A BRIEF NOTE ON RAJBANSHIS

Actually, the first work on Rajbansis was done by C. C. Sanyal, 1965, who wrote on the Rajbanshi community of North Bengal, with its own cultural heritage and their origin and important position even at the Indian context. According to him, these peoples were basically indigenous in nature, but involved in peasantry and associated with various agriculture related rituals, often acted as permanent agriculturists, established marital relationships with other sub-ordinates, underwent through the processes like Vaishnavization and Kshatriyaization, highly affected by Nathism, modified their traditional folk rituals so as to incorporate them into the Hindu fold, created the category of Kamrupi Brahmans, and transformation of
the pro-Paundra Kshattriyas Rajbansis up to the level of pro-Indian Koch-Rajbansi community against all the Bhutanese interference in this buffer region. These Koch-Rajbansis soon became the most dominating caste group with their relations with both other tribal and non-tribal ethnic communities during the entire Mogul Regime in Bengal up to the end of the British rule. Still these peoples maintain their folk life and possess their own values, norms, customs, symbols, and exclusive way of exerting expressions. These things would surely be helpful in determining their attachment with the land with a definite historicity. The author also provided handful of information on material culture, house type, folk songs, rite-de-passage, types of marriage as well as riddles found among the Rajbansis. On the other hand, S.R. Mondal, 2006, discussed about the huge cultural diversity leading to a multicultural situation in North Bengal; this situation has been typically formed by the involvement of various ethnic communities consisting of tribal and non-tribal small and large indigenous and non-indigenous categories distributed throughout the diversified landscape; the diversity in the ecosystems of North Bengal varying from region to region never let them to adopt the same occupation and therefore they have to chose different lines in order to satisfy their energy requirements. They might be from the banner of the Nepali ethnic communities or the fold constructed by the multilingual Adivasi tribal groups or the caste groups belonging to the Bengalis allied with the Rajbansi social fold connected with other small tribal sub-ordinates like Mech, Bodo, Rabha, Toto, Dhimal and so many. These communities living in villages and involved in peasantry or other non-subsistence type of economy in their traditional life have certainly become possessor of some kind of IKS. These IKS are the means of their livelihood and at the same time the important assets of the whole population of this North Bengal.

Here within the Rajbansi social fold, IKS is found functional but highly related to the relatively non-functional domains like religion (creating a culture lag due to formation of a disequilibrium between rapidly modifying material aspects and the traditional values) and caste system (provided with status mobility, structural changes, constitutional and legal provisions, human rights, caste-class nexus, caste-class-power nexus, public-private nexus). Other less-important non-functional domains are intrinsically related with the traditional politico-economic aspects and health cure system (now in the process of replacement by modern machinery).

The caste system has indigenously developed across the Indian sub-continent and becomes associated with the religious beliefs and the social practices among the Hindus sufficient to give it a hierarchical structure, practically or ideologically, as well as among the non-Hindus in the form of more or less ascribed economic categories related with agriculture without any religious provisions. The caste system itself is related with Indigenous Knowledge System providing a patterned division of labor needed for the societies with only agriculture and no trade at large scale, until it has been misused and become exploitative in nature. The caste system becomes either absent or quite invalid when the peoples in a rural society shed off their traditional values and knowledge system, change their traditional close-ended economy, become extremely urban, heterogeneous, individualistic, atomistic, dependent highly up on technological progress and do not bother much about the religious system. This type of social process on hypothetical ground would lead to an absolute social transformation and complete loss of traditional values, culture, norms, customs, identity and cause crisis to the culture survival, sustainability and civilization and at the real basis, could result into high level conflict and complete destruction that have not yet happened in case of the Rajbansis.