ABSTRACT:

Since Bengal was the first region of India to come under British control, it rose to prominence during the colonial period. The exposure to western education enabled the indigenous intelligentsia to start thinking about their country which despite having a glorious past filled with intellectual, cultural and material achievements, had found itself under the clutches of foreign rule. Taking cues from Orientalist research works as to the rise and fall of an ancient civilisation, the Bengali intellectuals began to respond to the official and missionary denigration of Hindu culture. It won’t be incorrect to say that in nineteenth-century Bengal we see the first concerted efforts by Hindus towards writing their own history. Still, a clear break is not made from the ancient tradition of taking recourse to Puranic legends in writing accounts of the past. We can also see intellectual efforts towards national unification through claiming stories of valour from other regions like Rajasthan and Maharashtra by presenting them as a collective heritage of the Hindu people.

 KEY PHRASES: Growth of the Hindu identity; Hindu nationalism; Hindutva in Bengal; historiographical tradition in Hindus; Bengal renaissance