Don’t just moon over your past, Bengal, eyes forward
Calcutta and Bengal were the centres of culture, commerce, and creative expression across undivided India. The state and her citizens stood as a beacon of intellectual and cultural prowess in India. The idea of Mother India – Bharat Mata – arose in Bengal with Bankim Chandra Chaterjee’s ‘Bande Mataram’.
Religious reform and modernisation arose with the tireless work of Raja Ram Mohan Roy and the Bhramo Samaj.
Jagdish Chandra Bose with science, Prafulla Chandra Ray with Bengal Chemicals, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar with women’s education, and of course Rabindranath Tagore. They all helped in bolstering the status of Bengal. Even post-Independence, this trend continued – in films, in music, in intellectual thought.
Bengal was the proverbial trendsetter — what it thought today, the rest of the country pondered upon tomorrow.
As a province/state, there is major trauma Bengal went through under the British — twice partitioned, in 1905 and 1947, facing multiple famines that broke the back of the farmers, and seeing the waning of influence as the national capital moved from Calcutta to Delhi. The cost to the people of the state was immeasurable.
Bengal, once the vanguard of intellectual and cultural renaissance in India, saw its prominence wane. This decline is a multifaceted phenomenon, transcending simple political explanations and delving into deeper socio-economic and cultural shifts.
And as a state, it has not yet come to grips with this decline. Instead, it has preferred to bask in the glory of what the greats from another era achieved. It sees culture as frozen in the past as opposed to being contemporary, fluid, and electric.
The story of Bengal's intellectual prowess begins with its educational institutions, like
