Bot In Focus
Rabindranath Tagore and the creation of national identity
Rabindranath Tagore is perhaps the only poet whose songs were chosen as the national anthems of two countries: India and Bangladesh.
BIRTH CENTENARY OF KALIM SHARAFI / A life dedicated to cultural activism
“I firmly believe in the profound impact of music, dance, and acting on shaping people’s thoughts and emotions.
Thus Spoke Sher-e-Bangla
I deem it a great privilege and pleasure to preside over this Convocation of the University of Dacca; and to join you in offering my blessings and good wishes for the success and prosperity of those graduates who have been admitted to various degrees today.
The Baropakhya Christians: A forgotten incidence of peasant repression in colonial Bengal
The Blue or Indigo Mutiny of 1861, was an outpouring of anger by Indian peasants coerced into cultivating the unprofitable indigo crop by British planters.
A freedom fighter’s journey to Mujibnagar
The necessity that was felt a few days after the Declaration of Independence of Bangladesh was that of a Government which could take upon itself the burden of directing the liberation struggle.
'We must reject religious majoritarianism to ride the wave of Asian resurgence'
The Daily Star (TDS): Your family was closely involved with the Liberation War of Bangladesh. Could you please provide some insights into this historical involvement?
Silencing the subaltern voice
Historian Willem van Schendel divides the historiography of the War of 1971 into two broad categories: i) first-generation historiographies and ii) second-generation historiographies.
In the Name of Lalon
In a jungle by a wide river bank, a small group is sitting amongst the dangling roots of a luscious banyan tree. The single-stringed ektara, four-stringed dotara, wood-bead necklace mala, hand-spunned bright-coloured cotton gamccha and white outfits identify the members as Bauls, the traditional mystic musicians of Bangladesh.
Dispute settlement mechanism under the UNCLOS 1982
The Law of the Sea dispute settlement mechanism is an area of great academic, economic, and political interest where the relationship between public and private law is in full evolution and constantly shows new challenges. Historically, the law of the sea was split between public and private domains.
Early Barristers from East Bengal
The failed Indian rebellion of 1857 also led to the ‘demise’ of the rapacious East India Company (EIC) in 1858, when political power was transferred to the crown-in-parliament in England with the founding of ‘The British Empire in India’ (1858-1947), popularly known today as the British Raj.
Bangladesh's foreign policy compulsions, constraints and choices
Policies are ethereal. Instead of a specific set of instructions, it is a general sense of being and a spatial sense of direction as to where we might be heading as a country, an institution, a society and an individual.
Two women, one family, and divided nations
I was born in 1899 in the Raychaudhuri family in the village of Gabtali, Sonargaon, East Bengal. My father worked in the Treasury in Mymensingh.
Memories of lives from villages under water
Speaking from his home in Agartala, the capital of the Northeast Indian state of Tripura, Mohendro Chakma recalls his role as the leader of the 19th group that was preparing to trek to the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA), present-day Arunachal Pradesh.
'It was like the morning after a nuclear attack'
The following is the field report on trip to Jessore, Khulna, Chalna and Kushtia submitted by Hendrik Van der Heijden, Economist, Pakistan Division, the World Bank, dated June 23, 1971.
The Dhaka Muslin Industry
The subject of this paper is the old muslin industry of Dacca [Dhaka] and its neighborhood. I shall not deal in this article with the Muslins produced here with British yarn.
The China wave in literature
At the Hay Dhaka Literary Festival of 2012 the celebrated Indian writer Vikram Seth, after reading some of his fine translations of Chinese poetry, remarked that he found it odd that his fellow South Asians were incurious about the great civilization north of the Himalayas.
The Incorrigible Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
The misdemeanors of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan are legendary.Tomes have already been written about this ‘dark, diabolical prince’ of Larkana, Sind, in Pakistan.
Habshi rule in Bengal (1487-94)
Very few people know that Bengal was once ruled by Habshi African sultans. Four rulers from an African background occupied the Sultanate of Bengal during 1487-94. Those who know about that period are mostly confined to a narrow group of academics, whose interest levels on the topic seem to have been also very limited.
