Chittagong

Chittagong has been a harbour for well over a thousand years, mentioned by Arab geographers and used by traders sailing between Bengal, Arakan and the ports of the Indian Ocean. Control shifted repeatedly between the sultans of Bengal and the Arakanese kingdom to the south. The Portuguese arrived in the 16th century and called it Porto Grande, the great port of Bengal; Portuguese and Arakanese raiders preyed on the delta until the Mughal governor Shaista Khan took the city in 1666 and renamed it Islamabad. The East India Company acquired it in the later 18th century and the modern port, railway and jute and tea trades grew from there.

The city has a place in the independence story out of proportion to its size. In April 1930 Surya Sen and a group of young revolutionaries seized the British armoury here in a raid that became famous across India. During the Second World War the city was a supply base for the Burma front, and the Commonwealth war cemetery holds the dead of that campaign. In late March 1971 the declaration of Bangladesh's independence was broadcast from the Kalurghat radio station on the edge of the city, and the port and its hills saw heavy fighting in the months that followed.

Since independence the port has driven everything. An export processing zone opened in 1983, drawing garment factories, and steel, cement and shipbreaking followed along the coast. The cyclone of April 1991 killed well over a hundred thousand people in the coastal districts and damaged the port badly. The city's official English name was changed to Chattogram in 2018, though Chittagong remains in common use.

Chattogram thinks of itself as a place apart, and its speech proves the point: Chittagonian differs so far from standard Bengali that many linguists count it a separate language, and outsiders rarely follow a conversation. The city is commercial, devout and proud, with a strong tradition of Sufi shrines and of merchant families whose names appear on mosques, schools and hospitals.

Its best-known institution is the mezban, a communal feast at which beef cooked in enormous pots is served to hundreds or thousands of guests, seated in rows and fed in shifts, to mark a death anniversary, a birth or a public occasion. Hospitality is measured by it. The other great local event is the Jabbarer Boli Khela, a wrestling tournament held at Laldighi on the twelfth day of the Bengali year and popularised in the early 20th century by the merchant Abdul Jabbar, whose surrounding fair fills the old city with stalls selling handicrafts, furniture and plants.

Chittagong also has one of the country's largest Buddhist communities, the Barua, whose monasteries and Vesak processions are part of the city's calendar, alongside Hindu temples and a small Christian presence. The Hill Tracts peoples are present in the city as students, traders and residents, and the Ethnological Museum is the national collection devoted to them. Cricket is followed closely, football has a strong local following, and the sea and the port shape the way people speak about their city.

About three million people live within the city corporation, and more in the built-up area spreading north towards Sitakunda and east along the Karnaphuli. The port is the reason for all of it: container terminals, freight yards, customs houses and shipping agents employ tens of thousands, and the export processing zones, garment factories, steel mills, cement works and oil refineries around them employ many more. Money from the Gulf and from the shipping trade shows in the newer apartment blocks of Khulshi and Nasirabad.

Most people live in dense, low-rise neighbourhoods behind the main roads, and many workers commute in from Hathazari, Sitakunda and the outer upazilas by bus and auto-rickshaw. Rents near the port are high for what they offer, and informal settlements have spread up the sides of the city's hills, where landslides after heavy rain are a recurring and sometimes deadly problem. Waterlogging is the other constant complaint: rain and high tides together put parts of Agrabad and the low ground under water.

The working day starts early, with markets and the fish landing at dawn and offices by nine. Evenings fill the restaurants around GEC Circle and the beach road at Patenga, where families come out for the sunset and fried snacks. Hill cutting, air quality and the pace of port expansion are steady subjects of local argument.

Chittagong's cooking is the spiciest and most meat-heavy in Bangladesh. Mezbani gosht is the city's emblem: beef, including bone and fat, simmered for hours with a heavy hand of chilli, cumin and other spices and served with plain white rice at communal feasts. Kala bhuna, beef fried slowly with onion, ginger and spices until it darkens almost to black, is the everyday version of the same enthusiasm, and both have spread from here to restaurants nationwide.

The sea and the river supply the rest. Fishery Ghat on the Karnaphuli lands prawns, crab, rupchanda and the fish of the season, and racks of shutki, dried fish, are prepared along the coast and cooked as a pungent bhorta with chilli, onion and garlic, or in curry. Loitta shutki, dried Bombay duck, is a particular favourite. Hilsa from the Meghna comes to market fried or in mustard sauce.

Beyond the beef and fish, the city eats rice three times a day, with dal, mashed vegetables and small fish. Chittagong is also known for a strong local tradition of sweets and milk-based puddings, and for the tea grown further inland and drunk everywhere at stalls. Ramadan brings evening street markets selling haleem, fritters and chholabuta, and the Patenga road fills at all seasons with stalls grilling fish, crab and corn.