How Pramatha Ranjan Thakur Saved Bengali Harijans From Being Engulfed By Pakistan

The question of caste remains ignored in the political and intellectual discourse of West Bengal. However this does not imply that caste did not play a steering role in mobilisation of political opinion in favour or against the Partition of Bengal in 1947. Two divergent and rival streams emerged within the Bengali Harijan community on the Partition issue- one was propounded by Jogendranath Mondal and the other by Pramatha Ranjan Thakur. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury in their article, In Search of Space: The Scheduled Caste Movement in West Bengal after Partition (2014) provide an insight into the contrasting ideas of the two Harijan leaders.

Jogendranath Mondal, a prominent leader of the Bengali Scheduled Castes during the pre-independence scenario was known for his endorsement of the Pakistan Plan. He argued against the relocation of 70 lakh Bengali scheduled caste people in India and joined the first Muslim League Ministry of Pakistan, becoming its Law Minister and drafting the Constitution of Pakistan. Disillusioned by his government’s indifference to the anti-Hindu Killings in East Bengal where his own caste-men were affected the most; he resigned from the ministry and migrated to India in 1950.

In this article, we shall elucidate upon the forgotten narrative propounded by the illustrious Harijan leader, Pramatha Ranjan Thakur, who argued in favour of Partition of Bengal, alongside the Bengali Bhadraloks. He garnered Bengali Harijan opinion in favour of a Bengali Hindu Homeland within India and henceforth saved the succeeding generations of Bengali Hindu Harijans from being engulfed by the forces of Pakistani separatism. His actions brought him in direct conflict with Jogendranath Mondal despite hailing from the same social background. Thakur’s thoughts and activities in India have not been discussed in great detail as much as Mondal’s. We can say Thakur is verily the antiseptic pro-Hindu, pro-India counter to Mondal.

P R Thakur: Birth and Education

Pramatha Ranjan Thakur was born in the year 1904 to Shashi Bhushan Thakur, the son of the second Matua patriarch, Guruchand Thakur, in the village of Orakandi in Faridpur district of Bengal Presidency. He belonged to the Namasudra caste and adhered to the Matuaism- a Vaishnavite religious reform movement founded by his great-grandfather, Harichand Thakur. After receiving his higher education in British Calcutta, he trained at the Bar in London, becoming the first barrister from the Namasudra community.

Thakur in the pre-Partition scenario

In the 1930s, Thakur took over the reins of the Matua community after the death of his grandfather, Guruchand Thakur. At this point of time, Jogendranath Mondal founded the Bengal Provincial Scheduled Castes Federation (BPSCF). Thakur established a rival organisation by the name of Bengal Provincial Depressed Classes League (BPDCL). Both the organisations remained intensely divided on the Partition issue. In the course of their struggle, they were conspicuously aligned with one or the other mainstream political party.

The Bengal Chapter of the DCL led by Thakur was aligned to the Indian National Congress and joined ranks with the Hindu Mahasabha in unleashing forces that would demand a partition of the province in 1946-47. The horrors of Great Calcutta Killings and Noakhali Genocide perpetuated fears within the scheduled caste groups in eastern Bengal who were increasingly becoming wary of their future in Islamic Pakistan. Their anti-Pakistan contention was obvious as the worst sufferers of the Two Horrors of 1946 were predominantly the scheduled castes who were victimised by the Islamic onslaught on their family, livelihood and property. 

While Mondal stressed on an alliance between scheduled castes and Muslim citing their common occupational interests and economic position, history bears testimony to the fact that relation between Muslims and Namasudras in Bengal, as Sekhar Bandyopadhyay writes, was not an uninterrupted story of harmony and co-operation; it was regularly interrupted by violent riots. The competition between Hindu Namasudras and Muslims for agricultural land, is a historical one. The campaign for partitioning Bengal and placing Hindu-majority West Bengal in the Indian Union was launched by the Mahasabha in its Tarakeshwar Convention of April 1947 and received sanction from the Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee (BPCC). 

