| Abstract: | India since independence has experienced a series of movements based on “identity politics” demanding separate states and reorganization of its internal state boundaries. Much of the contemporary discussions find uneven development and unequal access to power accelerated by regionalism and linguistic fanatism responsible for these movements. Through the study of social movements of Koch–Rajbanshi people in North Bengal, the paper argues that these movements display a timeless quest and aspirations of people that are rooted in their deep sense of history. People's unique sense of history or “historical imaginations” are contextualized within the secular language of socio-economic injustices and socio-cultural differences celebrated in a spectacular manner through these movements marked by re-interpretation, re-writing of the past, real yet imagined, time bound yet eternal. Today the Koch–Rajbanshi people are creating a “new past” and an identity which is a blend of colonial ethnography on one hand and Rajbanshi mythographies on the other. The paper also questions the dichotomy that apparently exists between the past and the present. |
