“It looked like a war zone! The century-old three-storey structure was bulldozed to the ground overnight!” Taimur Islam refers to Jahaj Bari in Old Dhaka which was demolished recently in the presence of the local lawmaker. The Member of Parliament claims ownership of the heritage site which is also waqf property.

Is there an academic field of Bangladesh studies? Let us limit ourselves to the social sciences and the humanities. Clearly, in these domains a lot of research activity is going on—and a lot more than used to be the case. Our understanding of the huge jumble of people that we call Bangladeshi society is increasing.

This feature article is a sequel to an earlier essay of mine entitled “Early Indian Voyagers to Vilayet” published in The Daily Star. In this essay, I shall briefly mention a few notable Indian travellers who went to Britain, including those who later wrote about their varied exposure and experiences there on their return home to India, between 18th to mid-20th centuries.

The peripatetic life story of centenarian Mohammed Shamsul Huq depicts the less-discussed history of Muslim migrants—arriving in hope or leaving in despair—during the tumultuous 20th century. The extraordinary research work Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration is a welcome effort in filling this gap. The book weaves together threads of experiences of Muslim migrants like Shamsul Huq, who migrated from and settled within the Bengal delta region after 1947.

In the past fifty years, Dhaka has transformed itself from a sleepy provincial centre left over by the British Raj, unchanged through its years as East Pakistan, into one of the world’s burgeoning megalopolises and can boast of being paradigmatic of the many threats human settlement poses to the environment world over.

The Pogose School in Dhaka is a familiar landmark in the city. What is perhaps unfamiliar to the Armenian Diaspora around the world is that it was opened in 1848 by local Armenian Joakim Gregory Nicholas Pogose.

Most of us in/of Bangladesh have had to tutor ourselves hurriedly in the world of Burmese history and politics, in the face of “hosting”—almost overnight—what is apparently the world’s largest refugee camp. It is in this spirit, with no claims to expertise on the subject, that I have sketched out my thoughts in this essay.

This essay is largely about the pictorial depiction of the once imposing south-western bastion of the Lalbagh Fort in Old Dhaka, along with a brief history of the fort.

After conducting a year-long survey of landscape, possible routes and profitability, Macdonald Stephenson, a Scottish engineer, proposed the first Indian railway scheme in 1845.

We tend to think of the world of nations as the natural order of things. The age of empires now seems archaic, doomed by history. But empires actually organised social space for most of human history.

Indian photojournalist and member of the prestigious Magnum Photos, Raghu Rai, is better-known to Bangladeshis for the photos he took during our Liberation War in 1971.

The Armenian Church of the Holy Resurrection (1781) on Church Road in Old Dhaka highlights a rich tapestry of the Armenian footprint on the commerce, politics, and education of East Bengal.

In 1921, a small delegation of Indians reached Moscow from Berlin. The team consisted of Bengali and Marathi émigrés who had earlier been nationalist conspirators or “terrorists” who had regrouped in Berlin, but were now eager to participate in the Third Congress of the Communist International.

Did you know that the famous Bara Katra, located in the old quarters of Dhaka city, was built to be an exact replica of the garden of paradise? It is also little known that its patron Mughal Prince Shah Shuja (1616–1661AD) was not satisfied with the structure and thus ordered it to be used as a caravanserai instead.

Dr Md Shahjahan Mian, Professor of the Department of Bengali, Dhaka University talks to Shamsuddoza Sajen and Moyukh Mahtab about the importance of studying and preserving old Bengali manuscripts to write a comprehensive history of the Bengali speaking region.

Liz Chater, a family history researcher based in the UK, has been working on the Armenian communities in South Asia since 2010. Currently, she is working with the Armenian Church of the Holy Resurrection in Armanitola on the Bangladesh Armenian Heritage Project, which aims to "build the stories, starting from the ground up" of the Armenian communities of Bangladesh and India. In an interview over email with Moyukh Mahtab, she talks of her own heritage, which led her to her research interest, and of her past and present projects.

Unlike Mughal Emperor Akbar's planned capital at Fatehpur Sikri in Agra or Shah Jahan's capital in Delhi—both constructed with a unitary concept over a relatively short time span—Mughal-era provincial capitals like Dhaka (or Lahore) grew piecemeal, during an extended period of time.

On a languid summer afternoon way back in 1973, after a hearty lunch I had settled down comfortably in bed and started to flip through the pages of the latest issue of the prestigious The Illustrated Weekly of India,

January 10 was the birth anniversary of Binod Bihari Chowdhury, the anti-colonial revolutionary famous for his participation in the Chittagong Armoury Raid led by Masterda Surya Sen. Binod Bihari passed away on April 10, 2013. This week, In Focus publishes an interview with the revolutionary, which was originally published in The Daily Star's Weekend Magazine in 2010.

First a disclaimer: this piece does not include any monstrous crocodile that will eat you up the moment you get into its terrain. It is about our national psyche that harbours fear against going out to sea and thinking of our deltaic islands as the limit of our political existence.