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“The history of Bengal is written in water.” — Niharranjan Ray, historian of medieval Bengal

The Indian Constitution turned 75 in 2024. The Santal পাড়হা (parha, “village council federation”) system of elected headmen, clan governance, and collective dispute resolution is several thousand years old. The Indian state has written both of these facts into its legal architecture — and then proceeded to violate the older one, systematically, in the name of development.

That tension is where this series ends. Not with a resolution. With an open question that I think we are obligated to sit with.

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Who Are “the Bengali People”?

When I was growing up, this question had an obvious answer. Bengali people speak Bengali, eat মাছের ঝোল (maacher jhol, “fish in thin broth”), celebrate দুর্গাপূজা (Durgāpūjā) or Eid depending on which side of a colonial cartographer’s line they were born on, and feel a specific kind of homesickness when far from Bengal. That answer is not wrong. It is just very, very thin.

Seven posts into this series, the answer is considerably thicker — and considerably more unsettling to anyone who needs their identity to be pure.

Bengali people are a sediment. Layer by layer:

The deepest recoverable layer is Austroasiatic — the Munda-speaking communities whose skeletal remains at Pandu Rajar Dhibi in the Ajay River valley resemble modern Santal people, whose rice-farming vocabulary is still embedded in Bengali words we use without thinking, whose O1b1a1a genetic lineage persists most strongly in Bengali Dalit and eastern delta communities. These were the people of the delta first — the ones who named the rivers, the marshes, the fish.

Above that, Dravidian influence (still debated, but plausible from place-name patterns across the Gangetic plain). Above that, the Indo-Aryan expansion — the plough agriculture, the jajmānī patronage system, the caste hierarchy that reordered everything it touched. Above that, Tibeto-Burman populations from the northeastern hills, most visible today in communities on Bengal’s edges. Above that, the Perso-Arabic cultural layer brought by the Sultanate and Mughal periods. Above that, the European colonial layer — English loanwords, administrative categories, the cartographic violence of 1905 and 1947.

Bengali Brahmins carry higher ANI (Ancestral North Indian, the Steppe ancestry that arrived with Indo-Aryan speakers) in their genomes. Bengali Dalits and eastern delta communities carry higher ASI (Ancestral South Indian, the indigenous South Asian ancestry that preceded the Indo-Aryan expansion) and higher proportions of the Munda O1b1a1a haplogroup. Muslim communities of the eastern delta — on the best current evidence, still contested — likely carry the highest proportion of pre-Indo-Aryan ancestry of any Bengali sub-population.

This is not a hierarchy. It is a map of who was here first and who arrived when. All of it is Bengali.

This layered history is the perfect mirror of Bengal’s geography — the Ganges delta itself. Just as floodwaters deposit fertile new silt each year, history’s currents have laid new cultural strata on this land. In the delta’s logic, the newer upper silt is always most visible and valued, while the older layers are buried and forgotten beneath it. And yet the entire delta — the entire Bengali identity — rests on the foundation of those invisible, ancient sediments.

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Eaton’s Frontier Thesis: The Last Round of an Old Process

Richard Eaton’s The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier (1993) is one of those books that reframes everything you thought you understood. Before Eaton, the conventional explanations for why Bengal became the subcontinent’s most Muslim-majority region were: mass conversion at sword-point, immigration from Central Asia, political patronage under the Sultanate, or social liberation from caste oppression.

Eaton dismantled all four and proposed something more structurally interesting.

The highest Muslim concentrations in Bengal are in the east — the newest agricultural land, the most recently cleared delta. Not in the west, where Brahmanical Hindu culture had been entrenched for centuries. Muslim pioneers, organized around Sufi পীর (pir, “saint, spiritual master”) figures, led forest clearing and settlement in the eastern delta during the Mughal period. These pirs were agrarian entrepreneurs as much as religious figures — clearing jungle, establishing villages, creating the social infrastructure for settled rice cultivation where none had existed.

The populations who converted were not primarily disaffected Hindus fleeing caste oppression. They were frontier populations — communities that had not yet been fully incorporated into either the Brahmanical Hindu or the Buddhist social order. These may well have included people of Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman, or other non-Indo-Aryan backgrounds being brought into settled agriculture for the first time.

Eaton’s conclusion has a structural elegance: Islamic conversion in Bengal was the latest round of the same long process. For thousands of years, the expanding civilizational systems of South Asia — Brahmanical Hindu, then Buddhist, then Islamic — had been incorporating pre-Indo-Aryan frontier peoples into new social orders. Each time, the frontier moved east. Each time, new delta land appeared from the silt. Each time, the communities at the edge were absorbed, reorganized, renamed.

The eastward shift of the main Ganges channel from the Bhāgīrathī to the Padma — accelerating from the 16th century — moved the zone of maximum agricultural productivity from western to eastern Bengal. This was not policy. It was hydrology. But it determined the shape of Bangladesh.

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Lalon and the Living Synthesis

Lalon Fakir, born in Kushtia (now Bangladesh) in the 18th century, did not set out to be a symbol of secular humanism. He was a wandering mystic singer — a ফকির (fakir, “itinerant spiritual seeker, one who possesses nothing”) in the Baul tradition, which dissolves Hindu-Muslim distinctions as a matter of practice, not as a political position.

His songs explicitly deny that caste or religion are the right categories:

সব লোকে কয় লালন কী জাত সংসারে (Sab loke kôy Lalon ki jāt saṃsāre) “Everyone asks: what is Lalon’s caste in this world?”