After this, Namasudras no more remained inimical to the idea of a Hindu Bengal. They joined the pro-Partition side in large numbers. Thakur mobilised scheduled caste support for partitioning Bengal, alongside the Bhadraloks. Two scheduled caste members of Constituent Assembly from eastern Bengal met Viceroy Mountbatten on 3 July and stated that the scheduled castes were not to be left under the brutal domination and suppression of the Muslims. 

They firmly demanded the partition of the province and suggested that the 70 lakh scheduled castes of eastern Bengal should be relocated in the proposed Bengali Hindu Homeland of West Bengal. Thakur’s organisation, the BPDCL issued a briefing through its secretary R. Das stating that the views of Jogendranath Mondal espousing for united sovereign Bengal, did not represent the majority scheduled caste opinion.

Mass Migration of Scheduled Caste Refugees to India

The Partition of Bengal adversely affected the scheduled castes of eastern Bengal, primarily the Namasudras and Rajbongshis. The districts of Khulna, Jessore, Faridpur, Bakarganj which were considered to be the ‘natural habitat’ of the Namasudras, were placed in Pakistan. With Partition in effect, the alarmist caste Hindus of eastern Bengal migrated en masse to West Bengal. 

It was during this time that Pramatha Ranjan Thakur along with his family and several Matua followers migrated from East Bengal (East Pakistan) districts to West Bengal. However the collective migration of the Namasudras was yet to happen. The Two pre-Partition Horrors had already sealed the fate of Muslim-Scheduled Caste Alliance in Bengal that Jogendranath Mondal envisaged. The dreadful turn of events in East Bengal in 1950 happened to be the final nail in the coffin of that repulsive alliance from which the Hindu scheduled castes had nothing to gain. It legitimised P R Thakur’s concerns with regard to the status of Hindu scheduled castes in an Islamic nation.

In December 1949, a communal disturbance occurred in the Kalshira village of Bagerhat subdivision in Khulna district where the police came in searching for communists who were hiding out in a Namasudra village. A fracas between the Namasudra peasants and the police turned violent, leaving two policemen dead. The next day, the police and Muslim Ansars raided Kalshira and surrounding 20 Namasudra villages with the obvious intent of avenging the murder. This led to a mass outpour of Hindu Namasudra peasants to West Bengal who spread the word of violence to the Hindus in Calcutta and neighbouring districts. As the Hindus retaliated, Muslims started leaving West Bengal and were driven away in large numbers to East Bengal in Pakistan.

This flocking of Muslims into East Bengal caused alarm amongst the Muslims there and ignited the already steaming anti-Hindu sentiments. Anti-Hindu killings, abductions, rapes that sparked off from Khulna, spread to Rajshahi, and then to Dhaka, Mymensingh and Barisal districts. Finally in January-February 1950, the Namasudra refugees decided to migrate en masse to India. Invidious differences between a ‘Bengali untouchable’ and a ‘Bengali Bhadralok’ collapsed therein and the phenomenon of ‘Othering’ by the Pakistani State, as Sekhar Bandyopadhyay puts forth, imposed an overarching ‘Hindu’ identity on the preeminent caste, class and political identities of the Hindu minorities. 

‘Reinvention’ of Harijan Space by Thakur

By the beginning of 1951, following the disturbances in Khulna, as many as 15 lakh refugees had arrived in West Bengal. Majority of them were scheduled caste peasants. According to official statistics, nearly 21 lakh refugees had arrived in West Bengal between 1950 and 1956. And these official figures are not often reliable, as they account for only those who registered themselves and were eventually despatched to various refugee camps. 

Anecdotal evidence suggests that there were probably many more who just crossed the border and settled down in various places in the border districts of Murshidabad, Nadia and 24-Parganas. No one knew their exact number. A police intelligence report of June 1952 stated that 95 per cent of the refugees were Namasudras.

