South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

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In Opposition and Allegiance to Hinduism:

Exploring the Bengali Matua Hagiography of
Harichand Thakur

Sipra Mukherjee

To cite this article: Sipra Mukherjee (2018): In Opposition and Allegiance to Hinduism: Exploring
the Bengali Matua Hagiography of Harichand Thakur, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies,
DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2018.1445400

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2018.1445400

Published online: 25 Apr 2018.

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SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2018.1445400

ARTICLE

In Opposition and Allegiance to Hinduism: Exploring the

Bengali Matua Hagiography of Harichand Thakur
Sipra Mukherjee
Department of English, West Bengal State University, Kolkata, India

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The article studies the Bangla hagiography of Harichand Thakur, the Bengal; biography; Chandala;
founder of the Matua sampraday, a sect that broke away from colonial Bengal; Dalit;
Brahmanical Hinduism in nineteenth-century Bengal. The paper Guruchand; hagiography;
explores how the hagiography takes on the added task of Harichand Thakur; Matua;
Namasudra
constructing the collective identity of the Matuas. It argues that for
a vulnerable and marginalised community where the hagiography
is among the few books published, the text serves to validate the
community’s aspirations and authenticates its legacy. The sect,
founded in opposition to the dominant Brahmanical hegemony
that had kept them suppressed for generations, has been an
upwardly mobile community in the twentieth century. The essay
examines the changing presentations of the hagiography over a
century to explore how the Matua community walks a fine line
between opposition and allegiance to the majoritarian Hindu faith,
and how the indeterminate boundaries between myth and history,
fact and fiction, are used in this project of the community’s self-
construction.

Hagiographies are texts that evoke suspicion. Known for their uncritical portrayal of an
individual who is perceived as a saint or avatar, the word ‘hagiographic’ has taken on the
function of an adjective that indicates more than the genre of a text. Hagiographic litera-
ture is, therefore, seldom considered a serious source for research despite its concern with
an often historically significant individual. The text is perceived as uncritical in its
appraisal, arbitrary in its choice of events, and guilty of conflating facts with imagination
to construct a history that speaks more of the writer’s inclinations than of the saint whose
life it claims to communicate. Paradoxically, then, this compromise with facts sometimes
makes the text a valuable narrative because of the tangential revelations it makes about
the writer and, by extension, frequently, the writer’s community—revelations that they
may be loath to otherwise articulate in explicit terms. Hagiographies may consequently be
read as reversing the accepted author-subject paradigm, making the author the subject of
the text which becomes a document that writes out the hopes, anxieties and fears of the
author, and the larger collective he or she belongs to who see the saint as ‘theirs’. Thus the
fear of mortality has been repeatedly assuaged by the saint’s miraculous healings, hopes of
prosperity are assured for the devoted, uneasiness of conscience is alleviated by rituals of

CONTACT Sipra Mukherjee mukherjeesipra@gmail.com

© 2018 South Asian Studies Association of Australia
2 S. MUKHERJEE

repentance, and dread of the world’s futility is appeased through soteriology. The hagiogra-
phy becomes a site where questions of the present and the future of a community can be
tacitly posed, and less tacitly answered. This becomes especially significant when dealing
with marginal communities like that of the Matua sect that this essay discusses, where the
hagiography is among the few books, or the only book, published by the community. The
book enables the hitherto inaudible marginalised voice to move to the foreground and to
articulate the story of an individual who is perceived by this fringe community as embody-
ing within his life the community’s aspirations and dreams. The remembering and repre-
sentation of the saint’s life consequently becomes an act not uninspired by politics and, not
surprisingly, hagiographies are written and rewritten over ages, adapting their commentary
and styling of the saint’s life to better engage with the concerns of the changing times.
Without a canonical religious text, the onus of representing the Matua sect’s inclina-
tions is to some extent borne by the hagiography of the sect’s founder, Sri Harichand Tha-
kur. As the community moves from a position of extreme marginality to a position of
relative strength, its equation with dominant Hinduism has seen many twists and turns.
Beginning with a defiant opposition to Brahmanical Hinduism, the Matuas have alter-
nately opposed and pledged allegiance to it, flirting with the boundaries of Hinduism,
sometimes identifying themselves as Hindu and sometimes not. The understanding of the
Matua dharma has consequently been marked by a certain degree of fluidity, allowing for
shifting stances to be taken by the community in response to shifts in stance by the domi-
nant Hinduism. The reversal of the author-subject paradigm in hagiographies, where it
becomes possible to read the author as the subject, is particularly useful for exploring this
fluid position. The negotiations between the dominant community and that of the periph-
eral, revealed through the life of the hagiographic text, chart the positions of power or vul-
nerability afforded by adherence to a particular religious community. This becomes
clearer if the transformations in the position occupied by the subject/s are viewed in rela-
tion to the process of conversion. Would the identification of the sect’s followers as Matua
rather than, or not only, Hindus indicate a conversion from one faith to another? If the
position of simultaneous allegiance and opposition visible in the hagiography appears to
indicate that ‘conversion’ would not be the right term to use here, what is at stake when a
marginalised community converts to a numerically and politically ‘smaller’ faith? Or, per-
haps more to the point here, what does that marginalised community stand to lose if it
does not remain within the fold of the dominant faith? How may a community take up an
equivocal position of adherence and resistance to a religion that is powerful but has been
its major oppressor in the past?
It is from this perspective that this essay will read the hagiography of Harichand Tha-
kur (1812–1878), the founder of the Matua faith popular among a majority of the Nama-
sudra caste group of Bengal, earlier designated by the name of Chandala, which was
published from Thakurnagar in West Bengal in 1916.1 Over the past century, this faith

1. ‘Starting in 1901, various castes sent representations to the Bengal government demanding a name change and a
higher status in the hierarchy. In 1911, the pile of such representations weighed 1.5 maunds (about 57 kilograms). Bab-
hans (who now call themselves Bhumihar) wanted to be called Brahmarshi Brahmans, Bengali Kayastha thought they
deserved the Kshatriya status and Baidyas sought the Brahman tag. All these demands were turned down. Two repre-
sentations—one from Chandals seeking to be renamed Namasudra and the other from the Kaibarttas to be declared
Mahishya—were accepted’: A.K. Biswas, ‘Bengal’s Unsung Namasudra Movement’, Forward Press (29 Nov. 2016)
[https://www.forwardpress.in/2016/11/bengals-unsung-namasudra-movement/, accessed 19 April 2018].
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 3

has spread among other depressed castes like the Poundra, Kapali, Malo, Kumbhakar and
Muchi, making it a 12.5 million-strong sect among the Scheduled Castes. This has pro-
pelled the community into a position of electoral power as political parties vie with each
other to secure this perceived vote bank.
The Matua dharma emerged among the then-Chandala community around the mid
nineteenth century, when the community began seeing itself as a distinct socio-political
entity. The president of the Bangla Dalit Sahitya Sangstha, Manohar Mouli Biswas, thinks
of the Matua faith as being in opposition to Brahmanism, the Vedas and their rituals.2
The emergence of this faith coincided with a period of relative financial stability that
some of the Hindu ‘lower’-caste groups and Muslims had begun to experience with the
emergence of rice and jute as cash crops. The jute acreage in the Bengal delta increased
from about 50,000 acres to close to three million acres between the 1850s and the 1900s,3
making these weaker communities more visible and audible than they had been earlier.
Gopalgunj, where about a fifth of the total Namasudra population of Bengal lived, was
located on an important riverine trade route linking East Bengal’s jute-exporting areas
through Khulna to Calcutta. As the biography (inclined to hagiography) of Harichand’s
son, Guruchand, says:
Home-grown rice, jute, mustard and pulses,
With laden boats the trader the river traverses.4

