The death of Bengali liberalism

In one of the first political acts of symbolism following the win of the right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP in the state of West Bengal, home to the former capital of the British Raj, the residents of a Kolkata (Calcutta) suburb promptly changed the name of a local park, from Siraj Uddyan (The garden of Siraj ud-Daulah, the last Nawab of pre-British Bengal in the 18th century), to Shivaji Uddyan (named after Shivaji Raje, the 17th-century Maratha King and rebel against the Mughal Empire). It is of course unusual to digest for anyone who knows their Bengali or British history: the one, Shivaji Raje, whose future Maratha empire raided and pillaged Bengal was chosen as an act of liberatory symbolism over the fiefdom of the other, Siraj ud-Daulah, a son of Bengal who spoke the then rudimentary Bengali language, and whose family defended Bengal against both Maratha raids, and eventually, albeit unsuccessfully, against the British.

The Hindu Maratha raids into Bengal were legendary in brutality, even by the standards of early modern warfare. Mid 18th-century Bengal, then the wealthiest region in the subcontinent, came under repeated plunder and rapine from Maratha raiders (known as Bargi, or light cavalry) who avoided large battles and instead swept rapidly through the countryside. Bengali mothers still sing lullabies such as ‘Bargi elo deshey’, about fear of raiders and pillage. The upper circular road in Calcutta was originally known as the Mahratta Ditch: the clue is in the name. The raids eventually ended due to a combination of factors: the overstretch of Maratha power in North India and the rise of the rules of Hyderabad and Mysore, the disillusionment of the Bengali intellectual class as well as bankers and traders against an incompetent Bengali Muslim ruling class, and the rise of a new liberalising power in the form of the East India Company.

On the 4 May 2026, the BBC elevated the status of Narendra Modi as another illustrious conqueror of Bengal, placing him alongside Bakhtiyar Khilji, Giyas ud Din Balban, Akbar the Great and Robert Clive. The BJP win in Bengal has brought forth a celebration from those who consider it a potential second Bengali renaissance – the first one being the 1820s liberalism under Rammohan Roy, William Bentinck and Lord Amherst – a city with a strong intellectual and rebellious tradition providing a new right-wing Hindu nationalist movement the necessary historic depth and aesthetic sense.

It is not going to happen. A true renaissance requires a cosmopolitan mind and an elite-led liberal tradition, neither of which is present today. In fact, dark days are coming. Chronicling this new epoch in Bengal is a historic necessity given Bengal’s outsized impact on India, Britain, and the world. What it shows is that Bengali cosmopolitan liberalism, an experiment that lasted since roughly the 1820s in several forms, is finally at an end.

It is a tragedy that no one has written a one-volume history of Bengali liberalism, the Bengali cosmopolitan elite, or the ‘Bhadralok’. There are no think-tanks in Washington or London dedicated to studying the effect of a BJP win in Bengal and Assam, two Indian states surrounding Bangladesh and currently undergoing a rapid Islamisation, and why the region is a tinderbox waiting to explode into riots, border clashes and even war.

More importantly, however, there is no funding, no university projects, PhDs or books and research on Bengali history and specifically Bengali liberalism. There are grand historical narratives, including Dr RC Majumdar’s definitive and magisterial History of Bengal from the dying days of the Raj, but the closest to any Whig interpretation of the history of Bengal (more on that later) would be Nirad Chaudhuri’s monograph ‘Suicidal Bengali’, yet to be translated in English. It is an epistemological blackhole that fails to consider and study the causes behind the rise and sustenance of that one force consisting of millions who once formed the backbone of translational British liberalism. British and American historical academies are loath to touch the subject, as that would force them to concede the British Empire’s role as a progressive and liberalising force: a modern Anglo-intellectual taboo.

It is impossible to summarise the entire thematic history of Bengal within the scope of this essay. According to Majumdar, Bengal emerged early as one of the easternmost intellectual frontiers of the Vedic-Aryan world, referred to by Pliny and Ptolemy as well as Sanskrit grammarians such as Panini and Patanjali, divided into several important cultural and territorial zones, including Pundra or Varendra in the north and northeast, Rarh in the south-western interior, Gauda in central Bengal, Tamralipta along the south-western frontier, and Vanga in the deltaic south-east. The Mahabharata also mentions Vanga rulers fighting with war elephants alongside the Kuru confederacy.

