The role of educational governance and socioeconomic structures in shaping revolutionary activities in East Bengal

This research investigates the intersection of governance, education, and socio-conditions in shaping revolutionary resistance in East Bengal between 1906 and 1917. The colonial rule aimed at centralizing power at Calcutta, and East Bengal was a peripheral province marked by historical marginalization. However, the socio-economic inequalities, infrastructural gaps, geographical advantages, and the paradoxical effects of colonial education generated deep discontent among the emerging middle class and rural populations. It is these conditions that provided fertile soil for revolutionary activity outside the metropolitan center. This qualitative and library-based study is based on archival documents, newspapers, official reports, memoirs, and secondary sources that describe the networks of resistance that thrived in areas like Dhaka, Chittagong, Comilla, Rangpur, Narayanganj, Mymensingh, Jessore, and Faridpur. Looting of government treasuries, raids on colonial officials and police stations, and secret weapons gathering were all signs, among others, of the failures of colonial rule and the changing nature of education and socio-conditions in organizing opposition. This paper contests the Calcutta-based history of Indian nationalism by placing East Bengal as an important but underrecognized region of revolutionary nationalism. It points out the ways in which governance policies, alongside educational policies and socio-conditions, conditioned the dynamics of peripheral revolutionary opposition and helped to develop a more geographically inclusive concept of the freedom movement in India.