The Rajbanshis and the history of their statehood demand

Keeping in mind the Rajbanshi vote, the BJP had in 2023 picked Ananta Rai as their Rajya Sabha face from Bengal. The Trinamool Congress (TMC) too has been wooing the Rajbanshis with much enthusiasm. In 2017, it created a Rajbanshi development board and Rajbanshi (language) academy. More recently in 2020 the party declared a state holiday on the birth anniversary of Panchanan Barma, a leading icon of the community and the following year it announced the establishment of Rajbanshi medium primary schools in five districts of North Bengal.

Ananta Rai, who is connected with the Koch Behar royal family, says that their state had always been independent, with their own language and culture. (Express Archive photo)

Who are the Rajbanshis?

While Ananta Rai’s claims of Rajbanshi history are laced with mythology and need to be read with caution, there is some truth to the ancient roots of the kingdom. “The Rajbanshis are a semi-Hinduised community that was once spread out over a large contiguous land mass covering India, Bangladesh, and Nepal,” explains Gautam Chandra Roy, assistant professor of Political Science at BN College, Dhubri, Assam. Within India, the community is present in North Bengal, Assam, Purnia district of Bihar and the Garo Hills of Meghalaya.

The entire Rajbanshi landscape was ruled by several different dynasties and its boundaries remained rather fluid. Between the fourth and the 15th century CE, the territory was held by the Kamrup-Kamata kingdom. As Roy writes in an article published in the Economic and Political Weekly in 2020, “Kamrup, Kamata and Kamatapur were used synonymously to refer to the eastern part of Mughal India.”
In the 16th century, this region came under the rule of the Koch dynasty, founded by Bisu, who was the son of Haria Mandal, a chieftain of Tibeto-Burman origin. The history of the Koch dynastic rule continues to consolidate the Rajbanshi identity till date.

The Koch empire reached its cultural and political peak under the rule of Naranarayan who was assisted by his brother and military commander Chilarai in the mid-16th century. But soon after the death of Naranarayan in the 1580s, the Koch kingdom split into two parts: Koch Hajo and Koch Bihar. “Interestingly, the two parts were divided by the Sankosh River, which continues to be the dividing line between Bengal and Assam today,” says Roy. In the consequent years, the traditional Koch region kept transforming and splitting apart with the coming of the Mughals and later the British. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the Koch kingdom signed a treaty with the East India Company, acknowledging the subjection of their Raja to the Company. Thereafter, Koch Bihar was annexed by the British as a province of Bengal.

Roy in his article mentions that the treaty allowed the East India Company to accumulate half of the revenue of Koch Bihar, thereby altering the socio-economic conditions in this region forever. Further divisions in the Koch landscape happened after the Partition, with Koch Bihar acceding to India and a significant group of Koch Rajbanshis remaining in the newly formed East Bengal.

Given that historical circumstances led to the Rajbanshis being spread out across multiple states and regions, there is huge cultural and political diversities within the community. Roy, who is a Rajbanshi from Assam, says their community prefers to identify itself as Koch Rajbanshi, as opposed to the group in North Bengal who refer to themselves as Rajbanshi. “In Assam and other parts of the Northeast, the tribal ethnic sentiment is very strong. Their (Koch’s) movement for self-determination is influenced by the Bodo and other Northeast tribal movements,” says Arup Jyoti Das, author of Kamatapur and the Koch Rajbanshi Imagination (2009). That kind of tribal sentiment was never there in North Bengal where caste was a more predominant factor.

In North Bengal, in fact, the Rajbanshis went through a process of Hinduisation in the late 19th century. Historian Rajib Nandi, in the journal ‘History and Anthrapology’ in 2014, explains that the agitation started with the publication of the Indian Census Report in 1882 when the British clubbed Koch and Rajbanshi as ‘same tribe’”. The Rajbanshi intelligentsia protested against this claiming that the Koch were inferior to Rajbanshis and that the latter were originally Kshatriyas and hence were called ‘Rajbanshis’ or ‘descendents of a Raja’.

The efforts to shed off their tribal identity was given a further boost by Panchanan Barma, the legendary Rajbanshi social reformer who spearheaded the Kshatriyaisation movement. “He felt the need for the Rajbanshis to get educated to be respected and accepted by the upper caste Bengalis, which he tried to achieve through the Kshatriya Samiti,” writes Nandi.

The efforts to shed off their tribal identity was given a further boost by Panchanan Barma, the legendary Rajbanshi social reformer who spearheaded the Kshatriyaisation movement. (Wikimedia Commons)

“The Rajbanshi name itself is of recent origin and gained popularity mostly in North Bengal during the Kshatriya movement when they claimed upper caste status,” says Das.

From the 1920s the Rajbanshis went through yet another round of identity formation as they joined hands with BR Ambedkar and enlisted themselves as Scheduled Castes, a demand they achieved in post-independent India. At present, while the Rajbanshis in Bengal are listed as SC, in Assam, they are identified as Other Backward Caste (OBC). The Koch Rajbanshis of Assam, however, have been carrying out a movement for several years claiming Scheduled Tribe (ST) status for the community.

The demand for Kamatapur

In more recent years, however, the Rajbanshis of Bengal have been reclaiming their Koch identity. While earlier they preferred to distinguish themselves from the Koch tribal group, now they wish to emphasise upon cultural affinities among the entire Koch Rajbanshi community through the collective memory of the Kamatapur dynasty. The idea is to project themselves as separate from and more ancient than the Bengalis and Assamese. “There was no Bengal or Assam in ancient times, nor was there a Bengali or Assamese language,” says Ananta Rai.