While the Namasudra refugees in West Bengal after Partition lost their physical space and their spatial capacity to organise articulate protests, they were also imagining a new spiritual space where they could reinvent their identity, more in a social sense than political. And it was happening through the initiatives of P. R. Thakur. It is interesting that when Jogendranath Mandal was organising agitations against the Namasudra refugees being sent off to areas outside West Bengal, Thakur was supporting the government rehabilitation policy. 

In 1946, Thakur had won the election to the Bengal Legislative Assembly as an Independent candidate, but then became a member of the Constituent Assembly with Congress support. At the Constituent Assembly, he opposed reservation for the scheduled castes, advocating instead ‘drastic social reforms through legislation so that all invidious distinctions between man and man may be abolished.’ 

He remained loyal to the Congress during the trying days of Partition, which he accepted after getting a solemn pledge from Gandhi and Nehru that rehabilitation of the Scheduled Castes would be taken care of if they had to migrate from East Pakistan. He remained outside organised politics, as he lost, like other political leaders from east Bengal, his electoral constituency. 

At this stage of his political career, he also devoted his time to the cause of the refugees, but his ways were very different from those of Mondal. It was also very distinct from a conventional Ambedkarite struggle. In December 1947, he purchased a piece of land in North 24-Parganas between Chandpara and Gobordanga and started the Thakur Land Industries Ltd, with himself as the Chair of the seven-member Board of Directors. This was the beginning of Thakurnagar, the first Harijan refugee colony in India started by an independent Harijan initiative. It was a small hamlet near the Indo-Pakistan border, about 63 kilometres away from Calcutta.

Within the next ten years around this place, in lands reclaimed from the marshy tracts, more than 50 thousand Namasudra refugees settled down. In 1951 Thakur received a government grant of Rs. 80,000 to develop the infrastructure of the colony, including roads and supply of drinking water, and each family received Rs. 200 and two bundles of corrugated iron for building houses. Many of the Namasudra peasants who migrated after 1950 – and continued to migrate thereafter – settled in the two border districts of North 24-Parganas and Nadia where more than half of the Namasudra population in West Bengal now live. Thakurnagar grew into a major cultural centre for these Namasudra refugees.

However Thakur was doing all these not for furthering his political ambitions, but as the Dharma Guru of the Matua Mahasangha. When large-scale migration of Namasudras took place, he visited those camps in his personal capacity as the Sanghadhipati of the Matua sect- to which majority of those refugees belonged to. By the early 1960s, with the relocation of the Matua Mahasangha’s headquarters to Bongaon, he came to be widely recognised as the undisputed hereditary Leader of the Matuas. The followers of the Matua sect are till date heavily concentrated in the two districts of North 24 Parganas and Nadia.

From the early 1949, Thakur became increasingly involved in the activities of refugee rehabilitation on one hand and in mobilising political opinion by organising non-violent satyagraha campaigns in refugee camps. He spoke at the meetings of the Nikhil Banga Bastuhara Mahasammelan (All Bengal Refugee Convention) in Gaighata and Naihati, and associated with the works of the relief committees for East Bengali Hindu refugees. 

All this while he was steadfastly loyal to the Congress party and built his constituency around Thakurnagar in North 24 Parganas. He was elected in Congress ticket from Haringhata (SC-reserved) seat to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly in 1957 and from Hanskhali (SC-reserved) seat in 1962. A year later, he was appointed Minister of State for Tribal Development in the Congress government. 

As a Congress leader, Thakur was encouraging Namasudra refugees to settle down in other parts of India where they could get land to resettle. In the Legislative Assembly, he, on the one hand, pronounced loudly his loyalty to Congress: ‘It is my Congress. With all its faults I love it.’ Addressing the Congress, he said, ‘Whatever you have done is enough.’ On the other hand, he expressed his faith in the effectiveness of the government rehabilitation plans. 

