as Bakhtin (1984) shows.
Similar to language, discourses of ethnic identity, like the term Bengali, or for that
matter any sociocultural or linguistic identity, also constructs like middle-class, upper-
caste, or urban-educated Hindu Bengali, are always heteroglot. Their characteristic
forms are the expression, juxtaposition or negotiation of individual and cultural
differences. Ethnicity is dialogised in that sense, always viewed also from the perspective
of the others. Bakhtin (1984: 293) discussed this dialogic nature of consciousness and
of human life itself:
The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open-ended
dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to
ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person par-
ticipates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit,
with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse
enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium.
This dialogism comprises not of an essentialised notion of ethnicity or nationality, but
represents a constant internal and external dialogue at a specic historical moment
that leads to a complex unity of differences. Bhabha et al. (1998: 35), drawing
from Derridas thoughts on ethnicity, displacement and ontopological tendency,
remark:
In the narrow passage between rootedness and displacement, when the archaic stability
of ontology touches the memory of cultural displacement, cultural difference or ethnic
location accedes to a social and psychic anxiety at the heart of identication and its
locutions. This passage opens an unsettling space that adjudicates among differences
and constructs epistemological boundaries among cultures.
Echoing this, it is argued here that the historiography of Bengali male identity pro-
vides an unsettling space where difference between the rootedness of history and its
displacement, between past and present, between ethnic particularity and national
imaginary, become sources of deep anxiety. A substantial number of texts dealing with
Bengali identity reect that anxiety and concern (Banerjee, 2005; Chowdhury, 2001;
Sarkar, 1998; Sinha, 1995).
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The Construction of Bengali Masculinity
The discourse on Bengali masculinity was clearly shaped by several historically
specic arguments that interacted with notions of colonialism, national politics and
historiography (Chatterjee, 1997; Sarkar, 1998). While generally speaking there were
efforts, at least since the early nineteenth century, to portray the Indian Hindu male
predominantly as effeminate and weak by the British colonisers (Sinha, 1995), especially
following the rebellion in 1857, this perception was almost unequivocally pointed at
educated Bengali middle-class men. Concerns regarding the physical strength, courage
and virility of the Bengali male nally led to the major restructuring of the Indian
army under colonial rule. As a consequence of such identication, gradually through
the nature of recruitment, two distinct masculine-identities were produced, martial
and non-martial (Enloe, 1980; Sinha, 1995).
The idea that certain ethnic groups are inherently more masculine, predominantly
because they possessed something like ghting instincts, which was conceived as the
appropriate expression of manliness, marked the doctrine of martial races. According
to this categorisation, while the Rajputs, Pathans, Nairs, Marathas, Gurkhas, Sikhs
and a few other ethnic groups were considered as manly, Bengalis were supposed to be
cowardly and effete, leading to their exclusion from the colonial Indian army. Sinha
(1995), in her seminal study on Bengali masculinity in the colonial period, clearly
shows how political and ideological deliberations over the Ilbert Bill (188384), the
Native Volunteer movement (188485), recruitment to the Public Service Commis-
sion (188687) and the Age of Consent controversy (1891) in the late nineteenth
century persistently assumed Bengali middle-class males as effeminate. The infamous
description of Bengalis by Thomas Macaulay (cited in Rosseli, 1980: 122) clearly
expresses this:
The physical organisation of the Bengali is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a
constant vapour bath. His pursuits are sedimentary, his limbs delicate, his movements
languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and hardy
deeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and his
situation are equally unfavourable.
Following on from this, Chowdhury (2001: 4) explains how physically and morally
the Bengali male was doubly identied with weakness, rst, with the frailty of women,
and second, with the powerlessness of the submissive slave. By the late nineteenth
century, this gendered identication of the colonised male as womanly had come to
be naturalised through repeated discursive constructions and reconstructions. Bengalis
were categorised in the fth category of Indian physical types and said to lack all the
aggressive characteristics of Sikhs and Rajputs. Chowdhury (2001: 53) notes in reliance
on Risley (1891) how Bengalis may be identied at a glance throughout the Empire,
wherever their remarkable aptitude for clerical pursuits had given them employment.