Harichand Biswas, popularly referred to as Harichand Thakur, and his son Guruchand
were successful traders who encouraged Harichand’s followers to do well financially. The
Matua dharma has a strong work ethic at its core, expressed in Harichand Thakur’s oft-
cited words connecting the act of incessant chanting of the Lord’s holy name with inces-
sant work: ‘Work on your hands, His name on your lips’ (‘Haate kaam, mukhe naam’).
Mocking their ardent chanting and dancing, the upper castes bestowed on them the
derogatory name ‘moto’ (‘drunkards’), a taunt which Harichand acknowledged and turned
on its head by making it the name of his faith—Matua. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay describes
the Matuas as ‘a protestant Vaishnava religious sect’5 that rejected the humiliating hege-
mony of the Brahmanical varna in order to create an independent, rebellious identity.
‘What do we care for Brahma-Vishnu-Maheswar? We know only you!’6 goes one Matua
song addressed to Harichand Thakur, voicing the defiance of a community placed beyond
the pale of the familiar gods.
Who were the Chandalas of Bengal? Unlike in many other parts of India, the work of
the Chandalas of Bengal was not restricted to the disposal of corpses. They were fisher-
men, boatmen and carpenters too, and then, as they began to move from the marshy
lands of far east Bengal into the settled community spaces, agricultural labourers, culti-
vators, roof thatchers, weavers, and egg and vegetable sellers. Their diverse occupations,
which made them largely self-reliant, were possibly a consequence of their distance

2. Personal interview with Manohar Mouli Biswas, 14 May 2012, at the State-Level Seminar on Bangla Dalit Literature,
West Bengal State University, Barasat.
3. Tariq Omar Ali, ‘The Envelope of Global Trade: The Political Economy and Intellectual History of Jute in the Bengal
Delta—1850s to 1950s’, unpublished dissertation, Harvard University, Boston, MA, 2012, p. 3.
4. Mahananda Halder, Guruchand Carit (Thakurnagar, 1943), p. 61. All translations from vernacular texts are mine.
5. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, ‘Community Formation and Communal Conflict: Namasudra-Muslim Riot in Jessore-Khulna’, in
Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 25, no. 46 (17 Nov. 1990), pp. 2563–8.
6. Ashwini Kumar Sarkar, Shri Shri Hari Sangeet (Sridham Thakurnagar: Sushila Printers, 2010), p. 311.
4 S. MUKHERJEE

from the organised caste community where each occupational group was alternately
dependent on, and providers for, the other. Isolated from the mainstream and with a
fairly recent incorporation into the Hindu caste system when they emerged as a settled
peasant community in the nineteenth century,7 the Chandalas had been remote from
caste discrimination and the disabling effects of persistent humiliation until the past
two centuries. The community’s spirit of independence and dignity was nurtured by the
Matua faith of dissent, enabling the community to move up the economic ladder
through its secular work ethic. Though education was forbidden to their ‘lowly’ caste
community, they began to embrace literacy in the nineteenth century with their leader
Harichand’s persistent reiteration of the need for education, and later through Guruc-
hand’s association with the Australian Baptist missionary, Cecil Silas Mead. Economi-
cally weak and lacking social privileges, this was a difficult journey, and the first book to
be published by the community was the hagiography of Harichand, Sri Sri Harililam-
rita. Begun around 1905 and published in 1916, the book came in the wake of the com-
munity’s change of name from Chandala to Namasudra in the 1911 Census of India. Its
significance as a text is located in its time of publication—a time when the community,
hitherto on the fringes of society, renamed itself as it moved into a stronger social and
political position.
The decision by Guruchand to authorise the writing of the book provokes questions
since it was against the wishes of Harichand, who had forbidden his disciples to write a
biography/hagiography. An early attempt to author a hagiography of Sri Harichand dur-
ing his lifetime had been severely censured by Harichand. Tarak Chandra Sarkar, the
author of the hagiography, writes that Harichand called his two disciples, Mrityunjay and
Dasarath, the patrons of the project, and advised them against the effort:
Listen, Mrityunjay, Mahaprabhu called to his disciple,
This kind of lila geeti writing is not desirable.
From such public trumpetings desist.
Keep my seat in your hearts’ midst.8
Harichand Thakur even allegedly threatened the writers with curses of leprosy and had
displayed sufficient anger to thwart the project during his lifetime. His strong disapproval
may have been out of fear that such a book would encourage a deification of his person.
Deeply critical of Brahmanical Hinduism and the domineering authority wielded by the
Vedas, Harichand would have been opposed to endeavours that could culminate in guru-
baad, avatar-baad or blind worship of written texts among his community. One hagiog-
raphy that was begun despite Harichand Thakur’s anger was lost. Though Sarkar
explains this loss as a ‘divine act’ by Devi Saraswati because the ‘time was not right’ (asa-
may), Sudhir Ranjan Halder, a follower critical of the Hinduisation of the Matua faith,
writes that Harichand ‘threw’ the book out.9 The later hagiography, Sri Sri Harililamrita,
seems to have been begun in the first decade of the twentieth century, nearly three

7. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Culture and Hegemony: Social Dominance in Colonial Bengal (New Delhi/Thousand Oaks,
CA/London: Sage, 2004), p. 154; and Richard Maxwell Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Ber-
keley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2004), p. 219.
8. Tarak Chandra Sarkar, Sri Sri Harililamrita (hereafter SSH) (Thakurnagar: Sridham Thakurnagar, 2010), p. 5.
9. Sudhir Ranjan Halder, Harichand Thakur and the Matuya Religion (Nadia, 2015), Chap. 5 [http://generalbooksonmatuya.
blogspot.in/2015/10/harichand-thakur-and-matuya-religion.html, accessed 15 May 2017].
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 5

