India, its administration & progress / Sir John Strachey.

John Strachey

Date:: 1903

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Licence: In copyright

Credit: India, its administration & progress / Sir John Strachey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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presidencies of Madras and Bombay are now the provinces of the same names. The term “Presidency of Bengal’’ requires some explanation. The name Bengal has had, at different periods since the country came into our possession, very different meanings. It was originally applied, as it still is by the Natives of India, to the tract sometimes called Lower Bengal, including the deltas of the Ganges and Brahmaputra, and inhabited by the people who speak Bengali. The earliest factories and settlements on that side of India were established in Bengal, and, as British authority went on extending, the name Bengal was applied to all the territories administered from Fort William, the official headquarters in Calcutta. Thus, the Presidency of Bengal, or, according to its proper official designation, Fort William in Bengal, came to include not only Bengal and the neighbouring provinces of Behar and Orissa, but the whole of the British con- quests in Northern India. Some remnants of the old system have lasted into our own times. There was, until 1894, a single army for the provinces of Bengal, the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, and the Punjab, and although, as I shall have again to notice, it had not a single native of Bengal in its ranks, it retained the name of the Bengal Army. This name still survives, for although the Army in the Punjab is now a separate body, the other provinces remain included in the so- called Bengal Command. Another survival from old times is seen in the Bengal Civil Service. The members of the Indian Civil Service, recruited under the system of open competition, are appointed, before they leave England, to the provinces to which under ordinary circumstances they remain permanently attached. The

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