HistoriCity | Dhaka: At the crossroads of revolution
The exploitative taxation policies of the East India Company led to a degradation of peasantry and Dhaka’s development was ignored at the cost of Calcutta.
Dhaka’s recent political convulsion follows an oft-seen pattern, where a seemingly placid polity suddenly explodes with violence. The ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina remains in a safe house near Delhi, while Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel laureate, called upon by students to lead the country out of the chaos, takes over as the caretaker Prime Minister. Bangladesh serves as a parable. For a nation-state that was born of violence in 1971, this kind of violent and bloody shake-up is not new. In fact in its 400-year old history as a political centre, the capital itself has seen political and social turbulence fairly frequently.
Rise of early kingdoms
According to Willem van Schendel, “The linguistic history of Bangladesh explains why archaeologists have long avoided the prehistoric period. Our understanding of South Asian archaeology is intimately related to the extensive early literature in Indo-European languages, notably Sanskrit and Prakrit. Writers in these languages were from more western parts of the Ganges valley and they had little knowledge of the area now covered by Bangladesh. In the most ancient epics, the Bengal delta appears as a distant land of barbarians, beyond the pale of Sanskritic culture…”
In the Bengal delta, states had first emerged in the south and west before gradually spreading across the region; with myriad forms of territorial organisation emerging: from village leaders to larger states that subsumed within them smaller chiefdoms.
It is presumed that the ancient Kamrup or Pragjyotish kingdom covered the Brahmaputra valley, and parts of undivided Bengal including Dhaka. Like many other parts of India, in the first half of the first millennium of the Common Era (CE), Bengal saw the rise of kings who patronised or embraced Buddhism.
“According to the Tibetan legends a Buddhist king named Vimala was master of Bengal and Kamrup, and therefore of Dhaka. Hiuen Tsiang who visited Kamrup in the second half of the seventh century states that Samtata, which probably included the pargana of Bikrampur, was a Buddhist kingdom although the king was a Brahman by caste. In the Raipura thana brass images of Buddhist origin have been discovered and two copper-plates with inscriptions of Buddhist kings. These have been assigned by experts to the end of the eighth and beginning of the ninth century, and a copper plate found in the Faridpur district, which is ascribed to the same period, proves that the Bikrampur pargana was also under Buddhist rule”, wrote B.C. Allen in the Eastern Bengal District Gazetteer of Dhaka.
In fact, present-day Bikrampur, situated just 20 kilometres from Dhaka’s centre, was the capital of this eastern region through the reigns of various dynasties like the Chandras (930-975 CE), the Varmans (1035-1150 CE), and the Sens (1070 -1230 CE).
An economic and socio-cultural frontier
The Bengal Delta served as a gateway to both the hinterland and the vastness of the Indian Ocean, ensuring that it was integrated into wider networks of trade, pilgrimage, and cultural exchange. In terms of the former, ancient maritime exports included cassia, rhinoceros horn, silk fabric, muslin cloth and horses. Cotton, of course, was the main commodity known for its high quality from ancient times, and remains prized even today.
As early as the third century BCE, we find evidence of cowrie shells as a form of currency. These were not locally found and were imported from the Maldives. Schendel notes that connections with Greece can also be attested by the discovery of a silver drachma of 300 BCE near Dhaka.
Lying very close to Dhaka, Sonargaon, or the golden hamlet became the hub of the plain weave cotton known as muslin, which was valued in ancient Greece and Rome. The ruins of Wari-Bateswar near Sonargaon are the only urban site dating back to the Iron Age (400-100 BCE) that has been discovered so far, according to Bangladeshi scholars, excavations here have found Janapada era (600-400 BCE) punch-marked coins and Mauryan era coins.
According to Sufi Mostafizur Rahman, the archaeologist who led the first excavations in the 1990s, the presence of Roman-style roulette and knobbed pottery indicates that Wari-Bateshwar could be the Sounagoura or emporium referred to in the Geographia by Ptolemy.