decades after Harichand’s death, since the 1916 Preface describes it as being incomplete
in 1907.10
The commissioning of the job was, in all likelihood, a difficult matter in itself, given the
very few members of the community who were not just literate, but sufficiently educated
to author a book. This difficulty was compounded by the added requirement of a poetical
disposition. It appears that a diffident and hesitant Tarak Sarkar had needed much
encouragement, alternately genial and bellicose, from several disciples of Harichand Tha-
kur before he finally agreed to take up the work. Though a master at composing verses
orally, Sarkar was uncomfortable with the written form. Sarkar began the work following
a dream in which the disciple Golak Gosain appeared as the Narasimha avatar, berating
him for being a fool for not starting the book following Guruchand’s directions and
threatening him with violence.11 The difficulty of writing out a full book was followed by
the considerable expense of publishing it. The tireless efforts of Haribar Sarkar and money
donated by Gopalchand Sadhu Thakur ultimately enabled the publication of the first edi-
tion two years after Tarak Sarkar died. The book was printed from the Shastra Prachar
Press at 5, Chhidam Mudi Lane, of Darzi Para, Kolkata. Subsequent editions were pub-
lished under the auspices of Guruchand’s descendants, the Matua Mahasangha, first in
undivided Bengal in 1940, and then in the two partitioned Bengals—East Pakistan, later
Bangladesh, and West Bengal (India)—by the two branches of Harichand Thakur’s
family.
Not much is known about the author Tarak Chandra Sarkar except that he was an
acclaimed kabiyal,12 born in Jessore district. He arrived at Orakandi to meet Harichand
Thakur on hearing of Harichand from his teacher, Mrityunjay Biswas.13 Though Sarkar
appears to have been the unanimous choice of all the noted Matua leaders to write the
hagiography, his authoring possibly introduced more of Vaishnavism than had been
desired by the leaders themselves. Mahananda Halder refers to this in his 1940 ‘Introduc-
tion’ as the ‘somewhat excessive leaning towards the Caitanya Caritamrita’.14 This ‘exces-
sive leaning’ can be seen in the positioning of Harichand as an avatar of Vishnu, and the
consequent explanation for Vishnu’s descent to earth at this time:
I will come as humanity, will connect with humanity,
Will complete my Lila as humankind….
I will bend low to liberate the lowly,
Will make holy, as avatar, all mankind.15

Halder felt the need to explain this away by attributing it to the fact that Tarak Chandra
Sarkar was a kabiyal who, often composing verses orally on the fly, must have had the
immensely popular Caitanya Caritamrita at the tips of his fingers. It is a consequence of
his love for Caitanya Caritamrita, and his knowledge of the same, wrote Halder, that his

10. Haribar Sarkar, ‘Introduction’, in Tarak Chandra Sarkar (ed.), Sri Sri Harililamrita (hereafter SSH 1916) (Faridpur: Haribar
Sarkar, 1323 BS [1916]), p. 1.
11. Haribar Sarkar, ‘Introduction’, SSH 1916, p. 1.
12. Kabiyals are popular poets who compose verses largely impromptu and sing them, set to traditional tunes, at public
gatherings. Their verses would be marked by much wit and worldly wisdom. Though kabiyals were popular across
undivided Bengal earlier, the practice is now largely limited to rural culture.
13. Mahananda Halder, ‘Preface to the Second Edition’, in Tarak Chandra Sarkar (ed.), Sri Sri Harililamrita (hereafter SSH
2010) (Thakurnagar: Modern Press, 2010), p. xvii.
14. Mahananda Halder, ‘Introduction’, in Tarak Chandra Sarkar (ed.), Sri Sri Harililamrita (SSH 2010), p. xix.
15. Tarak Chandra Sarkar (ed.), Sri Sri Harililamrita (SSH 2010) (Thakurnagar: Modern Press, 2010), pp. 20–39.
6 S. MUKHERJEE

mind must have unconsciously composed verses that echoed so closely the lines and form
of that other text. Sri Sri Harililamrita is an epic, wrote Halder, and therefore similar to
Bengali texts like Kashiram Das’ Mahabharata and Krittibas’ Ramayana. Both these texts
are considered inspired as much by Vaishnavism and Bengali culture as by the Sanskrit
originals. Kashiram Das,16 born into a Vaishnava family of Bardhhaman, wrote his
Mahabharata, named Bharat-panchali (the story of India) in the mangalkavya tradition
popular in Bengal. Krittibas too, who studied at Nabadwip, the city famous for the great
bhakti saint, Caitanya, used the oral narrative panchali form popular in Bengali, and enti-
tled his work Sri Ram Paanchali. To some extent, therefore, the form of Tarak Sarkar’s
hagiography may be seen as one ‘received’ from the ecology of traditional Bengali religious
literature. Mahananda Halder places Tarak Sarkar’s work within this context, where the
religious and poetic registers of Bengali Vaishnavism may have been ‘naturally’ used by
the author. The mangalkavya would be written using the payar chhanda (payar rhyme),
which was a couplet form with the rhyme scheme, aa bb. These narratives would mostly
be sung aloud to a gathering of devotees in rural Bengal, much as the Matua hagiography
and songs were during sankirtans.17 In praise of indigenous deities who often belonged to
the ‘Little Traditions’, and frequently in conflict with the ‘Great Tradition’ of Brahmanical
Hinduism, they may have been interpreted as forms that were entirely in consonance
with the spirit of Sri Sri Harililamrita. Paramananda Haldar, writing the ‘Introduction’ to
the hagiography in 1999, supports his predecessor’s arguments and describes the cultural
space of Bengal as being deeply permeated by the spirit of Vaishnavism since the birth of
Caitanya. Tarak Sarkar’s leaning towards Vaishnava narratives was to make his text easily
acceptable to his rural audience:
Besides he was one of the greatest missionaries of the Matua religion. Knowing how difficult
it was to preach a new religion at that time, he must have introduced Caitanya into his
preachings of Thakur Harichand’s religion with the aim of remaining in harmony with the
age.18

This logic regarding form and its understanding of the ways in which Bengali missionaries
worked are borne out by other examples too, as in the use of the panchali form by Ram
Ram Basu, William Carey’s munshi at Serampore, when he wrote about the life of Christ
in 1803.19
Yet an ambivalence remains between the discursive structure of the text and its sub-
ject, the life of Harichand. The repeated references to ‘avatar’ and to the Hindu pantheon
of deities, and the division of the hagiography into sections that relate an event much as
the lila of Krishna or Caitanya are related, make the tone of the text unlike the anger and
protest that may otherwise be heard in Harichand’s teachings. It is this ambivalence that
gives the text its potential to serve future generations of the sect by offering sufficient lee-
way to negotiate different relations with the Hindu community at differing times. An
integral element of Harichand’s life and the sect he built was distaste for the Vaishnavas

16. Das was not his family name, but a title that meant servant in the Vaishnava tradition.
17. The sankirtans, or singing of hymns in groups, is a Matua practice and shows an intrinsic connection between its tradi-
tions of performance and those that surround Vaishnava narratives.
18. Paramananda Haldar, ‘Introduction’, SSH 2010, p. ix.
19. I am grateful to Richard Fox Young for drawing my attention to this fragment.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 7

and Brahmans alike. This is revealed in the words which Tarak Sarkar makes Harichand
speak:
Where do you see Brahmins? Where Vaishnav?
All self-seeking hypocrites, full of self-love.
Rituals, mantras, habits veil the scheming soul.
Devote yourself to work, with purity your goal.20

Or the lines:
Not counting beads, nor streaking foreheads, neither the dripping of holy water.
It’s work on your hands, with His name on your lips, and an open mind that’ll matter.21

