Khulna

Khulna is a young city on very old ground. The country around it was cleared from tidal forest over centuries, and in the 15th century the saint and administrator Khan Jahan Ali founded Khalifatabad, today's Bagerhat, a short way to the east. The later Hindu chieftain Pratapaditya of Jessore held much of this delta against the Mughals around 1600, and the Bhairab and Rupsha carried trade long before any town stood on their banks.

The modern city began under British rule. A subdivision was created in the 19th century and Khulna became a district headquarters in 1882, growing quickly as a river port for rice, jute and timber brought out of the delta, with a railway from Jessore reaching it late in the century. Partition in 1947 cut it off from Kolkata, its natural market, and made it East Pakistan's substitute port and industrial centre: jute mills, a newsprint mill, a hardboard mill and a shipyard were built along the Bhairab in the 1950s and 1960s, and the deep-water anchorage at Mongla opened downstream in 1950.

The 1971 war was fought hard in the south-west, and the city has memorials to it. Afterwards the jute industry declined, and its place was taken by frozen shrimp and prawn farming, which turned much surrounding rice land into brackish ponds and made seafood the region's leading export. Khulna became a city corporation in 1990. Today it is a divisional capital of well over a million people, wrestling with salinity, waterlogging and the slow silting of the rivers that made it.

Khulna's character comes from the water and from a religiously mixed population. Hindu festivals are more visible here than in much of Bangladesh: Durga Puja fills the streets in autumn, and Kali Puja and the post-monsoon boat races on the rivers draw whole neighbourhoods. Muslim observance is equally present, and the shrine of Khan Jahan Ali near Bagerhat is a regional place of pilgrimage for both communities.

On the forest edge, honey collectors, woodcutters and fishermen — Hindu and Muslim alike — invoke Bonbibi, the guardian of the Sundarbans, before going into the channels, and her shrines stand in villages south of the city. The belief is one of the clearest examples of the shared folk religion of the delta.

The south-west also has a strong literary and musical tradition that Khulna claims a share of: the Baul songs of Lalon from Kushtia, the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt, born at Sagardari in Jashore district, and the painter S. M. Sultan of Narail all belong to this corner of the country. The city's universities give it a student culture of bookshops, debate and campus concerts. Local speech is the soft, drawn-out Bengali of the south-west, and people are known for plain manners and a direct way of talking that Dhaka finds blunt.

Khulna's city corporation counts roughly 700,000 residents, and the wider urban area over a million, making it the third-most populous metropolitan area in the country after Dhaka and Chattogram. Work follows the water. Shrimp and prawn processing plants employ thousands, the port at Mongla handles cargo for the south-west, the shipyard and engineering workshops line the Rupsha, and the surviving jute and textile mills of Khalishpur are a shadow of the industry that once defined the northern suburbs.

The day begins before dawn at the fish landings and markets and slows in the heat of the afternoon. Easy-bikes and rickshaws fill the roads, students crowd the Boyra and Gollamari junctions, and the evening brings families out to the parks and the riverbank. Most people live in low brick houses along narrow lanes, with newer flats going up in Sonadanga and around the university.

The city's problems are environmental as much as economic. Salinity has pushed inland with the shrimp ponds and the reduced flow of the rivers, drinking water is a recurring worry, and heavy rain leaves parts of the city waterlogged because the drainage channels silt up. Cyclones and storm surges strike the coast south of the city, and each one sends families north into Khulna looking for work, adding to the settlements on its edges.

Khulna's signature is chui jhal: beef, mutton or sometimes chicken cooked slowly with cut lengths of the chui vine, a relative of pepper, whose woody stems release a hot, aromatic flavour into the gravy. The pieces of stem are left in the dish and chewed rather than swallowed. Restaurants across the city advertise it, and it has spread from here to menus in Dhaka.

Prawns and fish are the other pillar. Golda chingri, the giant freshwater prawn raised in the ponds around Khulna and Bagerhat, is cooked in coconut milk as malaikari; bagda, the tiger prawn, goes mostly for export; and hilsa from the delta rivers is fried, cooked with mustard or steamed in banana leaf. Mud crab from the mangrove channels is a local delicacy, and dried fish, shutki, is used in pungent curries that outsiders find strong.

Everyday meals are rice with dal, a fish curry and bhorta, vegetables or dried fish mashed with mustard oil, onion and chilli. Coconut appears in both savoury cooking and sweets, and date-palm molasses tapped in the winter around Jashore turns up in payesh and in rice cakes. Sundarbans honey, gathered from wild hives in the mangroves, is sold in the city's shops. Tea is taken sweet and milky at stalls that stay open late along every main road.