ABSTRACT
Throughout the seventeenth century, the Mughal Suba of Bengal was regarded as Zannat-abad or ‘the realm of Paradise’ an epithet ascribed to it by the second Mughal emperor Humayun.1 Aurangzeb is said to have styled Bengal as the ‘Paradise of Nations’. Indeed no Mughal farman, nishan or other official papers ever mentioned Bengal without adding ‘the Paradise of India’ – an appellation given to it par excellence as pointed out by Jean Law, the chief of the French factory at Kasimbazar.2 That Bengal under the nawabs in first half of the eighteenth century was equally prosperous and flourishing as Europe in the seventeenth century is evident from the fact that the near-contemporaneous author of the Persian chronicle Riaz-us-Salatin describes Bengal as zannat-al-bilad or ‘Paradise of Nations’.3 The myth of wealth of Bengal as also the cheapness of its wares during the period under review is enthusiastically-pointed out by most of the contemporaneous European accounts of Bengal. Charles Grant described Bengal of the pre-British period as ‘easy in its finances, moderate in its expenditure, free from charges and cares of independent dominion, its inhabitants enjoying in the occupation of agriculture and commerce, public peace and abundance’.4 Harry Verelst ascribed the prosperity of nawabi Bengal to the cheapness and quality and the prodigious traffic of her manufactures. ‘Besides the large investments of the European nations’, according to him, ‘the Bengal raw silk, cloths etc. to a
vast amount were dispersed to the West and North inland as far as Guzrat, Lahore and even Ispahan.’5
