Exploring Old Dhaka

Even with a guidebook, I was not ready to single-handedly tackle Old Dhaka, with its winding, unnamed streets and back alleys. I called Taimur Islam, director of the Urban Study Group (USG), a non-profit outfit that offers walking tours. He said the morning tour had already left, but that he would see if I could join the group. He called back a few minutes later. I passed the phone to my auto-rickshaw driver and Taimur gave him directions. We set off on a harrowing, bumpy ride through the narrow streets.

I met Ana, a USG volunteer guide, at a 19th century merchant’s home, built in brick in the British colonial style with colonnades and balconies. Like most historic structures in Old Dhaka, it was in serious need of restoration. Years of baking heat and monsoon rains had taken their toll. The stucco had peeled off the walls and columns, exposing the brick, and the wooden balconies sagged. Small trees sprouted out of cracks and gutters.

Old Dhaka, wedged between the commercial center of Bangladesh’s densely populated  capital city and the River Buriganga, began its life as a river port with bazaars. From the 17th century, under India’s Mughal emperors, it became the most important commercial center in East Bengal, producing and exporting muslin, a high-quality woven cotton. Dhaka thrived until the 19th century, when British merchants took advantage of favorable tariffs to flood the market with imported cotton goods, sending the local industry into decline. It was cheaper to buy shirts from the mills of Manchester than to produce them at home.

Entrance to Shakhari bazaar

The city attracted Bengali Hindu artisans who lived peacefully alongside their Muslim neighbors. On March 26, 1971, when Pakistan’s army launched its offensive to put down the independence movement in what was then East Pakistan, politicians and clerics declared they were fighting a “holy war” to defend Islam. The army targeted the Shakhari bazaar, killing hundreds. Some Hindus fled to India, but many stayed. Their storefronts spill onto the bazaar’s narrow central street; down side alleys, in workshops squeezed between small Hindu temples, artisans fashion bangles and jewelry from metal and conch shells.  

In 2004, an old building in the bazaar collapsed. The government, supported by developers who saw an opportunity to grab prime real estate, proposed that many historic buildings, some from the colonial era, be demolished for safety reasons. Historians and conservationists were outraged, arguing the city’s cultural heritage would be destroyed. The controversy was the impetus for the founding of the USG by Taimur, a trained architect. The group campaigned to have streets and buildings designated as historically significant, and so protected from demolition. Some building owners opposed the designation, saying they did not have the money to maintain or restore their properties. The debate over preserving Old Dhaka echoes conflicts in other cities, with government agencies, developers, property owners and preservationists taking their disputes to the courts and the media.

The USG may have met its original goal of saving the buildings from demolition but restoring them will be a longer struggle. Landlords are unwilling to throw out tenants, lose rental income and invest in restoration. In Western countries, a government agency might buy the buildings and restore them, but in Bangladesh the government has other priorities. It’s difficult to argue for public funds for historic restoration when schools and health clinics are under-staffed, roads need to be repaired, and flood levees built.

The Water Palace, Old Dhaka

On the bank of the Buriganga River, a former merchant’s mansion, the Water Palace, is in a dilapidated state. It houses families of the Army Corps of Engineers, one of the government agencies that provides free or low-cost housing to staff, partly to compensate for their low salaries. We stood in the central courtyard, looking up at washing draped over the balconies as children played hide-and-seek among the pillars and narrow passageways.

One part of the palace has been taken over by Old Dhaka’s spice bazaar. From the mid-18th century, the French and British East India companies competed for the export trade in turmeric, ginger, garlic, chili, and other spices. The French were kicked out in 1757 after their ally, the Nawab of Bengal, was defeated by Major-General Robert Clive at the Battle of Plassey. The victory allowed the British East India Company to take over most of Bengal, and then expand its control across the sub-continent. In Old Dhaka’s Farashganj (the name is a corruption of Frenchganj, meaning French market-town), the merchants left behind stylish mansions with balconies and wrought-iron balustrades.

From the rambling Chowk bazaar, which for four centuries has been the city’s main wholesale market for fruit and vegetables, we emerged at the busy Buriganga waterfront. Bangladesh is dissected by more than 700 rivers; although its highway system has been improved, much of its commerce and many of its people still move by water.

Three-deck ferries (called launches) were lined up, waiting to take on passengers and cargo for destinations in the southern delta, where three major river systems, the Jamuna (Brahmaputra), Padma (Ganges) and Meghna, empty into the Bay of Bengal. Small cargo freighters loaded with building materials sat at anchor, ready to unload. On the south side of the river, freighters were hauled up on the bank for repairs; workers clambered over the hulls and decks, the sparks from their acetylene torches flashing. Motorized wooden nouka, the traditional Bengali river craft with a flat bottom and high prow, loaded with pumpkins, gourds, cauliflowers and coconuts, sacks of onions, garlic, potatoes, chilis and mangoes, were pulled up on the bank near the bazaar. Porters piled the produce into broad baskets and formed a human chain, carrying them on their heads and passing on to the next link.

