‘The Last Bench’ by Adhir Biswas: The serious repercussions of caste discrimination in classrooms

The Last Bench by the Bengali writer and publisher Adhir Biswas, translated from the Bengali by V Ramaswamy, gently yet radically unsettles the socio-economic spatiality we attach to the idea of the “last bench.” In many private school classrooms, we grow up seeing the last row as the space of indifference: the realm of so-called troublemakers, the mischievous, the disengaged. These backbenchers are often portrayed as either defiant or indifferent, performing a certain kind of adolescent coolness, unfazed by grades or teachers’ disapproval.

Casteism in the classroom

But Biswas, with clarity and brutal honesty, turns this dominant narrative on its head. Through a deeply personal retelling of his childhood, he reframes the last bench not as a position of indifference but as a position of exclusion – a spatial metaphor for caste, poverty, and invisibilised marginality. His memoir lays bare the everyday violence of caste and class that so often go unacknowledged in the national and dominant imagination of merit and education.

Ratan, the son of a barber who migrated with his family from erstwhile East Pakistan to India in 1976, looks back at his childhood in a lost homeland. His entry into school, ensured after much hardship and carried by a quiet hope for a better...

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