The delta is where organised Indian politics was first assembled - the Indian Association in 1876, the press and the college network, the first modern mass agitation in 1905 - so the national story and the regional story overlap here more than anywhere else in this project. Two things are worth separating out. First, the delta's own risings came a century before any of it and were agrarian: the Sannyasi and Fakir resistance of the late eighteenth century, and the indigo refusal of 1859-60, which was won by cultivators withholding their labour rather than by any political organisation. Second, the region produced two distinct and often hostile currents after 1905 - a constitutional and then Gandhian Congress, and the revolutionary societies - and the same families frequently contained both.
The Sannyasi and Fakir resistancec. 1763-1800
Bands of Hindu and Muslim itinerant ascetics who had long moved through Bengal on pilgrimage and trade routes came into repeated armed conflict with Company revenue and military detachments across the northern and western delta, in the years around and after the famine of 1769-70.
Outcome: Contained by the end of the century. The episode entered Bengali literature through Bankimchandra Chatterjee's novel Anandamath, published in 1882, which took its setting from it.
The indigo revolt1859-1860
Beginning at Chaugacha near Krishnanagar in March 1859 under Digambar Biswas and Bishnucharan Biswas, cultivators across Nadia, Murshidabad and the eastern districts refused to sow indigo on their land. The refusal was collective and largely non-violent, and it spread faster than the planters could litigate.
Outcome: An Indigo Commission was appointed in 1860; Dinabandhu Mitra's Nil Darpan appeared the same year, and its English translator's publisher, James Long, was prosecuted and imprisoned for it. The Indigo Act of 1862 ended compulsory cultivation.
The anti-partition and swadeshi agitation1905-1908
The partition of Bengal, effective 16 October 1905, was answered with a boycott of British goods, the founding of swadeshi enterprises and schools, and public processions and songs. The day itself was observed with fasting and with the tying of rakhis across the province.
Outcome: The partition was annulled in 1911. The agitation produced both the Congress's first mass technique and the revolutionary societies - Anushilan and Jugantar - that operated for the next four decades.
The Writers' Building action8 December 1930
Benoy Basu, Badal Gupta and Dinesh Gupta of the Bengal Volunteers entered the Writers' Building in Calcutta in European dress and shot the Inspector-General of Prisons, Colonel N. S. Simpson, then fought a gun battle in the corridor.
Outcome: Badal Gupta died by poison in the building; Benoy Basu died of his wounds on 13 December 1930; Dinesh Gupta was tried and hanged at Alipore Jail on 7 July 1931.