The Goddess, the Ecstatic and the Delta

Bengal is the delta of the lower Ganges, and its religious character is unusually distinct from the rest of northern India. Goddess worship is dominant rather than one option among several: Kali and Durga are the deities of the region's largest public festivals, and Durga Puja in Kolkata, with its commissioned image pavilions across the city, is inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage and functions as the civic calendar's central event.

Alongside that runs a strong ecstatic current. Chaitanya, in the sixteenth century, made congregational singing and dancing the centre of Krishna devotion, and the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition that formed around him produced a substantial theology of divine love in Sanskrit and Bengali alike; its twentieth-century missionary branch is the source of the Hare Krishna movement abroad. The Bauls, wandering singers who reject caste, temple and scripture in favour of an inward search expressed in song, draw on both Vaishnava and Sufi language and belong fully to neither.

Eastern Bengal became Muslim-majority through centuries of settlement in which Sufi figures cleared land and founded shrines as much as they preached, so Islam there arrived with agricultural expansion rather than with conquest of an existing centre. The result is a delta where two majority traditions and several minority ones share a literature and a language.