The Namasudra pioneer cultivators had in the ancient past reclaimed the marshy tracts of east Bengal and the forest lands of the Sunderbans, he argued. So if they could get vacant land they could build a new Bengal in Dandakaranya or Andaman Island. According to one report, he personally visited refugee camps and persuaded the scheduled caste refugees to move to Andaman. When the anti-Dandakaranya movement started in 1958, he criticised the communists for misguiding and manipulating the refugees for political reasons, and often forcing them not to go to Dandakaranya against their best interests.

While he was still the most revered religious figure amongst the Namasudras, his political support to the Dandakaranya Project in dispersing the scheduled caste refugees to far away regions, did not endear him well to some of them. In a group meeting in Bagjola Refugee Camp, one of the refugees proudly declared that 95 per cent of the camp inmates were Matuas, yet they did not like his endorsement of the Dandakaranya Project. A clear distinction between Thakur as the ‘Dharmaguru’ and Thakur as the ‘political leader’ emerged.

Thakur’s Disenchantment with the Congress and Parting of Ways

The point of departure for Thakur came in 1964, when he felt that the pledge he had received from Gandhi and Nehru about the rehabilitation of Scheduled Caste refugees had been broken. In this year, Prophet Muhammad’s relics were reported as stolen from the Hazratbal mosque in Srinagar in Kashmir. In retaliation, riots broke out in Khulna from 4 January, spreading to Jessore the next day and panic-stricken refugees began to arrive in Sealdah Station by Down Barisal Express, with harrowing tales of atrocities. 

In all, in 1964 more than 400 thousand scheduled caste peasants crossed the border as refugees in West Bengal. This fresh influx and the horror stories of riots in East Pakistan heated up the atmosphere in West Bengal too – particularly in the border districts of 24-Parganas and Nadia, as well as in Calcutta, where full scale anti-Muslim riots started from 10 January. As a precautionary measure, dawn-to-dusk curfew was clamped on Namasudra-majority areas like Bongaon town and Habra in 24-Parganas and Dhubulia Camp, Taherpur Colony and Cooper’s Camp in Ranaghat in Nadia. 

As a precautionary preventive measure, the District Magistrate of Nadia stopped cash doles of those who were arrested in connection with the disturbances. When repressive measures of the police specifically targeted the Namasudra refugees, Thakur resigned from the Assembly on 6 March 1964 as a mark of protest against the inaction of the Congress government against attacks on refugees in Bongaon. 

He then participated in a series of meetings with the opposition leaders demanding proper rehabilitation of the Namasudra refugees in the border districts of West Bengal. At this stage, he allegedly was also supporting the activities of the Save Pakistan Minorities Committee which was proposing an economic blockade of East Pakistan.

At a meeting in Habra on 24 March that year, Thakur for the first time blamed Prime Minister Nehru of breaking the pledge that he had given to Thakur at the time of Partition with regard to rehabilitation of scheduled caste refugees. He gave fiery speeches in Habra and Bongaon, condemning the inaction in the rehabilitation of Namasudra refugees and criticising the police crackdown on them, while referring to a particular incident of harassment of a Hindu Namasudra girl.

Thakur was arrested on 19 April 1964, under the Defence of India Rules, on charges of inciting public disturbances. In the same month that year, Jogendranath Mondal was arrested on similar charges. Both of them were incarcerated in the Dum Dum Central Jail in Calcutta till 3 June. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay posits a curious question: Did the divergent paths of the two rival leaders of the Bengal Scheduled Caste movement finally converge in a jail of free India?

In an interview with Pradip Kumar Biswas in January 1990, Pramatha Thakur acknowledged that his biggest life-time achievement was to mobilise the Namasudra migrants of East Bengal by organising them under the banner of the Matua Mahasangha. However, he clarified that he had realised much later that the Congress with which he was so actively involved, did not belong to him, and that the Matuas who are associated with the Left would realise that even the Left does not belong to them!

