Eastern Bengal and Assam Eastern Bengal and Assam Eastern Bengal and Assam was an administrative subdivision (province) of the British Raj between 1905 and 1912. Headquartered in the city of Dacca, it covered territories in what are now Bangladesh, Northeast India and Northern West Bengal. As early as 1868, British administrators saw the need for an independent administration in the eastern portion of the Bengal Presidency. They felt that Fort William in Calcutta, the capital of British India, was already overburdened. By 1903, it dawned on the colonial government on the necesscity of partitioning Bengal and creating prospects for Assam's commercial expansion. The British
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