Opinion From Bihar to Bengal, the battle is over memory and a term: ‘Jungle raj’

Many election analysts contend that the fear of the return of the Jungle Raj contributed immensely to the stellar victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led NDA in the recently concluded Bihar elections. The term, originally used by a Patna High Court judge in 1997 to describe Patna’s poor civic conditions, was converted into a popular political idiom, signifying RJD’s rule between 1990 and 2005. The party’s tenure saw the socio-political assertion of the backward castes against the upper-caste-dominated feudal power structure. But this era was also plagued by an unprecedented crisis of law and order, reflected by a steep rise in crimes, the emergence of private armies like Ranvir Sena, and of strongmen and notorious dons like Shahabuddin.

The NDA’s election campaign skillfully tapped into voters’ fears of a return to that era. The continuing apprehension about “jungle raj” is quite intriguing, given that in Bihar, one in four voters is from Gen Z, with about 1.5 million being first-time voters. How did the legacy of “Jungle Raj” then influence these young voters with no lived experience?

The common-sense idea of memory that it is rooted in personal experiences, as scholars of memory studies point out, is misleading and simplistic. Those who have not experienced the Holocaust or the Partition of the Subcontinent routinely invoke memories of these events, which have been transmitted to them by their family members or fellow citizens. More importantly, such transmitted memories often shape their political opinions.

Maurice Halbwachs, the father of the modern discipline of memory studies, while introducing the concept of “collective memory,” makes us aware of the crucial fact that memory is primarily a collective phenomenon, since it is constructed through present-day interaction with others within social structures and institutions like family, religion, class, nation-state, etc. Therefore, collective memory is a reconstruction of the past that is shaped by the demands of the present.

Application of Halbwachs’ analysis will reveal that Bihar’s Gen Z was impacted by the socio-political recollection of the “jungle raj” for two reasons. First, they are part of a social group, such as a family, neighbourhood, caste, or even the larger Bihari society in general, which engages in this collective recollection. Second, such collective remembering makes it possible for the past to seem intimate.

Consequently, in public consciousness, a vital and ongoing link develops between the past and the present, stretching the elasticity of time as a felt entity and blurring the distinction. This is why people tend to feel glad, sad, afraid, or ashamed about events (in this case, jungle raj) that had occurred to the members of their groups and communities long before they joined them, as if those events are part of their own past.

Further, in an age of social media and the internet, the memory of the jungle raj can also be looked at as “prosthetic memory.” Coined by cultural historian Alison Landsberg, it refers to a memory of an event acquired through mediated representations, such as films or photographs. Given the fact that on the eve of the Bihar elections, YouTube and social media were flooded with documentaries and anecdotes about Bihar’s jungle raj, it won’t be out of place to suggest that young Biharis’ image of the jungle raj, to a large extent, is a prosthetic memory. Additionally, popular OTT shows like Khakee: The Bihar Chapter or Jehanabad have also helped Gen Zs to acquire such memories about Bihar’s tumultuous past.

The Bihar elections reveal a fascinating tale of a complex interplay between inter-generational memories. The next round of memory politics will be played out in the political battleground of Bengal, where memories of partition have been shaping and reshaping political narratives since the rise of the BJP as a major political actor.

Guha is a British Academy International Fellow, Department of Anthropology, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK. Adsule is a John Dewey Emerging Scholar and Senior Research Fellow, Humanities Department, IIT-Delhi