Bengal Renaissance

The Bengal Renaissance was a long movement of social, religious, intellectual and artistic reform in Bengal under British rule, lasting from the late 1700s into the early 1900s. Centred on Calcutta (now Kolkata), it questioned caste, the burning of widows and other customs, built new schools and universities, and transformed Bengali literature, science and art. Its ideas fed into the rise of Indian nationalism, though historians since the 1970s have also stressed its colonial roots and its narrow social base.

After the East India Company's victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, Bengal became the base of British power in India, and Calcutta its capital until the seat of government moved to Delhi in 1911. Some historians date the movement's origins to this conquest, seeing it both as a reaction to colonial exploitation and as a product of the English-language education the British promoted. Others begin it with the reformer Ram Mohan Roy, born in 1772. Calcutta's presses turned out cheap books and newspapers in Bengali and English, giving the city's growing middle class a place to debate new ideas.

Raja Ram Mohan Roy campaigned against sati, child marriage and polygamy, and in 1823 urged the government to fund Western scientific education rather than a new Sanskrit college. He helped found the Hindu College in 1817 and the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, the forerunner of the Brahmo Samaj, a reformist movement that took that name under Debendranath Tagore. When Governor-General William Bentinck banned sati in 1829, Roy travelled to Britain in 1830 to make sure the ban was not overturned. He died in 1833. Around the same time the teacher Henry Derozio inspired a radical group of Hindu College students known as Young Bengal, until he was dismissed in 1831.

The scholar Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar led the campaign that produced the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856, against fierce opposition. Bengali prose, blank verse, the novel and modern drama all emerged in this period. Among the leading writers were Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Dinabandhu Mitra and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who published the first Bengali novel, Durgeshnandini, in 1865; his Anandamath of 1882 contained the hymn "Vande Mataram", later adopted by Indian nationalists. Religious renewal continued through figures such as Ramakrishna, Sarada Devi and Swami Vivekananda, and organisations such as the Ramakrishna Mission. The University of Calcutta and other institutions spread modern learning, although the government adopted a systematic education policy only in 1854.

Bengal produced a remarkable generation of scientists. Jagadish Chandra Bose pioneered research on radio and microwaves and invented the crescograph, and Prafulla Chandra Ray, Meghnad Saha, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and Satyendra Nath Bose followed. In art, Abanindranath Tagore led the Bengal School, a nationalist "Indian style" of painting that drew on Mughal miniatures and spread across British India in the early 20th century.

The movement is often said to culminate in Rabindranath Tagore, poet, composer and educator, who in 1913 became the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize, for literature. Bengali Muslims also took part, among them the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam and the feminist writer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, and in 1926 a Freedom of Intellect Movement challenged dogma in Bengali Muslim society. Critics note that its leading figures came mostly from affluent upper-caste Hindu families, and that radicals such as Young Bengal never reached the peasantry.

Our 1800 and 1878 maps show the expansion of East India Company rule and then the British Raj, with Bengal at its heart. See also the history of Kolkata.