Yet the loss of indigenous written chronicles from before the age of Alexander the Great leaves the early history of Bengal fragmented. Majumdar, however, demonstrated that Bengal’s riverine geography and maritime orientation made it more open and cosmopolitan than many of the inland kingdoms of northern and western India. The maritime character is also reflected in the Pali traditions surrounding Vijaya Singha, whose voyage to Ceylon around the 6th-century BC supposedly gave rise to the Sinhala identity of the island. Bengal’s strategic and commercial importance eventually drew it into larger imperial systems, first under the Mauryas and later the Gupta Empire, two of the four (Mughal and British) political formations that imposed a broad legal and administrative unity over much of the Indian subcontinent.

The 7th-century Chinese pilgrim Hiuen-Tsang refers to Bengali King Śaśāṅka as the emperor originating from Gauda, a place that is also notable for exerting another major political and cultural influence, and for a very Bengali tradition of reactionary Hinduism. Śaśāṅka ordered to cut down a Bodhi tree and remove Buddha’s temples, and was seen as a Hindu force against the spread of a centralising Buddhism. The major Brahminical schools of Bengal, whether the Varendras (Pundra) or the Radhiyas (Rarh), were western imports that settled and never truly lost their Vedic elitism. Majumdar notes: ‘Buddhists in Magadha and other parts of Śaśāṅka’s kingdom were in league with the Buddhist emperor Harshavardhana with whom Śaśāṅka was engaged in a prolonged struggle.’ This forms a recurring motif in Bengali history, a region simultaneously rebellious and reactionary, of a Hindu elite reaction against any liberalising and universalising force – embodied by Śaśāṅka against Northern Greco-Mauryan Buddhism in the 7th century, Chaitanya against political Islam in the 15th century, and Ramkrishna and Vivekananda against Brahmoism (Unitarian monotheistic Hinduism) and British liberalism in the 19th century.

Tsang visited Bengal in 633 AD and noted the disintegration into smaller kingdoms, after the death of Śaśāṅka. Bengal thereafter entered a more continuous historical phase under the Pala Empire and subsequently the Sena dynasty, whose reigns between roughly the 8th and 12th centuries created the first sustained dynastic continuity in Bengali history prior to the rise of Islam as a political identity in the subcontinent. During this period, the Indian subcontinent was undergoing profound political fragmentation under repeated invasions, and Bengal under Vallalsena and Lakshmansena became a major balancing power in the politics of northern Gangetic India. Yet this expansion also stretched the Sena Empire beyond its capacity to defend itself against emerging military powers, organised around mounted warfare and mobile cavalry tactics.

By the early 13th century, Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khilji, a Turkish soldier-general of fortune led to the first modern monotheistic conquest of Bengal, inaugurating a new epoch in Bengali history and, for the first time, establishing a parallel governing class alongside the older landed, Brahminical establishments, adding another layer to the region’s already plural and adaptive historical character, shaped over centuries by trade, migration, conquest, and religious change. In spite of its ignoble end, the short period of Sena rule in Bengal constitutes an important landmark in its history. A succession of three able and vigorous rulers consolidated the whole province into a united and powerful kingdom, which was then ripe to be the most prosperous and educated province of the Indo-Gangetic Plains. As Majumdar explains:

By their strong advocacy of the orthodox Hindu faith, the Senas helped it to attain the position of supremacy in Bengal which it had long ago secured in the rest of India. The Sena period also saw the high-water mark of development of Brahminical Sanskrit, as Buddhism in its last phase was a disintegrating force in religion and society, and there can be hardly any doubt that its predominance in Bengal was the main contributing factor to the phenomenal success of Islam in this region.

During the Islamic age of Bengal, world-renowned trades such as terracotta and satin-weaving flourished, but much else crumbled, as Bengal’s homegrown Islamic nobility had a major identity crisis between being Bengali and Muslim, and constantly faced warfare from other powers. Not considered staunchly Muslim enough from their brethren to the north, they also had natural enmity with the conservative Marathas in the west, who were themselves considered relatively low class by the Rajputs in the north, as well as the Bengali brahmins. Both the Kolkata traders and bankers as well as the Brahminical aristocracy suffered from a severe lack of governance stemming from continuous warfare. Prince Shah Shuja, the relatively liberal and Bengali-speaking third son of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (who was himself two thirds Hindu Rajput by blood, and the second Mughal emperor to be Indian by birth, i.e., born within the geographical Indian subcontinent) lost the civil war to the fanatical Aurangzeb (the last of the Greater Mughals) and fled to Arakan on the modern Bangladeshi and Burmese border, where he was beheaded and his Bengali daughters and Mughal princesses were raped and murdered by the Arakan king.

