Almost 10 years back on a lazy summer afternoon sitting in the veranda of our ancestral home in suburban Kolkata, my late grandfather in a casual conversation said something which has stuck to me till date: “While others can talk about it and be nostalgic, only people of Bengal and Punjab could feel the actual trauma of communal violence unleashed by the Partition. While people in other parts of India try to draw historical lessons from the partition, we who have experienced it believe that the best way to heal is to forget.

AYAN GUHA

My recent tryst with Suman Nath’s latest book Democracy and Social Cleavage in India: Ethnography of Riots, Everyday Politics and Communalism in West Bengal, which has uncovered through impressive ethnographic research the depths and scale of the ongoing process of religious polarisation and competitive communalism in West Bengal, leads me to ask: is it the tendency of convenient forgetfulness that has contributed to the present polarising atmosphere?

Nath’s book is a fascinating exploration of latent dynamics of micro communalism in contemporary West Bengal. Nath’s analytical distinctiveness lies in his perceptive divergence from the dominant understanding that associates the emergence of the current wave of communal politics with the recent rise of Hindutva in West Bengal. While being critical of the Hindutva forces for attempting to communalise the political consciousness of the Bengali Hindus, Nath situates present form of communalism in a slightly longer timeline. He attributes the rise of communal forces to the emergence of a post-left polity that has created a space for what he calls politics of ‘cultural misrecognition’. 

Interestingly, according to Nath, it was Trinamool Congress (TMC) that first inaugurated the politics of cultural misrecognition and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) only embraced it afterwards. Nath conceptualises cultural misrecognition as a strategy of diverting focus from real issues of everyday life through manipulation of cultural dynamics. For Nath, cultural misrecognition is an over-arching analytical framework that subsumes different forms of identity centric popular mobilisation and consensus building tactics applied by both the TMC and the BJP. …

https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/books/book-review-suman-nath-democracy-and-social-cleavage-in-india-indicts-both-tmc-and-bjp-for-communalism-in-west-bengal-weekender_story-310109