Bengal is the ancient land that is now Bangladesh. This article looks at its history and people.
Bengal is the land in which the two great rivers of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra join to form the Padma, which then flows into the Bay of Bengal. On this flat river plain, floods often do terrible damage to the Bengali people, especially now that it has become such a populous independent state, created in 1971 as Bangladesh.
Although the Bengali people share many common cultural institutions and practices and their Bengali language emerged in the period from the C7th–11th, the land had already been divided into two parts, Eastern and Western. Over the centuries subsequently, Western Bengal has become much closer to the Hindu states of the Northern Indian plain. Once the great Buddhist King Asoka’s influence started to ebb away, then Hindu communities and rulers began to return to the region. In the east, Arab traders found more fertile ground for converting people to Islam, which has now become the national religion of Bangladesh. The victory of Islam appears to have been achieved by the sword, at least initially, since the Pala kings of C8th-12th returned to Buddhism, until they were ousted by the Senas dynasty, who were adherents of Vishnu, a Hindu god, and who encouraged the settlement of Hindu elites in Eastern Bengal. The Senas were then defeated by a tribe of Islamic warriors from the northwest, perhaps related to the Steppe peoples who have so often swooped down upon the rich lands of South Asia with their powerful, swift-moving armies. In any case, Islam was confirmed as the main religion of East Bengal from that time.
Bengal was a state that existed in autonomy but on the fringes of two or three great economic systems: it was close to but not integrated into either the Indian or the Chinese economic systems and was too far away to be in regular contact with the Persian and Arab trading systems. This benefited the Bengali people, by and large, and stimulated the cultural renaissance that found its greatest flowering in the person of Rabindranath Tagore. It was not until the arrival of the colonizing British that Bengal was brought under the influence of a major international power. The British preferred to let existing Hindu nabobs – the zamindars – retain their position and collect surpluses from the peasant classes which were then transferred to the British crown by the offices of the East India Company. However, Bengal provided a major problem for the stretched British bureaucracy, which was at a loss to deal with millions of ‘seditious’ Bengalis of different religions. Independence was delayed but inevitable.
