The Bengal Renaissance as an Intellectual Movement: Ideas, Institutions, and Social Change - A Policy-Implementation Analysis of Inclusive Education in Rural West Bengal

Abstract

This article reframes the Bengal Renaissance as more than a nineteenth-century cultural awakening by tracing how its ideas and institutions continue to shape, and sometimes fail to shape, the governance of inclusive education in contemporary rural Bengal. While inclusive education is legally mandated in India through the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 (RPwD Act, Section 16) and internationally affirmed under Article 24 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), implementation in rural elementary schools remains uneven and discretion-heavy. Using a qualitative-dominant comparative case study of rural and semi-urban elementary schools in a selected district in West Bengal, the study combines interviews (teachers, head teachers, parents, district and block officials), classroom observations, school accessibility audits, and policy-document review. Thematic analysis is organized around three interlocking lenses: policy implementation theory, street-level bureaucracy, and local governance and institutional capacity. Findings show that district-block-school coordination is fragmented, capacity deficits are structurally ruralized (infrastructure, specialist support, training, multigrade constraints), and teachers and school leaders routinely translate rights into practice through discretionary coping strategies. The Bengal Renaissance is used as an interpretive-historical frame: its emphasis on rational pedagogy, institutional reform, and social improvement helps explain why inclusion is routinely imagined as “modernization,” yet its elite institutional geography also foreshadows contemporary rural gaps. The article argues that bridging the mandate-practice gap requires implementation systems that shift from compliance reporting to capability building: strengthened inter-tier governance, predictable rural support services, continuous teacher coaching, and safeguards against discretionary gatekeeping that silently reproduces exclusion.