There is no bridge over the Buriganga. The only way  to cross is in a narrow nouka, poled by a boatman. One USG volunteer asked if I would like to take a trip.  I looked at the wobbling craft and the dirty water. “I think I’ll just stick with the walking tour,” I said.  

Land of rivers

For a small country, close in size to its near neighbor, Nepal, or about the size of Illinois or Iowa, Bangladesh has an exceptionally large number of rivers, around 700 according to most estimates. Roughly 10 per cent of its land area is water, a high proportion considering that it has no large lakes. In other words, most of that water is moving, at least in the monsoon season. And when Bangladesh floods, as much as one third of its land area may be under water. The rivers are constantly shifting course, creating new channels or distributaries, making accurate mapping a frustrating exercise.

Three major river systems combine and empty into the Bay of Bengal. After flowing across the Indian state of Assam, the Brahmaputra turns south to enter Bangladesh where it is called the Jamuna. The second system is the Padma, the name given to the Ganges in Bangladesh. The third river system, the Meghna, also brings together rivers flowing out of India’s northeast. The combined waters of the Padma and western Jamuna join the Meghna south of Dhaka to form the Lower Meghna. At its widest point, the Lower Meghna is almost eight miles across, land, river and ocean merging into one hazy landscape. A maze of channels and distributaries combine into the great Gangetic Delta. At 23,000 square miles, it’s the largest delta in the world—the size of Lake Huron or almost as large as the state of West Virginia. The delta is ground zero for climate change, with floods and cyclones blowing up from the Bay of Bengal to submerge low-lying islands and push brackish saltwater inland. 

For Bangladesh’s rural population, the river is interwoven with every aspect of their lives. It sustains agriculture—rice paddies, fields of corn, mango orchards, fish and shrimp farms, herds of cattle, and flocks of ducks. It is the main highway for commerce, with nouka carrying fruit, vegetables, livestock, and building materials. In many places, you need to travel by river to reach the school, the health clinic or the government office.

The river, its seasons and rhythms, are common themes in Bangla literature. They figure prominently in the novels, short stories, plays, poems and songs of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), a leading figure in the Bengal Renaissance and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

As a zamindar—a hereditary landlord with the right to collect taxes from farmers—he and his entourage cruised the Padma and its tributaries on the well-appointed family houseboat. He witnessed the grinding poverty of rural Bengal and studied its folk traditions and songs. Several works from this period focus on the river, both literally and metaphorically, as in his famous poem, The Golden Boat (1894):

Clouds rumbling in the sky; teeming rain.
I sit on the river bank, sad and alone.
The sheaves lie gathered, harvest has ended,
The river is swollen and fierce in its flow.
As we cut the paddy it started to rain. 

Who is this, steering close to the shore
Singing? I feel that she is someone I know.
The sails are filled wide, she gazes ahead,
Waves break helplessly against the boat each side.
I watch and feel I have seen her face before. 

Oh, to what foreign land do you sail?
Come to the bank and moor your boat for a while.
Go where you want to, give where you care to,
But come to the bank a moment, show your smile -
Take away my golden paddy when you sail. 

For Tagore, the river was more than a setting for tales of love won and lost, or a place to marvel at the beauty and power of nature. From the 1920s, he became increasingly involved in social and political causes. He supported Indian independence while denouncing the elitism of its educated, urban leaders who, he felt, put political goals ahead of relieving poverty and suffering. In his later works, the river becomes a metaphor for class and social justice. In the poem Kopai, he compares a small river “intimate with the villages” where “the land and water exist in no hostility” to the majestic Padma, which is indifferent to humanity:

She’s different. She flows by the localities,

She tolerates them but does not acknowledge;

Pure is her aristocratic rhythm.

Across the wide Jamuna

For centuries, the Jamuna, the name given to the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh, had, like Tagore’s Padma, its own “aristocratic rhythm,” dividing the country vertically into two nearly equal halves. It was both a highway and a barrier to travel and trade. The only east-west links were by ferries carrying vehicles, rail cars, freight and passengers. Ferry traffic depended on navigability; in rough weather or in the dry season, east-west commerce was practically halted.

Soon after partition in 1947, political parties and businesses began campaigning for a bridge across the Jamuna. Consultants were hired, feasibility studies commissioned, and committees appointed. The project was abandoned more than once. By 1982, the estimated cost had climbed from $175 to $420 million. The clincher was to make it a multipurpose bridge, carrying a two-lane roadway, a dual-gauge railroad line, a natural gas pipeline and power and telecommunications lines. It was named the Bangabandhu Bridge, in honor of the hero of the independence movement, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, known popularly as Bangabandhu (Friend of Bengal). By the time his daughter and then-president Sheikh Hasina opened it in 1998, the cost had risen to almost $700 million.

Building the bridge meant taming the river. Records showed that at flood stage, the Jamuna could stretch almost nine miles across. A nine-mile bridge was not in anyone’s cost calculations, so engineers built a channel to confine the Jamuna, keeping the bridge length down to 3 ½ miles. Construction required anchoring 49 spans in the river bed, and building east and west viaducts, each with 12 spans. When opened, it was the 11th longest bridge in the world.