As Haripada Adhikary writes in his book, Harekrsna Movement, all Vaishnava sects utter
‘Harekrsna as their main word of prayer, except Matua samparadaya’ who chant the word
‘Haribol’.22 This ‘Haribol’ of the Matua sampradaya is a chant that brings together the
Hari of Narayana-Vishnu and the Hari of Harichand Thakur, navigating the perilous
waters of the Brahmanical tradition even as they refuse to yield prominence to its hege-
mony. With the title Sri Sri Harililamrita quite clearly in imitation of Vaishnava hagiogra-
phies, such as Sri Caitanya Caritamrita or Sri Prabhupada Lilamrita, the book appears to
be situated within the very fabric that Harichand Thakur had rejected. Both the title and
the language of the book have been debated within and outside the community, with
numerous articulate voices on both sides. This ambivalence has remained persistent
throughout the long journey that the text has made in its editions from 1916 to 2010.
It is interesting to note, though, that the hagiography Sri Sri Harililamrita was written
at the insistence of Harichand’s grandson, Shashi Bhusan.23 Though Guruchand, Haric-
hand’s son, was the organisational leader under whom ‘the sect achieved its doctrinal
cohesion and organisational push’,24 Sudhir Ranjan Halder writes that Guruchand was
‘hesitant’25 to authorise a hagiography. It was Shashi Bhusan who convinced his father of
the necessity for a biography. Educated in nineteenth-century Calcutta and the first of his
community to secure a government job, Shashi Bhusan also determined that the hagiogra-
phy should be titled ‘Sri Sri Harililamrita’ instead of ‘Sri Hari Caritra Sudha’ as the
kabiyal Tarak Sarkar had titled it. The near-echoing of Caitanya Caritamrita and the
inclusion of the word ‘lila’ in the title, a term associated with the divine play of Krishna,
accentuated the Hindu Vaishnava aspects of the text. A brief introduction to Shashi Bhu-
san may better inform our understanding of his decisions. Born in 1868 and growing up
in late nineteenth-century Bengal, Shashi Bhusan moved to Calcutta, which was the seat
of colonial power, for his higher education. He was a student at Metropolitan College and
then at General Assembly’s Institution. He became a teacher at Cotton School after

20. Kothay brahman dekho kothay Vaishnab.

Swarthabashe arthalobhi jata bhanda sab.
Tantramantra bhek jhola sab dhandhabaji
Pabitra hriday rekhe hao kajer kaji. (Tarak Chandra Sarkar, SSH)
21. Mala tepa phota kata jal phela nai.
Hate kam mukhe nam mon khola chai. (Tarak Chandra Sarkar, SSH)
22. Haripada Adhikary, Harekrsna Movement: The Unifying Force of the Hindu Religion (Calcutta: Academic Publishers, 1995),
p. 188.
23. Mahananda Halder, ‘Preface to Second Edition’, SSH 2010, p. xvi.
24. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Culture and Hegemony, p. 96.
25. Sudhir Ranjan Halder, ‘Sri Sri Harileeslamrita Prasange’ [http://generalbooksonmatuya.blogspot.in/2016/03/blog-
post_36.html, accessed 15 Dec. 2017], p. 1.
8 S. MUKHERJEE

teaching for some years in a secondary school that he established at his village, Orakandi.
During this time, Shashi Bhusan was deeply influenced by the Brahmo movement and
desired to convert to the Brahmo faith.26 On hearing of his son’s intended conversion,
Guruchand dissuaded him with the rationale that the Brahmo ideal could be achieved
without conversion, and that Shashi Bhusan was blind to the Brohmo27 who was present
within his own community:
Brohmo took the form of Sri Hari Thakur
Sincere devotion will for you that ideal secure.…
To the words of the Gita, Shashi, be attentive,
One’s own dharma is the greatest, say the most perceptive.
Another’s faith is dangerous, say those most pure,
Even death for one’s faith is nobler, know this for sure.28

Guruchand’s words may appear to speak of a devotion to the Hindu religion that, despite
the caste hierarchy and the lowly position in which his caste group was placed, had
remained secure. That such an interpretation, though pertinent for much of the main-
stream, would be simplistic for the margins is revealed in Guruchand’s following words,
which tear apart the Brahmo faith. So, he asks, since all are equal in the Brahmo faith,
how many of the lower castes have entered it? How many of the Brahmos belong to the
Muchi and the Dom community? It is possible that Shashi Bhusan, having received
schooling in an English-medium school at the village of Lakshmipasha and his higher
education in the Scottish missionary Alexander Duff’s General Assembly’s Institution,
had remained largely protected from the severe caste discrimination that the rest of his
community faced. Guruchand’s words seek to open Shashi Bhusan’s eyes to the reality of
his identity, an identity that he had perhaps been sufficiently privileged to escape during
his youth. The power dynamics which governed their situation were grasped with a star-
tling clarity and were spelt out explicitly by Guruchand:
Know one truth, Shashi, that the King is supreme.
Without the King’s power, the dream will remain a dream… .
To draw the King’s eyes, towards your community,
Is an ambition worth endeavour, look for that opportunity.29
Shashi Bhusan’s desire to join the Swadeshi movement (another of his son’s plans that
Guruchand thwarted), elicited from Guruchand a discussion on the idea of the nation
that is sophisticated and astute:
For your motherland will you the garb of Swadeshi don?
But who is this Mother to whom you are so drawn? 30
Guruchand’s anti-Swadeshi attitude, perhaps interpreted as loyalty to Britain by the impe-
rialists, won him the durbar medal in 1911. Shashi Bhusan responded to Guruchand’s

26. Brahmo is a monotheistic Hindu reform movement that began in nineteenth-century Bengal.
27. The concept of the ‘Brohmo’, as it exists in the Hindu popular mind, is that of an absolute entity, the Supreme Creator
and Consciousness, who is beyond any physical attribute. The Brahmo Samaj was often called the Brohmo Samaj
when it was established, as the prayer hall established at Telinipara by Anandaprasad Bandyopadhyay was called and
as the hymns of the Samaj (‘Brohmo sangeet’) are still called.
28. Mahananda Halder, Guruchand Carit, pp. 339–49.
29. Ibid., p. 349.
30. Ibid., pp. 350–1.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 9

