Barishal

The land Barishal stands on is young, built by the silt of the Ganges and Meghna, and for centuries this was the country of Chandradwip, a Hindu kingdom of the southern delta whose rulers later moved their seat inland as the rivers shifted. Arakanese raiders known as the Maghs, backed by Portuguese mercenaries and pirates, preyed on the coast into the 17th century, and villages were built back from the open water because of them.

Under British rule the district of Bakerganj was created in 1797, and the town that grew at the meeting of the Kirtankhola and the trade routes became its headquarters. It prospered on rice, which was shipped out in enormous quantities to Kolkata and beyond, and on river commerce; steamer services connected it to Kolkata and Dhaka, the Zilla School opened in 1829, and the Oxford Mission built its church and schools in the early 20th century. The name Barishal is usually derived from the Perso-Arabic phrase Bahr-e-Sawal.

The 20th century brought disaster and politics in equal measure. Sher-e-Bangla A. K. Fazlul Huq, the peasant leader and premier of undivided Bengal, came from this district. The Bhola cyclone of 12 November 1970, the deadliest tropical cyclone on record, devastated the coast south of the city and killed at least 300,000 people, and the failure of the response fed the anger that led to the war of 1971, in which the region saw heavy fighting. Barishal Division was created on 1 January 1993, and the municipality, dating from 1876, became a city corporation in 2002; and the opening of the Padma Bridge in 2022 has, for the first time, made Dhaka a half-day away by road.

Barishal's reputation in Bangladesh rests on its speech and its temperament. The Barishali dialect is instantly recognisable and much imitated, and people from the region are said to argue politics harder and joke more sharply than anyone else in the country. Students from the south have long been prominent in national movements, and the city's political meetings are well attended and loud.

It is also a literary place. The poet Jibanananda Das, one of the most important figures in modern Bengali verse, was born and taught here, and his imagery of rivers, kingfishers and rice fields belongs to this landscape. The district produced Fazlul Huq, whose memory is honoured across the south, and a long line of teachers and lawyers trained at the old colleges.

Religious life is mixed. Mosques and madrasas are numerous, the Hindu minority is larger than in most of Bangladesh and fills the autumn with Durga Puja, and the Oxford Mission church has kept a small Christian community since the colonial period. Rivers shape the calendar as much as religion does: boat races after the monsoon, ferry crossings to village fairs, and the arrival of the launches, which remains a social event as much as a timetable.

About 400,000 people live in the city, and several million in the division around it. Barishal is a trading and administrative centre rather than an industrial one: rice, guava, coconut, betel nut and fish come in from the surrounding districts, government offices and colleges employ many residents, and the river port handles passengers and cargo. Much of the division's income arrives as remittances from family members working in Dhaka, in Chattogram or in the Gulf.

The day is set by the tides and the launches. The fish market works before dawn, Sadar Road fills through the morning, the heat empties the streets in the early afternoon, and the embankment comes alive again at dusk. Most people live in low brick or tin-roofed houses along lanes off the main roads, with canals and ponds between them, and newer flats are rising near the university and the northern approaches.

The city's difficulties are those of a delta: waterlogging after heavy rain, canals that have been filled in or silted up, salinity creeping inland from the coast, and riverbank erosion that takes land and houses each year. Cyclones and storm surges strike the districts to the south, and each one brings families north to Barishal. Better road links since the Padma Bridge have brought investment and also drawn more young people away to Dhaka.

Barishal eats fish, rice and coconut. Ilish, the hilsa, is the great prize, netted in the Meghna and the channels around Bhola; it is fried in mustard oil, cooked with mustard paste as shorshe ilish, or steamed in banana leaf, and the roe is eaten as a delicacy. The classic pairing is with panta bhat, rice soaked overnight in water. Prawns, small delta fish and dried fish, shutki, fill the rest of the market.

The everyday meal is rice with dal, a fish curry and bhorta — vegetables or dried fish mashed with mustard oil, onion and green chilli — and coconut milk thickens many dishes here as it does across the south. Duck cooked with coconut is a winter dish of the delta villages, and khichuri appears on rainy days.

Fruit is the region's other signature. The guava orchards of Jhalokati and Pirojpur supply markets across Bangladesh, and hog plum, coconut, betel nut and bananas grow along every canal bank. Winter brings date-palm molasses from tapped trees, eaten with pitha rice cakes and stirred into payesh. Sweet shops on Sadar Road sell rosogolla, sandesh and curd, and tea is drunk strong, sweet and milky at stalls along the embankment late into the evening.