Bengal

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.

Modern Bengal produced the reform movements that shaped how Hinduism was argued about globally, and then was divided twice.

The Brahmo Samaj, founded in Calcutta in 1828, rejected image worship and caste and read the Upanishads as monotheist scripture; the Bengal Sati Regulation of 1829, which criminalised widow burning in the presence of British authority, belongs to the same reforming milieu and to the arguments in it about which practices scripture actually required. Later in the century Ramakrishna, a temple priest at Dakshineswar with an ecstatic devotional practice quite unlike Brahmo rationalism, attracted a circle that included Narendranath Datta, who as Vivekananda addressed the Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1893 and founded the Ramakrishna Mission. The vocabulary in which Hinduism is now presented internationally largely comes out of that Bengali generation.

The region was then partitioned in 1947 along religious lines, with the Muslim-majority east going to Pakistan, and millions moved. In 1971 the same territory divided again, this time on language and political grounds rather than religious ones, when East Pakistan became Bangladesh after a war in which enormous numbers were killed and Hindu villages were specifically targeted.

Bengal therefore carries two partitions of different kinds, and its religious history since 1947 is inseparable from both.