Geography of West Bengal districts north of the Ganges i.e., Cooch Behar, Darjeeling, kalimpong, Jalpaiguri, Alipurduar, North Dinajpur, South Dinajpur and Malda are together termed as North Bengal. The capital and largest city of the state is Kolkata – the third-largest urban agglomeration and the seventh-largest city in India.Asansol is the second largest city & urban agglomeration in West Bengal after Kolkata. Siliguri is an economically important city, strategically located in the northeastern Siliguri Corridor (Chicken's Neck) of India. Other major cities and towns in West Bengal are Howrah, Durgapur, Raniganj, Haldia, Jalpaiguri, Kharagpur, Burdwan, Darjeeling, Midnapore, and Malda. Darjeeling Himalayan hill region is
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