We were at the dinner table. My wife asked if I had seen Bulbuli, the Coke Studio Bangla song. Till then I hadn’t. The upload was only a few days old.

Perhaps the starkest image of the Partition, which created the two independent states of India and Pakistan in 1947, is that of the train massacres.

Between May 9 and 14, 1947, in Sodepur near Calcutta, Mahatma Gandhi had a fascinating set of conversations with Hindu and Muslim leaders of Bengal.

The Battle of Plassey and the Battle of Boxar were the imperial wars between the East India Company and the Mughal authority, which in turn gave the Company a legal status in Bengal.

A child’s memory of her parent is often difficult to narrate. There is no single narrative, no linear structure. There are so many stories, so many events that fold into each other.

It is, indeed, a great pleasure for me to avail myself the opportunity to say a few words on the occasion of the 10­0th birthday of the late Professor A. K. Nazmul Karim, who was my teacher, supervisor and colleague at the Department of Sociology,

One of the most important but undervalued events of India’s independence movement was the naval revolt of 1946, about which Indian historian Sumit Sarker wrote,

Dr Shahidullah is one of the greatest linguists that the South Asian region has produced. This is a universally acknowledged fact and one can easily use it as the beginning statement of an article on him.

Unlike in Western universities, the teaching staff of DU is constituted of her own brilliant graduates, but the brilliance of result is seldom the guarantee of excellence in teaching and competence in research.

Each year on 23 June arrives an occasion of template lament for Bengalis: the defeat of Siraj-ud-daulah at Plassey at the hands of forces led by Robert Clive—and Bengal’s subsequent quick subjugation by the East India Company.

In the early 2000’s, a concept restaurant was opened in my birth-town, Paris, France, named “In the Dark” (“Dans le Noir”). Clients enter a completely dark space, and are served a set menu which, obviously, they cannot see.

What makes theatre good, bad or even deadly? I thought I knew the answer to this tricky question. I had a valid ground for this belief because more than thirty years ago, the pre-eminent playwright of Bangladesh,

Note: To commemorate the 38th death anniversary of renowned historian ABM Habibullah we are reprinting one of his articles on Mughal painting. The article was first published in Pakistan Quarterly in Spring, 1959.

One late December night in 1921, Kazi Nazrul Islam wrote what would be his most iconoclastic poem, the poem that would give rise to his soubriquet, “Bidrohi Kabi,” the Rebel Poet. Inspired by a complex of emotions, Nazrul’s ideas were flowing too fast for his pen to keep pace.

It is now commonplace to call Rammohun Roy the ‘Father of Modern India’; it is much less common to understand or appreciate the historical and ideological content and context of this modernity.

In conformity with the wish, you have frequently expressed, that I should give you an outline of my life, I have now the pleasure to give you the following very brief sketch:-

During the Mughal period, gardens were a ubiquitous element of the city landscape. Dhaka, once capital of the Bengal Subah, was no exception, and the names of some areas of the city such as Shahbag, Lalbag,

If you look for a definition of the word ‘nationalism’ on Google, or in an encyclopedia, you will find quite a few.  However, this word, like many such words, is ‘notorious’ in its own way, as no single definition seems to define it thoroughly.

This writing celebrates how Bangladesh has practised a ‘disturbingly relevant’ legacy of William Shakespeare through a testimonial of Aly Zaker, a phenomenal figure in the cultural arena of the country.

In his seminal publication -- The Men who ruled India (1985) -- Philip Mason, in the last paragraph of the epilogue wrote: “When all has been said, one simple point remains.