[1][2][3] According to Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, the Bhadralok primarily, though not exclusively, belonged to "the three traditional upper castes of Bengal", the Brahmin, Baidya and Kayastha.
[10] Among others, Joya Chatterji, Lecturer in History of Modern South Asia at Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College, blames the Bhadralok class for the economic decline of the state of West Bengal after India's independence in 1947.
Far from being in the vanguard as they liked to believe, by 1947 Bengal's bhadralok had become a backward-looking group, living in the past, trapped in the aspic of outdated assumptions, and so single-mindedly focused upon their own narrow purposes that they were blind to the larger picture and the big changes that were taking place around them.
[12]The Bhadralok class appears frequently in popular Bengali literature, including in the novel and stories of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore.
Kaliprasanna Singha in his famous book Hootum Pyanchar Naksha sarcastically criticized the class's social attitude and hypocrisy during its ascension to prominence in the nineteenth century.