Dhaka & Central Bangladesh

Settlement here is old — the area of Bikrampur in Munshiganj was a seat of Buddhist and Hindu kings before the Muslim conquest, and the scholar-monk Atisha Dipankara is remembered as born there. Under the Bengal Sultanate, Sonargaon became the capital of eastern Bengal; Ibn Battuta passed through in the 1340s, and in the late 16th century it was the base of Isa Khan, leader of the Bara Bhuiyan chieftains who resisted the Mughals.

The Mughals made Dhaka, renamed Jahangirnagar, the provincial capital of Bengal in 1610. The city grew rich on trade and on its muslin, and Lalbagh Fort was begun in 1678 by Prince Muhammad Azam and left unfinished. When the capital moved to Murshidabad in the early 18th century Dhaka declined, and under the British it was a provincial town until the Nawab family of Ahsan Manzil and the short-lived province of Eastern Bengal and Assam (1905–1911) revived it. The University of Dhaka opened in 1921.

After 1947 Dhaka became the capital of East Pakistan, and its streets saw the defining moments of the national story: the shooting of students on 21 February 1952 during the language movement, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's speech of 7 March 1971 at the Racecourse, the army crackdown of 25 March, and the Pakistani surrender on the same ground on 16 December 1971. Mujib was born and is buried at Tungipara in Gopalganj. In recent decades the region has been reshaped by garment factories, marked by the Rana Plaza collapse at Savar in 2013, and in July and August 2024 Dhaka was the centre of the student-led uprising that ended Sheikh Hasina's government.

Old Dhaka keeps an identity of its own. Its long-settled families speak Dhakaiya, a local form of Bengali mixed with Urdu words, and are known for their banter, their food and their neighbourhood loyalties. In January the rooftops fill with kite-flyers for Shakrain at the end of the month of Poush, and during Ramadan the Chawkbazar market becomes a vast evening stall of iftar food. The Hindu quarter of Shankhari Bazar still has its conch-shell carvers, and Durga Puja is celebrated around the Dhakeshwari temple.

The newer city has a different energy: universities, publishing, theatre and the February book fair of the Bangla Academy, held in the month of the language martyrs, when crowds lay flowers at the Shaheed Minar on 21 February. Pahela Baishakh begins with singing under a banyan tree at Ramna Park and the Mangal Shobhajatra procession from the Faculty of Fine Arts.

Weaving is the region's great craft. Jamdani, the fine figured muslin woven around Rupganj in Narayanganj, is listed by UNESCO as intangible heritage, and Tangail gives its name to a style of sari. Mymensingh has its own literary tradition in the Mymensingh Gitika, folk ballads collected in the early 20th century, while Garo and Hajong communities along the Netrokona and Sherpur border, many of them Christian, keep their own languages and festivals, such as the Garo harvest feast of Wangala.

The Dhaka metropolitan area holds over 20 million people and is growing all the time, pulled by jobs in government, trade and garments. The factory belts of Gazipur, Savar, Ashulia and Narayanganj employ hundreds of thousands, mostly women, and shift changes fill the roads morning and evening. Narayanganj, on the Shitalakshya, is an old river port once known for jute. Mymensingh, on the old course of the Brahmaputra, is the main city of the north, home to the Bangladesh Agricultural University, and Tangail, Kishoreganj and Jamalpur are busy district towns.

The day in Dhaka is organised around traffic. People leave early, work long hours and eat lunch at their desks or from roadside stalls, and the evening brings crowds to the markets of New Market and Chawkbazar and to tea stalls everywhere. The metro, opened from 2022, and the elevated expressway have eased some journeys, but flooding in the monsoon, air pollution in winter, a shortage of housing and the fouled water of the Buriganga remain daily problems.

Outside the city, life follows rice and water. In the haors of Kishoreganj and Netrokona villages sit on raised mounds that become islands for half the year; people travel by boat, fish in the monsoon and grow a single large rice crop, boro, as the waters fall. A flash flood before the harvest can ruin a whole year's work.

Old Dhaka is the region's great kitchen. Its kacchi biryani, in which raw marinated mutton is cooked under the rice in a sealed pot, is the city's signature dish, and famous old shops serve morog polao, a chicken pilaf, and tehari, a beef and rice dish, with borhani, a thin spiced yoghurt drink with mint. Bakarkhani, a thick, layered flatbread from the Mughal kitchen, belongs to the same tradition. In Ramadan, Chawkbazar sells haleem, jilapi, and the famous mixed dish called boro baper polay khay.

Beyond the capital the food is river and field cooking: rice, dal, fish curries, and bhorta mashes. The haors supply freshwater fish of many kinds, and dried fish, shutki, is eaten with fiery chilli. Winter brings pitha, rice cakes, sold warm at roadside stalls — bhapa pitha steamed with date-palm jaggery and coconut, and chitoi pitha eaten with bhorta or molasses.

The region is famous for its sweets. The monda of Muktagachha, near Mymensingh, is a soft round sweet made from milk curd and sugar, and the chomchom of Porabari in Tangail is a dense, oval, syrup-soaked milk sweet with a brownish crust. Tea comes milky and sweet, and sweet shops in every town sell roshogolla and mishti doi.

Old Dhaka is best seen on foot and by rickshaw. Lalbagh Fort holds the tomb of Pari Bibi, daughter of the governor Shaista Khan, within its walls and gardens. Ahsan Manzil, the pink palace of the Nawabs of Dhaka, is now a museum facing the Buriganga, and a short walk away is Sadarghat, the river port where launches and hundreds of wooden boats crowd the water. The Star Mosque, covered in ceramic mosaic, the Armenian Church of 1781, the Dhakeshwari temple and the Hussaini Dalan complete the old city.

Newer Dhaka has Louis Kahn's National Parliament House, the Shaheed Minar, Curzon Hall at the university, the National Museum and the Liberation War Museum. East of the city, Sonargaon keeps the crumbling two- and three-storey merchant houses of Panam Nagar, the Goaldi Mosque of 1519 and the Folk Art and Craft Museum founded by Zainul Abedin. Bhawal National Park in Gazipur and the sal forest of Madhupur in Tangail are the nearest woodlands.

In the north, Mymensingh sits on the old Brahmaputra and has a museum of Zainul Abedin's work, and the zamindar palace at Muktagachha lies nearby. The wetlands of Mymensingh stretch east into the haors of Kishoreganj and Netrokona, where boat trips at Nikli and Mithamain cross open water in the monsoon. Birisiri, in Netrokona, has the Someshwari River and the china-clay workings of Durgapur.