Clerical pursuits implied a lack of heroism, for when compared to the war-like races of
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Chattopadhyay: Bengali Masculinity and the National-masculine 271
the Punjab, the Bengalis did not have any stomach for ghting and submitted tamely
to the periodical raids of the hill people.
2
Such stereotypes, constructed through colonial discourse, continued to inuence
and eventually naturalised the construction of Bengali masculinity. As a result, the
educated, middle-class, urban elite Bengali gentleman or bhadralok character was
identied as effeminate, compliant and physically feeble. This naturalisation oc-
curred not only in the minds of colonisers, but also, perhaps more importantly, this
identication was entrenched in the self-perception of the Bengali male and other
martial ethnicities. Bengali bhadralok, commonly working as clerks, were collectively
addressed as babu under the subordination of more masculine British males and in
contrast to other martial Indians.
However, the emergence of major nationalist resistance in Bengal provided a site for
reconguration of the Bengali masculine self. The Swadeshi Movement, a concerted
campaign against the partition of Bengal and a period of revolutionary terrorism against
the colonial rule with the involvement of a number of Bengali leaders, to a certain
extent countered the predominant notion of the effeminate, non-aggressive Bengali
male. It is thus important to recognise that such expressions of manly aggressiveness
were undeniably contingent upon a reinterpretation of the past that was often more
mythic than historic.
It is argued here that since the late nineteenth century, the colonial discourse
regarding masculinity of the Bengali male has followed three distinct trajectories.
First, a manner of self-ridicule and self-irony, primarily embodied in the writings of
Madhusudan Dutta, Kaliprasanna Sinha, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Sukumar
Ray and others. This rst mode of expression is used as a subversive ploy, as Kaliprasanna
Singha (1862) declares in the introduction of Hutom Penchar Naksha:
I have not used a single idea that is fanciful or untrue in my sketches. It is true that
some people might discover themselves in its pages, but I need hardly add that these are
not themselves. All that I can say is that I have not aimed at anyone, but observed all.
Indeed, I did not forget to include myself in these sketches.
Such expressions of self-ridicule reect efforts towards producing a narrative of identity
that is in itself subversive but not specically gendered. To take just one example of
this literary strategy, referring to Bankims writings (Chattopadhya, 1953), Kaviraj
(2000: 388) claims that Bankim strived to show the Bengali educated man how to
write himself out of babuness.
The National-masculine and Gendered Linear Time
Second, though, one nds a mode of mythic-historical discourse about reclaiming
the supposedly more masculine past. This second trajectory of the mythic-historical
discourse that attempts to reclaim this supposedly more masculine past becomes
one of the most signicant constituents of the national-masculine. Nationalism
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throughout the world has imagined history for its specic motivation. In the view
of some commentators, imagination of the past received greater impetus since the
early twentieth century in India as colonisation and the resistance against it obtained
ideological enunciations (Chatterjee, 1986). But imagination of the past appears to
have always been a lively aspect of Indic civilisations.
Ernest Renans notion of the collective memory of a glorious heroic past and
Bankims assertion of ascetic masculinity embodied by the Hindu sanyasi were followed
by Vivekanandas formulation of ideal masculinity comprising of Kshatra-Virya
and Brahma-Teja (Vivekananda, 1995 [1899]). Later, Gandhis mythic Ramrajya, as a
constructed historiography within the ambit of nationalism, substantially inuenced the
formation of Bengali male identity. Here the notion of Bengali identity as a heteroglot
resurfaces, as it embodies the coexistence of socio-ideological contradictions between
present and past, between different periods of history and between different ideologies
in the present (Bakhtin, 1984).
