Chittagong’s neighbour Sandwip is absent from Bay of Bengal history because its nature is hard to define.
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.
The writing of history in the Bengali language by a Bengali began around 225 years ago with the publication of Raja Pratapaditya Charitra in 1801.
If you think about the international reaction to the Bangladesh Liberation War, you most likely would consider the United States government openly siding with Pakistan.
In the sixties of the last century, I earned my primary degree with majors in Philosophy and Indian Studies and became a secondary school teacher.
Cartography in India might have had its roots in this expansionist ambition but went on to achieve much more than this. Rennell’s Map of Hindostan, published by an act of Parliament in 1782, inaugurated the cartographic identity of modern India for the first time on the world stage.
Exactly 169 years ago, in the jungles of what is now the Indian state of Jharkhand, Bengal Army sepoys fired the final shots in what became known as the ‘Hul’, or uprising, of 1855.
Although Rammohun Roy was notably many things, he was not an unlikely person to write a grammar—or, in fact, two grammars: one in English and one in Bangla, the latter being a free translation of the former.
When writing a confidential report on the Bengali workers of Karnaphuli Paper Mills to the Superintendent of Police, D.I.B Rangamati, Sub-Inspector of Police Md. Nurul Islam noted with disgust and frustration:
Kazi Nazrul Islam, according to Kazi Abdul Wadud (1895-1970), perhaps the first formidable critic who took him seriously, “was the first writer among Bengali Muslims of the modern era who was able to conquer the hearts of Hindus and Muslims alike of Bengal.”
In Europe, steam power evolved gradually and uncertainly over the course of the eighteenth century, with innovative peaks and long plateaus, from Thomas Savery’s steam pump (1698) via Thomas Newcomen’s reciprocating atmospheric engine (1712) to James Watt and Matthew Boulton’s double-acting rotative steam engine with a separate condenser (1765-90).
Rabindranath Tagore is perhaps the only poet whose songs were chosen as the national anthems of two countries: India and Bangladesh.