The genesis of the Kamatapur movement lies in 1947 when Jogendra Nath Mandal, a leader of the East Bengal Scheduled Caste community, demanded, for the first time, a separate state for the SC people of North Bengal. Although it was not successful, it laid the foundation for future separatist movements in the region. The Uttarakhand Dal (Party) founded in 1969 demanded a separate state for North Bengal called Kamatapur. The objective was to protect the people of North Bengal from the ‘Calcutta-centric capitalist leaders’.

From the late 1980s onwards, the Uttarakhand Dal came to be known as the Kamatapur Gana Parishad, which later gave rise to the Kamatapur People’s Party (KPP) in 1995.

“While the movement initially started in North Bengal after Independence, it spread to Western Assam over time and got momentum during the 1990s,” says Roy.

Journalist and author Snigdhendu Bhattacharya explains that “the Koch-Rajbanshi ethnic identity movement has been associated with two separate statehood demands — the Kamatapur state and the Greater Cooch Behar state.” Both roughly have the same boundaries. The proposed Kamatapur state is to be composed of Cooch Behar, Darjeeling, Alipurduar, Uttar Dinajpur, Dakshin Dinajpur and Malda in West Bengal and the districts of Goalpara, Dhubri, Kokrajhar, and Bongaigaon in neighbouring Assam. The Greater Cooch Behar state’s proposed map does not include Malda.

Bangshi Badan Barman and the Great Cooch Behar Party (Express Photo by Shashi Ghosh)

However, these movements come in conflict with the Gorkhaland movement, which seeks a Gorkhaland state made of Darjeeling and parts of Alipurduar and Jalpaiguri districts.

“Since TMC’s return to power in 2021, a fourth statehood demand has emerged, that of a separate state of North Bengal. This one has been raised mostly by BJP leaders of northern West Bengal, repeatedly. This demand conveniently excludes the four Assam districts from the statehood demand,” says Bhattacharya. However, the party’s state unit leaders have said their official stand is against any division of Bengal. “They had to. If the party formally supports any demand from Bengal’s division, it would get wiped out in south Bengal,” Bhattacharya adds.

As written by Nandi in his article, the public discussion on Kamatapur movement took centre stage in the late 1990s when a series of violent incidents and political assassinations were carried out by the extremist party Kamatapur Liberation Organisation (KLO). The KPP carried out several democratic political demonstrations during this period.

“However, the movement has declined considerably in the last 15 years,” says Bhattacharya. “The KLO no longer has a presence in Bengal and is mostly in hiding.”

At present, the movement is split between two groups — one led by Ananta Rai Maharaj and the other by Bangshi Badhan Barman. Barman was arrested after the 2005 riots in Koch Bihar and was released by the TMC government in 2011. “While Ananta Rai has sided with the BJP for long, Barman has tilted more towards the TMC,” says Bhattacharya.

Even though the Kamatapur statehood movement has lost its steam in recent years, given the significant population of the Rajbanshis in Bengal, no political party wants to ignore the community.

Bhattacharya says “several BJP leaders from North Bengal have previously mentioned plans for separate statehood. However, senior BJP leaders of the state have repeatedly denied any such plan.”

In 2022 for instance, Ananta Rai had triggered quite a controversy when, after a meeting with the Minister of State for Home Affairs Nisith Pramanik, he announced that the “new union territory of Koch Bihar is only a matter of time”. His remark drew a quick retort from the TMC which said that it would never allow the division of West Bengal.

In the subsequent years though, Rai says, he has been disappointed by the centre’s silence over the statehood demand. “We had discussed the issue both with the UPA and the NDA. But no one did anything,” says Rai. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP managed to wrestle the Koch Bihar seat from TMC by allying with Rai’s faction of the GCBPA.

Bangshi Badan Barman (Express Photo by Shashi Ghosh)

“The BJP’s objective in making Rai a Rajya Sabha MP was to send out a message that they are sympathetic to the Rajbanshi cause, even though they will never be in support of statehood,” explains Bhattacharya. He adds that the main poll plank for the BJP in Koch Bihar in the upcoming election will be corruption and misgovernance on the part of the ruling TMC.

The TMC for its part has also been actively trying to win the support of the Rajbanshis by emphasising on the nature of work they have done for the development of the community, its culture and language. “The TMC is also using the anti-CAA narrative to win support among the Rajbanshis,” suggests Bhattacharya. The Rajbanshis have been opposed to the CAA on account of their opposition to illegal immigration from neighbouring Bangladesh.

Speaking about the issue of statehood, Roy explains that “this region of North Bengal is very vulnerable from the perspective of security, given that it’s a small area surrounded by many state borders… The issue of security would eventually play the biggest determinant in granting Kamatapur statehood.”

Further reading:

Rajib Nandi, ‘Spectacles of Ethnographic and Historical Imaginations: Kamatapur Movement and the Rajbanshi Quest to Rediscover their Past and Selves’, History and Anthrapology, 2014

Gautam Chandra Roy, ‘Negotiating with the Changing Landscape: The Case of the Rajbanshi Community’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2020

Arup Jyoti Das, ‘Kamatapur and the Koch Rajbanshi Imagination’, Montage Media, 2009