West Bengal

• 1. Introduction

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  West Bengal sits along the Bay of Bengal on India's eastern edge, and by the 2011 census it held more than 91 million people within an area of 88,752 square kilometres. By 2026, that figure had grown to an estimated 106 million. That makes it the fourth-most populous state in India and the eighth-most populous country subdivision in the world. Yet the numbers alone miss what makes this place so singular. Within its borders lie the tea gardens of Darjeeling, the vast mangrove wilderness of the Sundarbans, the Ganges delta, and one of the subcontinent's great cities, Kolkata. The questions this documentary will answer are not merely geographic. How did a region that Europeans once called the richest country to trade with end up spending decades in economic stagnation? What produced the Nobel laureates, the filmmakers, and the reformers who changed India? And why did a place so central to the birth of modern Indian identity end up partitioned, flooded with refugees, and politically turbulent for generations?

• 2. Deep Roots

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  Stone Age tools excavated in West Bengal date back 20,000 years, pushing human occupation there roughly 8,000 years earlier than scholars had previously thought. The ancient Greeks mentioned the region around 100 BCE, calling it Gangaridai, a land at the mouths of the Ganges. The Sri Lankan chronicle Mahavamsa records that Prince Vijaya of the Vanga kingdom conquered Lanka around 543 CE and gave it the name Sinhala kingdom. These are not footnotes. They signal a civilization whose reach extended across the Bay of Bengal long before any European ship arrived.

  The kingdom of Magadha, formed in the 7th century BCE from the regions now comprising Bihar and Bengal, was one of the four main kingdoms of India at the time of both Mahavira, the central figure of Jainism, and Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. Under Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE, the Maurya Empire of Magadha stretched across nearly all of South Asia, including Afghanistan and parts of Balochistan. From the 3rd to the 6th centuries CE, Magadha served as the seat of the Gupta Empire.

  The first recorded independent king of Bengal was Shashanka, who reigned in the early 7th century. Buddhist annals describe him as an intolerant Hindu ruler who murdered Rajyavardhana, the Buddhist king of Thanesar, and who destroyed the Bodhi tree at Bodhgaya, replacing Buddha statues with Shiva lingams. After a period of anarchy, the Pala dynasty ruled for four hundred years beginning in the 8th century. The citadel of Gauda served as the capital of the Gauda kingdom, the Pala Empire, and the subsequent Sena Empire. The tension between Buddhism and Hinduism that Shashanka embodied ran through centuries of Bengal's history before giving way to another faith altogether.

• 3. Trade, Islam, and Empire

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  Islam reached Bengal not through conquest at first but through commerce, arriving via trade with the Abbasid Caliphate. The Ghurid conquests led by Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji then established the Delhi Sultanate and spread the Muslim faith across the entire Bengal region. Mosques, madrasas, and khanqahs followed. During the Islamic Bengal Sultanate, founded in 1352, Bengal became a major world trading nation. Europeans referred to it as the richest country with which to trade. In 1576, the Mughal Empire absorbed the region.

  The Bengal Sultanate was briefly interrupted by a Hindu uprising under Raja Ganesha. Several independent Hindu states endured through the Mughal period, including those of Pratapaditya of Jessore District and Raja Sitaram Ray of Bardhaman. The Koch dynasty in northern Bengal flourished through the 16th and 17th centuries, weathering Mughal pressure and surviving into the British colonial era.

  Following the death of Emperor Aurangzeb in the early 1700s, Mughal Bengal became a semi-independent state under the Nawabs of Bengal. Historians note that this proto-industrialised economy showed signs of what might be called the world's first Industrial Revolution. The wealth of that era did not survive what came next. The British East India Company defeated Siraj ud-Daulah, the last independent Nawab, at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. After the Battle of Buxar in 1764, the Company gained the right to collect revenue in the Bengal province. The Bengal famine of 1770 then claimed millions of lives, a direct consequence of tax policies enacted by the British company. Calcutta was named the capital of British-held territories in India in 1773, and from 1772 to 1911 it served as the capital of all the Company's territories and then of all India after the establishment of the Viceroyalty.

• 4. Renaissance and Partition

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  Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, and Swami Vivekananda all worked in Kolkata, and their social reforms helped dismantle practices including sati, dowry, and caste-based discrimination. Sir William Jones established the Asiatic Society in 1794 to promote oriental studies. Fort William College was established in 1810, the Hindu College in 1817, and the Scottish Church College, now the oldest Christian liberal arts college in South Asia, in 1830. This wave of institutional expansion produced what became known as the Bengali Renaissance.

  Rabindranath Tagore reshaped Bengali literature and music and later received the Nobel Prize. C. V. Raman won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the Raman Effect, work done at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Kolkata, the first research institute in Asia. Satyendra Nath Bose, Meghnad Saha, Jagadish Chandra Bose, and statistician Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis all emerged from this same milieu. Amartya Sen and Abhijit Banerjee added to the region's roster of Nobel laureates in later decades.

