West Bengal

West Bengal stretches from the Himalaya in the north to the Bay of Bengal in the south, with the capital at Kolkata. The Ganga divides into the Hooghly and the main distributaries in the state’s south, forming the delta that runs into Bangladesh. The Darjeeling hills and the Terai lie in the north.

Kolkata was the capital of British India until 1911 and remains the largest city in eastern India, with a substantial legacy of colonial-era institutions, publishing and education. The state’s economy rests on agriculture — rice, jute, tea from the Darjeeling and Dooars estates, and potatoes — alongside jute and cotton mills, engineering, leather and a growing information-technology sector. The state is among India’s largest producers of rice.

The Sundarbans, the mangrove forest in the delta at the state’s southern edge, is the largest such forest in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage site; it holds a population of tigers that move between the Indian and Bangladeshi sides and whose movement into villages is a recurring source of conflict. The state’s politics has been shaped by the 1947 partition and the subsequent influx of refugees from East Pakistan, and by the Left Front’s unbroken three-decade tenure from 1977 — the longest of any elected government in India — which ended in 2011. The northern hills have seen a long-running movement for a separate Gorkhaland.