Rajshahi

The city grew from Rampur Boalia, a river settlement that became a trading post in the 18th century when Dutch and then English merchants set up silk factories on the bank of the Padma; the surviving Baro Kuthi belongs to that trade. The district was established in 1772, and the name Rajshahi, usually traced to the raja families whose zamindar estates dominated the surrounding countryside, above all that of Rani Bhabani of Natore, came to be used for the town as well. Silk, indigo and sugar moved down the river, and the town acquired courts, a jail and, in the 19th century, the schools and colleges that still define it.

Education arrived early. Rajshahi Collegiate School dates from 1828 and Rajshahi College from the 1870s, and in 1910 local scholars founded the Varendra Research Museum to collect the sculpture and inscriptions being turned up across the Barind. The University of Rajshahi followed in 1953, the second university in what was then East Pakistan, and gave the city a student population that has shaped its politics ever since.

Partition in 1947 cut Rajshahi off from Murshidabad and Malda across the river, severing old trade routes and leaving it on a closed border. The city saw heavy fighting and killings during the war of 1971, commemorated on the university campus and at sites around the town. Since then it has grown steadily rather than explosively, without heavy industry; a switch to cleaner fuels and battery-powered vehicles, the paving of earth streets and a campaign of tree planting brought international notice in the 2010s for the sharp fall in its air pollution.

Rajshahi's identity is bound up with silk, mangoes and study. Silk weaving has been practised here for centuries, and the city's showrooms sell saris and scarves from local mills, and the city has been known for its silk textiles since the British period. The mango harvest is the year's great collective event, discussed, graded and argued over from the first flowering to the last basket shipped to Dhaka.

The student city gives it a second character. Three large campuses, a medical college and an engineering university fill the eastern side with young people, and the university has a long record of political activity, theatre, music and poetry, with cultural evenings and book fairs through the cooler months. Rabindra and Nazrul songs are staples of these occasions, and gambhira, the satirical folk dialogue of nearby Chapai Nawabganj, is performed here too.

Socially the city is conservative and quiet. Evenings are spent walking on the embankment, in the tea stalls and at family gatherings rather than in nightlife; the Hindu minority is significant, and Durga Puja and the Muslim festivals are both public occasions. People take visible pride in the city's cleanliness and its trees, and in being calmer and greener than the rest of urban Bangladesh — a comparison a visitor will hear often.

About 550,000 people live in the city corporation area, and roughly a million in the wider urban area that takes in Nowhata and Katakhali. There is little large industry: the economy runs on government offices, the universities and colleges, hospitals, the silk mills, and above all on agriculture and its trade — mangoes, rice, wheat, pulses and vegetables from the Barind, sold through markets in the city and trucked east. Many families also depend on relatives working in Dhaka or the Gulf.

Neighbourhoods are low-rise and green, with houses set among trees; Uposhohor and the roads near the university hold the newer apartment blocks, while the old quarters near the river are denser and poorer. Rickshaws outnumber cars, the streets are swept, and the city is notably less noisy than others of its size. Students set the rhythm in term time, and the market day, the school run and evening prayers order the rest.

Water and land are the long-term worries. The Padma's dry-season flow is much reduced, blamed locally on the Farakka Barrage upstream in India, leaving broad sandbanks in winter, while groundwater under the Barind is falling as deep tube wells irrigate the dry soil. Riverbank erosion and the flooding of char islands displace families most years, and heat waves before the monsoon are becoming a serious public health issue.

Mangoes come first. The orchards around the city produce Fazli, Langra, Gopalbhog and Khirsapat, also called Himsagar, each with its own weeks in early summer, and they are eaten fresh, pulped into juice, pickled green with mustard oil and chilli, and dried into amsotto, a chewy sheet of mango leather. Whole households turn to the harvest, and boxes are couriered across the country as gifts.

The staple cooking is rice with dal, vegetables and fish from the Padma — katla, rui, boal and, in season, hilsa — with bhorta, mashed vegetables or dried fish with mustard oil, green chilli and onion, at almost every meal. The local speciality of the wider north-west is kalai ruti, a thick, chewy flatbread of black gram baked on a clay pan and eaten with fiery chilli paste and aubergine bhorta, sold at stalls in the evening.

Sweets are a serious business. Curd set in clay pots comes from Bogura, kachagolla, a loose fresh-cheese sweet, from Natore, and the city's own shops make milk sweets, syrupy jilapi and sandesh. Tea is drunk strong and milky at stalls all day, and winter brings pitha, rice cakes with date-palm molasses, cooked at home and sold from carts.