Sonargaon

Sonargaon — the name means golden village — was the leading town of eastern Bengal for several centuries. Its rise came under the Deva kings and then under Muslim rule from 1338, when Fakhruddin Mubarak Shah made it the seat of an independent sultanate. Ghiyasuddin Azam Shah, who ruled around the end of that century, is buried at Mograpara, and Bengali tradition remembers his exchange of verses with the Persian poet Hafez. Ibn Battuta reached Sonargaon by river in the 1340s and sailed from it towards Java.

In the late 16th century the area was the base of Isa Khan, the best known of the Bara Bhuiyan chieftains who resisted Mughal expansion into Bengal. After the Mughals prevailed, the capital moved to Dhaka in 1610 and Sonargaon's political importance ended, though it remained a centre of the muslin trade; the finest Bengal muslins were woven in villages nearby and sold to merchants who came upriver.

Panam Nagar belongs to a later chapter. The street of mansions was built mostly between the 1860s and the early 20th century by Hindu cloth merchants who prospered under British rule, each house facing the lane with a pond and garden behind. Their owners left in stages after partition in 1947 and finally after the riots of 1964, and the street has stood empty ever since. It is now a protected site, its buildings propped and slowly decaying, and the area around it has become part of the industrial belt spreading east from Dhaka.

For all its ruins, Sonargaon is a working rural upazila, and its culture is that of the villages of central Bengal: mosques and madrasas, Friday prayers that empty the bazaar, weddings with loud music and long feasts, and a Hindu minority whose Durga Puja pandals go up in autumn. The Langalbandh bathing on the old Brahmaputra channel nearby is one of the largest Hindu gatherings in Bangladesh and has been observed for centuries.

Craft gives the place its modern identity. The folk art museum, founded on the initiative of the painter Zainul Abedin, was set up to collect and keep alive Bengali village crafts — jamdani and other weaving, nakshi kantha embroidered quilts, terracotta, brass, masks, puppets and model boats — and its grounds hold a crafts fair in spring with makers from across the country. Weaving is still a living trade in the wider district, and the jamdani looms of Rupganj a short distance north-west produce the figured muslin that UNESCO lists as intangible cultural heritage.

Sonargaon also carries a strong sense of being a place that history left. School groups, students of architecture and photographers come out from Dhaka to walk the empty street, and a debate over how far the mansions should be restored, stabilised or left as ruins has run for decades. Local people are used to visitors, and hospitality is straightforward: tea first, questions after.

The people of the upazila are spread over Mograpara, Baidyer Bazar and dozens of villages rather than gathered in one town. The Dhaka–Chattogram highway runs through the middle of it and shapes the economy: garment and textile factories, brickfields, small workshops and transport businesses line the road and the approaches to the river crossings, and many residents commute to Narayanganj or into Dhaka itself.

Away from the highway the pattern is older. Rice is grown in the fields between the two rivers, with vegetables and mustard in winter, and fish comes from ponds as well as from the Meghna. Handloom weaving survives in some villages, and remittances from relatives working in the Gulf and Malaysia pay for the brightly painted concrete houses that are replacing tin and bamboo. Land near the highway has become valuable, and its sale to industry is a constant subject of local argument.

The day starts early, with the bazaar busiest in the morning and again at dusk. Tea stalls are the meeting places, boys play cricket on any dry patch of ground, and in the monsoon children travel to school along lanes edged with standing water. The familiar problems of the belt around Dhaka are here too: air and water pollution from brick kilns and dyeing works, traffic on a highway never built for its present volume, and the steady loss of farmland to factory sheds.

The food is the plain river-and-field cooking of central Bengal, and the fish is what distinguishes it. Hilsa from the Meghna is the prize — fried in mustard oil, cooked in a mustard-seed sauce, or steamed in banana leaf — and rui, catla, boal and small fish from the ponds are curried with turmeric, chilli and onion. Rice comes with dal, vegetable bhaji and a plate of bhorta, the mashes of aubergine, potato, dried fish or lentil worked with mustard oil, green chilli and raw onion that are eaten with almost every meal.

The highway restaurants serve the food travellers expect between Dhaka and Chattogram: biryani and tehari, beef bhuna, chicken curry, dal and rice, taken quickly and washed down with sweet milky tea. In the bazaar the same dishes appear in smaller eating houses, along with parathas and eggs in the morning and singara and piyaju — fried pastries and lentil fritters — in the afternoon.

Sweets are made in shops on the main road and at every bazaar: roshogolla, chomchom, sandesh, and mishti doi set in unglazed clay pots. In winter, stalls sell pitha, the steamed and fried rice cakes made with date-palm jaggery and coconut, and the sap itself is drawn from palms in the villages and drunk fresh in the early morning. Ramadan brings the usual evening spread of haleem, jilapi and fried snacks to the bazaar stalls.