Bogra

Bogra's importance comes from what lies just outside it. Twelve kilometres to the north, on the old bank of the Karatoya, stand the ramparts of Mahasthangarh, identified with Pundranagara, the capital of the ancient land of Pundravardhana. Excavation there has produced material from about the third century BC, including a stone slab with one of the oldest inscriptions found in Bangladesh, and the citadel remained in use through Maurya, Gupta, Pala and Sena times. The Karatoya, now a modest river, was then a major waterway and is treated in Sanskrit texts as a sacred boundary of Bengal.

The town of Bogra itself is far younger. It grew as an administrative and market centre and was made the headquarters of a district in 1821, during British rule, taking its name by tradition from Nasiruddin Bughra Khan, governor of Bengal in the 1280s. The district lay on the trading routes between the Padma and the Jamuna, and the railway linked it south to Santahar and north towards Rangpur.

In the 20th century Bogra's position at the meeting of the northern highways made it a commercial hub rather than a political one, and the opening of the Jamuna Bridge in 1998 cut the journey to Dhaka sharply and pulled trade and industry towards the town. It has grown steadily since, spreading along the roads out of Sathmatha, while the sites on its northern edge have become the most visited archaeological landscape in the country.

Bogra is a market town first, and its culture is the culture of the northern plain: mosque and madrasa on one side, folk song, village fairs and river legend on the other. The Gokul Medh mound outside town is known to almost every Bengali child as Behula's bridal chamber, from the story of Behula and Lakhindar in the Manasamangal poems, in which a bride takes her dead husband's body down the river to win his life back. The tale is retold in jatra theatre and in song.

The shrine culture of the north is strong here. Mahasthangarh holds the tomb of the saint Shah Sultan Balkhi Mahisawar, and fairs held at shrines and temples in the district draw crowds from the villages. Bogra also has an old Hindu minority whose Durga Puja pandals fill the autumn, and the calendar of Eid, Pohela Boishakh and the harvest months orders the year for everyone.

People in Bogra speak a northern Bengali with its own vocabulary and intonation, noticeably different from Dhaka speech. The town takes an outsized pride in two things: its curd, which has carried the name across the country, and its cricket ground, which brought international matches to a district town. Manners are formal and hospitable, elders are addressed with respect, and visitors are usually invited to sit and take tea long before they have explained themselves.

About 490,000 people live in Bogura city, with about a million in the wider urban area, and the district around it is one of the most densely farmed in Bangladesh. The economy rests on trade and agriculture: rice, potatoes, maize, vegetables and mustard come in from the surrounding upazilas, and the town's wholesale markets send them south to Dhaka. Bogra has a long-established light-engineering trade, with foundries and workshops turning out irrigation pumps, shallow-tube-well parts and agricultural machinery sold across the north.

The day starts early. Traders open around sunrise, the bazaars are at their busiest in the morning and again after dusk, and the roads stay choked with rickshaws, battery-powered easy-bikes and trucks through the middle of the day. Most people live in low houses along lanes off the main roads, and the newer flats cluster near Sherpur Road and the highway ring. Many households have a member working in Dhaka or in the Gulf, and remittance money pays for much of the building visible on the edges of town.

The standing worries are familiar ones for the north: the price of fertiliser and diesel, groundwater levels in the dry Barind country to the west, seasonal unemployment between harvests, and the condition of the highways on which the town's trade depends. Political life is followed closely and argued over in tea stalls, which serve as the town's real public space.

Bogra's fame is its doi — thick sweetened yoghurt set in shallow unglazed clay pots, the milk reduced and caramelised so that the curd turns pale brown and dense enough to hold a spoon. It is bought by the pot at sweet shops around Sathmatha and along Sherpur Road, eaten at the end of a meal or with chira, flattened rice, and it travels to Dhaka in stacks of pots on the back of buses. The same shops sell rosogolla, sandesh and milk sweets.

Everyday eating is northern Bengali: rice with dal, a fish or vegetable curry, and bhorta, vegetables or dried fish mashed with mustard oil, onion and green chilli. Beef and mutton curries appear on holidays and at restaurants, and biryani and tehari counters do good trade in the evening. Chicken roast with plain paratha is standard hotel fare, and every crossroads has a stall frying singara and piyaju.

The countryside supplies the rest of the table. Litchis and mangoes arrive in early summer from Rajshahi and Dinajpur, winter brings cauliflower, radish and mustard greens, and date-palm molasses from the season's tapping is stirred into rice cakes and payesh. Tea is drunk strong, sweet and milky at stalls on every corner, often with a dry biscuit, and the stalls stay open well into the night.