History of the Present: Dhaka

I have long wondered how people develop their attachments to or perceptions of the cities they inhabit. How does a migrant navigate the uncertain intermingling of mobilities between and memories of cities? What shapes a city dweller’s frame of mind in response to a birthplace or an adopted home? What does it take to make us love or despise one or the other? Most importantly, how do we acknowledge that the cities we claim as ours are constructed, to use Italo Calvino’s words, out of “desires and fears … their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else?” ¹ Cities are destined — aren’t they? — to project illusions of always being “something else,” leaving residents in perpetually provisional relation to their surrounds.

What shapes a city dweller’s frame of mind in response to a birthplace or an adopted home?

Let me posit these questions and assumptions more particularly, in the context of the city where I came as a young person to study architecture. For almost a decade in the 1980s and early ’90s, having moved away from my family in the port city of Chattogram on the Bay of Bengal, I lived in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka. It was an era of change, as this quaint regional center remade itself into a cacophonous megalopolis. Curiously, I remained intellectually unaware of the strong winds of modernization sweeping the place — until I left it. We were not, as architecture students, well trained as urban analysts, and I was, like my peers, more interested in individual buildings — sometimes in their falsely splendid isolation — and less in a macro view of the city as such. Louis Kahn’s masterpiece, the Parliament building at Sher-e-Bangla Nagar at the geographic heart of Dhaka, completed a year before my arrival, was the undisputed focus of our spatial inquiries. Only much later, when I lived oceans away, did I comprehend, ironically, that the maturation of this boisterous metropolis had coincided with my own arrival in adulthood and the emergence of my beneficial perplexities about what a city is or could be.

It has been a mystery to me why and how I retroactively became fascinated with Dhaka, taking it as my perennial subject, walking its congested streets like Baudelaire’s flaneur, writing about the “magic realism” of its breakneck modernization. To this day, I can’t pinpoint what aspects of the city seemed most interesting to me as a student, as I unconsciously sought Calvino’s “something else.” I think instead of the elusive, palimpsestic vision offered by the Bengali writer Akhtaruzzaman Elias in his 1986 novel Chilekothar Sepai (The Soldier in an Attic), which is set against the backdrop of the 1960s secessionist movement in what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. The protagonist, Osman, muses:

Has anyone ever seen such a massive procession in Dhaka? … Days pass, city population explodes, city expands. But who are these people in the procession? Are they the same people who breathe like me and eat fish and rice like common Bengalis? So many of them seem unfamiliar! Who are they really? Is it possible that people from all historical eras have joined the march? ²

Elias’s Dhaka is composed of many moving parts, an assemblage both traumatized and inspired not only by the past and present but by intimations of the future, as historical actors from different eras convene in an imaginary, redemptive time. I have always felt a kinship with this uncanny concatenation.

It has been a mystery to me why I retroactively became fascinated with Dhaka, taking it as my perennial subject.

For in many ways Dhaka and I grew up together. We were “handcuffed to history,” as Salman Rushdie writes in Midnight’s Children (1981), destined to grapple in synergy with the contradictory meanings of modernity in South Asia. I reckon that my love-hate relationship with this sui generis world capital has been a slow-motion, retrospective enactment of penitence for always, inevitably, failing to grasp the full cosmopolitanism, the resilience and absurdity, of this city as it has flourished in broad daylight, before my eyes, over the last four decades.

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As in many other postcolonial countries, the 1980s in Bangladesh were intense, characterized predominantly by military rule. The former East Pakistan had gained independence in 1971, after nine months of genocidal war. This was followed, in 1975, by the brutal assassination of the founding leader of the independent state, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman — a crisis generating further political turmoil and still more hectic changes in social mores. At the fag end of the ’80s, as the Berlin Wall fell and the neoliberal world order loosened trade barriers and encouraged global capital to move more freely than ever, urbanization arrived with gusto in a society that had been mostly agrarian. Bangladesh’s urban population was only seven percent in 1971. The population of Dhaka alone grew nearly ten percent in the following decades, and by the early ’90s, it was more than six million. By 2022, topping eighteen million persons according to some estimates, Dhaka joined New York City, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Mexico City, São Paulo, Lagos, Cairo, Delhi, and a handful of others on the list of global megacities. (According to the United Nations Center for Human Settlements, these are “urban agglomerations” of more than ten million people.)

Growth in Dhaka has been ad-hoc, provisional, organic, pluralistic. Call it fluid-mechanics urbanization.

