This study focuses on Bengali text classification using machine learning and deep learning techniques. Text classification is a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP) that involves categorizing text documents into predefined categories or classes. While text classification has received considerable attention in the English language, there is a limited amount of research specifically addressing Bengali text classification. This gap in the literature highlights the need for exploring and developing effective techniques tailored to the Bengali language. Furthermore, although some datasets for Bengali text classification tasks have been produced, most of the datasets have a limited number of labels. In our work, we introduce a new dataset for the Bengali text classification task, which has 38 class labels. The dataset includes data from the leading Bengali newspapers. We have evaluated many state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning classification methods on our dataset to construct a benchmark that will facilitate future research.