Sylhet

Sylhet appears in early records as Srihatta, a trading town on the Surma at the edge of the Bengal plain, where boats met the routes coming down from the hills. Its decisive moment came in 1303, when forces of the Bengal Sultanate took the town; the Sufi saint Shah Jalal, who arrived with them from the west, settled here with his followers, and the region's conversion to Islam is traced to that generation. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta made a month-long detour through the hills to meet him in 1345. For centuries afterwards Sylhet was a frontier district of Bengal, governed at a distance and known chiefly for its shrine.

Under British rule the town was attached to Assam rather than to Bengal from 1874, a decision that shaped its trade, its schools and its politics. Commercial tea planting began in the district in the 1850s, and the hills around the town filled with estates worked by labourers brought from central India. The great Assam earthquake of 12 June 1897 flattened almost the whole town, which was rebuilt on a European plan. In 1947 a referendum placed most of Sylhet in East Pakistan rather than India.

Sylhetis had been going to sea on British ships since the 19th century, and from the 1950s that thread became mass migration to Britain, where families from the district came to dominate the Bangladeshi community. The money they sent home rebuilt the city in concrete. Sylhet became a divisional headquarters in 1995 and a city corporation in 2001, and has grown quickly since, with severe river flooding in 2022 among its hardest recent years.

Sylhet is spoken of within Bangladesh as a land of saints, and the shrines set its tone. Thursday evenings at the dargah of Shah Jalal draw crowds for devotional song and the lighting of lamps, and the same shrine culture supports a long tradition of mystic poetry and music: the songs of Hason Raja and Shah Abdul Karim, both from the Sunamganj wetlands nearby, and of Radha Raman, are sung throughout Bengal. Dhamail, a circle song and dance performed mainly by women at weddings, belongs to this corner of the country.

The Sylheti language marks the city out. Distinct enough from standard Bengali that many linguists treat it as a separate language, it was once written in its own script, Sylheti Nagri, and it is the mother tongue of most British Bangladeshis. Returning families, British-accented teenagers in the shopping centres of Zindabazar and houses built to designs imagined abroad are all part of the city's texture.

Manners are more formal and religion more visible than in Dhaka. Mosques are numerous, Friday prayers empty the streets for an hour, and Ramadan changes the rhythm of the whole city, with iftar stalls appearing along the main roads in the late afternoon. Hindu, Christian and Buddhist minorities have their own festivals and institutions, and the Manipuri communities of the wider division keep their own language, weaving and dance.

About half a million people live in the city corporation area, with many more in the surrounding upazilas that are steadily being absorbed into it. Wealth is unusually visible for a Bangladeshi city of this size: banks, money-transfer offices, shopping centres, private hospitals and hotels cluster in Zindabazar, funded largely by remittances from Britain and the Gulf, while apartment blocks spread across Upashahar and the roads out towards the airport.

The wider economy rests on tea from the estates of Sylhet and Moulvibazar, on natural gas from fields in the division, on stone and sand dredged from the border rivers around Jaflong, and on agriculture in the haors, the seasonal wetlands that flood each monsoon and are harvested in spring. Education is a large employer too, with Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, a medical college and an agricultural university drawing students from across the country.

The day starts early, with markets busy soon after dawn and offices working through the morning; the evening belongs to restaurants, tea stalls and the shopping streets, which stay open late. Traffic is the common complaint, along with the loss of hills and wetlands to building. Flooding is the recurring crisis: the Surma rises fast when rain falls on the Meghalaya hills, and low neighbourhoods near the river are the first to go under.

Sylheti cooking has a sour, aromatic streak that sets it apart. The signature ingredient is satkora, also called hatkora, a citrus fruit whose thick rind is cooked with beef or fish to give a bitter-fragrant edge; beef with satkora is the dish Sylhetis abroad most often miss. Akhni, rice and meat cooked together with whole spices, is the standard dish of weddings and large gatherings, lighter than the biryanis of Dhaka. Shutki, dried fish, appears as a fiery paste or in curries, and fermented fish pastes are pounded with chilli and onion into bhorta.

The wetlands and rivers supply the table. Small river fish, prawns from the haors and seasonal greens are cooked simply with mustard oil and green chilli. Chunga pitha, sticky rice stuffed into a length of young bamboo and slowly smoked, is a winter speciality of the region, and date-palm molasses sweetens the rice cakes made in the cold months.

Tea is the other constant. It grows on the city's doorstep and is drunk strong, sweet and milky at stalls on every corner, with the layered seven-colour tea of the tea district to the south now sold in Sylhet as well. Around the shrine, sweet shops sell milk-based sweets and jilapi, while Zindabazar's restaurants serve everything from grilled meat and paratha to Chinese dishes and the British-Bangladeshi curry-house menu, brought home again by returning families.