The city has continued to “agglomerate” at staggering rates. Wherever there is space or opportunity, people arrive as if drawn gravitationally to take advantage of it; high population density and hodgepodge expansion swallow everything in a vortex of land speculation, building booms, dystopian squatters’ enclaves, and environmental degradation. Growth has been ad-hoc, provisional, organic, pluralistic, ambiguous, ingenious — what I call a fluid-mechanics urbanization — even as traditional ways of living with, around, and on the water have slowly dissipated. If modernity, as the American political scientist Marshall Berman has written, is “a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity [that] pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal,” then Dhaka continues to unfold in a quintessentially modern flux, in which optimism and pessimism, adaptation and dysfunction, affluence and poverty flourish without clear boundaries — even without offering distinct ways of experiencing their oppositions ³ It is impossible to be binary in Dhaka.

It is tempting to see in all this a failure to develop a livable urban center, in the western sense of functionality and zoning. Dhaka ranks near the top of the global air-pollution index, and close to the bottom in surveys of livable cities. ⁴ The benefits of planned growth — walkability, public transportation, boulevards and ring roads, setbacks and height restrictions, parks, public health facilities, traffic control, pollution control — are common challenges.

It would be futile to circumscribe analysis within the predictable limits of humane good city versus dangerous bad city, or indigenous city versus neoliberal city.

But in succumbing to the temptation to read this megacity as a “failure,” one misses the grassroots reality of what the architect Rahul Mehrotra calls “local logic” in South Asian urban centers. ⁵ Under the congestion and the grit, there surges a raw human energy, a will to grind along and eke out existence in extreme conditions. One visitor may see in today’s Dhaka an irredeemable maze, an apocalyptic wasteland marked by huddling masses, speeding vehicles, and incessant noise. But another will view it as a resilient shahor — the Bengali word for “city” — that could even now be transformed through a happy marriage of political goodwill and sustainable planning. As Mehrotra has written about the paradigmatic South Asian metropolis: “Here the idea of a city is an elastic urban condition, not a grand vision, but a grand adjustment.” ⁶

My point is that, in thinking about Dhaka as a paradigm for what a city is, or is not, or has been, or has not been, one must contend with a global history, and not with a false narrative of isolation. East Bengal developed, from its origins in the first millennium C.E. to the 1970s, as an agricultural hinterland, without a sustained record of city-building or civitas in a traditional sense. ⁷ Nevertheless, a global history of Dhaka would show how this settlement has flourished, across the centuries, in regard to trade, migration, military invasions, and the movements of religious communities and nomadic tribes. Just as London’s history is hardly confined to the geographic and political entity called England, or that of New York City to the United States alone, Dhaka’s history cannot be constricted to Bengal. Dhaka’s story spreads across a larger canvas, parts of which have yet to be filled in.

Any city is an epic of encounters, blendings, adaptations, triumphs, and tragedies, and any city’s historiography will remain a perpetual work in progress. Dhaka should not and cannot be an exception. When I walk the streets in neighborhoods overflowing with people, buildings, and traffic — Motijheel, Gulistan, Mirpur, Mohammadpur — I understand anew that it would be futile to (attempt to) circumscribe my analysis within the predictable limits of humane good city versus dangerous bad city, or indigenous city versus neoliberal global city. The nouveau riche café culture of the Gulshan neighborhood feels like a light year away from Karail, the capital’s largest “informal settlement,” even though they are minutes apart. The cliché that prosperity and poverty live side by side is glaringly inadequate to study such a pixilated economic geography. Dhaka calls for new types of urban analyses and fresh terminologies. Like other metropolises, especially in the Global South now and in the future, Dhaka will remain a place where urban logics are tested and adjusted, constantly.

Accidental and Reluctant Urbanism

Key to Dhaka’s mega-development since the later 1980s has been the readymade garments industry. North American and European multinationals had begun to outsource lucrative contracts, and soon Bangladeshi entrepreneurs were mass-producing shirts, trousers, sweaters, and other items for export. Echoing the rural-to-urban migrations that, in the mid-to-late 19th century drastically expanded mercantile cities in the west, Dhaka experienced a homegrown industrial revolution, as people across the country left their villages for work in a metropolis that was increasingly connected to other centers of erstwhile empire. The journalist James J. Novak hints at this global past:

