Suhrawardy’s popularity, unlike Jinnah’s, was rooted primarily in the regional sphere, though he enjoyed a strong base of mass support. Jinnah’s emergence as the architect of Pakistan owed considerably to Suhrawardy’s efforts, yet Suhrawardy, in turn, received comparatively little support from Jinnah.

Teacher, comrade, and lifelong revolutionary Badruddin Umar (20 December 1931 – 7 September 2025) is no more. We offer him our deepest respect and love. Alongside this, on behalf of the people of Bangladesh, we convey our gratitude — for he devoted his entire life, thought, and activism to the cause of the people.

Hasina took dynasty politics to levels we could not have ever imagined. What happened to Sheikh Mujib’s former residence was unfortunate. But I would say that Sheikh Hasina is partly responsible for the incident.

In the annals of modern Middle Eastern history, few documents have cast a longer or darker shadow than the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.

Both Bengals are grappling with intense periods of unrest. While the political events unfolding in these two lands may not align directly, they share one significant commonality: distrust.

“Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.” — Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 3.

The history of Bangladesh’s leftist politics is a story of unity and division, of shared ideals splintering into competing paths.

While Europe experienced an age of evangelical awakening in the eighteenth century, political circumstances in India posed challenges to the work of missionary preaching.

The 1947 Partition of South Asia is usually associated with divisions, disruption, and the melancholia of displacement.

Reading The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi in the midst of Israel’s genocidal bombing and starvation of Gaza is both illuminating and depressing.

Before taking a close look at the three feature films that comprise Ray’s tribute to Tagore we might note a few similarities between the two cultural giants.

While the July Uprising was sparked by economic problems, political repression, and a desire for democracy, it found a strong and surprising voice in a new form of music for Bangladesh: rap. Two songs, “Kotha Ko” (Speak Up) and “Awaz Utha” (Raise Your Voice), came to represent the sentiment of the movement in July.

In his analysis of the Estado da Índia, which was the official name of the Portuguese Empire, George Winius distinguished between the formal administration by the Estado’s headquarters at Goa over overseas possessions and the ‘informal empire’, which he called the ‘shadow empire’, that the Portuguese established in the Bay of Bengal. The shadow empire was a unique experiment carried out by sailors, merchant adventurers, pirates, and missionaries, with little formal sanction either from Goa or from Portugal.

In the immediate aftermath of the Bangladesh Liberation War, as world attention fixated on the harrowing human toll of conflict and the fate of 93,000 Pakistani POWs in Indian  custody, a darker, largely buried chapter was quietly unfolding in Pakistan.

“If properly planned, even now, Dhaka can be transformed into a very decent, liveable city. We can take advantage of the river, the khals, the lowlands, and the richness of the soil for the growth of trees and plants.

“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” — Frantz Fanon had thundered, as if pleading with flesh and sinew to refuse silence, to resist obedience.

The poet and playwright Michael Madhusudan Dutta (1824–73) made no effort to conceal his disapproval of traditional Brahmin pundits.

In the late afternoon, the sun seemed to drift hastily towards the Phuromon hill in the west. The krishnachura leaves whispered softly in the breeze while the birds’ chirping spread a melodic resonance.

Chittagong’s neighbour Sandwip is absent from Bay of Bengal history because its nature is hard to define.

The first experience of the great river Padma is nothing less than overwhelming, and slightly terrifying. I first came to face the mighty river as a young lad in my teens sometime in April of the momentous year of 1971. My first sighting came with two terrors. My father was fleeing Dhaka with the family with the hope of crossing the river to escape the brutal onslaught of the Pakistan army. Arriving at the banks, there was the Padda (Padma) before us with its glorious panorama. It seemed like an oceanic river, with no sight of the other side, and the frightening prospect of crossing it.