History was evidently crucial to nineteenth century nationalist formation of India
as a political entity and was the site where the coloniser and the colonised navigated
their respective perceptions of self and other. In this context, for Bengal, Bankims
focus on the importance of physical strength and the necessity to acquire virility can
be interpreted as an effort to translate a constructed incompetence into a historically
acknowledged contention. The construction of the sanyasi or santan was devised to
transform itself as a politically proactive, assertive, even militant, rebellious and violent
gure, at the same time incorporating an ascetic, celibate and thus spiritually pure
masculinity (Alter, 1994a). As Chattopadhyay (1953: 697) noted: The task of a
Santana is a difcult one. Anyone who is not a renouncer in the absolute sense is not
t to carry out this work. Indubitably, this task in the colonial context was to drive
out from the Motherland those who did not have faith in sanatana dharma and to
liberate the Hindu nation-state.
3

Such militant yet elitist nationalist ideas in Bengal, originating in Bankim and
later were inherited by Aurobindo, were of necessity ideologically limited. Chatterjee
(1986: 79) remarks:
It is born out of the encounter of a patriotic consciousness with the framework of know-
ledge imposed upon it by colonialism. It leads inevitably to an elitism of the intelligentsia,
rooted in the vision of a radical regeneration of national culture.
Hence, it was not surprising for Chatterjee (1986: 79) that in the history of political
movements in India, Bankims direct disciples were to become revolutionary terrorists, a
small group of armed activists drawn from the Hindu middle classes, wedded to secret
underground organisation and planned assassination (Chattopadhya, 2006).
Such discourses about constructing the ideal masculinity by evoking a mythic,
glorious, more masculine past seem to have had fourfold implications: (a) they
established the notion of militant Hinduism, against other religions, which later
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Chattopadhyay: Bengali Masculinity and the National-masculine 273
took an undesirable shape in the postcolonial Indian political sphere, with strong
reverberations today; (b) they reinforced hypermasculinity as a form of colonial mas-
culinity. The term, explained inter alia by Ashis Nandy (1983), refers to a reactionary,
distorted and exaggerated expression of traditionally masculine traits that led to
open sanction of new forms of institutionalised violence and a false sense of cultural
homogeneity. Ultimately, this generated violence in the name of nationalism, turning
different Indians against each other; (c) this meant that the Hindu middle-class,
upper-caste, educated urban elite became (or at least came to believe that it was)
the dominant form of hegemonic masculinity; (d ) given the constant process of
renegotiation noted earlier, this also meant that there was always a search for sites
where these contesting masculinities could prove their respective superiority. These
sites ranged from gymnasiums (akharas) and secret swadeshi terrorist groups to the
game of football (Alter, 1994b; Dimeo, 2002).
Chowdhury (2001) draws attention to the formation of self through a mythic-
historical narrative and how the mythic structure within this historiography entails a
double move. On the one hand, myth functions as the repository of an essentialised
tradition which foreigners could have no access to. On the other hand, within the
historical rhetoric of certain Enlightenment assumptions, Indians could be positioned
alongside the colonisers. Thus, notes Chowdhury (2001: 51), Hindu/Aryans and by
extension, Bengalis/Indians could claim a resemblance to their enlightened and manly
rulers. This incorporation of the mythic into the historic, perhaps more importantly
that specic historiography, could become an authoritative and internally persuasive
discourse emerging from a particular socio-ideological consciousness. This was possible,
as Bakhtin (1984: 364) argues, because [o]ur ideological development is just such an
intense struggle within us for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological
points of view, approaches, directions and values. Irrespective of the ideology behind
such constructions, crucial for the present argument is that these constructions are just
that, they are imagined. But then, pasts are to a large extent always imagined. Hence,
it becomes important to examine the nature of this imagined past and to check how
the internally persuasive discourse invests in the struggle to dene the self through a
differentiation of past and present.
