‘Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past if he is totally ignorant of the present.’ ~ Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft

Political history is too important to be left either to political memory or to political mythology. Its first obligation is historical explanation. Few regions of modern India have generated as rich and diverse a historiography as Bengal. Over the last century, historians have examined its intellectual awakening, nationalism, revolutionary politics, agrarian movements, communal relations and Partition from a variety of perspectives. Nationalist, Marxist, Subaltern and more recent scholars have all enlarged our understanding of Bengal’s past. Their contributions remain indispensable.

Yet historical inquiry advances not only because new evidence is discovered but because historians learn to ask new questions of familiar evidence. The purpose of this essay is not to challenge the achievements of earlier scholarship but to suggest that one important dimension of Bengal’s political history deserves greater analytical attention. The dominant narratives of late colonial Bengal have generally been organised around nationalism, communalism, class and Partition. These themes remain fundamental. They explain much of Bengal’s extraordinary political experience during the first half of the twentieth century. Yet they do not fully explain how politics itself changed.

It should be said now that late colonial Bengal should also be understood through the constitutional transformation of politics. Between the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 and the Partition of 1947, representative institutions progressively reshaped political life. Constitutional reforms altered electoral competition; electoral competition redefined political organisation; and changing ideas of representation transformed the way communities imagined political authority, democratic legitimacy and constitutional security. This process did not replace ideology.

It reconfigured the arena within which ideology operated. Viewed from this perspective, Bengal........

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