  The Great Bengal famine of 1943 claimed three million lives during the Second World War. Revolutionary groups such as Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar drove armed resistance to British rule, and the Indian National Army led by Subhas Chandra Bose posed a direct military challenge before being defeated. In 1947, the Bengal Legislative Council and the Bengal Legislative Assembly voted on the Partition of Bengal along religious lines. West Bengal became a Hindu-majority Indian state; East Bengal became a Muslim-majority province of Pakistan, later renamed East Pakistan, and ultimately the independent nation of Bangladesh in 1971. In 1950, the Princely State of Cooch Behar merged with West Bengal. In 1955, the former French enclave of Chandannagar was integrated into the state.

• 5. Decades of Turbulence

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  The Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 sent millions of refugees into West Bengal, placing severe strain on infrastructure that was already fragile. The 1974 smallpox epidemic killed thousands. Through the 1970s and 1980s, severe power shortages, strikes, and a violent Marxist-Maoist movement by groups known as the Naxalites damaged much of the state's industrial base, leading to deindustrialisation. The state's share of total Indian industrial output was 9.8% in 1980-1981; by 1997-1998 it had fallen to 5%.

  The Left Front won the 1977 assembly election and, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), governed for the next three decades. That made West Bengal's Left Front government the world's longest-running democratically elected communist government. Economic recovery began to gather momentum only after the central government introduced economic liberalisations in the mid-1990s, aided by the growth of information technology services.

  Clashes between industrial land acquisition and communities proved decisive politically. In the 2011 assembly election, the Trinamool Congress under Mamata Banerjee defeated the Left Front, winning 225 seats. Banerjee was re-elected in 2016 with 211 seats and again in 2021 with 215. In 2006, the state's healthcare system drew severe criticism following the West Bengal blood test kit scam. As of 2017, at least nine districts in the state suffered from arsenic contamination of groundwater, with an estimated 1.04 crore people afflicted.

• 6. Land and Ecology

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  West Bengal stretches from the eastern Himalayas in the north to the Bay of Bengal in the south. Sandakfu, at 3,636 metres, is the highest peak in the state. The Ganges splits in two as it crosses the state: one branch enters Bangladesh as the Padma, while the other flows through West Bengal as the Bhagirathi and Hooghly rivers. The Farakka barrage manages this division, and its water flow has been a source of lasting dispute between India and Bangladesh.

  The Damodar river was historically called the Sorrow of Bengal for its frequent floods; several dams under the Damodar Valley Project now control it. The Sundarbans at the Ganges delta form part of the world's largest mangrove forest and have been declared a Biosphere Reserve. They shelter the endangered Bengal tiger, the Gangetic dolphin, the river terrapin, and the estuarine crocodile. The Singalila National Park in the high-altitude forests shelters the red panda, barking deer, and pangolin.

  Forest area recorded in the "India State of Forest Report 2017" was 16,847 square kilometres, while in 2013 it stood at 16,805 square kilometres, which was 18.93% of the state's geographical area, against the national average of 21.23%. The monsoon brings rain across the whole state from June to September. Heavy rainfall above 250 centimetres falls in the Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri, and Cooch Behar districts. In September 2017, West Bengal achieved 100% electrification, with remote Sundarbans villages among the last to be connected.

• 7. Culture and Identity

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  The Bengali saying "machhe bhate bangali" translates as "fish and rice make a Bengali", and it carries real weight. Hilsa preparations are a favourite. Bengalis make distinctive sweetmeats from milk products, including Rôshogolla, Chômchôm, Kalojam, and several kinds of sondesh. The folk literature tradition runs deep: the Charyapada, a collection of Buddhist mystic songs, dates to the 10th and 11th centuries; Mangalkavya, Hindu narrative poetry, was composed around the 13th century.

  The Baul mystic minstrels carry a music tradition that remains alive. Folk music is often accompanied by the ektara, a one-stringed instrument. Chhau dance of Purulia is a rare form of masked dance. The Bengali film industry, whose studios in the Kolkata neighbourhood of Tollygunge gave rise to the name Tollywood, has won India's National Film Award for Best Feature Film twenty-two times in sixty-seven years, the highest total among all Indian languages. Satyajit Ray is widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century. The Bengali language itself is the first language of 86.22% of West Bengal's population, according to the 2011 census.

  Durga Puja is the biggest festival in the state, a five-day celebration in which thousands of pandals are erected across cities, towns, and villages. The idols of the goddess are fashioned in Kumortuli throughout the year and then immersed in the rivers on Vijayadashami. Christmas in Kolkata, locally called Bôŗodin or Great Day, draws people of every religion to Park Street, where the state tourism department organises an annual festival. Ananda Bazar Patrika, published in Kolkata, holds the largest circulation of any single-edition regional language newspaper in India, with over 1.27 million daily copies as of the data cited in the source.