Bagerhat

Bagerhat stands on what was, in the 15th century, the southern frontier of settled Bengal, a country of tidal creeks and salt forest being cleared for rice. In the mid-15th century a Muslim saint and administrator remembered as Khan Jahan Ali established a town here called Khalifatabad, under the nominal authority of the Sultanate of Bengal. He is credited with cutting roads and excavating enormous freshwater tanks in a saline landscape, and with building mosques across the district; his own tomb, dated by inscription to his death in 1459, stands beside the largest of the tanks.

The architecture of that moment is distinct. The builders used brick, with stone shipped in for columns and door frames, and covered their halls in rows of low domes carried on thick round towers at the corners — a style known from the Sultanate period in Bengal and seen at its fullest in the Sixty Dome Mosque. More than fifty structures of the period survive in the area, many of them half-buried until modern times.

After Khan Jahan Ali's death the town declined. The rivers shifted, the forest crept back, and by the colonial period the mosques stood in jungle and farmland, visited by pilgrims but otherwise forgotten. Bagerhat became a subdivision and later a district headquarters, a modest administrative centre for a farming and fishing hinterland. The monuments were cleared and conserved during the 20th century, and in 1985 UNESCO inscribed the Historic Mosque City of Bagerhat as a World Heritage Site, which is what brings most outside visitors today.

The town's identity is bound up with Khan Jahan Ali. He is revered as a saint as much as remembered as a governor, and his shrine draws a steady flow of pilgrims, Muslim and sometimes Hindu, who tie threads, pray and make offerings. The crocodiles kept in the tank beside the tomb are part of the tradition, and their feeding is a local spectacle that has continued for generations.

Around the monuments, life is that of the rural south-west: mosque and madrasa, village bazaars, rice fields and shrimp ponds, and a Hindu minority larger than in most of the country whose Durga Puja pandals go up in autumn. The folk religion of the delta is present here too, and villagers on the forest side of the district invoke Bonbibi, the guardian of the Sundarbans, before entering the mangroves to fish or collect honey.

Manners are conservative and hospitable. Visitors are usually offered tea and asked where they come from, and children accompany strangers happily around the mosque grounds. Local speech is the soft south-western Bengali also heard in Khulna, and the district is proud that its small, quiet town carries one of the country's three World Heritage inscriptions.

Bagerhat town is small — roughly fifty thousand people — and the district around it far larger, with most residents living in villages. The economy rests on farming and on water: paddy rice, coconut, betel nut and vegetables on the higher ground, and shrimp and prawn ponds, known locally as ghers, across the low land. Prawns from these ponds are processed in Khulna and exported, and the money they bring has reshaped village life while turning much former rice land brackish.

Work also comes from the port at Mongla to the south, from the Rampal power station nearby, which has been a long-running environmental controversy because of its closeness to the Sundarbans, and from the forest itself, where licensed fishermen, crab catchers and honey collectors still go out in season. Many families have a member working in Dhaka or abroad.

Days start early with the markets and the tides, and the town is quiet by mid evening. The chronic problems are those of the whole coast: salinity in soil and drinking water, waterlogging after heavy rain, riverbank erosion, and the cyclones that periodically come up the Bay of Bengal, among them Sidr, which made landfall on this coast in November 2007. Conservation of the monuments, and the pressure of the town growing around them, is a continuing local issue.

Bagerhat eats what the delta produces. Golda chingri, the giant freshwater prawn farmed in the ponds all around the town, is the prize dish, usually cooked in coconut milk as malaikari; bagda, the tiger prawn, mostly goes for export. River fish from the Bhairab and Pashur, hilsa in season and mud crab from the mangrove channels fill the market, and dried fish, shutki, is cooked into strong-smelling curries that are a taste of the south-west.

The standard meal is rice with dal, a fish curry and bhorta — vegetables or dried fish mashed with mustard oil, onion and green chilli. Chui jhal, the beef or mutton curry cooked with pieces of the pungent chui vine, is the regional speciality shared with Khulna and appears on most restaurant menus. Coconut finds its way into curries, sweets and rice dishes.

Winter brings khejur gur, the molasses boiled from date-palm sap tapped overnight, which is eaten with rice cakes, stirred into payesh and sold as hard patali cakes. Honey from the Sundarbans, gathered from wild hives by licensed collectors, is sold in jars in the bazaar. Sweet shops near the shrine sell rosogolla and sandesh, and tea is drunk strong, sweet and milky at stalls throughout the day.