Mymensingh

Mymensingh became a district headquarters in 1787, when the East India Company carved a vast district out of northern Bengal and made this riverside spot its centre. The town that grew around the courts and offices took its name from the district; the older settlement nearby was called Nasirabad. Its position on the Brahmaputra — then the main channel of the river — made it a natural collecting point for the rice, jute and timber of a huge agricultural hinterland, and steamers and country boats carried the trade downstream.

The river itself changed the town's fortunes. During the 19th century the Brahmaputra shifted west into the course now called the Jamuna, leaving Mymensingh on a smaller channel known as the old Brahmaputra. Wealth then came less from shipping than from land: the zamindar families of Mymensingh and Muktagachha built mansions, schools and public buildings, of which Shashi Lodge and Alexandra Castle survive. Colleges and schools followed, giving the town the educational character it still has.

In the 20th century the district was known for peasant movements against the zamindars and for its part in the language movement and the war of 1971, when the town stayed out of the occupying army's hands until late April. The zamindari system was abolished after partition and the estates broken up. The Bangladesh Agricultural University opened in 1961 on the southern edge of the city, and in 2015 Mymensingh became the capital of a new division split from Dhaka, raising its administrative standing again.

Mymensingh's best-known contribution to Bengali culture is the Mymensingh Gitika, a body of folk ballads collected from villagers in the district in the early 20th century by Dinesh Chandra Sen and published in the 1920s. The songs tell stories of love across caste and religion, and they made the district's name familiar to readers of Bengali far beyond it. Folk theatre, jatra performances and boat songs belong to the same tradition.

The city is also identified with the painter Zainul Abedin, who was born in the district, drew the Bengal famine of 1943 in a series exhibited in 1944 that became a national symbol, and is remembered in a museum opened in 1975 in a house on the riverbank here. That combination of art and education shapes the place: it is a town of colleges, coaching centres, student hostels and bookshops, with the agricultural university and the medical college supplying much of its population and its politics.

North of the city, towards the border, live Garo, Hajong and Koch communities, many of them Christian, with their own languages, dress and festivals such as the Garo harvest celebration of Wangala; their crafts and food reach the city's markets. In the city itself, manners are those of provincial Bangladesh: hospitality offered immediately and insistently, elders addressed with respect, modest dress taken for granted, and Friday prayers emptying the streets around the mosques at midday.

Close to 600,000 people live in the city, and the division it heads holds several million more. The economy rests on administration, education and health — government offices, the university, the medical college and its hospital, which draws patients from across the north — and on the trade of an intensely farmed district. Rice dominates the fields; fish farming in ponds is a major business, and the district is one of the country's main sources of farmed fish and hatchery fry.

Days start early. The bazaars are busiest soon after dawn, offices open in the morning and close in the late afternoon, and Ganginar Par fills with shoppers in the evening. Rickshaws are the pulse of the city, thousands of them, and their bells are its background noise. Students give the place a young character, and tea stalls near the colleges stay busy into the night.

The problems are those of a growing provincial city: traffic on streets built for far fewer vehicles, waterlogging in heavy rain, pressure on housing as people arrive from the countryside, and the loss of farmland at the edges to building. Migration is a constant fact of life, with workers from the district in Dhaka, the Gulf and Malaysia, and the money they send home visible in new concrete houses in the villages around.

Mymensingh eats the food of the northern plains: rice at every meal, dal, vegetable bhaji, and fish above all. Farmed rui, catla, pangas and tilapia from the district's ponds, and smaller river fish, are cooked in light turmeric-and-chilli curries or fried; shutki, dried fish, is pounded into bhorta with mustard oil, onion and green chilli. The bhortas themselves — mashed aubergine, potato, lentil or dried fish — are the heart of an everyday plate, and khichuri, rice cooked with lentils, is the monsoon dish.

The region's fame rests on sweets. The monda of Muktagachha, a soft round milk sweet first made there in the 1820s, is the one people carry home in boxes; alongside it the sweet shops sell chomchom, roshogolla, sandesh and mishti doi, the sweetened yoghurt set in clay pots. Milk from the district's dairies supports the trade.

Street food follows the national pattern — singara, samosa, puri and dal, chotpoti and fuchka on the riverbank in the evening, and jilapi coiled into hot syrup — while winter brings pitha, rice cakes steamed with date-palm jaggery and coconut, sold warm at roadside stalls. Tea is milky and sweet and drunk all day. In the villages towards the Garo hills, food shifts towards dried fish, bamboo shoot and sharper, simpler cooking with less oil.