The Bengal Renaissance: Art, Identity, and the Company

The Hidden History of Bengal: Kingdoms, Empires, and Revolution — Fexingo History · Nov 9, 2026 · 8m · transcript

While earlier episodes traced the political upheavals of Plassey and Buxar, or the economic exploitation of the weavers, this episode shifts focus to the cultural soil that emerged from that chaos. We explore how the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Calcutta became a crucible for a new Bengali identity, driven not just by colonial administrators but by indigenous intellectuals like Raja Rammohun Roy and the radical poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. We examine the founding of the Hindu College in 1817, the debate over Sanskrit versus English education, and the rise of the…