It is hard to recall today that for 190 years Bengal and Bangladesh were as much a part of the English-speaking world as were London, New York, Ottawa, and Canberra. Over nearly two centuries, English law, English science and education, English art and architecture were as much a part of Dhaka as of Manchester. One can still glimpse the remnants of this heritage of Dhaka, that mixture of Greek, Roman, and Gothic architecture that the British used to grade their own cities. ⁸

Economic migrants pouring out of the hinterlands hoped, on one hand, to escape the uncertainties of agricultural labor amidst environmental challenges like river erosion. On the other, they were eager to pursue new opportunities and better standards of living. As the historian Willem Van Schendel wrote as recently as 2009: “The mobility that had always characterized the people of the Bengal delta is now more urban than ever.” ⁹

For us as architecture students in the volatile 1980s, myopic focus on “great” buildings distracted from this demographic change. Our professional orientation did not, however, preclude thinking and arguing about the military government’s dictatorial stranglehold, or the last throes of Cold War geopolitics. All the while, globalization was affecting us culturally as much (or more) as it was politically. We listened to world music — Michael Jackson became our musical avatar — and watched Hollywood films on VCR and American series like Dallas on television in the comfort of our dorm rooms; we applauded in real time the spectacular skills of the Argentine football superstar Diego Maradona and other World Cup heroes. The world was becoming smaller, and cultures and economies more intricately enmeshed.

Dhaka experienced a homegrown industrial revolution, as people left villages for work in a metropolis connected to other centers of erstwhile empire.

I was a doctoral student in the U.S., studying histories of American urbanization, when I began to think more seriously about the urbanity I had experienced in Dhaka. Perhaps surprisingly, one focus for my fascination was a painting exhibited at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, a work celebrated in its time, though little remembered now: Breaking Home Ties, by the Irish American painter Thomas Hovenden. How could a genre scene from the Gilded Age, in which a small-town American lad bids goodbye to his mother, have foreshadowed so accurately the “home ties” to be broken a century later in rural Bangladesh? Hovenden’s youth is a most unlikely and yet apt precursor to the young people — many of them teenage girls — who were departing their villages for work in Dhaka’s garment factories. All were embarking, in melancholia and optimism, on an uncertain journey to the rising frontier that is the big city.

America’s urban population rose from seven percent in 1820 to more than 50 percent in 1920, and I began to notice that the scene had replayed repeatedly in American art. ¹⁰ A generation after Hovenden, for instance, in a charcoal drawing titled The Lure of the City (c. 1925), architect and illustrator Hugh Ferriss in effect repositioned Hovenden’s callow youth in the chiaroscuro eruption of a neogothic “metropolis of tomorrow.” ¹¹ Just recently, while shooting footage for a documentary on Dhaka’s density in the uber-congested shopping complex where the New Market and Gausia Market intersect, it occurred to me that George Bellows’s painting New York, 1911, had been reincarnated. ¹² I sometimes think, too, of Howl, the American poet Allen Ginsberg’s paean of existential angst to the extremities of 20th-century life. “Howl 2.0” could be written in Dhaka:

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? ….

Robot apartments! Invisible suburbs! Skeleton treasures! Blind capitals! Demonic industries! Spectral nations! Invincible madhouses! ¹³

In Dhaka, the village girl who travels to seek her fortune in the factories — the courageous and entrepreneurial citizen of this “spectral nation” —  finds employment sewing T-shirts or knitwear. The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association reports that the industry employs over four million workers, the majority of them female; their output accounts for three-quarters of all registered exports, and plays a robust role in raising the gross domestic product. ¹⁴ Referring to the city’s precolonial reputation as producer of a unique cotton-like fabric known as Dacca muslin — and, in general, as a textile hub attracting merchants from all over Eurasia and China — Van Schendel wryly noted in 2009: “After a lapse of some two centuries — and under vastly changed conditions — Bengalis were once again producing textiles for the world market.” ¹⁵

The home ties broken in the 1980s and ’90s helped to establish a new culture of women’s economic independence. It was the first era in the country’s history in which mass employment opportunities were available to women, who traditionally did not work outside the home. Young women became increasingly likely to delay marriage and childbirth; to attain higher levels of literacy and numeracy; and to enroll in school. Parents’ ability to educate younger girls increased. ¹⁶ (Government policies and nongovernmental organizations’ capacity-building work in rural areas have further helped to empower women.) Visit industrial neighborhoods during morning rush hour in Dhaka today, and a common spectacle remains the procession of young women on their way to work. Indeed, as I was writing this essay, factory workers were agitating in the streets of an industrial suburb, demanding a pay raise.

