Rediscovering Chittagong and its lost stories

WHAT happened to my Chittagong, the verdant, hilly, and storied Chittagong of my childhood? That's how I felt during the ride from Shah Amanat International Airport to the city centre. It seemed almost banal to imagine that Chittagong's urban identity has always been driven by various claims of “uniqueness.” The uniqueness of its geography, its historic origin, its local dialect, its multi-faith social amalgamation, its history of anti-British movement, its Porto Grande global attraction through the ages, among others. Uncharacteristic mountainous terrain in a predominantly flat deltaic country has always been an essential part of the city's mythology. The Chinese traveler poet Hsuan Tsang's 7th-century depiction of the city as “a sleeping beauty emerging from mists and water” was no doubt a reference to Chittagong's hilly idyll.

Alas, a profiteering building boom, a preening consumer culture, and the tyranny of billboards across Chittagong has either hidden or erased the city's stories.

Legend has it that the Buddha came to a vihara or a chakrashala located in Patiya, a southern town of greater Chittagong, employing his miraculous powers for disembodied travel. According to some historians, Buddhism spread to Chittagong during the time of the Buddha himself, over twenty-six centuries ago, when Plato was not yet born!

Within a century after Islamic forces under the leadership of Tariq ibn-Ziyad crossed Gibraltar in 711 CE to colonise most of the Iberian Peninsula, Arab sailors began to arrive on the shores of Chittagong. They left enduring marks in the port city's life and local dialect. Place names, such as Alkaran (Al Qarn) and Sulak Bahor (Sulukal Bahar), demonstrate Arab influence. The use of negative before a verb in chatgaiya, Chittagong's local dialect, is another instance of Arabic contribution to the culture of the port city.   

Portuguese explorers in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries frequently called it the “City of Bengala.” Duarte de Barbosa, one of the earliest Portuguese writers to offer a geographical account of the African and Indian coasts in the early sixteenth century described Chittagong as a natural attraction for traders, missionaries, and fortune-seekers from far-flung places.

The history of Chittagong is richly crisscrossed by actors of all sorts: Buddhist mendicants, Hindu zamindars, Arab saints, Mughal governors, European traders, British colonialists, anti-British revolutionaries, Western development experts, wealthy industrialists, national leaders, and globally known entrepreneurs. When history becomes a jigsaw puzzle of people, events, places, and narratives, myths thrive!

Thus, to know Chittagong and to imagine its future, one must first learn to negotiate its stories. The city's genius loci is found not just in its people, hills, dighis, rivers, and sea, but also in its stories, myths, fables, and allegories. The fantastical tales of the Buddha's divine voyage to Chittagong or the Muslim dervish's lighting a chati on Cheragi'r Pahar to drive away demons are as important as the city's life-giving river, Karnafuli.

Many historic events that occurred in Chittagong fuel Bengal's collective folklore. The city was a real-life theater for revolutionary sagas during the heyday of anti-British agitation. In a much mythologised political action, Master Da Surya Sen's young comrades captured the armory of the British Raj in Dampara Police Line in 1930. The gallows in the Chittagong Central Jail, where Surya Sen was hanged, is considered an archetypal symbol of popular resistance. Bedabrata Pain's 2012 film, Chittagong, recaptures the sentimental history of the city's gallant fight against the British Raj.

Chittagong has other, more recent, stories, steeped in a combination of patriotism, political intrigue, and entrepreneurship. The nation's independence was declared on the radio from Kalurghat, a sleepy outpost steps away from the Karnafuli River. The much venerated journey of modern-era microcredit began from an impoverished but now famous village named Jobra in the vicinity of the University of Chittagong.

But, like all stories, there are darker sides. One of the tragic failures of Chittagong's urban administrators and planners has been their inability to hear the city's stories. A visit to the port city today alarms the most casual of observers that when a crony development agenda takes precedence over a city's ecological wellbeing the result is disastrous.

Chittagong is a chaotically expanding, environmentally challenged metropolis. Its population jumped from approximately 200,000 in the early 1950s to over 5 million in 1991 and about 7 million in 2014. The metropolitan area is home to 3.4% of the country's population (Dhaka 10%). The economic performance of the city is noticeable, contributing 11% of the country's GDP (Dhaka 36%). Yet, livability is an acute issue. Chittagong, like other burgeoning metropolises of developing economies, has been experiencing a laissez-faire construction boom. Real-estate development has become a key economic driver, unfortunately giving rise to a widespread culture of land-grabbing and hill-cutting. The Chittagong City Corporation and the Chittagong Development Authority are both oblivious of and complicit in these illegal and harmful actions.

The city's western ocean front from Faujdarhat to Bhatiari and beyond is, as the BBC hauntingly noted, “where the world's ships go to die.” The ship-breaking industry's corrosive effect on the area is no less an environmental “genocide.” Having spent six childhood years at the nearby Faujdarhat Cadet College, I recall fond memories of playing football on the Faujdarhat beach. The seafront's tranquility, however, has been replaced by the disquieting industrial wasteland of half-cut ships and desperately poor workers. The Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado's Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age (1989) shows the tragic transformation of the pristine beach into a maritime graveyard and an environmental disaster.

The preservation of heritage buildings is a far cry. The famous Nalapara site of Rabindranath Tagore's civic reception in 1907, the Kamolbabu's Theater (established in 1906; later renamed as Bishwambhar Hall and then Lion Cinema Hall) has been razed to create an unsightly apartment building!

There were many buildings that shaped our childhood perception of the city. Window-shopping in the Chittagong New Market -- an American-style shopping mall built in 1964, the first of its kind in the then East Pakistan -- was a magnet for shoppers. It was even a domestic tourist attraction. Across the outer stadium located at Kajir Dewri -- where we played cricket -- the colonial-era Circuit House (built in 1913 as a guest house for government officials) provided a lush forecourt. During the mid-1990s, driven by the era's wrong-headed development plans, the site was taken over to create a garish theme park for children

Consider J. M. Sen Hall, a town hall built in 1920 during the pivotal days of shawdeshi andolon, The well-known British-trained barrister and anti-colonial revolutionary, Jatindra Mohan Sengupta of Chittagong, commissioned the city's first town hall in honour of his father, advocate Jatra Monan Sengupta. A political hotspot for anti-British gathering during the 1920s, J. M. Sen Hall later became the heart of cultural activities in Chittagong. J. M. Sen Hall now stands hopelessly with a quiet melancholy amidst towering apartment buildings.

Today, Chittagong feels like a faceless, dusty, generic city, typical of developing economies around the world. The crucial question now is whether the city's administrators could bypass making the same planning mistakes of western metropolises in the early stages of their modern growth and leap-frog to the practices of sustainable urbanism that ensures the continued survival of the city's ecology and heritage.

The first step toward this end would be to start listening to the city's stories that provided Chittagong its physical persona and mental universe. It is not possible to return to a simpler past, because growth is inevitable. But it is possible to design the present and the future. The city's stories should be the guiding framework for moving forward.

The writer teaches architecture and urbanism in Washington, DC. He is the author of Oculus: A Decade of Insights into Bangladeshi Affairs.