Bengal Presidency

The Bengal Presidency was the British Indian province whose territory included, at its widest, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa and parts of what is now Bangladesh, with Calcutta as its capital. This article is marked as a stub: the retrieved sources do not include a dedicated encyclopedic entry on the Presidency as an administrative unit, so the account below is assembled from the neighbouring entries listed in the sources, and the gap is recorded openly rather than filled by inference.

Territorial development

Bengal had included Bihar and Orissa since 1765 ⁵. The lieutenant governor of Bengal administered an area of 189,000 square miles, and by 1903 the population of the province had risen to 78.50 million ⁵.

Before the twentieth century the province’s boundaries had been repeatedly reorganised: the upper provinces were sliced off in 1836; Bengal was placed under a lieutenant governor in 1854; Assam, along with Sylhet, was severed in 1874 to form a chief-commissionership; and the Lushai Hills were added to Assam in 1898 ⁵. The retrieved entry records that these changes aroused little public curiosity until the partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon in 1905 ⁷.

Administration and revenue

The origins of the Presidency’s administrative machinery lie in the Mughal subah. The governor of the Subah Bangala was called subahdar, also addressed as nazim, and was the civil and military head of the province, while the provincial diwan was separately appointed by the emperor and held supreme powers over revenue administration ¹. Murshid Quli Khan transferred the provincial capital from Dhaka to Murshidabad in 1717 ².

In 1765 the East India Company acquired the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa by imperial farman, and in 1772 the Court of Directors resolved to stand forth as diwan, Warren Hastings abolishing the Double Government and assuming diwani administration directly ³. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 thereafter fixed land revenue permanently and made zamindars and talukdars permanent proprietors, with the rents paid by cultivating raiyats left open to change ⁴.

The India Act of 1935 gave a fresh stimulus to peasant politics in Bengal; the Krishak Praja Party was formed, and its leader A. K. Fazlul Huq, committed to abolishing the Permanent Settlement, formed the government in 1937 ⁴. The Floud Commission, set up by the Huq ministry, submitted its report in 1940 and recommended the immediate abolition of the zamindari system, but the report remained unimplemented ⁴.

Elections under the Presidency

An elective institution of the western type was introduced in 1868 by a municipal act providing for a municipal committee, two-thirds of whose members were elected and one-third nominated, with only rate-payers enfranchised; the earliest Bengal municipalities with elections were Serampore, Burdwan and Krishnanagar in 1868 ⁹. Act III of 1884 extended the elective system to all the important municipalities of Bengal, including Dhaka, and under the same act district committees and local boards were formed partly by election and partly by nomination ⁹.

The electoral system was introduced at the level of legislative councils, both central and provincial, under the Government of India Act of 1909, and the franchise and elective bodies were further extended under the Act of 1919; from 1909 elections were held on a communal and occupational basis, and elections at local, municipal and national levels were held from 1920 onward ⁹. The provincial election held in 1937 under the Government of India Act of 1935 was marked by an extensive franchise, though not yet universal ⁹.

The end of the undivided province

The province was partitioned in 1905 and reunited with effect from 1912, when the capital of British India was also moved from Calcutta to Delhi and Lord Carmichael was chosen as the first governor of reunified Bengal ⁵⁶. Within 36 years of the annulment, the province was divided again in 1947 into two halves along broadly the same geographical lines, West Bengal joining the Indian Union and East Bengal joining Pakistan ⁷. Radcliffe’s award gave East Bengal an area of 130,383.19 square kilometres from undivided Bengal and 12,393.15 square kilometres from Assam, mainly the district of Sylhet, with a population of 39.11 million of whom 11.4 million were Hindus; West Bengal received about 72,520 square kilometres with 21.19 million people, of whom nearly 5.3 million were Muslims ⁸.

Could not verify

No Banglapedia entry titled "Bengal Presidency" was retrievable, so the Presidency’s formal territory, its successive capital arrangements and its administrative structure as a Presidency are not documented here from a dedicated entry. No dedicated entry on the Government of India Act 1935 was retrieved; the Act appears only as it is referenced in the "Permanent Settlement, The" entry. No facts could be sourced on the composition or number of Bengal’s districts, or on its population totals as a Presidency, from the retrieved pages. This article is therefore marked `stub` on completeness.

Related articles

Company Rule in Bengal · Partition of Bengal, 1905 · Partition of 1947 and East Pakistan · History of Bangladesh

Sources

9 sources cited. Tiers: T1 official or primary, T2 scholarly or curated, T3 media of record.

1. Subahdar — Banglapedia, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh (via Internet Archive Wayback Machine) (T2, accessed 2026-09-19). https://web.archive.org/web/2023id_/https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Subahdar
2. Murshid Quli Khan — Banglapedia, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh (via Internet Archive Wayback Machine) (T2, accessed 2026-09-19). https://web.archive.org/web/2023id_/https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Murshid_Quli_Khan
3. Diwani — Banglapedia, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh (via Internet Archive Wayback Machine) (T2, accessed 2026-09-19). https://web.archive.org/web/2023id_/https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Diwani
4. Permanent Settlement, The — Banglapedia, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh (via Internet Archive Wayback Machine) (T2, accessed 2026-09-19). https://web.archive.org/web/2023id_/https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Permanent_Settlement,_The
5. Partition of Bengal, 1905 — Banglapedia, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh (via Internet Archive Wayback Machine) (T2, accessed 2026-09-19). https://web.archive.org/web/2023id_/https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Partition_of_Bengal,_1905
6. Annulment of Bengal Partition — Banglapedia, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh (via Internet Archive Wayback Machine) (T2, accessed 2026-09-19). https://web.archive.org/web/2023id_/https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Annulment_of_Bengal_Partition
7. Partition of Bengal, 1947 — Banglapedia, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh (via Internet Archive Wayback Machine) (T2, accessed 2026-09-19). https://web.archive.org/web/2023id_/https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Partition_of_Bengal,_1947
8. Radcliffe Award — Banglapedia, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh (via Internet Archive Wayback Machine) (T2, accessed 2026-09-19). https://web.archive.org/web/2023id_/https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Radcliffe_Award
9. Election — Banglapedia, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh (via Internet Archive Wayback Machine) (T2, accessed 2026-09-19). https://web.archive.org/web/2023id_/https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Election

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Every factual claim above is attributed to a numbered source. Figures marked “as of” were retrieved on that date. Not affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation.