Once the birth place of protestant movements against the ritual- ridden Vedic religion; the seat of mighty empires-the Nanda, the Maurya and the Gupta; the home of great universities-Nalanda and Vikramshila, Bihar saw bad days with the advent of the British rule. Even though socially, culturally and linguistically linked with the Hindi heartland of India, administratively it now became an appendage of Bengal proper in the Bengal Presidency. Naturally, it had for quite some time no advantage of the birth of even a colonial middle class which could have carried forth the torch of New Learning as was the case in Bengal, Bombay or Madras. As a result of unequal development in the different regions of India, there were different levels of national consciousness in the different parts. While Bengal had the Young Eengal movement, the Brahmo Samaj and several related awakenings, Bombay had the new pulsations of life, and so had Madras and other regions, Bihar had no substantial formentation to boast of until the middle of the nineteenth century. As a result, even by the end of the third quarter of the nineteenth century S. N. Banerjea, one of the makers of modern India, had to lament, "Indian opinion was weak, hardly vocal. The pulsations of national life were not felt. The great Indian continent consisted of innumerable units, disintegrated, without coherence of consistency, without unity of purpose or aim; speaking with different voices, wrangling, quarrelling, contending, with their energies dissipated amid a conflict of views and Babel of tongues." When this was the condition of affairs with regard to the whole of India in the eyes of an extremely intelligent man from resurgent Bengal, what might have been the condition of Bihar can be better imagined than described. However, there were some regional violent protest movements in Bihar culminating in the Revolt of 1857.
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