The first experience of the great river Padma is nothing less than overwhelming, and slightly terrifying. I first came to face the mighty river as a young lad in my teens sometime in April of the momentous year of 1971. My first sighting came with two terrors. My father was fleeing Dhaka with the family with the hope of crossing the river to escape the brutal onslaught of the Pakistan army. Arriving at the banks, there was the Padda (Padma) before us with its glorious panorama. It seemed like an oceanic river, with no sight of the other side, and the frightening prospect of crossing it.
When Zainul Abedin left Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1947, as India and Pakistan negotiated a partition-ridden freedom from the British Empire, he was one of the city’s most acclaimed artists.
This endeavour seeks to offer a more nuanced, responsible, and humane approach to shaping our built environments
Roquiah Sakhawat Hossein was born in 1880, Kazi Nazrul Islam in 1899. Apart from their difference in gender, there could not have been more differences in the circumstances of their class and upbringing.
Hafiz Uddin Ahmad leafed through the stack of day-old newspapers in the officer’s mess, scanning headlines in Bengali, English, and Urdu.
Writers are drawn to the bleakest of places, Arundhati Roy once said, the way vultures are drawn to kills. I didn’t know the full import of the statement until I began to work on my book,
The term diaspora originates from the ancient Greek dia speiro meaning a scattering of seeds.
Considerable research conducted by renowned Orientalists such as Moriz Winternitz,
It is well-known that Bangla literature took a new turn in the 1940s. Following the revolutionary work of Kazi Nazrul Islam, we got four powerful poets among Bangalee Muslims: Farrukh Ahmad,
Marc Riboud (1923-2016), one of the first generation of Magnum photographers, was born in Lyon, France.
A modern remake of Ajoy Kar’s 1961 film Saptapodi, Shameem Akhtar’s film Rina Brown (2017) unfolds intimate geographies of love and loss among individuals from India, and West and East Pakistan.
Sixty years ago, John, Paul, George, and Ringo released their first single, Love Me Do, on October 5, 1962. It was a Parlophone 7-inch 45rpm with the seal 45-R 4949.
There are many ways a nation’s history can be understood, for it has many points, opinions, and arguments depending on the sources one can reach.
