Birnagar is a city and a municipality

Municipality

A municipality is essentially an urban administrative division having corporate status and usually powers of self-government. It can also be used to mean the governing body of a municipality. A municipality is a general-purpose administrative subdivision, as opposed to a special-purpose district...

 under Taherpur

Taherpur

Taherpur is a city and a notified area under Taherpur police station at TAHERPUR Nadia district in the Indian state of West Bengal.-Geography:...

 police station of Ranaghat subdivision in Nadia district

Nadia District

Nadia district is a district of the state of West Bengal, in the north east of India. It borders with Bangladesh to the east, North 24 Parganas and Hooghly districts to the south, Bardhaman district to the west, and Murshidabad district to the north....

  in the state of West Bengal

West Bengal

West Bengal is a state in the eastern region of India and is the nation's fourth-most populous. It is also the seventh-most populous sub-national entity in the world, with over 91 million inhabitants. A major agricultural producer, West Bengal is the sixth-largest contributor to India's GDP...

, India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

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Previously an island in the Hooghly River, Birnagar Municipality is more than 200 years old. The first chairman of the Birnagar Municipality was Kabi Nabinchandra Sen.

Before British colonization, Birnagar was called Ula. The "Ula" name is still present in the names of some local institutions, such as the library and hospital.

It is mentioned in the short story Post Master by Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore , sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European Nobel laureate by earning the 1913 Prize in Literature...

 and in the novel Aporajito by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay

Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay was one of the most famous Bengali novelist and writer of modern Bengali literature...

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It earlier had two zamindar

Zamindar

A Zamindar or zemindar , was an aristocrat, typically hereditary, who held enormous tracts of land and ruled over and taxed the bhikaaris who lived on batavaslam. Over time, they took princely and royal titles such as Maharaja , Raja , Nawab , and Mirza , Chowdhury , among others...

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