In the lowlands of northern Bangladesh, where the Brahmaputra weaves its ancient path and songs echo across open fields, a quiet fight to preserve cultural memory is underway.
Jaya and Sharmin—a film produced by Jaya Ahsan—is a quiet reminder of who we were and still are, five years after the pandemic struck. In this quiet, haunting two-woman film, the pandemic is never centerstage—rather the film avoids its dramatization. There are no sirens, no scenes of hospital chaos, no feverish handheld camera work. Instead, the film offers what most pandemic stories avoid: the internal climate of a shared household. Time slows. Fear settles. News flits across the TV, unnoticed. Through understated rhythm, the film accomplishes something powerful—it keeps the focus on the emotional, relational toll of confinement, rather than its spectacle.
When Subahdar of Bengal, Islam Khan Chishti, entered Dhaka in 1608 or 1610, he was accompanied by a diverse group of North and North-West Indians, Afghans, Iranians, Arabs, and other foreign Muslims and Hindus.
Dr Rebecca Prentice, Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Development at the University of Sussex, has studied garment workers’ health and labour rights for over two decades.
Mohammed Taher, a young Rohingya poet and teacher from the refugee camp in Ukhia, Cox’s Bazar, uses education and writing as tools for change.
“The sun rises, but the light of life seems to be stuck at the gate of the Tinbigha Corridor.”
There was a time when pens had “health issues” and needed to be taken to the “Pen Hospital.”
Nine months have passed since the July Uprising, yet its human toll continues to surface—survivors left scarred, jobless, and crushed by mounting debt. Among the most visible yet overlooked are those who lost their eyesight—many now living with permanent disability and fading hope.
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.
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:
The Blue or Indigo Mutiny of 1861, was an outpouring of anger by Indian peasants coerced into cultivating the unprofitable indigo crop by British planters.
Historian Willem van Schendel divides the historiography of the War of 1971 into two broad categories: i) first-generation historiographies and ii) second-generation historiographies.
The fishermen communities of Bengal were diverse with regional variations. Apart from Malos, Kaibartas, Bagdis, and Pods, the numerically significant fishermen sub-castes, there were many other smaller and localized communities involved in fishing.
Sonamoni! No prefix, no suffix, that is her name. It signifies the golden pearl of the eye.
The existence of enclaves in different continents is a perceptible reality of contemporary world history.
The labour movement in Bangladesh has a rich and complex history that dates back to the 19th century.
“We try to stop them, but they want to go. They say that Allah may help them to find a good malik. And so, they go; and we let them go because we need food, because here we don’t have enough.
