HistoriCity | West Bengal’s distinct Matua community find themselves at the crossroads of identity and politics

The origins of the Matua Sect

The origins of the Matua community can be traced earlier than the birth of its founder Harichand Thakur in 1812 in Safaldanga village in Faridpur district (now called Gopalganj) in undivided Bengal. For centuries, the Brahmanical caste system had straitjacketed people into discriminatory occupation-based categories; the worst treatment was meted out to ‘Shudras’ who were considered untouchables by Brahmins and other elite castes.

Historian Manosanta Biswas writes: “According to Smriti Shastra and 'Brihat-Dharma-Purana of the 12th century, among the nine abominable castes, Namasudra was in the third place and according to Bramha- Baiborto-Purana: “they were the lowest among ten outcastes. Brahmin and other high-caste people did not take drinking water from them. They were not allowed admission in temples and Brahmin priest hated to participate in their religious rituals”.

Since the 14th century, however, Islam’s egalitarian appeal has attracted a significant number of ‘Shudras’ to its mosques and dargahs.

The Bhakti movement too offered succour to the community in the form of equal and non-ritualistic access to God. However, Bhakti-influenced Vaishnavism too succumbed to the discriminatory practices of orthodox traditions, condescendingly labelling priests and disciples from lower castes ‘Jat (caste) Vaishnava’. Soon enough, it lost its appeal among Bengal’s lower castes, the bulk among the Hindus.

Author Sekhar Bandopdhyay writes in Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India: “An early twentieth-century oral tradition from the Bengal countryside bears ample testimony to this new aristocratic spirit of differentiation among the Vaishnavas: “Neda nedi sabai bujhi? Emni matibhram. Vaishnavero uchunichu achhe bhedkram." [They are all just shaven-headed males and females, you think? That is an error. Distinctions between high and low exist among the Vaishnavas too.]”

To escape degradation, lower castes, who were called ‘Chandals’ by the Bengali Hindu upper caste, took to various forms of social protest as well as ways to assimilate. However, the Brahmanical caste system continued to mould one reform movement after another to its alienating and exclusionary frame.

The history

Against this backdrop, in 1812, Harichand Thakur was born in a Vaishnavite family of modest means in the Faridpur district of undivided Bengal. Bengali writer Kapil Krishna Thakur writes in ‘Harichand Thakur's Matua Movement and Dalit Awakening in Bengal’: “Harichand’s family became a victim of the conspiracy of Surjamoni Mazumdar, the local landlord. In order to pay the instalments of revenue owed to the British government the landlord had borrowed seven hundred rupees from Harichand's family, but he did not care to repay the amount even after one-and-half years of the transaction. Moreover, a reminder about the repayment of the loan infuriated the landlord so much that he sent his men to pick up the elder brother of Harichand, Krishnadas, forcibly.”

Mazumdar continued: “Harichand were five brothers; as the insult went beyond their tolerance, they stood up to drive the goons out. It was difficult for the landlord to forget the humiliation. He took a different path to retaliate: a court case was filed, which ensured the landlord a decree that enabled him to confiscate the property of the Thakurs.”

Thakur subsequently moved to nearby Orakandi where he settled down as a small trader and cultivator. He had become well known for taking up cudgels against landlords.

Another transformative experience recorded is the Brahmin boycott of a funeral ceremony that he and other ‘Chandals’ were attending. This incident finally led him to initiate the Matua sect among Chandals or Namasudras (a name the community took in 1911).

As Rajat Roy points out in “Namasudra Literature and the Politics of Caste in West Bengal”, there is no certainty on the etymological root of the term Namasudra, with early colonial literature remaining silent for the most part about the name’s existence.

However, many colonial ethnographers have sought to explore the meaning of the name. Herbert Risley, for instance, posits that the name Namasudra may have come from one of two possible words — namas, a Sanskrit word, for admiration or adoration, and the other, namate — a Bengali word, meaning below.

Both denote a certain negative attribution to the name; in the first case it means the group of people who show admiration for the ‘sudras’ and the second one would mean a lower grade among the ‘sudras’.

Initially, the Hindu elite derided Harichand’s followers by calling them “moto or people drunk with their own spiritual outpourings (matoyara)”, writes Sekhar Bandopadhyay. Harichand inverted this derision into even greater solidarity among his adherents by turning the epithet into the name of his sect, ‘Matua’.

Before his death in 1877, the uneducated Thakur had somewhat formalised the basic framework of values for the community. He rejected both Vedas and Brahmins saying “Na Mani Veda, Na Mani Brahman (we do not follow the Vedas or Brahmin)” and formulated 12 principles that are an eclectic mix of progressive and Vaishnav ideals: “1. Always speak the truth. 2. Look at women other than your wife as mothers. 3. Love everybody in the world. 4. Never practice casteism. 5. Respect your parents. 6. Beware of the temptations of the six senses. 7. Do not condemn other religions. 8. Give up outward monkhood and desire for ascetic life away from family. 9. Sing Hari’s praise but toil with the hands. 10. Establish temples of Sri Hari. 11. Pray daily with heads bowed down. 12. Give yourself to Sri Hari”.

