With all his receptive qualities, his love of novelty and readiness to learn, his retentive memory, his luxuriant imagination, his gift of facile eloquence, the Bengalee has seldom shown himself to be a born ruler of men.
All these differences are reflected in the unrest in Bengal, though on the surface it presents a close resemblance to the unrest in the Deccan, and there have been constant contact and co-operation between the leaders.

Except as a geographical expression, Bengal is practically a creation of British rule and of Western education.

The claim of the modern Bengalees to be regarded as a "nation" has no historical basis.
The inhabitants of Bengal are of mixed Dravidian, Mongolian, and Aryan origin, and in no other speech of India, writes Sir H.Risley, is the literary language cultivated by the educated classes more widely divorced, not only from the many popular dialects spoken in the province, but from that of ordinary conversation.

Literary Bengalee is not even an altogether indigenous growth.

It owes its birth mainly to the labours of English missionaries, like Carey, in the first half of the last century, assisted by the Pundits of Calcutta.