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
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.