In such constructions, a presumed glorious past is often at the opposite end
from the present, marked by perceived incompleteness and lack of fullment. As
Chatterjee (1997: 210) explains, we tend to construct a somewhat romantic picture
of those days when there was beauty, prosperity and healthy sociability, all of which
were, above all, our own creation. The image of those past days is then not merely a
historical past for us, since we construct it only to mark the difference posed by the
present (Chatterjee, 1997: 210). A number of literary texts, from newspaper articles
to various essays, contain such laments about incompleteness and lack of fullment,
especially related to the manliness of the Bengali male. Rajnarayan Basu (1951 [1873]:
63) commented that [c]ompared with men of those days, men now have virtually no
strength at all. especially bhadralok, respectable people have now become feeble,
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sickly and short-lived. In a similar vein, Bankim (Chattopadhyay, 1953: 288), in the
essay Banglar Kalanka, asserts:
Everybody believes that the Bengali is forever weak, cowardly, effete, and runs away at
the site of a st This may seem somewhat acceptable if one discusses the Bengali
character in the nineteenth century, but one may say that there are enough reasons behind
such pathetic condition of Bengali if somebody says that a Bengali has been like this
eternally, that he is eternally puny, eternally craven and effete, then may thunder strike
him down! It is a lie! (My translation from Bangla.)
This anxiety about the past and its images, explicitly related to those days (se-kal ),
as contrasted with these days (e-kal ) has a particular trajectory (see Basu, 1951
[1873]). The specic, authoritative historiography and its corollary, the temporality
of Bengali masculinity, points to an ostensible but noticeable impression that time
itself is gendered. The temporality of Bengali male identity poses in this case an inverse
relation between time and masculinity. As the Bengali masculine self moves within linear
time from an imagined masculine past to an allegedly feminised present, masculinity
is supposed to be lessened. The opposing construction of national-masculine as an
enterprising, rational, aggressive, often physically violent male seems to react against
this feminisation. It is an imaginary ideal type located in the past, followed by an
uncomfortable present, and a phantasmatic promise for the future, a claim.
4
The
notion of national-masculine thus becomes an emblematic instance as it involves
both the empty political signier of the nation and the phantasmatic promise of
being masculine.
5

In the mid-twentieth century, while Indian masculinity increasingly attempted
to equate itself with this national-masculine, Bengali masculinity, albeit at a limited
extent, formed its own brand of subversive masculinity. Focusing on a male who is
employed in clerical service (chakurijibi), is family-oriented and is a relational self,
instead of being physically violent, this image is effectively claiming to be paternalistic
and affective in nature.
Compensatory Masculinity and the Bengali Male
In contrast with the hard masculine project of the active male militant nationalism,
the third trajectory of discourse, as suggested above, was centred on urban middle class
bhadralok engaged in clerical work, who pursued a more ambivalent masculine self that
is beyond the gender binaries and forms a more subversive, exible masculinity.
This notion of subversion can be identied in the gure of Ramakrishna in
nineteenth century Bengal. As Sarkar (1998: 300) notes:
For the bhadralok, the hiatus between the myths of renaissance improvement and
nationalist deliverance encouraged moods of introspection and nostalgia. There was a
partial turning away from forward-looking male activism towards a series of logically
distinct but often intermingled Others.
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Chattopadhyay: Bengali Masculinity and the National-masculine 275
According to this line of reasoning, conscious subversion or binaries were employed,
including deliberate feminisation as opposed to active masculinity, as well as the
attractive playfulness and irresponsibility of the child and the imbecile (pagal) as against
the goal-oriented instrumental rationality of the adult male.
