How did the partition of Bengal lead to capital changes in India?
Executive summary
The partition of Bengal—first in 1905 and then decisively in 1947—triggered both symbolic and practical relocations of political power: Curzon’s 1905 design elevated Dacca (Dhaka) as the administrative centre of Eastern Bengal while provoking a political backlash that helped prompt the 1911 imperial decision to move the seat of the British Indian government from Calcutta to Delhi [1] [2] [3]. The 1947 division of Bengal crystallized those changes within the structure of two nation-states, with Kolkata (Calcutta) becoming the capital of Indian West Bengal and Dacca becoming the capital of Muslim-majority East Pakistan, later Bangladesh [4] [5] [6].
1. The 1905 partition introduced new regional capitals and unsettled Calcutta’s primacy
Lord Curzon’s administrative division of the Bengal Presidency in 1905 created an Eastern province—Eastern Bengal and Assam—with Dacca proposed and used as its capital while western Bengal retained Calcutta; that relocation aimed both to administer a huge province more efficiently and to cultivate Muslim support in the east by giving it its own centre of government [1] [2]. British sources and later historians argue that positioning Dacca as an eastern capital was intended to address Eastern Bengal’s relative economic neglect and to “invest the Mohamedans in Eastern Bengal with a unity” after decades of Calcutta-centric modernization and jobs concentrated in the west [2] [1]. Opposition to the partition—especially the Swadeshi protests rooted in Calcutta’s intelligentsia—transformed the capital question into a flashpoint of nationalist politics [7] [8].
2. The political backlash helped trigger a broader capital shift to Delhi in 1911
The widespread resistance to the 1905 split, combined with imperial calculations about controlling nationalist ferment, led the British crown to annul Curzon’s partition at the 1911 Delhi Durbar and simultaneously to relocate the imperial administration from Calcutta to New Delhi—explicitly framed as a measure to reduce Calcutta’s political centrality and the influence of Bengal’s intellectual elite [3] [9]. Contemporary accounts and later summaries show the move was presented as both a response to unrest and a deliberate reorientation of imperial power away from a city that had become the hub of Indian nationalism [10] [3].
3. 1947 partition re-drew capitals along communal-national lines and fixed regional seats of power
When the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947, Bengal was divided along the Radcliffe Line into Hindu-majority West Bengal (within India) and Muslim-majority East Bengal (within Pakistan); the same urban poles—Calcutta and Dacca—now became the regional capitals of separate states, embedding the earlier administrative disentanglement in the postcolonial map [4] [5] [6]. The result was that Calcutta, which had once been capital of British India and the Bengal presidency, remained the capital of West Bengal in India, while Dacca assumed the central political role in East Pakistan, later becoming Dhaka, capital of independent Bangladesh [6] [5].
4. Motives: administration, communal calculation, and imperial strategy
Across both partitions, official rationales mixed administrative efficiency with political strategy: Curzon’s plan cited governance and development of an isolated eastern region while critics—then and now—see a deliberate effort to weaken Bengal’s unified nationalist potential by carving it into communal blocs [1] [7] [11]. The 1911 shift of the imperial capital to Delhi is widely interpreted as an explicit attempt to undercut Calcutta’s symbolic power; the 1947 division followed the communal logic that had hardened across the first half of the 20th century, producing new national capitals that reflected the communal map [3] [9] [5].
5. Legacy and limits of the sources on capital change
Primary and secondary accounts converge on the central facts—the 1905 creation of Dacca as an eastern capital, the 1911 transfer of imperial headquarters to Delhi, and the 1947 bifurcation leaving Calcutta and Dacca as capitals of different polities—but the sources emphasize different motives (administrative vs. divide-and-rule) and do not provide a single authoritative account of internal British deliberations or the full range of Indian political responses [2] [3] [7]. Where evidence is sparse in these sources—such as detailed minutes from imperial councils or the private calculations of individual Indian leaders—this analysis does not speculate beyond what the cited scholarship records [9] [10].