The delta’s wealth and strategic location naturally attracted traders and travellers alike. Marco Polo, a 13th-century Italian traveller and merchant writes about Bengal: “The province Bengal has a proper king and peculiar language. The inhabitants thereof are all idolaters: They have masters who keep schools and teach idolatries and enchantments: A thing common to all the great men of that country. They eat flesh, rice and milk: They have cotton in great plenty, and by reason thereof, much and great trading is exercised there”.
Further, the region was also seen to possess sites of religious learning. For example, Hiuen Tsiang, who visited Samatata in eastern Bangladesh wrote: “There are thirty or so monasteries with about 2,000 priests. They are all from the Theravada Buddhist school. There are some hundred Brahmanical [Deva] temples . . . The naked ascetics called Jains are most numerous …”
Interestingly, Islam is said to have reached Bangladesh in two ways: Through the seaborne route via traders and travellers, and also by land, brought by invading rulers.
Dhaka, situated by the Buriganga, remained a small village while the bigger town of Sonargaon acquired wealth and status during the Delhi sultanate. Firoz Shah, the Governor of Gauda (an older name for the Bengal kingdom), opened a mint in Sonargoan, over the short-lived reigns of successive governors the town emerged as a regional hub of Islamic culture and learning.
Nawabs and the British
The Portuguese established a textile trading post in Dhaka in the 16th century, followed by the Dutch, the English and the French, which also marked the beginning of missionaries promoting Christianity. By the 17th century, Bengal had seen contestation between the Ahom kings, the Afghan chiefs, the Arakanese rulers, and the Portuguese.
It was in 1607 when Islam Khan was appointed governor of Bengal that the hamlet of Dhaka started gaining prominence. He shifted the capital from Rajmahal to Dhaka owing to its suitability for military operations but chiefly due to changes in the course of the Ganga which necessitated a new port at Dhaka.
Islam Khan became the first Nawab of Dhaka and named the new town Jahangir Nagar after his eponymously named foster brother and Mughal emperor Jahangir. From the 17th century onwards, Dhaka grew rapidly as a centre of trade and Mughal rule in this easter region lying in the Ganga – Brahmaputra delta. The legendary governor Shaista Khan (1644-1688) administered the province ably taking the city to its peak of prosperity.
According to Thomas Bowrey, an English merchant, the city’s population consisted of over nine lakh people surpassing that of London. Bengal became the financial driver of the Mughal empire on the back of exports of rice, silk and cotton textiles.
The city grew rapidly with massive construction projects, notable among them the Lal Bagh fort which was built by its governor prince Azam Shah (son of emperor Aurangzeb who later became emperor himself) in 1678.
During the Nawabi period, Dhaka remained one of the four divisions of Bengal. However, Dhaka’s decline as a political centre was imminent with the growing internal conflict between the Diwan of Bengal, Murshid Quli Khan (1717-1727) and Azam Shah. Eventually, Murshid Quli Khan prevailed over the Shah and shifted the capital to Murshidabad declaring himself the independent Nawab of Bengal.
The exploitative taxation policies of the East India Company led to a degradation of peasantry and Dhaka’s development was ignored at the cost of Calcutta, the westward stronghold and later colonial capital of the English.
It was after the British took over Bengal after the Battle of Plassey (1757), that Dhaka’s fortunes started reviving, where the takeover precipitated a new life in the jute trade. However, as Schendel observes, it was unable to recover its 1800 population levels till well over 100 years later, in the 1930s, and its industrial prowess nearly 200 years later, in the 1970s.
The independence of India was an internecine affair with Dhaka becoming the capital of East Pakistan, a scenario which was untenable owing to regional identity-based Bengali nationalist politics. Since the ignition of the Bangladesh Liberation War, and the creation of the independent Bangladesh in 1971, the country and capital Dhaka has been a parable of revolution and agency; witness to frequent and violent regime changes, even as it remains the global sweatshop-producing textiles for international companies.
HistoriCity is a column by author Valay Singh that narrates the story of a city that is in the news, by going back to its documented history, mythology and archaeological digs. The views expressed are personal
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