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
Ak Khandker: Around June-July of 1971, those of us involved in the Liberation War were a bit frustrated. But in mid-August, our naval commandos conducted successful attacks on shipping at the Chittagong and Chalna ports.
Amar Ekushey (Immortal 21 February) is a day of special significance for us in Bangladesh, as we recall with reverence and gratitude, all those young brave-hearts who made supreme sacrifice by giving up their youthful lives for a noble cause.
This stain-splattered daybreak, this night-bitten dawn,
Before the Partition of British India (1947), Calcutta (Kolkata) was as much of a Muslim city as it was a Hindu one. Muslims who came to this city belonged to diverse classes, various sects and spoke in different tongues.
I had written this letter to my friend Hafiz who was then a Lieutenant of the 1st Bengal regiment and was in winter exercise in Chowgacha Police Station of the then Jashore district adjacent to subdivision Jhenaidah where I was posted.
Like bunches of blood-red Oleander, Like flaming clouds at sunset Asad’s shirt flutters In the gusty wind, in the limitless blue.
The 1930s in Bengal were devastating for the poor. Global depression since 1929 had disabled the economy, and across the province there was ample evidence of starvation.
East Bengal has a population of about 45 millions and an area of about 15,000 square miles. Less than three per cent of its people have any education in the real sense of the term. The only way in which you can get to know this province, is to study its folk-songs and tales, which mirror its aspirations, achievements and frustrations.
A small incident took place at a school in Burdwan in 1944. A class teacher of Grade 7 was wrongly reprimanding a student, accusing him of stacking all the high benches of the classroom against the short ones the previous evening, when a lanky boy stood up and said, “It was not Abanti, it was me.” Impressed by the boy’s moral courage, the teacher excused him.
