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Most of these 148 thousand square kilometers is riparian lowland, but the north rises to extreme heights in the Himalayas; Kula Kangri to above 7,500 meters. Of the rivers, the Ganga
UNESCO honors two natural areas as World Heritage Sites: Khangchendzonga National Park (also honored for the local syncretic Buddhist heritage) and Sundarbans National Park. Tourists also enjoy Jaldapura and Gorumara National Parks.
The majority
There are two metropolitan areas of over one million: কলকাতা (Kolkata)
The third of the World Heritage Sites, which is also a tourist attraction, is the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway.
Santali is a Munda language, and Munda languages are Austro-Asiatic languages, as are some languages of southeast Asia. The connections are established but distant, so it is presumed they diverged from a common ancestry thousands of years ago. From this, it is presumed that Austro-Asiatic languages were spoken over a wide area of south and southeast Asia before the arrival of more recent groups such as the Indo-Aryans. There is no positive proof, nor is there contradictory evidence; Indo-Aryan and subsequent literature does not speak of later migrations, for example. So it can be tentatively asserted that the Munda were in this area 3,000 or more years ago.
Indo-Aryans, perhaps Sanskrit-speaking, arrived by the first millenium B.C.E. The religion of the elites, as subsequently recorded in scriptures, focused on a pantheon that included Indra, Varuna and Soma. Over time, it embraced more beliefs and abstracted some original ones, and evolved into Hinduism. During this transformation, Buddhism, Jainism and Ajivikaism also arose. Jains and Ajivikas were locally prominent early on, later followed by a mix of Hindus, Jains and Buddhists. Later on the latter two had faded, leaving forms of Hinduism--Vaisnavism, Saivism and Sakta to greet the conquest by the Islamic Moguls.
north of Sikkim, and northeast of Druk Yul
northeast and east of Druk Yul
east of Paścimbangga
south
southwest
west
northwest
1. India is the other official name (in English).
2. There should be a diglyph/ conjunct for শচ which would eliminate one vertical line, and there should be a diglyph/ conjunct for নগ which would have the core of the second glyph dangle from a curvy version of the first glyph and with a horizontal line with a small loop below it and with no vertical line.
3. The Indian national government may not have approved this name, but the state government uses it. See https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/49/West_Bengal_State_Emblem.jpg, accessed July 18, 2018 for seal. The English name of the state is West Bengal. Paścim (transliterated Hindi) means west.
4. Phrukh Yul is phoneticDzongka and Druk Yul is the conventional representation. The nation is called Bhutan in English.
5. Also called the Ganges in English.
6. Also spelled Hooghly. Its upstream portion is sometimes called the Bhāgīrathi.
7. About 17 in 20 speakers in 1950.
8. Selected from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_attractions_in_West_Bengal, accessed July 11, 2018. The first nine were examined but the Donars was omitted as too vague, so eight were included for these articles.
9. Hindi and Urdu are sometimes considered one language.
10. Although a Santali alphabet was created in the 20th century, it is largely unused.
11. 1961.
12. Formerly Calcutta.
13. 2007.
14. First one listed on https://travel-triangle.com/blog/tourist-places-in-bhutan/, accessed July 11, 2018.
15. There should be a diglyph/ conjunct for नत which would eliminate a vertical line. Sikkim uses Nepali, which is represented in Devanagari.
16. First one listed on http://www.esikkimtourism.in/blog/top-15-most-visit-places-sikkim/, accessed July 11, 2018.