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Although a rich tradition of poetry existed in India long before the arrival of the Europeans - even scientific manuscripts were written in rhyming couplets - prose was all but unknown. Thus the foundation by the British of Fort William College in 1800 - primarily intended to assist administrators to learn Indian languages by commissioning prose in Bengali, Urdu and Hindi - had the unexpected side effect of helping to create a vital new genre in indigenous literature. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838-99), a senior civil servant who wrote novels of everyday life, became known as the father of Bengali literature, while Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1829-73) introduced European poetic conventions into Bengali poetry. Simultaneously, Westernization began to sweep Bengali middle-class society, as people grew disenchanted with their culture and religion.

A leading figure in the new intelligentsia was Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1774-1833), born an orthodox Hindu, who travelled in Tibet before joining the East India Company, and eventually died in England as the ambassador of the Moghuls. Roy founded the Brahmo Samaj , a socio-religious movement that believed in a single god and set out to purge Hinduism of its idol worship and rituals, advocating the abolition of sati and child marriage. Keshab Chandra Sen 's Navabidhan (New Dispensation), a synthesis of all the world's major religions, created a split in 1866 over its emphasis on universal Unitarianism and the downplaying of the role of Hinduism. A reformer of boundless energy and a renowned orator, Keshab Sen travelled to Britain to lecture, commanding huge audiences and even meeting Queen Victoria.

No single figure epitomized the Bengali Renaissance more than Rabindranath Tagore , a giant of Bengali art, culture and letters, and a Brahmo, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. As well as writing several hymns, he set out the principles of the Brahmo Samaj movement in The Religion of Man . The intellectual and cultural freedom of the Brahmo Samaj earned it an important influence over the Bengali upper classes that endures to this day, but in recent years extreme Bengali reformists have attacked the movement for having been a corrupting influence on Bengali society.

During and following the period of the Renaissance, Bengal saw a resurgence of Hindu thought through religious leaders such as Ramakrishna (1836-86), a great Kali devotee whose message was carried as far as North America by his disciple Vivekananda . Having spent some time in London as a student, Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) returned to India to become a freedom fighter and, finally, emerged as one the most influential philosophers of twentieth-century India. Aurobindo, who went on to establish his own ashram in Pondicherry, preached a return to a reformed esoteric Hinduism.