Kapil Krishna Thakur, the son of P R Thakur and fourth Sanghadipati of the Matuas, claims in an article that his father had supported Jogendranath Mondal’s candidature in the 1964’ Assembly byelection to Hanskhali seat which he vacated. Mondal, however, did not see the face of success. By 1967, Thakur’s anti-Congress temperament reached dizzy heights and he chose to contest the Indian general election on a Bangla Congress ticket. In the Nabadwip parliamentary constituency, Thakur defeated his nearest Congress rival, J.C. Biswas by a thumping margin of 89 thousand votes, receiving 61.24 per cent of the total votes polled.

Assessing P R Thakur’s Role in Bengal Harijan Movement

The election of 1967 was the last election that Thakur won. In the elections of 1971 and 1977, he lost to CPI (M) candidates both the times. This indicated a decisive takeaway of the refugee and scheduled caste vote bank by the Left parties. This vote bank would propel the communists to power in 1977 Assembly election in West Bengal. 

The reason for Thakur’s decisive role in Harijan politics of Bengal after 1947 was not entirely political. As a politician, he was opposed to affirmative action like reservation, for the scheduled castes, and instead pressed for radical social reforms and stressed in the need of organisation and self-help. As a religious leader, he held a charismatic sway over the Namasudras so much so that all those who protested against his arrest, participated in hunger strikes and sent petitions for his release, described him as a religious Guru, as the Mahasanghadhipati of the Matuas, whose incarceration had seriously jeopardized the religious activities of the sect.

He provided the much needed intellectual support and spiritual guidance to an uprooted and illiterate people who were compressed between Islamic onslaught on one hand and a struggle for livelihood on the other. The reinvention of a spiritual space for the Bengal scheduled castes in West Bengal is owed entirely to the efforts of P R Thakur. 

He was indefatigably loyal to the larger Hindu cause and did not dither away from collaborating with the caste Hindu, provided his caste’s interests were better served. The Matua Mahasangha led by P R Thakur was devoted to mobilise the dispersed Namasudra community and to convert Thakurnagar into a new cultural and spiritual hub for a Namasudra renaissance, reminiscent of the olden glorious days of Orakandi. 

When Thakur was arrested in 1964, he was described in a police report as a leader with ‘considerable influence upon the refugees of East Pakistan particularly upon the Namasudra community’. His endeavour to mobilise the Bengali scheduled castes away from the Pakistan Project and aiding in their resettlement in India placed him at par with his grandfather, Guruchand Thakur who ameliorated the plight of the so-called untouchables by spreading the light of education to their households. He constantly instilled self-confidence and boosted the morale of the Bengali scheduled castes who were sent to explore new avenues of livelihood and occupations in Dandakaranya and Andaman.

Though the intellectual and political space continues to be dominated by the Bengali Bhadralok, yet the Matua Mahasangha exercises a decisive influence on its adherents who dominate in 70-80 assembly segments in West Bengal. Apart from Pramatha Thakur, several other Matua leaders of the Thakur family have held positions of political eminence. The fourth Sanghadhipati, Kapil Krishna Thakur served as Member of Parliament for Bongaon. His younger brother, Manjul Krishna Thakur served as Minister of Refugee Relief and Rehabilitation in the first TMC government. Mamata Bala Thakur, the widow of Kapil Krishna Thakur, was also elected MP from Bongaon. The current and fifth Sanghadhipati, Shantanu Thakur was elected MP from the same seat in a BJP ticket in 2019.

Much to Thakur’s credit, the Namasudras considerably improved their social and educational status in post-Partition West Bengal. According to the 2011 census, the literacy rate of the Namasudras is at 79.52 per cent, which is much ahead of the state average of 76.26 per cent. Namasudras have decreased their traditional dependence on agriculture and took to modern professions. The Citizenship Amendment Bill passed by the Indian Parliament in December 2019, cleared the path for dignified citizenship for the Bengali Hindu refugees from East Pakistan and Bangladesh who migrated before 2015, of which, the Matuas constitute a large section. Pramatha Thakur and the Matua Mahasangha offered a new imagined space to a geographically dispersed and socially divided community, trying again to recover their collective self in post-Partition India.