words by turning his attention towards his neglected community and establishing numer-
ous small schools in and around his village.
With his many close connections in Calcutta, Shashi Bhusan would have been familiar
with the historical strides that were being taken by the nationalist movement. He was
aware of the growing disaffection with British rule, the anti-colonial efforts, and the
nationalist discourse that, at the turn of the century, shifted its emphasis from the reli-
gious, linguistic and caste identities of Indians to that of the ‘Indian’ identity, delineating
the coloniser as its Other. Both Hindus and Muslims, anxious to include within their flock
as many as possible, widened the identities of the two religions to include many whom
they had earlier marginalised. The Hindu ‘upper’ castes looked to build bridges with the
‘lower’ castes who had been on the margins, while the ashraf Muslims looked to recognise
as Islamic the pir-worshipping, idolatrous Bengali Muslims and the altafs whom they had
earlier disregarded. This was also a reaction against Christian evangelisation, as well as a
response to the census, which delineated each community by numbers, eventually culmi-
nating in the colonial government’s policy of the Communal Award, political representa-
tion according to numbers.31 In this political climate, then, focusing on differences within
the folds of a religious community made little political sense. Shashi Bhusan, aware of the
overtly Hinduised discourse of the Swadeshi movement then sweeping across Bengal,
with its cry of ‘vande mataram’ (‘hail to the mother’) being declared a punishable offence
by the government, may have felt it imprudent to emphasise the Matua sect’s differences
with the parent Hindu community at this time. The necessity for the Namasudra commu-
nity to enter the corridors of power, or at the very least to move closer to these corridors,
was far more important. That these corridors commanded by the British colonial govern-
ment were beginning to see the entry of Hindu nationalist leaders as the Swadeshi move-
ment made rapid strides towards power was a fact probably not lost on Shashi Bhusan.
A keen awareness of the social machinery by which hegemonic powers control the
politico-economic state of a society marked the Matua leaders’ approaches to the abstrac-
tions of religion and nation. Religion facilitates communal bonding and the consequence
of this bonding is that it gives the community strength and power: ‘Jar dal nei, tar bal nei’
(‘If you don’t have numbers, you don’t have strength’), reiterated Guruchand to his com-
munity time and again. The Matua religion was crucial to the Namasudras because it gave
them the muscle to discard the crippling humiliation of Brahmanical Hinduism. Even as
religious identity acted as the salient basis for the identity formation of the Namasudras,
the dimensions of this identity went beyond the paradigm of religion. By the time Guruc-
hand, took up the leadership of the community, the Matuas had moved away from their
opposition to Hinduism that Harichand had charted during his lifetime. The Matua iden-
tity, inclusive of sociological and political facets besides the religious, was wider in range
than a purely religious identity, and this may be the reason why identification with the
Matua sect was not perceived as a religious conversion. Moreover, beginning with the
writing of Harichand’s hagiography, elements of Hinduism such as explicit references to,

31. For detailed discussions on this subject, see Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengali Muslims, 1871–1905: A Quest for Identity
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981); Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India: The
Namasudras of Bengal, 1872–1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 143–53; and Christophe Jaffrelot,
‘The Idea of the Hindu Race in the Writings of the Hindu Nationalist Ideologues in the 1920s and 1930s: A Concept
Between Two Cultures’, in Peter Robb (ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1995), pp. 334–5.
10 S. MUKHERJEE

and worship of, Hindu gods and goddesses began to find a place within the community. If
Sri Sri Harililamrita was introduced to the community as a mirror (darpan) of the lives of
the untouchable Chandala community, the biography of his son Guruchand, authored by
Mahananda Halder, was an alternative narrative of the community. Structured partly as
hagiography and partly as biography, with Guruchand seen as an avatar of Shiva, this text
seeks to write the history of the Namasudra community:
Guruchand Charit, authored by Mahananda Halder is a valuable text and the Life-Veda
(‘Jeevan-Veda’) of the Matua sect. It is a grand narrative of the struggle for freedom of
Bengal’s underprivileged and disadvantaged classes… . No history of these people has been
written before this.32

The text of Sri Sri Harililamrita underwent significant changes between the first edition
of 1916 and later editions. There was the inclusion of a genealogical table of Harichand
Thakur’s roots that claimed Ramdas Misra, a Maithili Brahman, as Harichand’s ancestor.
Working for and living amidst the downtrodden, Ramdas Misra was considered to have
lost his caste and no Brahman was willing to give his daughter in marriage to Ramdas’
son, Chandramohan. Consequently, Chandramohan married Rajlakshmi, a Namasudra
woman, and thus the Sudrahood of Ramdas’ lineage began.
Variations of this story of a caste Hindu birth and a morganatic marriage, or the loss of
caste status as punishment for disregarding societal rules, may be found in the various
iterations of the hagiography. It is one of the arguments given in favour of them rejecting
the Chandala name and taking on that of the Namasudra (the higher Sudras). While this
may be seen as being consonant with M. N. Srinavas’ theory of achieving mobility through
Sanskritisation,33 Bandyopadhyay points out that it ‘may also be read as a denial of a pre-
viously ascribed caste identity’ and that when ‘everyone claims to be Brahmins, Brahmin-
hood loses its connotations of power’.34 The 1916 edition of Tarak Sarkar’s hagiography,
however, made no mention of the Maithili Brahman story, which began to be seen only in
the later editions, first through a paragraph in the 1940 Preface to the second edition,35
and in later editions through a genealogical table at the beginning of the text. Comparing
the 1916 edition with the 2010 edition of Sri Sri Harililamrita, one finds, besides the gene-
alogical table, 354 lines appended prior to Harichand’s birth (abirbhav), of which 210
lines deal with his Brahman ancestry.36 This is echoed in the 1994 autobiography of Pra-
matha Ranjan Thakur, better known as P.R. Thakur, the great-grandson of Harichand,
who joined nationalist politics via the Indian National Congress and who went on to
become a minister in the West Bengal legislative assembly in independent India. In his
Atmacharit ba Purba Smriti (Autobiography or Old Memories),37 Thakur writes in detail
about the religiosity of his family, and of his grandfather Guruchand, whom he describes
as a naisthik Hindu (pious Hindu) whose family celebrated the Vaishnava festivals of Dol-
jatra, Rathjatra and Raslila as well as the Sakta festivals of Durga Puja and Kali Puja. This

32. Mahananda Halder, Guruchand Carit, p. v.

33. M.N. Srinivas, Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1965).
34. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, ‘Texts of Liminality: Reading Identity in Dalit Autobiographies from Bengal’, in Ezra Rashkow,
Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti (eds), Memory, Identity and the Colonial Encounter in India: Essays in Honour of
Peter Robb (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 91–109.
35. SSH 2010, p. xv.
36. SSH 2010, pp. 22–9.
37. Pramatha Ranjan Thakur, Atmacharit ba Purba Smriti (Thakurnagar: Matua Mahasangha, 1994).
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 11

