West Bengal historical timeline

Bengal was where British rule in India began, and where much of modern India was intellectually assembled.

Before the British

Ruled by the Palas, then the Senas, then from 1204 by a Muslim sultanate that developed its own architecture and made Bengali a court language, and from 1576 as a Mughal province — the richest in the empire, exporting muslin, silk and saltpetre.

The Company

The East India Company established a factory on the Hooghly in 1690, which grew into Calcutta. In 1757 Robert Clive defeated the nawab Siraj ud-Daulah at Plassey, largely by arranging his betrayal beforehand, and the Company acquired the revenue rights to Bengal — the beginning of British territorial rule in India. The extraction that followed contributed to the famine of 1770, in which an estimated ten million people died.

Capital

Calcutta was the capital of British India until 1911, and the second city of the empire.

The Renaissance and nationalism

Reform, literature and science from the 1820s; the 1905 partition of Bengal on religious lines provoked the Swadeshi boycott movement and was reversed in 1911.

Why Calcutta

Job Charnock chose a site on the Hooghly’s east bank in 1690 for reasons that were purely commercial — deep water, a defensible approach and access to the muslin-weaving districts inland. Three villages were bought from the local landholders, and within a century the settlement was the administrative centre of a territory larger than Britain, laid out with a European town around a fort and an Indian town beyond it, a division still legible in the street plan.

1943 and 1947

The Bengal famine of 1943 killed some three million during the war. Partition in 1947 split the province, sending millions of refugees into Calcutta and creating East Pakistan, later Bangladesh.