His answer, sustained across hundreds of songs, is that the question is the wrong question. The site of the divine is the body — দেহের সাধনা (deher sādhana, “spiritual practice through and in the body”) — not a temple or mosque.

This has precise parallels with the Sahajiyā Buddhism of the Charyapadas, those 8th–12th century tantric songs that are the oldest recoverable literature in Bengali. It also has plausible resonances with non-Brahmanical spiritual practices of Munda communities, for whom the divine is encountered in forest, mountain, and ancestral spirit rather than in priestly ritual.

This is not syncretism as a modern liberal project — two religions politely shaking hands. It is the natural outcome of four thousand years of layering in a deltaic landscape where the categories themselves were never perfectly fixed. The Baul and Fakir traditions are Bengali in the way a river is Bengali: not because they were designed to represent something, but because they emerged from this particular soil, this particular water, this particular accumulation of people.

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What the Indian State Knows and Chooses to Forget

The Indian Constitution contains a sophisticated, if imperfect, framework for recognizing that some communities have prior claims.

The Fifth Schedule (Article 244) establishes governance of Scheduled Areas — regions with significant tribal populations — with special protections. The Sixth Schedule creates autonomous district councils in Northeast India. PESA 1996 (Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas Act) extends gram সভা (sabhā, “assembly”) sovereignty to tribal areas, including the right to prior consent over land use decisions.

The Forest Rights Act of 2006 explicitly acknowledges that colonial and post-colonial forest policy was unjust, and recognizes both individual and community forest land rights for communities that had been using those forests for generations. The Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act and Santhal Parganas Tenancy Act protect tribal land from alienation to non-tribals.

This is the state’s self-knowledge speaking. The legislature knew.

The contradiction is that the same state approves mining leases in Schedule V areas. The Supreme Court’s Samatha judgment (1997) held that private companies cannot mine in Schedule V areas — and was then systematically worked around through state government intermediaries. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 was repealed in 1952 and replaced by the Habitual Offenders Act of 1952 — same communities, different law, same surveillance. Development projects have displaced an estimated 50 to 60 million people since 1947; tribal communities are disproportionately represented in that number, though precise figures are politically contested.

This is not uniquely Bengali. The legislative landscape of PESA and the Forest Rights Act covers tribal communities across Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, and Odisha. The Kondh, Sora, and Juang communities of Odisha share the same civilizational substrate with the Santal and Munda of Bengal and Jharkhand. The Oraon communities of Jharkhand carry the same genetic and cultural histories, face the same legislative contradictions. This is an eastern India plateau story, not a Bengali story. The delta and the plateau are part of the same long sentence.

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The Philosophical Question This Series Was Always About

Here is the question I have been building toward for eight posts.

If a culture has survived and self-regulated — governed water, forest, land, marriage, dispute, and collective memory — for ten thousand years, on what grounds do we rank it as “not mainstream”?

The Santal parha system survived the Indo-Aryan expansion. It survived the Mauryas, the Guptas, the Bengal Sultanate, the Mughals, the British, and independence. It is functioning today in the Santhal Parganas. Western liberal representative democracy, as a system of mass governance, has existed for perhaps 200 years and is, by most measures, under significant stress.

The development discourse says that Santal, Munda, Oraon, Kondh, and other communities are “backward” and need integration into modernity. The ecological counterargument is that monocultures are fragile. The Munda knowledge systems — of forest management, of water governance, of collective dispute resolution without recourse to state violence — are not relics. They are, arguably, a hedge against the civilizational failure modes that modernity keeps rediscovering: the depletion of commons, the privatization of knowledge, the collapse of institutions that cannot adapt quickly enough.

I am not romanticizing. The parha system has its own inequalities; Santal oral tradition preserves memories of internal conflict and hierarchy as well as solidarity. The Forest Rights Act, imperfect as its implementation has been, represents a genuine, hard-won legal achievement. The question is not whether pre-modern systems were utopias. The question is whether we have earned the right to dismiss them as having nothing to teach us.

I do not think we have.

The world made by settled agriculture, caste hierarchy, and state centralization has produced extraordinary things. It has also produced extraordinary suffering for the people it could not accommodate. The people who survive at its margins — who maintained alternate systems of knowledge and governance across every imperial transition — are not failures of development. They are, in a meaningful sense, the most successful survivors in this story.

I do not know how to resolve this. The Indian state does not know how to resolve this. Following the Western model offers no shortcut: by the measure of what we have been discussing here, Western liberal democracy is a 600-year-old infant. The contradiction between constitutional recognition and extractive development policy is not an oversight — it is a structural feature of a state that needs both the legitimacy of rights language and the revenue from resource extraction.

What I know is that the river remembers. The delta keeps creating new land and new frontiers, and the process Eaton described — of incorporating the people at the edge into the latest expanding civilizational system — is still running. The question of who has the right to incorporate whom, on what terms, and at what cost, remains open.

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Eight Posts, One River

বাঙালি মানে একটা ভাষা নয়, একটা দেশ নয় — বাঙালি মানে হাজার বছরের মানুষের মিলমিশ।

(Bangali māne ekṭā bhāṣā noy, ekṭā deş noy — Bangali māne hāzār bochhôrer mānuşer milmiş.)

“Bengali is not one language, not one land — Bengali means thousands of years of people blending together.”

That blending is still happening. The river is still moving. The delta is still growing eastward into the Bay of Bengal, depositing the sediment of the Himalayas into new land that did not exist a century ago. Somewhere on that new land, in a generation or two, someone will grow rice, name a child, bury a parent, argue about water rights with a neighbor, and call themselves Bengali.

They will be right.

This is the final post in this series.