CLASS LECTURE

British Colonial Bengal

British Bengal - 1757-1947

The province of Bengal was one of the most valuable acquisitions that was ever made by
any nation. Its fertile soil produced every thing requisite for the food of man or animal;
and in such abundance, that the crops of one year were sufficient for the consumption of
its inhabitants for two. It was thereby enabled to supply all other parts of India with its
superabundance; and to become the granary of the east, as Egypt formerly was of the
west. In variety of fruits and animals it equally abounded; and yielded every other article
requisite for the comfort, or even' luxury, of man. The ingenious inhabitants of Bengal,
being well versed in all the arts of useful industry, require no assistance from other
countries ; while their delicate and valuable manufactures are exported to every part of
the world.

Including Assam, which, until the spring of 1874, was a part of Bengal, the area was
248,231 square miles, and the population 66,856,859. This great lieutenant-
governorship, excluding Assam, contained one-third of the total population of British
India, and yielded a revenue of £17,687,072, or over one-third of the aggregate revenues
of the Indian empire. It was bounded on the N. by Assam, Bhutan, and Nepal; on the S.
by Burmah, the Bay of Bengal, and Madras; on the W. by an imaginary line running
between it and the adjoining lieutenant-governorship of the North-Western Provinces,
and by the plateau of the Central Provinces; and on the E. by the unexplored
mountainous region which separates it from China and Northern Burmah.

The territory teemed with every product of nature, from the fierce beasts and
irrepressible vegetation of the tropics, to the stunted barley which the till-man rears,
and the tiny furred animal which he hunts within sight of the unmelting snows. Tea,
indigo, turmeric, lac, waving white fields of the opium-poppy, wheat and innumerable
grains and pulses, pepper, ginger, betel-nut, quinine and many costly spices and drugs,
oil-seeds of sorts, cotton, the silk mulberry, inexhaustible crops of jute and other fibers;
timber, from the feathery bamboo and coronetted palm to the iron-hearted tal tree—in
short, every vegetable product which fed and clothed a people, and enabled it to trade
with foreign nations, abounded.

The word Bengal was derived from Sanskrit geography, and applied strictly, to the
country stretching southwards from Bhagalpur to the sea. The ancient Banga formed
one of the five outlying kingdoms of Aryan India, and was practically conterminous with
the Delta of Bengal it derived its name, according to the etymology of the Pandits, from
a prince of the Mahabharata, to whose portion it fell on the primitive partition of the
country among the Lunar race of Dehli.
But a city called Bangala, near Chittagong, which, although now washed away, is
supposed to have existed in the Muhammadan period, appears to have given the name
to the European world. The word Bangala was first used by the Musalmans; and under
their rule, like the Banga of old Sanskrit times, it applied specifically to the Gangetic
delta, although the latter conquests to the east of the Brahmaputra were eventually
included within it. In their distribution of the country for fiscal purposes, it formed the
central province of a governorship, with Behar on the N.W., and Orissa on the S.W.,
jointly ruled by one deputy of the Dehli emperor.

Under the English the name did at different periods have very different significations.
Francis Fernandez applied it to the country from the extreme east of Chittagong to Point
Palmyras in Orissa, with a coast line which Purchas estimates at 600 miles, running
inland for the same distance, and watered by the Ganges. This territory would include
the Muhammadan province of Bengal, with parts of Behar and Orissa. The loose idea
thus derived from old voyagers became stereotyped in the archives of the East India
Company. All its north-eastern factories, from Balasor, on the Orissa coast, to Patna, in
the heart of Behar, belonged to the "Bengal Establishment," and as British conquests
crept higher up the rivers, the term came to be applied to the whole of Northern India.

The Presidency of Bengal, in contradistinction to those of Madras and Bombay,

eventually included all the British territories north of the Central Provinces, from the
mouths of the Ganges and Brahmaputra to the Himalayas and the Panjab. The term
Bengal continued to be officially employed in this sense by the military department of
the Government of India.

But the tendency to a more exact order of civil administration gradually brought about a
corresponding precision in the use of Indian geographical names. The North-Western
Provinces date their separate existence from 1831. Since that year they stood forward
under a name of their own as the North-Western Provinces, in contradistinction to the
Lower Provinces of Bengal. Later annexations added new territorial entities, and the
northern Presidency was mapped out into four separate governments — the North-
Western Provinces, Oudh, Panjab, and Lower Bengal.

