In her bright head scarves and long, flowy dresses, Yonghua Zheng is a recognisable figure around Sangpo in Henan province, central China. This is because Zheng is an imam – or Ahong – of an all-women mosque in the hamlet.

Feroz Ahmed (F. A.): Let me begin with a question concerning a recent development in the East Bengal independence movement, i.e., the formation of a consultative committee consisting of the Awami League, your party and three other parties. Do you think that it is a significant development?

The history and the political landscape of Bengal have been greatly determined by its geographical position, like that of many other countries of the world.

This year, on August 14 and 15, Independence Day of Pakistan and India, celebrations were tainted with the political tensions that followed the Bharatiya Janata Party led Indian Government’s decision on August 5, 2019 to abrogate Article 370 and Article 35a, that granted special status to Jammu and Kashmir, including the right to have its own constitution and its own flag, and residents’ rights and privileges, respectively.

Dr. Shamsul Bari, a former Director of UNHCR, talks to The Daily Star about the Rohingya refugee crisis, its local, regional and global implications and the possible solutions to the crisis.

The Partition of British India (1947) had complex and wide ranging implications for the jute economy of deltaic Bengal. The border between East Pakistan and India separated Bengal’s jute fields from the jute factories. East Pakistan received more than 75 percent of the total jute growing land of undivided India, whereas all the mills were in India.

I am enamoured of Netaji. I have been since I was a five-year-old, when I had first listened with wide-eyed wonderment about this legendary hero from the elders in my family.

The First World War was contemporaneously described as “the war to end all wars”.

Medieval Bengali poems and foreign travellers’ accounts give us the impression that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Bengal was prosperous–her seaborne trade and a diverse mix of her industrial products added to her prosperity.

On June 3, 2019, the world of architecture lost one of its greatest designers and theorists, Stanley Tigerman. It is difficult to label the celebrated architect as a modernist or an early postmodernist; his works were wonderful fusion of modernism, technology, playfulness and pragmatic inventions.

“It looked like a war zone! The century-old three-storey structure was bulldozed to the ground overnight!” Taimur Islam refers to Jahaj Bari in Old Dhaka which was demolished recently in the presence of the local lawmaker. The Member of Parliament claims ownership of the heritage site which is also waqf property.

Is there an academic field of Bangladesh studies? Let us limit ourselves to the social sciences and the humanities. Clearly, in these domains a lot of research activity is going on—and a lot more than used to be the case. Our understanding of the huge jumble of people that we call Bangladeshi society is increasing.

This feature article is a sequel to an earlier essay of mine entitled “Early Indian Voyagers to Vilayet” published in The Daily Star. In this essay, I shall briefly mention a few notable Indian travellers who went to Britain, including those who later wrote about their varied exposure and experiences there on their return home to India, between 18th to mid-20th centuries.

The peripatetic life story of centenarian Mohammed Shamsul Huq depicts the less-discussed history of Muslim migrants—arriving in hope or leaving in despair—during the tumultuous 20th century. The extraordinary research work Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration is a welcome effort in filling this gap. The book weaves together threads of experiences of Muslim migrants like Shamsul Huq, who migrated from and settled within the Bengal delta region after 1947.

In the past fifty years, Dhaka has transformed itself from a sleepy provincial centre left over by the British Raj, unchanged through its years as East Pakistan, into one of the world’s burgeoning megalopolises and can boast of being paradigmatic of the many threats human settlement poses to the environment world over.

The Pogose School in Dhaka is a familiar landmark in the city. What is perhaps unfamiliar to the Armenian Diaspora around the world is that it was opened in 1848 by local Armenian Joakim Gregory Nicholas Pogose.

Most of us in/of Bangladesh have had to tutor ourselves hurriedly in the world of Burmese history and politics, in the face of “hosting”—almost overnight—what is apparently the world’s largest refugee camp. It is in this spirit, with no claims to expertise on the subject, that I have sketched out my thoughts in this essay.

This essay is largely about the pictorial depiction of the once imposing south-western bastion of the Lalbagh Fort in Old Dhaka, along with a brief history of the fort.

After conducting a year-long survey of landscape, possible routes and profitability, Macdonald Stephenson, a Scottish engineer, proposed the first Indian railway scheme in 1845.

We tend to think of the world of nations as the natural order of things. The age of empires now seems archaic, doomed by history. But empires actually organised social space for most of human history.