Bengal's New Governor RN Ravi Honors State's Legacy as Cultural Capital

At the same time, he said that he viewed the responsibility as a great honour and opportunity.

"I am immensely blessed and profoundly humbled to have the opportunity to serve the people of West Bengal, a great land that has been the spiritual, intellectual and cultural capital of Bharat for several thousand years," Ravi said.

According to him, West Bengal is the land where the eternal wisdom of the Vedas blossomed thousands of years ago. He also said that it is the land where the teachings of Gautama Buddha found new expressions and where the great tradition of Bhakti flourished and inspired the national freedom movement.

In his message, Ravi also recalled how the land had been blessed repeatedly with the emergence of great visionaries in different eras.

"During critical periods of foreign invasions and occupation which began systematically destroying our culture and identity, this land gave birth to numerous great personalities and divine souls like Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Bhagwan Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Swami Vivekananda, Babu Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay whose Vande Mataram became the war cry of our national freedom movement, the towering poet-intellectual Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, revolutionary spiritual leader Sri Aurobindo and the great revolutionary freedom fighters Subhas Chandra Bose and Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee," Ravi said.

"I pray to Maa Durga for wisdom and strength to serve the people of this land with utmost devotion," he added.

Ravi succeeds C.V. Ananda Bose, who suddenly resigned from the post on the evening of March 5, following which Ravi's name was announced as his successor the same evening. Ravi arrived in Kolkata on Wednesday, while Bose left the city for his hometown in Kerala.

Ravi is the second former IB officer to be sworn in as the Governor of West Bengal in the last one-and-a-half decades.

Before the crucial West Bengal Assembly elections in 2011, which marked the end of the 34-year-long Left Front regime and the beginning of the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government, former IB chief and National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan was sworn in as the Governor of the state.

- IANS