Three of the provinces of the Lieutenant-Governorship of Bengal — namely, Bengal

proper, Behar, and Orissa — consisted of great river valleys; the fourth, Chhota or
Chutia Nagpur, was a mountainous region which separated them from the Central India
plateau. Orissa embraced the rich deltas of the Mahanadi and the neighbouring rivers,
bounded by the Bay of Bengal on the S.E., and walled in on the N.W. by tributary hill
states.

Proceeding westward, the province of Bengal proper stretched along the coast from
Orissa to British Burmah, and inland from the sea-board to the Himalayas. Its southern
portion was formed by the united deltas of the Ganges and Brahmaputra; its northern
consisted of the valleys of these great rivers and their tributaries. Behar lies on the
north-west of Bengal proper, and comprises the higher valley of the Ranges, from the
spot where it issued from the territories of the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-
Western Provincea Between Behar and Orissa, but stretching further westward and deep
into the hill tountry, lay the province of Chhota or Chutia Nigpur.

The Indian subcontinent had indirect relations with Europe by both overland caravans
and maritime routes, dating back to the fifth century BC. The lucrative spice trade with
India had been mainly in the hands of Arab merchants. By the fifteenth century,
European traders had come to believe that the commissions they had to pay the Arabs
were prohibitively high and therefore sent out fleets in search of new trade routes to
India. The arrival of the Europeans in the last quarter of the fifteenth century marked a
great turning point in the history of the subcontinent. The dynamics of the history of the
subcontinent came to be shaped chiefly by the Europeans' political and trade relations
with India as India was swept into the vortex of Western power politics. The arrival of
the Europeans generally coincided with the gradual decline of Mughal power, and the
subcontinent became an arena of struggle not only between Europeans and the
indigenous rulers but also among the Europeans.

The Portuguese, in the days of Aurangzéb, were of so little account that the dealings
between them and his government may be passed by. The struggle for the eastern
maritime trade then lay between the English and the Dutch. But the Hollanders devoted
their attention chiefly to the commerce with the Indian Archipelago and Spice Islands,
keeping very quiet in their Indian factories. The small settlements on the coasts made by
the French and Danes during the reign did not seriously concern the Mogul empire. The
real trouble was with the English traders who began to assert themselves and to claim
the right of fortifying their ‘factories’ or commercial stations.

Lesson 6: Bengali Renaissance

Referred to as the Bengal Renaissance, the 19th century is considered to have been a
time of transition from medieval to modern in a number of fields, including literature,
religion, social reform, political leanings and scientific discoveries. During this time
Bengal formed part of undivided India under British rule, and the Renaissance is said to
have begun with Indian religious, educational and social reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy
(22 May 1772-27 September 1833) who pushed the boundaries of traditional Hindu
culture and advocated progress for Indian society even though under the rule of the
British. Together with Dwarkanath Tagore of the influential Tagore family of Kolkata, as
well as other prominent Bengalis, Ram Mohan Roy established the Brahmo Sabha in
1828, which later become the societal aspect of Brahmo religion referred to as Brahmo
Samaj. It is generally agreed that the Bengal Renaissance period ended with the death of
Rabindranath Tagore in 1941, but it is also acknowledged that many staunch supporters
of the Renaissance continued to encourage progress in different fields.

The intellectual awakening that took place during the time of the Bengal Renaissance
has been compared to the 16th century European Renaissance, although it must be
noted that Europeans did not face the challenges of colonialism as was the case with
Bengal under British rule. In the case of the Bengal Renaissance there was a questioning
of practices such as the burdensome dowry system, the unjust caste system and the
constraints of some religious beliefs. It was during this time too, that one of the Bengal
region’s first social movements came into being, as the Young Bengals promoted
atheism and rationalism as a code of conduct to level the caste system.

With Ram Mohan Roy and Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar leading the way, the Bengal
Renaissance produced a wealth of Bengali literature. Prominent literary figures at the
time included Bengali poet, writer and journalist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838-
1894), and later Saratchandra Chatterjee (1876-1938). With a specific interest in
educational reform, the Tagore family was very influential and active in the Bengal
Renaissance. Rabindranath Tagore became the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for
Literature, awarded to him in 1913 for his English translation of poems titled the
Gitanjali.

Scientific advances during the Bengal Renaissance included pioneering work in a

number of fields by Bengali physicist, biologist, archeologist, botanist and science fiction
writer Jagadish Chandra Bose. Other notable Bengali and Indian scientists from this era
are Satyendra Nath Bose, Meghnad Saha and Upendranath Brahmachari.

Certainly, the Bengal Renaissance was an exciting time in Bengali history, with
contributions by innovative and motivated people benefiting subsequent generations.