Waqar A Khan

This feature article is a sequel to an earlier essay of mine entitled “Early Indian Voyagers to Vilayet” published in The Daily Star. In this essay, I shall briefly mention a few notable Indian travellers who went to Britain, including those who later wrote about their varied exposure and experiences there on their return home to India, between 18th to mid-20th centuries.

This essay is largely about the pictorial depiction of the once imposing south-western bastion of the Lalbagh Fort in Old Dhaka, along with a brief history of the fort.

On a languid summer afternoon way back in 1973, after a hearty lunch I had settled down comfortably in bed and started to flip through the pages of the latest issue of the prestigious The Illustrated Weekly of India,

In this essay the word Vilayet, which originated during the Ottoman empire to specifically mean a geographical area or district, is used to denote Europe in general and, Britain in particular. More recently, Vilayet (Bilat in Bengali) has been further narrowed down to mean England, or even London proper.

It would be difficult to find someone in this country today who, having grown up in a typical middle-class Bengali household of the 1950s-60s, has not heard of the fabled tale of the Bhawal Sannyasi (a Hindu mendicant) through family sources.

This fascinating story needs retelling, particularly for the younger generations in Bangladesh, who would take pride in knowing that a fairly sizable portion of one of the most successful...

In the summer of 1970, our prestigious Notre Dame College in Dhaka went on recess for three weeks. I was a student there, having recently relocated from Islamabad after my matriculation for a better prospect of a good college education.

It was the Dhaka of 1970. Unlike today, it was then a laidback provincial capital city. I was a student at Notre Dame College.

Jorashanko and Pathuriaghata along Chitpur Road used to be the major centres of Bengali arts and culture. Pathuriaghata Street is so named as it once led to a stone-flagged ghat on the Hooghly River.

While posted to Dhaka he invited his friend the accomplished English professional artist George Chinnery (1774–1852) to join him in Dhaka, as his house guest. In their leisure time, the two friends would go around Dhaka looking for exotic rural landscapes and other picturesque subjects, of which there was no dearth in those days.

We, the Bangalees in Pakistan were ecstatic with joy. However, soon the reality also dawned upon us that we were stranded in Pakistan. The million dollar question was, when and how shall we all go back to liberated Bangladesh? There would be long months of anxious waiting and uncertainty ahead of us.

I had written on Colonel Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon (1914-2006) of the Indian National Army (INA), in an article published in The Daily Star on June 19, 2017 entitled, “A Letter from the Tiger's Den.”

Jnanendra Nath Gupta was born in 1869 in colonial Bengal. His father, Ghanashyamdas Gupta, was a district judge and, therefore, he spent his childhood in various parts of Bengal and Bihar.

The advent of the holy month of Ramadan, ever since the year 2000 CE, reminds me of an idealistic soul, a gallant freedom fighter against British colonial rule in India, who so graciously replied to my letter, that too, from an unknown.

Khan Bahadur Qazi Azizul Haque was born in 1872, in the village of Paigram Kasba, Phultala, in the Khulna district of Bengal, British

I spent a part of my impressionable years, that is to say, my boyhood school days in Islamabad, West Punjab, Pakistan.

Swinton on his return to Britain in 1766, writes Taifoor, had taken a certain Mirza Sheikh Itesamuddin of Nadia, Bengal, along with

Henrietta Aimee Elizabeth Simpson, née Stephen, lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. We were introduced by a mutual friend, the

My friend Charles Greig is a distinguished British Art historian and scholar. He was born in 1955 of aristocratic British and