Bengal Renaissance

The Bengal Renaissance was a broad social, intellectual, religious and literary awakening centered on Calcutta that unfolded from the late eighteenth century through the early twentieth century, as Bengali intellectuals engaged with Western education and ideas introduced under British colonial rule to reform and revitalize Bengali literature, religion and social custom. Catalyzed by the reformer Raja Rammohan Roy, who campaigned against practices such as sati and founded the reformist Brahmo Samaj religious movement, the movement's literary flowering produced a modern Bengali prose and poetry tradition that culminated in the work of Rabindranath Tagore, who became the first Asian recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for his poetry collection Gitanjali. Alongside Tagore, the movement encompassed novelists and essayists including Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, whose novel Anandamath and its hymn Vande Mataram became touchstones of Indian nationalism, and the Bengal Renaissance is generally regarded as having established a modern Bengali literary language and sensibility while feeding directly into the broader currents of Indian cultural nationalism that preceded independence.