In April 1971, at the age of 24, Val Harding was volunteering as a nurse at a hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal, when she first heard of the atrocities on March 25 in Dhaka and the fight for the Liberation of Bangladesh.
Hashim believed that ethnically driven societies with a common language would benefit from using religion as a tool for political self-representation rather than relegating it to the private realm.
In the seventeenth century, Dhaka was among the most prosperous cities of eastern India, home to nearly nine lakh people.
From the period of his lifetime and particularly in the aftermath of his assassination, Gandhi’s philosophies have been the subject of deep scholarly discussion.
When the Dutch, Portuguese, Mughals, and Arakanese fought over a tiny island
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.
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.
The history of Bangladesh’s leftist politics is a story of unity and division, of shared ideals splintering into competing paths.
The 1947 Partition of South Asia is usually associated with divisions, disruption, and the melancholia of displacement.
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.
Rabindranath Tagore, whose genius touched nearly every branch of the arts and literature, left an indelible imprint on the world of drama—not merely as a playwright, but as an actor, director, and visionary of the stage.
With the passing of Professor Tony K. Stewart, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities Emeritus, the field of South Asian religions, and more specifically, premodern Bengali literature, has lost one of its leading lights.
The writing of history in the Bengali language by a Bengali began around 225 years ago with the publication of Raja Pratapaditya Charitra in 1801.
The Cold War was a war of armaments and ideologies—but it was also a war of words, fought in classrooms, libraries, and on the printed page.
Jamdani is not just the material or the motifs; it encompasses everything—from the river system and flora-fauna of the Dhaka region
Dhaka's air is a stew of brick kiln soot, exhaust fumes, construction dust, and factory emissions