The collapse of Mughal power and the horrific raids from Marathas, as well as the boneheaded incompetence and strategic illiteracy of the Nawabs of Bengal, led upper-class Bengalis to look towards the British as the only source of financial and military stability, western education, and resources. ‘Under British rule’, Jogendranath Bhattacharya wrote in his seminal 1896 study Hindu Castes and Sects, the Bengali brahmins, hungry for enlightenment and opposed to both medieval Islamic and the more barbaric heartland Hindu dogmas, were the ‘first to adapt themselves to the exigencies of the new regime and to take advantage of such opportunities’. In a rain-soaked and humid summer of 1757, the brave but imbecilic Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, hyped up by the French, did what any teenager would do: marched on the British garrison in Calcutta. He lacked industrial-scale technology, such as tarpaulin, to guard his fuses and spirits from dampening rains, as well as the support of the Bengali elite and the majority of his 40,000 strong army. He lost to Clive’s furious cannonade manned by only 3,000 local Bengalis and 800 Europeans, thus establishing British rule.

It is impossible to chronicle without the scope of a book-length study the march of British liberalism in Bengal for the next 50 years, but three developments were notable. The British support for western education was instrumental in freeing the Bengali intellect from the dark days of Islamic and Hindu late medieval practices. The early adoption of elite Bengali Brahmins of British liberalism created a syncretic social norm based on Christian unitarianism. That, in turn, resulted in the rapid social reforms, chiefly in the domain of women’s emancipation, and resulted in elite split and an eventual Hindu reactionary cycle.

The history of the foundations of social liberalism in Bengal is clearly recorded in western historiography.  They were laid in the early 19th century through a convergence of British orientalist scholarship and educational reforms, first by James Prinsep, who deciphered ancient Brahmi inscriptions and revived awareness of India’s classical past; and William Jones, whose establishment of the Asiatic Society reopened proper scientific translations of Sanskrit literature, Hindu law, and comparative philology to systematic study. It helped create a new educated Bengali intelligentsia conscious of both its ancient heritage and modern European ideas. The idea that the native Bengali elite are not intellectually inferior resulted from the works of John Zephaniah Holwell and Thomas Babington Macaulay as a class of homegrown imperials – ‘English in taste, opinions, morals and intellect’ – emerged and transformed Bengal as the intellectual centre of the Raj, providing the empire with a new mobile and competent global upper middle class. When remnants of the feudal north, central and western India rose up in revolt against the East India company in 1857, the silence and tacit support for the British troops from the enlightened Bengali upper class was notable. That loyalty to the cosmopolitanism of the Raj stayed until around the end of the First World War.

Two other developments happened at the same time. The first was a combination of intellectuals who merged Unitarian thoughts and social liberalism with elite Brahmin reformist power. Some elite families, such as Reverend Krishna Mohan Banerjee, or Michael Madhusudhan Dutt, adopted Christian social reformist ideas, while other Bengali intellectuals, stemming from the Young Bengal Movement and former Derozio followers, merged unitarian impulses with reformed Hinduism and the promotion of rationalism and liberty. Some of the knowledge that had been lost between the 6th and 12th centuries due to Hindu-Buddhist conflict, and during the Islamic middle ages, was rediscovered under British patronage and Bengali scholarship.

The success of such endeavours generated a backlash, partly because liberalism contains within itself an intense loathing for any tradition, and, by unfortunate design of democratic politics, most of the masses in any society are not elite, and thereby not enlightened. As Jaspreet Singh Boparai wrote in his magisterial essay on the Bengal Renaissance:

The Hindoo College was instrumental in creating an indigenous English-speaking, at least moderately Whiggish intellectual class in Bengal. Its former pupils were at the centre of liberalising movements in religion (against caste restrictions and dietary taboos – the eating of beef, for example), and society (widow remarriage, and the abolition of suttee, or the forced immolation of women on the funeral pyres of their husbands); more boringly, it also helped to supply the East India Company with a body of more or less capable native administrator. (…) Indeed, Young Bengal was often little better than a club of rich boys eating beef and wearing English clothes…

