Bengali (people)

Bengali (people), name indicating both Bengali (Bangla) speakers and all inhabitants of West Bengal (India) and Bangladesh. Bengalis live around the alluvial deltas of the Ganges and Brahmaputra, between the Bay of Bengal, the Himalayan foot-hills, the North Indian Gangetic plain, and Myanmar.

The estimated number of Bengali-speakers is 125 million in Bangladesh and 70.5 million in India. Other groups speak Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, and Tibeto-Burman languages (see Sino-Tibetan Languages).

Bengali people are Hindus (16 per cent in Bangladesh, 75 per cent in West Bengal) and Muslims (83 per cent in Bangladesh, 23 per cent in West Bengal). Other faiths are Christianity, Buddhism, and animism.

Early records of Bengali people appear in Vedic literature. Bengal is described as a savage and forbidden country. The assimilation into Vedic culture is attested by the 4th century bc. Then Bengal was ruled by Hindu and Buddhist dynasties.

First examples of Bengali literature belong to the 10th century. From the 12th century Bengal was already a well-reputed centre for Hindu, Buddhist, and Tantric studies. Typical Bengali literary expressions such as folk theatre (yatra), poems of glorification (mangal-kavyas), epics, and devotional poetry also flourished.

The arrival of the Muslims in the 13th century determined radical changes: the birth of Bengali Islam and syncretic forms of art and literature. The Persian and Urdu languages were imported.

From the mid-18th century, the British turned the region into a colony. In 1905 Bengal was divided in two on a communal (Hindu/Muslim) basis. The subdivision was maintained until 1909. It was the premise for the later partition of 1947, when East Pakistan was created. In 1971, after the war with Pakistan, the People’s Republic of Bangladesh was born.

Bengalis have celebrated and exported their regional culture, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, or folk/tribal. Best-known personalities are reformist Ram Mohan Roy, educationalist Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, mystics Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, writers Madhusudan Datta, Dinabandhu Mitra, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Mir Mosharraf Hossain, Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, Jibanananda Das, Shamsur Rahman, and Taslima Nasreen, economists Mohammad Yunus and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, film director Satyajit Ray, musician Ravi Shankar, and folk-artists like the Bauls.