In the post-Independence political history of West Bengal, the 1970s stand out as a highly turbulent, volatile, and politically consequential decade. Characterized by a complex interplay of political unrest, state repression, institutional instability, and popular resistance, this period profoundly altered the state’s socio-cultural fabric. While the Naxalite movement lost its initial organizational momentum early in the decade, severe state counter-insurgency operations persisted. The regional landscape was further fractured by frequent government collapses, repeated impositions of President’s Rule, rampant electoral malpractices, labour strikes, student factionalism, mass agitations against inflation, and violent clashes inside correctional homes. These local crises intersected with national upheavals, most notably the 1975 Declaration of Emergency, which stifled political dissent through strict press censorship and the curtailment of fundamental civil liberties. The subsequent defeat of Indira Gandhi in 1977 reshaped the national discourse and paved the way for a decisive shift in West Bengal: the democratic election of the Left Front government led by Jyoti Basu. This transitioned the state into an era of political stability, launching progressive reforms like the unconditional release of political detainees, sharecropper registration (Operation Barga), free secondary education, and the three-tier Panchayati Raj system, thereby forging a new discourse on social justice and rural empowerment. These intricate political realities inevitably permeated contemporary Bengali short fiction. Rather than offering a passive or direct reproduction of historical events, short-story writers transformed these crises into nuanced literary narratives. Authors reinterpreted historical traumas through the prism of individual consciousness, memory, alienation, and defiance. The restrictive climate of the Emergency forced a unique condition of literary production; to circumvent institutional censorship, writers innovated indirect, symbolic, and allegorical narrative modes, turning fiction into a vital site of alternative creative resistance. Against this historical backdrop, the present study critically investigates the representation of West Bengal's political history in selected Bengali short stories of the 1970s. The objective is to examine how historical circumstances were metabolized into narrative discourse and how writers negotiated the tension between raw political reality and aesthetic representation.