Death as a Marker of Caste and Class in Twentieth Century Select Bengali Texts

Abstract

This article examines how death, ostensibly the universal equalizer, becomes a site of entrenched inequality when mediated by caste and class in twentieth-century Bengal. Drawing on Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Abhagir Swargo (1926) and Mahasweta Devi’s Breast-Giver (1978; trans. 1997), the study explores how literary representations of funerary rites and bodily disposability expose the persistence of social hierarchies even in death. The analysis is situated within a wide theoretical framework, incorporating insights from Michel Foucault, Achille Mbembe, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu, Louis Althusser, Mary Douglas, Arnold van Gennep, and B. R. Ambedkar. In Abhagir Swargo, the denial of cremation to a lower-caste woman underscores caste as a determinant of posthumous dignity. In contrast, Breast-Giver reveals how class exploitation reduces a Brahmin woman’s life and death to mere disposability once her reproductive labour ceases. Together, the texts demonstrate that caste and class operate differently yet converge in stripping marginalized women of dignity in death. By linking these narratives to contemporary realities—including caste-based cremation denials and pandemic deaths—the article argues that death is not a neutral biological end but a socially inscribed process that mirrors and reproduces structural inequalities.