The Partition of British India (1947) had complex and wide ranging implications for the jute economy of deltaic Bengal. The border between East Pakistan and India separated Bengal’s jute fields from the jute factories. East Pakistan received more than 75 percent of the total jute growing land of undivided India, whereas all the mills were in India.

I am enamoured of Netaji. I have been since I was a five-year-old, when I had first listened with wide-eyed wonderment about this legendary hero from the elders in my family.

The First World War was contemporaneously described as “the war to end all wars”.

The unravelling of family history and their associated stories can sometimes take unusual twists and turns. Armenian family history in Asia is no different. For those of you who like facts and figures, sources and citations as well as biographical details, this is for you.

Medieval Bengali poems and foreign travellers’ accounts give us the impression that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Bengal was prosperous–her seaborne trade and a diverse mix of her industrial products added to her prosperity.

On June 3, 2019, the world of architecture lost one of its greatest designers and theorists, Stanley Tigerman. It is difficult to label the celebrated architect as a modernist or an early postmodernist; his works were wonderful fusion of modernism, technology, playfulness and pragmatic inventions.

“It looked like a war zone! The century-old three-storey structure was bulldozed to the ground overnight!” Taimur Islam refers to Jahaj Bari in Old Dhaka which was demolished recently in the presence of the local lawmaker. The Member of Parliament claims ownership of the heritage site which is also waqf property.

Is there an academic field of Bangladesh studies? Let us limit ourselves to the social sciences and the humanities. Clearly, in these domains a lot of research activity is going on—and a lot more than used to be the case. Our understanding of the huge jumble of people that we call Bangladeshi society is increasing.

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.

The peripatetic life story of centenarian Mohammed Shamsul Huq depicts the less-discussed history of Muslim migrants—arriving in hope or leaving in despair—during the tumultuous 20th century. The extraordinary research work Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration is a welcome effort in filling this gap. The book weaves together threads of experiences of Muslim migrants like Shamsul Huq, who migrated from and settled within the Bengal delta region after 1947.

In the past fifty years, Dhaka has transformed itself from a sleepy provincial centre left over by the British Raj, unchanged through its years as East Pakistan, into one of the world’s burgeoning megalopolises and can boast of being paradigmatic of the many threats human settlement poses to the environment world over.

The Pogose School in Dhaka is a familiar landmark in the city. What is perhaps unfamiliar to the Armenian Diaspora around the world is that it was opened in 1848 by local Armenian Joakim Gregory Nicholas Pogose.

Most of us in/of Bangladesh have had to tutor ourselves hurriedly in the world of Burmese history and politics, in the face of “hosting”—almost overnight—what is apparently the world’s largest refugee camp. It is in this spirit, with no claims to expertise on the subject, that I have sketched out my thoughts in this essay.

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.

After conducting a year-long survey of landscape, possible routes and profitability, Macdonald Stephenson, a Scottish engineer, proposed the first Indian railway scheme in 1845.

We tend to think of the world of nations as the natural order of things. The age of empires now seems archaic, doomed by history. But empires actually organised social space for most of human history.

Indian photojournalist and member of the prestigious Magnum Photos, Raghu Rai, is better-known to Bangladeshis for the photos he took during our Liberation War in 1971.

The Armenian Church of the Holy Resurrection (1781) on Church Road in Old Dhaka highlights a rich tapestry of the Armenian footprint on the commerce, politics, and education of East Bengal.

In 1921, a small delegation of Indians reached Moscow from Berlin. The team consisted of Bengali and Marathi émigrés who had earlier been nationalist conspirators or “terrorists” who had regrouped in Berlin, but were now eager to participate in the Third Congress of the Communist International.

Did you know that the famous Bara Katra, located in the old quarters of Dhaka city, was built to be an exact replica of the garden of paradise? It is also little known that its patron Mughal Prince Shah Shuja (1616–1661AD) was not satisfied with the structure and thus ordered it to be used as a caravanserai instead.