ABSTRACT
The Government of India Act, 1935 was instrumental in bringing the politics of Bengal countryside into the political mainstream. As Joya Chatterji has argued, by expanding the electorate to mofussils, the Act created avenues for country folk to voice their demands and lend support to the political parties that now claimed to speak in their name. 1 Until this point, no party in Bengal had made a serious and sustained attempt to win over the rural population, or to set up organisational bases in the hinterlands. 2 But the Act changed this, not least because the vast majority of both ‘general’ and ‘Mohammedan’ seats in the Legislature were now located in mofussils.