This reasoning allows for the argument that the Bengali males implicit rejection
of values of aggressive maleness also entailed the rejection of being identied with
the national-masculine. The rhetoric of Ramakrishna reinforced such rejections of
stereotypes, especially through the expressions of educated Bengali middle class and
lower-middle-class clerks. They could neither be associated with the ideal masculine
occupations of military or political leadership, nor could they associate themselves
with protable self-sufcient business ventures. Consequently, Ramakrishna and his
devotees successfully subverted the rigid binaries that the civilising mission of the
West established in colonial Bengal. This clearly had a signicant social dimension
and posed a discernible contradiction particularly to the imposed world of formal
routinised education and time-bound clerical labour (chakri), as Sarkar (1998: 300)
elaborates.
6

This particular formation of Bengali masculinity was constructed around four
specic rhetorics: rst, the notion of kaliyuga, as the format for voicing a variety of
high-caste male anxieties, again a reection of a decient present as opposed to a
golden past. Second, the triad of women (kamini), gold (kanchan) and clerical jobs
(chakri) identies that the central link is probably between women or wives and their
desire for jewellery. As a consequence, men as husbands are compelled to engage in the
slavery of clerical ofce jobs. They are male, but are made to serve others, including
women. Third is the intolerability of the labour of chakri, as it made the colonial
middle-class male aware of the subjection, primarily through disciplinary clock time
and disciplinary sites of ofces spaces. Fourth, bhakti becomes seen as a counterpoint to
chakri. The notion of bhakti provided an easy response for middle-class Bengali males,
to pacify the anxieties and drudgery of clerical life with neither any understanding of
ritual nor sacricing the normal bhadralok careers and lifestyles (Sarkar, 1998: 337).
Moreover, the notion of bhakti has a predominant feminine aspect, thus making it
an even more subversive approach. Such forms of subversion can also be found in a
different context, in Gandhis formulation of androgyny as divine bi-unity against
hypermasculine kshatriyahood as a representation of true Indian manliness. More
recently, Nandy (1983: 53) suggests that this alternative manliness is embodied by a
man who chooses to defy his cowardice by recognising the feminine principle of the
cosmos and owning up to his feminine self.
Hence, parallel to the discourse of the Bengali male being effete, it is suggested here
that another crucial discourse on the compensatory agency of such allegedly effete
masculinity was now being articulated.
7
This gave Bengali masculinity a unique shape,
in the process forming a compensatory masculinity. This fundamental compensatory
agency for the Bengali males masculinity was centred on the notion of mental strength
and intellect (buddhibal ) in contrast to physical power (bahubal ).
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276 South Asia Research Vol. 31 (3): 265279
Indeed, Bankim, commenting on how to defy social oppression, explores two
different kinds of strength (bal ), namely, physical strength (bahubal ) and the power or
strength of rhetoric (bakyabal ). Bankim used the latter in a broader sense to connote
intellectual exercise in the elds of sociology, politics and theology, literature, science
and art. Bakyabal is perceived as far superior to bahubal. Hitherto, it is argued by
Bankim, bahubal has only led to deterioration of this world. Whatever accomplishments
have been achieved, are due to bakyabal. Hence, as Chattopadhyay (1953: 317) notes,
civilisation has progressed only because of bakyabal. Whoever is a speaker, a poet, an
author, a philosopher, scientist, moralist, priest or manager, everybody is mighty and
strong in bakyabal.
While retaining this conceptualisation to explain the agency of compensatory
masculinity for the Bengali male, I reframe bakyabal here as buddhibal, which connotes
the strength of the intellect. As Bankim mentions in the same essay (Chattopadhyay,
1953: 317):
Bahubal is the strength of the animalBakyabal is the strength of human. But Bakyabal
does not mean merely to gibberI am not referring to the strength of speaking as
Bakyabal. I am referring to the strength of the things that are conveyed through speaking.
An intellectual through his intellect engender the worldly principlesthe speaker
impart that through speaking. The incorporation of these two forces, I call Bakyabal
(My translation from Bangla).
