Living the ‘Absence’ The Rajbanshis of North Bengal

While often it describe the modern era - framed by the Post-Enlightenment narrative - as one marked by an unprecedented concern for identity and identification, it often lose sight of the parallel process of dis-identification whereby a body of people either finds it impossible to make any claim to identity or is expressly deprived of the identity that it claims as its own. It proposes to focus on two registers of identity politics, namely, caste and ethnicity and make a case study of the Rajbanshis of North Bengal – numerically the third largest Hindu caste in West Bengal. By all accounts, Rajbanshi search for Kshatriyahood and a separate linguistic identity met with little success inasmuch as the Bengali upper castes hardly ever accorded recognition to their claim. These denials and exclusions reduce them to a body that is caught in an endless process of becoming. The paper shows how ‘lack’ or absence becomes active and how the Rajbanshis live their absence by exercising agency for more than a century in ways specific to their situation.