Bengal (Bengali)

The delta, the richest province of Mughal India, and the place where British rule began. Bengal's wet, fertile alluvium supported an enormous population and an export economy in cotton textiles and silk that made it the wealthiest region of the subcontinent, which is why the East India Company's victory at Plassey in 1757 mattered so much - it handed a trading company the revenues of a province. The consequences arrived quickly: the famine of 1770 killed perhaps a third of the population, and the Permanent Settlement of 1793 created the zamindar landlord class that structured rural Bengal for a century and a half. Calcutta became the capital of British India and, in the nineteenth century, the centre of the Bengal Renaissance - Rammohan Roy, Vidyasagar, Bankim Chandra, Tagore, Vivekananda - which produced Indian nationalism's vocabulary before it produced its politics. Curzon's partition of the province in 1905 on religious lines was reversed in 1911 by mass agitation, but it had already established the template. Partition in 1947 divided Bengal permanently, and the eastern half, made East Pakistan, broke away in turn in 1971 after Pakistan refused to accept an election won by a Bengali party. The famine of 1943 killed some three million people under British administration. Bengali is the world's sixth or seventh most spoken language. Communist governments held West Bengal for thirty-four consecutive years. Kolkata was the capital of British India until 1911. Tagore won the Nobel prize in 1913, the first outside Europe. The Sundarbans mangrove forest spans the delta's seaward edge. Jute was the region's other great export crop.

• Existed: 1100 CE – present
• Type: Entity