autobiography is significant because when P.R. Thakur was writing his autobiography, he
was already the spiritual head of the Matua community and his opinions are reflected in
Sri Sri Harililamrita.
Apart from the added lines about Harichand’s ancestry in the 2010 version, the text of
Sri Sri Harililamrita has remained largely unchanged. In the earlier editions, while Maha-
nanda Halder rued the ‘excessive leaning towards the Caitanya Caritamrita’, it is hinted
at that cleansing the text of its many Vaishnava inclinations would prove extremely cum-
bersome, if not outright impossible, because they are embedded in the very discourse of
the hagiography. In later editions, however, the Vaishnava, and by extension the Hindu,
elements elicit fewer explanations, and the editors are content to let them remain as they
are. Indeed, with the text largely unchanged, much of the drama is played out in the Prefa-
ces to the various editions, and they offer an interesting reading of the trajectory of the
book through the twentieth century.
As early as the second edition, published in 1940, we find the Preface referring to dif-
ferences with the original first edition of 1916. Halder writes of ‘specific reasons’ that
induced the editors of the second edition to make changes ‘in many places’. ‘A few’ sub-
jects that were felt to be ‘unnecessary’ were removed and many areas felt to be of ‘particu-
lar necessity’ were added. The changes were made to ascertain that ‘the titles of each
section gave the reader a clear idea of what was included in them’.38 In the Preface to the
fourth edition, written by Kapil Krishna Thakur and published in West Bengal in 1988,
the subject of changes is dealt with again, with the editor apologising for being unable to
complete work on an appendix that would explain the changes.39
By then, the Partition of India had been accomplished and the subcontinent had been
carved into three distinct parts. The eastern region of India, where the Bengal Presidency
had been situated, was divided into two following an approximate division along religious
lines. Being approximate, and somewhat arbitrary, this division left large populations of
Muslims and Hindus on the ‘wrong’ side of the border, causing millions to flee their
homes and cross to the country where the majority belonged to their religious group. The
large Namasudra population occupying the Faridpur and Barisal (earlier Bakergunj) dis-
tricts that became part of East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) were scattered as a consequence
of the violence that followed Partition. A majority of them crossed the border to relocate
to areas of Bengal, the Andaman Islands, the Dandakaranya region and other places in
India. A large section of the Matua community from the neighbourhood of Harichand
Thakur’s original home in Orakandi, Faridpur, in East Bengal moved to a new centre at
Thakurnagar in West Bengal, a township set up by Pramatha Ranjan Thakur:
In December, 1947, Thakur bought a piece of land in north 24-Parganas between Chandpara
and Gobardanga and started the Thakur Land Industries Ltd. …This was the beginning of
Thakurnagar, the first Dalit refugee colony in India started by an independent Dalit initia-
tive… . Within the next 10 years, around this place, in lands reclaimed from the marshy
tracts, more than 50,000 Dalit refuges settled down.40

38. Mahananda Halder, ‘Preface to the Second Edition’, SSH 2010, p. xv.
39. Kapil Krishna Thakur, ‘Preface to the Fourth Edition’, SSH 2010, p. xi.
40. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury, ‘Partition, Displacement and the Decline of the Scheduled
Caste Movement in Bengal’, in Uday Chandra, Geir Heierstad and Kenneth Bo Nielsen (eds), The Politics of Caste in Ben-
gal (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 75.
12 S. MUKHERJEE

Following Partition, therefore, there were two Matua centres, both hallowed by tradition,
one at the birthplace of Harichand Thakur, Orakandi in East Pakistan, and the other at
Thakurnagar, the new residence of his family, which grew into the holy city of the Matuas
in India.41
In the fourth Preface, Kapil Thakur writes that he recognises the need to inform read-
ers about what changes to the text had taken place, when and why, no matter how justified
they might be. It was authored in West Bengal, in India:
Though these changes were in keeping with the spirit of God Harichand’s life, no matter how
reasonable and in accordance with the age, there should be a detailed description of why and
what these changes have been. It had been my desire to include such a description in the
fourth edition… . I will complete this task before the fifth edition and append it to that edi-
tion for everybody’s information.

In the Preface to the 1992 fifth edition, a noticeably shorter and cryptic one, Kapil Thakur
informs readers that regarding the appendix he had promised in the fourth edition, it had
been decided to keep to the earlier text in this edition too:
We have meanwhile given deep thought and much discussion to the matter. The present
form of the text was arrived at prior to the Partition of India, after profound thought and col-
lective discussion, by our much respected Kabi Churamani Haribar Sarkar, Gopalchand
Sadhu Thakur, Nakul Chandra Goswami, Acharya Mahananda Halder, my father Matua
Mahasanghadhipati Pramatha Ranjan Thakur, dedicated Matua thinkers, who followed
them and were devotees, bearers, carriers (sadhak, dharak, bahak) and acharyas of the Matua
faith. We think the changes they had made in the text are relevant and appropriate to the age.
We have therefore printed this edition following their footsteps.42

Two aspects of the 1992 Preface strike the reader: one, the earlier 1988 Preface authored
by Kapil Thakur had used the first person singular pronoun ‘I’ when discussing the
changes to the text (‘It had been my desire to include such a description in the fourth edi-
tion… . I will complete this task’). He begins the 1992 Preface with this pronoun, but soon
shifts to the plural pronoun ‘we’ when announcing the decision to retain the text as it
was. The shift perhaps denotes that this was a decision which the community as a whole
had a stake in, and which consequently needed to be taken by the heads of the community
as a group. What also strikes the reader is the elision of the matter of the explanatory note.
While Kapil Thakur vindicates the present form of the book, he does not say anything
about why the note that he had earlier believed should have been part of the book (‘bid-
heya’ = advisable, proper) is not appended. His silence is in contrast to the frankness and
commitment to transparency conveyed in his 1988 Preface: ‘no matter how reasonable
and in accordance with the age, there should be a detailed description of why and what
these changes have been’.43
When compared to the earlier prefaces, in fact, the 1992 Preface appears far more com-
plex and aware of its context, and after this fifth Preface, there have not been any new

41. The hagiography has continued to be published from the Matua centre at Orakandi, Bangladesh, too. Interestingly, the
1999 edition shows the editors using the 1916 text, with the inclusion of the genealogical table in front, but without
the addition of the lines detailing the Maithili Brahman birth. The genealogical table adds in this text the names of the
descendants of Sudhanyachand, the second son of Guruchand, who headed the Sridham Orakandi. Tarak Sarkar, Sri Sri
Harililamrita (Orakandi: Thakur Sridham Orakandi, 1999).
42. Kapil Krishna Thakur, ‘Preface to the Fifth Edition’, SSH 2010, p. xii.
43. Kapil Krishna Thakur, ‘Preface to the Fourth Edition’, SSH 2010, p. xi.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 13

