The Yellow Butterfly: How Sheba shaped my world growing up
18 August 2026
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In Focus
What Bangladesh’s historic Test victory in Australia means for Bangladeshi-Australians
17 August 2026
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In Focus
Remembering Sumit Sarkar, a historian who questioned orthodoxy
17 August 2026
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In Focus
The unfinished histories of Partition
16 August 2026
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In Focus
In conversation with William Dalrymple / ‘Britain didn't conquer India’
15 August 2026
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In Focus
Sheikh Mujib’s killing: What the newspapers told and what they omitted
15 August 2026
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In Focus
Mirrors of Empire / The bureaucrats and intellectuals who shaped the Mughal Empire
14 August 2026
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In Focus
To feel Bengali, to think beyond Bengal: Dipankar Gupta in conversation
11 August 2026
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In Focus
Bangladesh's visual history / The enduring allure of vintage photographs
10 August 2026
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In Focus
The enduring legacy of the 2nd Bangladesh Liberation War Course
7 August 2026
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In Focus
The story of Gauhar Jaan
Gauhar Jaan aka Eileen Yeoward was not Armenian. Here’s why.
7 August 2020
Bulbbul: Not a revolutionary feminist consciousness
I want to begin by saying that I do not look towards Bollywood for feminist lessons or representations.
29 July 2020
The different intrigues and agendas tied to the Srebrenica Massacre
This year marked a quarter of a century since the Srebrenica Massacre of July 11, 1995, when around 8,000 Muslim men and boys were allegedly massacred by Bosnian Serbs—during the Bosnian War—in what has been described by some as the “worst war crime” to have taken place on European soil “since World War II”.
26 July 2020
Shirin Banu Mitil: A person out of a fairy-tale
Shirin Banu Mitil is my mother. This is the most beautiful truth of my life and the part of my identity that fills me with the most pride.
20 July 2020
Ignaz Semmelweis
One of the front-line defenses individuals have against the spread of the coronavirus can feel decidedly low-tech: hand-washing.
19 July 2020
Conservation of biodiversity and mother tongue during coronavirus pandemic
Fear, despair, pain are all around us in the time of corona. The outbreak of the virus has been devastating for humankind.
However, there has been an awakening about the importance of the natural ecosystem.
14 July 2020
The Bengal Cyclone of 1876: The Empire on Trial
Benjamin Kingsbury’s An Imperial Disaster: The Bengal Cyclone of 1876 (Hurst & Company, London, 2018) is a stimulating intervention in the history of disaster in British India.
12 July 2020
A colossus from Brahmanbaria
The Honorable Justice Nawab Sir Syed Shamsul Huda, KCIE, an illustrious son of Eastern Bengal (Bangladesh) was born in 1862, in the village of Gokarna, formerly in Comilla then a part of Hill Tipperah, in British India.
5 July 2020
Rethinking Dhaka's Urbanism: A Child's World in a Manmade City
In 1998, at Shangshad Chattar, an infant was relishing fresh air in the country’s largest and most emblematic civic-space.
28 June 2020
The road to Plassey
This paper argues, contrary to received wisdom, that the Plassey conspiracy leading to the British conquest of Bengal in 1757 was engineered and encouraged by the British who in their project of the revolution roped in an influential section of the Murshidabad darbar.
21 June 2020
The newly urban woman in Mrinal Sen's cinema
For the legendary Bengali auteur Mrinal Sen, cinema often went hand in hand with agitprop, meaning the use of political messaging as an aesthetic element.
14 June 2020
The Bangladeshi-Armenian Harneys of Dhaka
A brief on the Armenians of Dhaka: Regardless of the absence of any definitive chronicle on the advent of the Armenians in Bengal, particularly to Dhaka, historians today unanimously agree that the Armenians started to arrive in Bengal, from the late 17th century onwards.
7 June 2020
Anisuzzaman, the unexpected heir
Some legacies are merely handed down, transferred to a presumptive next-in-line by the inert push of the past. Other legacies are earned – and thus more truly owned – by those who, unforeseen and perhaps even unwelcome, rise up to claim them.
6 June 2020
On free speech and the imperatives of democracy
It is almost axiomatic that free speech is indispensable to democracy.
31 May 2020
COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis of isolation
COVID-19 has had an unprecedented effect on people all around the world and Bangladesh is no exception.
22 May 2020
The giants of the sea: all but gone
When we get there at the break of dawn, Cox’s Bazar is asleep and unexpectedly cold. Pinching at our cheek, making everyone scrunch up their noses. But reassurances drop in from right and left that the coast is rarely ever cold, for a long stretch anyway.
17 May 2020
Disappointment of a son
On 3rd May, after 12 am, I turned on my computer and began to write a short article regarding my missing father. I didn’t know back then that I was about to get a call and would be able to talk to my father in two hours.
11 May 2020
'LAST MAN STANDING'
Some of us speak words and these words become weapons. Some of use actions in our daily lives – gestures of kindness and compassion,
11 May 2020
Kajol might not be able to speak out, BUT WE MUST
Mysterious events surrounding the ‘disappearance’ and ‘recovery’ of photojournalist Shafiqul Islam Kajol are by now well known.
11 May 2020
What is a book, anyway?
In the Palace Museum of present-day Beijing, 10 stones of about 90 cm height and 60 cm diameter contain some ancient Chinese symbols.
3 May 2020