Ibn Battuta wrote in 1345, “I have seen no country in the world where provisions are cheaper than in this country (Bengal).” While complaining about the tropical humidity, he called Bengal “a hell full of good things.”
Three centuries later, French physician François Bernier thought that Bengal was “the finest and most fruitful country in the world.” He observed merchants living lavishly, eating off gold and silver, while even the poorest ate well on rice, vegetables, ghee, fish, and meat purchased for “the merest trifle.” This sheer exuberance prompted a common proverb among European traders: “The kingdom of Bengal has a hundred gates open for entrance, but not one for departure.”
By the early 18th century, Bengal had become a global manufacturing hub. It single-handedly generated half of the Mughal Empire’s economic output and roughly 10% to 12% of global GDP. The British recognized that controlling Bengal meant controlling India. It was Bengal’s financial resources that funded both their expanding empire and the Industrial Revolution.
Bengal was also the first Indian region to experience intellectual rebirth, or the Bengali Renaissance. This era produced the likes of Rammohan Roy, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Dwijendralal Ray, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, and many others. Other regional languages across India drew immense warmth and structural sustenance from both English and Bengali literature. While reconnecting to the past rooth, the Renaissance Bengalis focussed on reform and progress. There was a spark of hope of a free future where ‘the mind was without fear.’
Toward the close of the 19th century, when it seemed India might completely succumb to Western cultural dominance, Ramakrishna and his disciple Swami Vivekananda redressed the balance. Vivekananda’s intellect and “torrential eloquence” anchored India’s spiritual identity, turning mysticism into a core theme of the literary renaissance. “Joto mot, to to poth” (As many faiths, so many paths) became the liberal Bengali path to liberation.
By the early 20th century, the cultural awakening shifted toward physical culture and political radicalism. Patriots like Subhas Chandra Bose inspired millions to revolt against the British. Akharas and bodybuilding societies, like the Anushilan Samiti, sprouted across the region, advocating physical strength and tactical violence to end colonial rule. In North Calcutta, the Jugantar movement gained traction under leaders like Sri Aurobindo Ghosh, operating under the guise of fitness clubs to recruit and train young revolutionaries.
Bengal became a threat to imperialistic ambitions of British. Recognizing this, Lord Curzon deployed a classic “divide and rule” strategy, partitioning the province in 1905 along communal lines.
This sparked the Swadeshi movement, a massive campaign to boycott British goods and promote indigenous manufacturing. The resistance successfully forced the British to reunite Bengal in 1911, but the underlying communal fractures remained. Rattled by the deep-seated insurgency in Kolkata, the British ran away and shifted the capital to New Delhi in 1912, hurting Bengal financially and politically.
Despite a brutal crackdown, Kolkata retained immense wealth and prestige. The City of Joy was known as the Second City of the Empire after London. Even as late as 1937, the yogic writer Francis Yeats-Brown noted: “Those times have ended, never to return, but it is still the richest and most European city in the East.”
However, within a decade Bengal collapsed into what became known as the “Twilight of Bengal.” The filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak recalled how placid life felt till 1940s, before ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ upended everything.
It started with the Second World War.
Japan recognized that capturing Calcutta would wipe out 70% of India’s wartime capability. The British fortified the city. The military build-up stressed local infrastructure and sent prices skyrocketing. Then in 1942, a combination of a devastating cyclone, hyperinflation, and administrative failure cut off food supplies. The British government halted Burmese rice imports and exported Indian wheat to feed armies abroad. Eyewitness Eugenie Fraser described a “devastating famine” where starving villagers flooded Kolkata’s pavements, hopelessly resigned to their fates. Over two million people died of hunger. It was an untold holocast. Bloody were the hands.of Churchill. Yet, as intellectual Ashis Nandy recalled of his childhood, the starving poor died quietly, “without ransacking a single grocery, restaurant or sweetmeat shop.”
This was just the beginning of the tragedies. Then came the Calcutta Killings of 1946. Direct communal violence tore the city apart just prior to independence. Within ten days, between 6,000 and 10,000 people were dead, with bodies rotting in the streets or crammed down manholes.
Bengal was partitioned again next year, and East Bengal was merged with Pakistan. The division of the province severed Kolkata from its rural agricultural base, leaving West Bengal to absorb millions of displaced, traumatized refugees from East Pakistan.
Post-independence Kolkata lived heavily on its past cultural capital, a reality starkly captured by Mother Teresa when she opened her “Home for the Dying” in Kalighat in 1952. The city center became the densest urban center on Earth.
In 1956, the Indian Statistical Institute in Baranagar installed India’s first digital computer (the HEC-2M), making Kolkata a foundational birthplace of Indian computing. Yet, the wider economy entered a severe, multi-decade decline driven by three major factors.
Firstly the Freight Equalization Policy (1952–1993) stripped away the natural competitive advantage of mineral-rich states like Bengal by subsidizing the transport of raw materials across India. It systematically starved the state of industrial investment for four decades.
The second big issue was the refugee crisis. Unlike the robust rehabilitation grants provided to refugees in Punjab on the western border, eastern refugees received significantly lower per-capita assistance. The heavy influx of people broke Bengal’s infrastructure.
The third nail in the coffin was the aggressive Trade Unionism. The economic stress fueled a political shift. By 1967, political power swung toward the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and its allies. While the communist regime prioritized the rural peasantry and secured major successes in rice and jute agriculture, its aggressive trade unionism and resistance to modernization (including famous protests against computerization) drove away remaining industries.
By the time India liberalized its economy in the early 1990s, West Bengal’s industrial ecosystem was too crippled to easily compete with the rising service and manufacturing hubs elsewhere in the country.
Bengal suffered for the wars that she did not want, and the famines that she did not create. She suffered because she was too adament, sometimes violent, in asking for freedom. Bengal’s capital shifted from Berachampa, to Pataliputra, to Gour, to Vikrampur, to Murshidabad, to Dacca, to Kolkata…yes the spirit of Bengal remained.
And despite the downfall, the liberal mind of Bengal kept giving humanity its highest scientific minds, its finest literature, Oscars, and Nobel Prizes. It survived because it clinged to the hope of the future and not to the vanity of the past.
That does not mean all Bengalis were liberal. They still formed a small part of the community.
Sudeep Chakravarti writes about the “horrific statistic of more than 1,500 incidents of sati in and around Kolkata between 1815 and 1818…Hindu widows accounted for 90% of Kolkata’s comfort women, most of a young age…. The kulin Brahmins of Bengal, who freely practised polygamy and endorsed sati, were among the apex offenders,”
Raja Rammohan faced resistance from orthodox Bengalis, including his mother who put a lawsuit to disinherit him from his ancestral properties. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar faced resistance from orthodox Bengalis, that included threat to his life. He is said to have got inscribed in Sanskrit a plea: Bring up your daughter with the same love and care as you do a son, educate her.
The liberals always faced challenges… but they could make their voices heard.
Bengal is in ICU. But Bengal is not yet dead. Her survival would depend on hope of the future. The liberal voices for Bengal needs to keep shouting.
If not, her end would be written in vanity of the past.
“It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear.”