prefaces that introduce the text of the hagiography. This is despite the fact that five more edi-
tions of Sri Sri Harililamrita have been published since then. This could be interpreted in two
ways: one, the text has come to command a large audience and further explanations through
introductions or prefaces are felt unnecessary, or two, any preface or introduction would
need to address the questions that have grown increasingly louder regarding the Hindu/
Vaishnava bias of the text. Since the answer to the religious identity of the Matua community
appears to be as yet undecided, this would be a troublesome question to negotiate.
While this may sound like a nitpicking researcher intent on unearthing dark hidden
meanings from missing prefaces and introductions, these editions were published around
the time the Matuas took another decisive step out of the shadows. The 1990s and the
2000s saw the efforts of the Namasudras, the largest caste group in West Bengal, culmi-
nate in concrete political gains. The historic movement of resistance by the Namasudras
begun by Harichand and led by his son Guruchand had for several decades in the mid
twentieth century lost focus, as caste politics lost its primacy to the anti-colonial national-
ist politics of the 1930s and the 1940s. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay has argued that in indepen-
dent India, the Partition violence and influx of refugees ‘led to a rephrasing of the idioms
of victimhood and resistance, placing less emphasis on caste and focusing more on the
predicament of migration and the struggles of the refugees’. This led to the disappearance
of caste as ‘an idiom of protest from public space’.44 But by 1987, the Namasudras had
established themselves sufficiently strongly to launch the Bangiya Dalit Lekhak Parishad
(Bengal Dalit Writers’ Association) in 1987, and to enter mainstream politics by the
1990s. Praskanva Sinha Roy discusses the entry of the Matua Namasudras as a new phe-
nomenon in Bengal’s politics.45 Conscious of the strength of their numbers, the leadership
of the Matua Mahasangha has successfully negotiated with mainstream political parties,
using the more universalist anti-caste ideology of Harichand Thakur rather than draw
attention to the exclusivist, and possibly anti-Hindu, ideology of their spiritual leader.
Mamata Banerjee, the leader of the Trinamool Congress Party, who was India’s railway
minister in 2009 and who in 2011 became the chief minister of West Bengal, forged an
alliance with the Matuas in 2009 to receive a lifetime membership of the Matua Mahasan-
gha.46 Mamata Banerjee’s intangible gain from this alliance was the assurance of the sup-
port of the Matua community, which was large enough to influence outcomes in nearly
80 assembly seats across the state in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, and in the 2011 West
Bengal legislative assembly election. Mamata Banerjee made P.R. Thakur’s younger son,
Manjulkrishna Thakur, a minister, and then nominated her elder son, Kapil Krishna,
from the Bongaon constituency.47 These events took the Matua community into the cru-
cial corridors of power as the second millennium ended and the next began.
With four editions of Sri Sri Harililamrita published between 1992 and 2010, compared
to only five editions published between 1916 and 1992, the Matua community has moved
from strength to strength over the past three decades. It appears logical to assume that the
Matua leaders would not have wanted to upset the apple cart during this time with the
Hindu or non-Hindu question, not having arrived at a clear answer within the community

44. Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India, p. 248.

45. Praskanva Sinha Roy, ‘A New Politics of Caste’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 47, no. 34 (2012), pp. 26–7.
46. Jayanta Gupta, ‘Mamata gets Matua Membership’, The Times of India, Kolkata edition (6 Dec. 2009) [https://timesofin
dia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Mamata-gets-Matua-membership/articleshow/5306294.cms, accessed 14 March 2018].
47. Ajanta Chakraborty, ‘The Matua Factor in Bengal Politics’, The Times of India (31 Mar. 2014).
14 S. MUKHERJEE

itself. A visit to the Matua Baruni Mela, which celebrates the birth of Harichand Thakur,
finds Thakurnagar decorated with banners and posters depicting Harichand seated on the
lotus, and other signage that indicates the Hinduisation of the community. This intimacy
with Hindu identity is not entirely innovative, as the previous claims of Harichand’s
Vaishnava ancestry demonstrate. In addition, the experience of Partition saw Namasudras
marked as ‘Hindu’ by the discourses of both the nation-states. As Bandyopadhyay and
Basu Ray Chaudhury write in their ongoing work on Dalit refugees:
In West Bengal, in the 1950s, the dominant popular discourse represented all these refugees
as ‘minority Hindus’ fleeing from Islamic Pakistan, and the predicament of the ‘Hindu’ refu-
gees overshadowed all other public discourses of victimhood. But the Congress government
refused to accept this migration to be permanent or legitimate and wanted the migrants to
go back at an appropriate time. …But the Hindu Mahasabha launched a campaign to
demand military action against Pakistan. Shyama Prasad Mukherji demanded an exchange
of population as the only solution to this ‘Hindu minority’ problem and vowed not to allow
the refugees to be sent back. In West Bengal’s public space, the rhetoric of the victimhood of
the ‘Hindu refugees’ seemed to have silenced all other discourses of identity at this juncture.
To put it in another way, what we witness here is a dual process of ascription: an Islamic
nationalism in Pakistan sought to collapse all internal boundaries within its non-Muslim
Other, while the dominant Hindu discourse in West Bengal tried to appropriate everyone
into a corporate Hindu identity.48

While the P.R. Thakur-led section of the Matuas moved to West Bengal during Partition,
many chose to remain in Pakistan. During this exodus of Hindus from East Bengal to
West Bengal, and of Muslims from West Bengal to East Bengal, there was much debate
within the Namasudra community as to whether they saw themselves as closer to the
Muslim peasants with whom they shared their circumstances or whether they should
align themselves with the Hindus. In any event, in 1950 those who had stayed in East
Pakistan were forced to leave their lands and enter India as refugees due to communal vio-
lence, thus marking them as Hindus in any case.49
The conflicting experiences of feeling closer in identity first to the Muslim peasants,
and then to the Hindus, has had its inevitable echo in the literature authored by the
Namasudras. Stories reveal the alienation they feel from caste Hindus and the kinship
they feel with the Muslims who are discriminated against and considered as untouchables
by caste Hindus. While most of the Matua Namasudras identify with Hindus, describing
Matua dharma as a Hindu sect, there are many who believe Matua dharma to be a sepa-
rate religion. For example, in 1977 Deben Thakur produced Matua-ra Hindu Noy: Dalit
Oikyer Sandhane (The Matuas Are Not Hindus: In Search of Dalit Unity), published by
the Harichand Mission Press.50 He argues that the Matuas are not Hindus because if they
were, then Harichand would have found a place in the Hindu pantheon of avatars. Many
critics within the Namasudra community have resented the echo of Vaishnavism, seeing

48. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury, In Search of Space: The Scheduled Caste Movement in West
Bengal after Partition, issue no. 59 of Policies and Practices (Kolkata: Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, 2014), p. 5.
49. This cannot, however, be a simplistic understanding of the term ‘communal violence’. Bandyopadhyay reveals that the
migrations occurred as a result of an ‘acute economic crisis’, particularly in the district of Khulna where, according to
one report, ‘a near famine condition’ prevailed. This serious resource crunch destroyed whatever good will there was
between the two communities of the Hindu and the Muslim peasants, causing the low-level ‘routine violence’, which
Haimanti Roy has observed in East Bengal since 1948–49, to escalate after 1950; Bandyopadhyay and Basu Ray Chaud-
hury, In Search of Space, pp. 5–6.
50. Debendralal Biswas Thakur, Matua-ra Hindu Noy: Dalit Oikyer Sandhane (Harichand Mission Press, 1977).
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 15

it as an intrusion, not just extraneous but contradictory to Harichand’s teachings. Sudhir

Ranjan Halder has written a number of essays and monographs critiquing the Vaishnava
and Shakta allusions in the text and calling it two-faced (dvicarita):51
It would not be an exaggeration to term the blend of the Vedic and the un-Vedic that the
author has created in the text a betrayal. A number of the imaginary stories that he (Tarak
Sarkar) has introduced into the narrative in the style of the Vedic texts, are entirely in disso-
nance with the un-Vedic Matua religion. The sayings of Harichand Thakur, which the author
has included in his book, are not in accord with his attempt to make Harichand Thakur into
an avatar in the Vedic ideal.52

