Session 7: David Boyk
Did Bihar and Orissa Exist? Provinces and Regions in Late Colonial India
Chair: Mallika Shakya
Respondent: Ankita Choudhary
- Wednesday 2026-07-08 14:00-15:30
- Location: Seminar Room
- Type: session
In 1912, the province of Bihar and Orissa was carved out of the Bengal Presidency when the 1905 partition of Bengal was repealed. In 1936, the province was divided into Bihar (including today’s Jharkhand) and Orissa (now Odisha). In the intervening years, it was widely taken for granted that the province represented an administrative marriage of convenience between two regions with little in common except a history of marginalization within the Bengal Presidency. Bihari politicians acknowledged that the Biharis and the Odias were “practically strangers to each other,” while their Odia counterparts worried that they had simply traded one “intermediary ruling race” for another. At the same time, the era saw a range of attempts to more closely integrate the people and territory of the new province. Examining these unsuccessful efforts to redefine the region, I will ask what they tell us about understandings of language, ethnicity, and geography in eastern India in the late colonial period.