ADMINISTRATIVE RECONFIGURATION AND REGIONAL IMAGINARIES: BENGAL'S TRANSFORMATION FROM MUGHAL SUBAH TO COLONIAL PROVINCE

This paper explores how shifting practices of administrative contouring fundamentally shaped the imagination and articulation of Bengal as a region from the Mughal period through the early colonial era. Beginning with Mughal innovations in subah, sarkar, and pargana divisions, it investigates how imperial strategies of revenue extraction and territorial management generated layered spatial identities that frequently intersected with vernacular and devotional geographies. The analysis proceeds to examine how colonial interventions—through surveying, cartography, and codified revenue settlements—reconfigured earlier frameworks, crafting new modes of regional legibility rooted in bureaucratic rationality and extractive imperatives. By focusing on the interplay between administrative rationalization and cultural geography, the paper emphasizes the formation of Bengal not just as a lived cultural landscape but also as a governable territorial unit. It pays special attention to how overlapping and contested regional imaginations emerged across textual, cartographic, and administrative sources, underscoring the region’s construction through both imperial governance and local epistemologies. Ultimately, the study argues that the making of Bengal as a “region” was never a linear process but an ongoing negotiation shaped by the entwined histories of imperial policies, local knowledge systems, and colonial regimes of power and representation.