Manoranjan Byapari, one of the most prominent writers of the Namasudra commu-
nity, authored a biography of Harichand Thakur in 2013, portraying him in a secular
manner as a dynamic and courageous leader who led his Dalit community out of the
darkness of poverty and exploitation. The title of the book, Matua Ek Mukti Sena (Matua,
the Freedom Fighters), emphasised this secular aspect of Harichand’s character. Byapari
details the devoted Vaishnavism of Harichand’s father and family, but underlines Haric-
hand’s intense dislike of the Vaishnavas:
The only exception was his second son Harichand. While everyone else fell at the feet of the
Vaishnavs and placed the hallowed dust of their feet on their heads and tongues with rever-
ence, Harichand remained aloof. …Not only did he not pay them his respects, he delighted
in frustrating them with pranks.53

A number of such passages appear to bear out Sudhir Ranjan Halder’s theory that Haric-
hand Thakur viewed Vaishnavism as yet another corrupted sect of Hinduism, and thus
pioneered a faith that was separate from any form of Hinduism or Islam. Harichand’s
firm rejection of avatar-baad, gurus and worship of deities may also be taken to vindicate
Manoranjan Byapari’s theory that this was a secular movement. In Byapari’s book, when
Harichand Biswas hears of the Chandalas drawing courage from what they believe are
miracles performed by Harichand, he tells his wife Shanti:
It is this strength through blind faith that I am uneasy with. Human beings take another
human being and make him into a god, or into an avatar. It is because the clever know of
this human frailty that they keep a few tricks up their sleeve. To charm and deceive the fool-
ish masses into believing in them. They then become avatars, gurus, gosains. And the people
keep faith and are fooled. What, after all, are these idols in the temples? In reality, some
wood, some straw and some paint… .54

Are the Namasudra Matuas Hindus or not Hindus? The Introduction to the 1999 Tha-
kurnagar edition of the hagiography positions Harichand as the avatar who is different
from Vishnu’s earlier avatars in that Harichand took birth within the lowliest of commu-
nities. Paramananda Halder states that an understanding of the ‘essence’ of the hagiogra-
phy can scarcely be comprehended unless one knows the social and religious context
within which Harichand emerged. Bengal, he writes, has always been a land of ‘kauma

51. Sudhir Ranjan Halder, Dvicharitay Matyua Dharma. [http://dalitliteratures.blogspot.in/2017/02/dwicharitay-matuyad

harma.html, accessed 17 May 2017].
52. Ibid.
53. Manoranjan Byapari, Matua Ek Mukti Sena, in Hatebajare Patrika, Utsab Sankhya 1420 (Bardhhaman: Pranab Kumar
Chakrabarty, 2013), p. 24.
54. Ibid., p. 42.
16 S. MUKHERJEE

dharma’. ‘The land has, since ancient times, been occupied by small “kauma rashtras”,
whose inhabitants were devout, independent, democracy-loving and worshippers of
equality (dharmaparayan, swadhin, ganatantrapriya, samyer pujari)’. They were unwill-
ing to accept the alien faiths of Brahmanical Hinduism and Buddhism. Bengal was thus
recognised as a land that was anti-Brahmanism and anti-Buddhism. Situating the Matuas
as standing distinct from Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, Halder identifies them as the
autochthonous sons and daughters of Bengal who professed the ‘kauma dharma’ and
who were not part of these ‘alien’ religions that have, at different times, attempted to
appropriate the indigenous faiths via their hegemonic power. The indigenous people of
Bengal were suppressed and kept on the margins because most of them refused to join the
nexus of the Brahmanical Hindus and ashraf Muslims.55 The choice of the word ‘kauma’
is interesting because it is a word that is used interchangeably with the words ‘tribe’ or
‘race’. Derived in all likelihood from the Arabic term ‘kawm’ and, therefore, more a part
of the Hindi lexicon than the Bengali, the word ‘kawm’ appears to have entered the vocab-
ulary of Halder via the intimate sharing of space with Muslims in the villages of Bakergunj
and Faridpur.56 Generally seen as referring to the ancient lineage of a community, its
racial antecedents, the word may be read as being in accordance with the many move-
ments that were begun in the early twentieth century among various Indian Dalit groups
that claimed to be the adi-vasis (original inhabitants) and the first tillers of the soil,57 for
example, the Adi Andhra movement or the Adi Karnataka movement that accused the
Aryans of being intruders and invaders on non-Aryan land.58 In the longish description
that Paramananda Haldar gives us of the Chandala community as a kauma jati with its
kauma dharma, he follows Debiprasad Chattopadhyay’s thesis that the races inhabiting
the region were ‘recruited’59 by coercion or temptation.60 This places the Chandalas, along
with the Hadi, the Dom, the Bagdi and the other marginal castes who occupied the region,
as having separate identities that were gradually assimilated by the dominant Aryans with
their Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist religions. In many ways, this appears to be a trajectory
approximately followed by the Matua sect too.
The Matua dharma, a dissenting faith against the established Brahmanical faith, nur-
tured the community’s spirit of independence and dignity, enabling it to move up the eco-
nomic ladder through its secular ethic of work. Its successful negotiation with the political
parties and with the majoritarian faiths has been viewed by many as a weakening of the
promised emancipatory potential of the Matua dharma. Yet it needs to be recognised that
intelligent interventions, arbitrations and tactful handling of the complex realities of a
changing India have helped the Namasudra community to emerge as one of the political
and social forces to be reckoned with in the twenty-first century. This diplomacy and

55. Paramananda Halder, ‘Introduction’, SSH 2010, p. v.

56. Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam along the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of
California Press, 1993), pp. 118, 123–5, 219. See also H. Beveridge, The District of Bakargunj: Its History and Statistics
(London: Trubner, 1876), p. 223.
57. The word for ‘plough’ is ‘l~angala’ in the Bengali language, and is a word of non-Aryan, Austroasiatic origin.
58. For more details on the Adi Andhra movement, see K.Y. Ratnam, ‘The Dalit Movement and Democratization in Andhra
Pradesh’, Working Paper no. 13, East West Center, Washington, DC, Dec. 2008; N. Chandra Bhanu Murthy, ‘Identity,
Autonomy and Emancipation: The Agendas of the Adi-Andhra Movement in South India, 1917–30’, in The Indian Eco-
nomic and Social History Review, Vol. 53, no. 2 (1 April 2016), pp. 225–48.
59. ‘The less hypocritical and more matter-of-fact term for it is “recruitment”’: Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Lokayata: A
Study in Ancient Indian Materialism (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1959), p. 184.
60. Ibid., pp. 184–6.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 17

astuteness can be charted through the life of the hagiography of Harichand, who it hails as
both its spiritual and secular leader. The alternating opposition and allegiance to domi-
nant Hinduism has enabled the Matuas to voice their denial of the Brahmanical varna
system and at the same time to draw upon the strengths of being part of the majoritarian
Hindu community. Harichand’s hagiography, through its many editions over the last cen-
tury, gives us an insight into this complex play of adherence and resistance.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank John Zavos and the two anonymous South Asia reviewers for their insightful
comments and valuable suggestions which helped me improve upon the earlier draft of this paper.
I am also grateful to Kalyani Thakur who introduced me to the Matua Baruni Mela and stoked my
interest in the Matua faith.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.