West Bengal West Bengal West Bengal () is an Indian state, located in Eastern India on the Bay of Bengal. With over 91million inhabitants (as of 2011), it is India's fourth-most populous state. It has an area of . A part of the ethno-linguistic Bengal region of the Indian subcontinent, it borders Bangladesh in the east, and Nepal and Bhutan in the north. It also borders the Indian states of Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar, Sikkim, and Assam. The state capital is Kolkata (Calcutta), the seventh-largest city in India. As for geography, West Bengal includes the Darjeeling Himalayan hill region, the Ganges delta, the
West Bengal Renaissance. A hotbed of the Indian independence movement through the early 20thcentury, Bengal was divided during India's independence in 1947 along religious lines into two separate entities: West Bengal, a state of India, and East Bengal, a province of Pakistan which later became independent Bangladesh. Between 1977 and 2011 the state was administered by the world's longest elected Communist government. The economy of West Bengal is the sixth-largest state economy in India with in gross domestic product and a per capita GDP of . The state's cultural heritage, besides varied folk traditions, includes authors in literature, such as Nobel laureate