Thus, the strength of the intellect, or buddhibal, compensates for the lack of manliness
and grounds a form of compensatory masculinity for the Bengali male. Having made
the above argument, I must caution that I do not seek to suggest that it is simply
intellect, but also there is an aspect of affect that constitutes the new Bengali middle-
class masculinity.
8
This agency was also not limited only to the colonial period. In
the immediate post-independence period, too, the formation of Bengali maleness
will have negotiated with the hegemonic national-masculine through the agency of
compensatory masculinity. How these processes function in detail will need to be
researched not just from a literary and historical perspective, but also with reference
to sociocultural realities in immensely diverse current Bengali contexts.
Conclusions
The primary intent of this article was to provide some conjectures to explore Bengali
masculinity. The Bengali male is on the one hand an ethnic and linguistic entity
and identity. On the other hand, he also bears some elements of and links to the
national identity. This gendered self therefore has problematic, unequal and necessarily
heteroglot relations with ethnic and national identities. Differences, whether ethnic or
other, must not be hastily read as the reection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits
(Bhabha et al., 1998).
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Chattopadhyay: Bengali Masculinity and the National-masculine 277
This article focused on the slippages, displacements and heteroglossia of the
narrative of identity and more importantly on the discursivity through which such
contestations and performances of identity can be ascertained. The focus was only
on one single dominant subject, Bengali middle-class bhadralok that exist within
the intricate constitution of male subjectivity. Hence, what has followed so far con-
stitutes an engagement to explore this issue further in other social and cultural con-
texts. First, we need to research in more depth the specicity of the formation of
Bengali bhadralok masculinity in relation to the mutual constitution and historical
contingencies of colonial and nationalist ideologies. Second, the trajectory of the
emergence of a compensatory discursive agency of Bengali masculinity that somewhat
offset the internalised Bengali effeminacy and persisted as hegemonic masculinity in
the immediate post-independence period will need to be further explored.
Notes
1. Many references could be given here, but see Barthes (1973), Chatterjee (1986 and 1993),
Hall (1994), Nandy (1983) and the articles in Mortimer (1999).
2. Readers may wish to note that this seems to be contradicted by Ghosh (2011) in this issue,
portraying Bengalis as frontier-shifting, active people.
3. The non-believers in sanatana dharma were not only the British, but also the Muslims as
well. So the project of driving out these Others became essentially a Hindu nationalist
project (see Sarkar, 2001: 16390).
4. Drawing from Lacan and Freud, Zizek (1989) articulates a theory of political signiers as
performatives which, through becoming sites of phantasmatic investment, effect the power
to mobilise identication. In other words, the subject is produced through the pursuit of a
phantasmatic promise.
5. Butler (1993) agrees with Zizek (1989) that political signiers, especially those that designate
subject positions, do not represent pre-given constituencies, but are empty signs which come
to bear phantasmatic investments of various kinds.
6. Sarkar (1998) is quick to provide a caveat that the subversive male identity had its own
limitations, as professionals from the elds of law, education or journalism rarely identied
with these classes. In other words, the appeal of this subversive male identity predominantly
remained within the domain of the clerks.
7. I am thankful to Anirban Das for pointing out this aspect and am particularly indebted to
his essay (Das, 2006).
8. People are individuals and are innately different. The Bengali male perhaps may never fully
embody the masculinity that is wholly centred on the notion of intellect with its exclusive
scientic, modern and rational traits and likewise may never completely negate the affective
aspect of his masculinity.
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Saayan Chattopadhyay is Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of
Journalism and Mass Communication at Baruipur College, afliated to University
of Calcutta. After a stint as a journalist, he is currently engaged in research in media,
ethnicity and gender. He has published several articles and book chapters and his
research interests include postcolonial journalism, performative theory, new media
and masculinity studies.
Address: 131 N.S.C. Bose Road, Block 19, Flat 3, Regent Park Govt. Housing Estate,
Kolkata 700040, West Bengal, India. [e-mail: saayanchattopadhyay@gmail.com]
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