Eastern India’s Bengal shore holds about a hundred million
West Bengal, along the Bay of Bengal, counted about 91 million people on 88,752 square kilometres in 2011 and is estimated near 100.6 million by 2026—India’s fourth-most populous state. Ancient Janapadas and Vedic-period cities underlie a long Hindu–Buddhist contest of empires.
Nobody knows for certain where the name Bengal comes from. One theory points to the Bang, a Dravidian tribe that settled the area around 1000 BCE; another links the Bengali Bongo to the ancient kingdom of Vanga, mentioned in early Sanskrit texts, though the region’s early history remains hazy. Stone tools excavated in the state date back some 20,000 years, pushing human occupation 8,000 years earlier than scholars had assumed.
The Mahabharata places the land in the Vanga kingdom, and several Vedic realms, among them Vanga, Rarh, Pundravardhana and Suhma, lay in the region. Greek writers around 100 BCE described Gangaridai at the mouths of the Ganges, and Bengal traded overseas with Suvarnabhumi, meaning Burma, lower Thailand, the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra. Sri Lanka’s Mahavamsa chronicle says a Vanga prince, Vijaya, conquered the island in the sixth century BCE and founded the Sinhala kingdom.
When British rule ended in 1947, and after religious violence, Bengal’s legislative council and assembly voted to split the province along religious lines. West Bengal stayed in India, while East Bengal became a province of Pakistan, later East Pakistan and eventually independent Bangladesh. The region had been a driving force in the independence movement and remains an artistic centre, with Rabindranath Tagore its most celebrated literary figure.
The state has tried to rename itself. In 2011 the government proposed Paschim Banga, the Bengali for West Bengal, and in August 2016 the assembly voted for Bengal in English and Bangla in Bengali over objections from Congress, the Left Front and the BJP. The central government refused, wanting one name in all languages and warning that Bangla could be confused with Bangladesh.
Source: West Bengal
