An article by the eminent Bengali historian Jayanta Sengupta, published in the Indian newspaper, The Telegraph, this week caught my eye and held it for a long, long while. Rarely do I come across a piece of writing that is scholarly and eloquent in equal measure, that is lucid and urgent, that is ecologically sparse with words but inflected through and through with the exuberant rhythms and patterns of life that words exist to capture. I was enraptured and emailed him immediately. He was kind enough to respond promptly in spite of his busy schedule as Director of the Alipore Museum in Kolkata, a post that follows his work as Director of the Victoria Memorial Hall and long years of illustrious teaching at Jadavpur University. He is the author of At the Margins: Discourses of Development, Democracy and Regionalism in Orissa (Oxford University Press, 2015) and two books of essays in Bengali and is the co-editor of The Long History of Partition in Bengal: Event, Memory, Representations (Routledge, 2024).We are both alumni of Presidency College, Kolkata, and Cambridge University.

Professor Sengupta's Telegraph article takes off from a book, Bangalir Mon (The Bengali Mind), written by the intellectually formidable Alapan Bandyopadhyay, another alumnus of Presidency College, who entered the elite Indian Administrative Service and rose to be Chief Secretary of West Bengal. The common concern of these two Bengali intellectuals is the fate of the bhadralok, "a status group that once imagined itself as Bengal's natural custodian".

Why are the bhadralok important? Sengupta writes: "For over a century, this primarily upper-caste, educated, urban, disproportionately Hindu group had occupied a peculiar position in Bengal's political and cultural life. More than a 'class', it was an ethos forged in the crucible of colonial modernity and the so-called 'Bengal Renaissance'. The bhadralok mediated between empire and society, between tradition and reform, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Their authority derived not from numbers but from cultural capital - education, language, and a self-assigned role as interpreters of the public good."

Sengupta turns to a seminal moment in Bengali history. "Partition reshaped the bhadralok psyche profoundly, with the trauma of displacement - especially among Hindu refugees from East Bengal - producing a complex amalgam of victimhood and resilience. It reinforced a sense of historical grievance, even as it deepened attachment to a secular, linguistic identity that could transcend religious divides. This ambivalence between a cultural Hindu self-understanding and a professed secularism has remained central to the bhadralok political imagination."

That was then: This is now. In the upcoming West Bengal elections, both the Trinamool Congress, which governs the state, and the Bharatiya Janata Party, which rules at the Centre, are seeking the bhadralok's support in spite of the loss of their former position. "Today, as that authority stands eroded, this election presents them with a paradox. They are courted rhetorically by both sides. The ruling party invokes Bengali identity and cultural pride, often framed as resistance to a homogenising, 'outsider' nationalism. The Opposition appeals to anxieties around putative demographic change, minority 'appeasement', and a perceived erosion of Hindu interests. Both, in different ways, seek to activate the bhadralok's historical anxieties about loss, displacement, and cultural dilution."

Sengupta clinches his valedictory argument: "Yet, in electoral arithmetic, they scarcely matter. The transformation of West Bengal's political landscape over the past five decades has steadily displaced them from the centre of power. The Left Front's long tenure, beginning in 1977, initiated what might be called the democratisation of political agency... The rise of populist welfare regimes, direct benefit transfers, and identity-based mobilisation in the post-Left period has further entrenched a politics where numerical strength and immediate material interests outweigh abstract ideological discourse. The idiom of politics has moved from the bhadralok's cultivated rhetoric to a more visceral, performative style often dismissed as 'low-brow'. But that very dismissal betrays the residual elitism of the bhadralok gaze... The bhadralok, accustomed to setting the terms of debate, now find themselves reacting to narratives they do not control."

About time, I would say. The loss of any caste- and class-based hegemony, exercised through suspect cultural capital, is always to be welcomed, whether in West Bengal or in Bangladesh, which together once used to be Sonar Bangla (Golden Bengal). As I have written before in these pages, Maulana Bhasani, the earthy icon of plebeian Bangla in its struggle against patrician Pakistan, exemplified the possibilities of using religious faith as the very basis of political angst. The Muslim bhadralok of Pakistan, the ashraf - the avowed inheritors of the nation's foreign origins who could not bear the body odour of their fellow-Muslim ajlaf and arzal - have fallen by the wayside of Bangladesh's history. Those who have come to the fore in the demographic reordering of West Bengal are marginalised Hindu Dalits and Muslims, residual repositories of hope for an inclusive and progressive India.

May history continue.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com.