Contrary to post-colonial and Marxist historiography, which frames Indian nationalism as a liberal and progressive force, it was essentially an intra-elite competition: the fight for widow’s rights that started under figures such as Raja Rammohan Roy, was opposed by Raja Radhakanta Deb of Sovabazar, who led the orthodox Hindu organisation known as the Dharma Sabha, which also opposed the abolition of Sati (or ‘suttee’) under Lord Bentinck. Reformers such as Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar and Rammohan Roy, advocating for women’s education and widow remarriage were frequently condemned as agents of Westernisation, heavily influenced by Christian Unitarianism and intrusive British legislation into Hindu society.

‘In presenting this subject to your Lordship, I conceive myself discharging a solemn duty which I owe to my countrymen, and also to that enlightened sovereign and legislature which have extended their benevolent care to this distant land, actuated by a desire to improve the inhabitants’, Rammohan Roy wrote in a letter to Lord Amherst in 1823. He argued that a ‘Sanskrit system of education would be best calculated to keep this country in darkness, if such had been the policy of the British legislature. But as the improvement of the native population is the object of the Government, it will consequently promote a more liberal and enlightened system of instruction; embracing Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy, with other useful sciences…’

Two hundred and three years later, Rammohan lost. His pristine statue remains in the English city of Bristol as testament to a better, more civilised time. In Kolkata, however, BJP supporters defaced his painting. One doesn’t desecrate what they have vanquished; they desecrate what they fear. The Indian liberals and leftists thought they could denigrate the legacy of imperial liberalism while creating a nativist and nationalist elite. That experiment, running on corrupt and incoherent fumes for over 60 years, seems to have come to an end, as nativism has reached its long dormant ur-reactionary stage. There is no single national party in India with a broad, cosmopolitan reach and a cogent plan. In the context of India, post-colonialism has circled right back to its pre-modern form, with simmering sectarian tensions and lurking regional cleavages within.

This is not to let the ruling powers in Bengal off the hook, who were corrupt, violent, and proto-communist in their worldview. If you think mass Islamic migration has changed the culture and landscape of Luton and Birmingham, you should read about the fate of those who lived on the Indo-Bangladesh border for over 60 years. The right-wing reaction was, to some extent, historically inevitable. There is also a potential for a ‘short and successful’ territorial war, similar to Crimea, Lebanon or Armenia. With Bangladesh turning increasingly Islamist, and now completely surrounded by BJP-led Indian states on both sides, any efforts at deportation might result in potential clashes. India would be strategically inclined to permanently sever Bangladesh’s jugular, and do a rapid land grab that reconnects the northern corridor ‘chicken neck’, fortifying easternmost India against China.

Immediate concerns notwithstanding, there is a greater historical dynamic at play. Bengal emerged as the true intellectual centre of the empire producing the Bengal Renaissance, an extraordinary period of cultural and intellectual cosmopolitanism, which remains unparalleled in the history of the subcontinent. It provided the manpower to run the British-Indian Army’s officer corps, as well as civil servants, doctors, barristers and administrators, who served the empire from Fiji to the Caribbean. But it was deeply influenced by a combination of a very English idea of liberty and an austere, presbyterian work ethic. There are still individual Bengalis who silently and competently fill all those roles, scattered across Europe, Asia and America. But in the land of their ancestors, a very different wind is blowing away the fumes of the British legacy, from the common law, secular rationalism and meritocracy, to a sense of public propriety and fair play, and restraint and elite detachment.

Isaiah Berlin wrote on revolutionary Russia that the moderates hoped, against all evidence, that the ferocious anti-intellectualism among the masses, often resulting in violence, was passing. He argued that societies periodically generate explosive movements rooted in wounded collective identity and the demand for recognition. The new Bengali reactionary imagination similarly isn’t historical – if it were, they would not elevate the Marathas given what the Marathas did to native Bengalis – but aesthetic and emotional. And if the Indian social media discourse is a measure of the intellect of the masses, then something very different is returning to form. Tea and cricket, Victoria Memorial Hall, and the ICSE English final Hamlet, are empty skin suits, as are the original still colloquially used names of Minto Park, Dalhousie Square and Rippon Street.