Partha Chatterjee in his treatise ‘Bengal: Rise and Growth of Nationality’, argues that the rise of the nation-state in history has always coincided with the emergence of capitalism. In the context of Bengal, the nationalist movement was a corollary of the changing economic mode and marked the death of feudalism. In ‘Devdas’, the bleak end of feudalism is illustrated through the deployment of the popular trope of the degenerate and unproductive son of the Zamindar who lives a life alienated from the estate. Devdas becomes the quintessential absentee landlord who belongs to a class that enjoys eminence and wealth (through rents) yet is disconnected from its productive source. He encapsulates the nostalgic experience of a class of feudal landlords who are trying to grapple with the drastic transformations in the economic mode which demand a rigid routinization of the body and a reformation of the self. The ‘Babu’ epitomized by Devdas in the novella, belongs to a class of landed gentry with an “almost uniquely unproductive orientation”- the Bhadralok.Devdas’ unpredictable behavior throughout the novel is symptomatic of his inadequacy to cope with the heady changes of his age and his failure to discipline his body. Chunnibabu whose presence pervades the narrative also represents the ubiquitous Bengali Babu who parasitically breeds on revenue from the estate and dissipates it through drinking and other amusements.

Interestingly, this rejection of the colonial education by Devdas can also be read as an assertive repudiation of the education designed by the colonizer to socialize the native. Devdas’ rejection then confuses the reader even more because in appearance, he very strikingly dresses like a British Dandy. In the novella, his appearance is described through the gaze of Parvati as- “accha sa coat, paint, tie, chari, sone ki chain aur ghadi, golden frame ka chashma” (“a good coat, tie, walking stick, a gold chain and watch, a spectacle with a golden frame.”) His appearance then clashes with his actions—his mind is colonized and his psyche is implicated within the discourse of westernization—but his identity is also rooted outside it. Devdas, then epitomizes the colonial subject who exists on the periphery yet gravitates towards the centre. He resists the hegemonic colonial discourses yet displays a patriarchal attitude which is a characteristic masculine instinct of Western colonialism, and replicates certain patterns of patriarchal domination yet distances himself from the colonial project. This paradox is what defines Devdas and the Bhadralok community.

Chatterjee argues that in the course of the nationalist movement, the indigenous bourgeoisie assume the role of the leaders to wrench the home economy out of the hands of the imperialists and expand their market by ousting the colonizers. He argues that the landed gentry along with the section of indigenous comprador traders constituted the Bhadralok class. The landed gentry soon got absorbed into the expansive gel of British commercial, administrative and education apparatus and became indistinguishable from the “dependent bourgeoisie”—the middlemen in a market ruled by European firms. On the other hand, with the introduction of the Permanent Settlements Act, land also became a profitable source of revenue and got transformed into a capitalist commodity-- the indigenous traders invested in land and it became a constant source of revenue for them; as it was for the absentee zamindar. Essentially, what this resulted in was the blurring of the line dividing the feudal landed gentry and the trading class and there was an overlap between the two classes of society, which formed a new class—the Bhadralok middle class.

~ Niyati Sharma