Thakur emphasised that material well-being is a precondition to spiritual pursuits: He exhorted his followers to always remember the dictum: “Hate Kam, Mukhe Nam” or (pray to god while working). Instead of preaching abstinence and shunning wealth, he taught them: “Grihosther mulbhitti orthoniti bote/ banijye bosoti lokkhi ei bani rote (money is the familial base/ the goddess of wealth blesses the man of commerce).

Thakur, convinced about the transformative power of education, ensured that his son, Guruchand (1846-1937) learnt Arabic and Persian at the local Maktab (school), besides Bengali from his father, and spread the importance of compulsory education, particularly for girls, among the community.

In 1880, Guruchand started the first ever paathshala (school) for shudras or untouchables in Orakandi village, Bangladesh’s Gopalganj (earlier Faridpur) district. A year later, the first-ever conference of Matuas was held to grow the network of schools for the community. Guruchand set up the Namasudra Welfare Association in the same year which drew members from twenty-two districts.

In 1908, with the aid of C S Mead, an Australian missionary, Guruchand started the first English-medium school and went on to set up the first school for girls under the aegis of the Hari-Guruchand Mission in Orakandi.

Matua contributions overlooked

Mandal and other subaltern scholars of Matua history have argued that Harichand and Guruchand’s contribution to the upliftment of the masses has been ignored by historians despite, Guruchand starting nearly 2,000 schools, out of which over a thousand were opened in the erstwhile Dhaka division alone.

Mandal says, “This pales the educational contribution of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, the much-glorified face of the Bengal Renaissance, who established, by one account, around 36 schools. And yet, it is Ishwar Chandra who is remembered as the archetypal educational reformer of Bengal and Guruchand’s revolution in the educational field remains undocumented in the official intellectual history of Bengal.”

Assimilation and rejection

While Matuas adopted an oppositional position to Vaishnavism drawing many followers, the sect also had to adopt some of the practices of elite Hindus in order to gain legitimisation within the larger Hindu society.

Notable here are their self-conscious steps to curb the free mingling of sexes and other practices such as consuming wine and swine’s meat, which were attributed to their tribal origins.

Thus, writes Bandopadhyay: “The proper performance of familial duties required a combination of two qualities or guna, i.e. Raja and Sattwa, the former motivated people to work, while the latter elevated them above worldly desires. The flag of the Matua sect therefore contained two colours: it was in red with a white border - red representing the Raja and the white standing for the Sattwa qualities.”

As the years rolled by, however, the Matua sect succumbed to elite caste culture and had to dilute its stance on equal rights for women by adopting practices such as child marriage and prohibition of widow remarriage. According to Bandopadhyay: “Child marriage and widow celibacy began to grow in popularity, as in 1911, 22.2% of the Namasudra girls in the age group of 5-12 years were either married or widows, the proportion being much higher than that among the traditional higher castes. And along with this, the earlier marriage arrangement of the groom paying a ‘bride price’ gave place to the high-caste practice of paying dowry, the amount of which gradually went on increasing.”

Matua, the British and Indian nationalism

Under Guruchand and his grandson Pramatha Ranjan Thakur, the Matuas strategically courted the British rulers and aligned themselves with the Muslim peasantry. This part of their 150-year evolution is today conveniently overlooked, as it suits the narrative of the religion-based CAA, which a section of the Hindu Matua community sees as being beneficial.

Guruchand also sat out of the freedom movement which was spearheaded by elite Hindus of the Congress under M K Gandhi and C R Das. While declining to participate in the Non-Cooperation movement, Guruchand wrote to Das that the Matuas and other untouchable communities first needed to be accorded equal rights which was only possible if the stranglehold of caste was broken.

Instead, Guruchand focused on winning the favour of the British and through persistent advocacy got the British to accept Namasudras as the official term for Chandals in 1911. Due to the mobilisation of Matuas, in 1909, the British introduced reservations for Scheduled castes in Bengal, a decade later under the Montague-Chemsford Act, 1919, similar reservation was enacted in all other Indian provinces.

The partition of India in 1947 and then the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 are considered two pivotal events in Matua history, both leading to their displacement from east Bengal into the western districts of Nadia, North and South 24 Parganas and Bongaon among others. The rise of religious fundamentalism forced them out of Bangladesh while their low caste status impeded their full integration in Indian Bengal.

This anti-Brahmanical sect’s present conundrums have been long in the making. From dismissing Veda and Brahminism to adopting some of their practices like deification, and ideas of purity, the Matua find themselves drawn to the resurgent Hindu nationalism under the last decade of BJP rule. However, this poses a serious risk to their distinct identity. How the current Matua society copes with this remains to be seen.

HistoriCity is a column by author Valay Singh that narrates the story of a city that is in the news, by going back to its documented history, mythology and archaeological digs. The views expressed are personal