In these recent demonstrations, a young female garment worker was killed. I thought of how the urban underclass might seek justice, equity, and an alternative existence inside the hubbub itself. Inevitably, I was reminded of a poem, “The world is dear to me,” by the Bangladeshi poet Mahadev Saha. The speaker yearns for refuge in an intimate corner of the megalopolis:

Dhaka is dear to me, but I live

In a village called Azimpur, a tiny place in the city.

It can be called a village or a tranquil, peaceful neighborhood.

Dhaka is faraway, I know nothing of this Dhaka. ¹⁷

 

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The transformations of the last generation have given rise not only to a class of newly urbanized young women, but to wealthy industrialists and a status-conscious bourgeoisie. However, from a policy point of view, the city has not accommodated its radical growth. Infrastructure remains a work in progress. Many of Dhaka’s core institutions and monuments were built during the British colonial period, including the administrative establishment of Dacca Municipality in 1864, and construction the same year of the embankment promenade called Buckland Bund along the River Buriganga. But even in 1971, the city retained a rural ambiance. Despite prior attempts to create a disciplined urban morphology — among them, a comprehensive ecological plan put forward by the Scottish biologist and town planner Sir Patrick Geddes in the 1910s, and the First Master Plan proposed by the London-based architects and town planning consultants Charles Anthony Minoprio, Hugh Spencely, and Peter Macfarlane in the 1950s — responses at policy level were, and are, anemic.

Mass employment was made available to Bangladeshi women, helping to establish a new culture of economic independence.

Impoverished migrants have long found refuge in what the journalist Doug Saunders calls “arrival city,” leftover places where daily lives are driven by the survival entrepreneurship of the underclass.¹⁸ Nevertheless, today, when I roam Dhaka’s western edge, defined by the sinuous flow of the Turag River and its overlapping wetlands, I am reminded that urban margins are never one thing alone. Here, the points where land and water meet play host, as they always do, to myriad experiments in built form and community life — from makeshift bamboo housing perched on stilts to high-end social clubs, from heavy industries to educational institutions.

This, then, is Mehrotra’s “grand adjustment,” unfolding in real time. I am reminded of Rem Koolhaas and his discussion of an urbanist “middle path” that he claimed to have discovered while studying Lagos — “a protean organism that creatively defies constrictive Western ideas of urban order.” ¹⁹ As the Dutch architect noted in 1997, in an unpublished report titled “Lagos: How It Works”:

What is now fascinating is how, with some level of self-organization, there is a strange combination of extreme underdevelopment and development … what particularly amazes me is how the kinds of infrastructure of modernity in the city trigger off all sorts of unpredictable improvised conditions, so that there is a kind of mutual dependency. ²⁰

The American journalist George Packer criticized Koolhaas’s trip to the Nigerian capital as “tourism by car,” yet Koolhaas saw in the urbanism of developing economies not a predictable western bogeyman or harbinger of Armageddon, but a realistic image of what to expect in megacities of the future. ²¹ By 2050, three-quarters of the world’s population will live in urban areas, and most future megacities will be in developing countries. The experiments that will define this future, I would argue, cannot today be experienced more viscerally than in Dhaka.

The Follies of Dhaka’s Origin Myth

In 2003, in India, in a landmark revisionist ruling based on the report of an expert committee, the Calcutta High Court declared that Job Charnock (1630-1693), an English administrator with the East India Company, must not be considered the sole founder of Calcutta. After all, “an important trading center” had existed on the site long before Charnock began his colonial project. ²² The high court argued, in other words, that it is not possible to pinpoint the exact origin-point of a city. This is not a narrowly academic or legalistic question, because how a city evolved historically helps to explain how it might develop in the future. The politics of origin shape policies for growth.

In Dhaka, the very ideas of founders and beginnings are confounded. ²³ Prevailing mythology teaches that the city is four centuries old. The 400th anniversary of its establishment, circa 1610, as a Mughal administrative hub in the Bengal subah (or province) was celebrated with much fanfare fifteen years ago. In 2011, offering authoritative support to the idea that Dhaka was founded in the 17th century, the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh published 400 Years of Capital Dhaka and Beyond. The three-volume compendium recapitulates a prevailing view succinctly stated by the historian Abdul Karim in his 1964 study Dacca: The Mughal Capital. This is Dhaka’s legend about itself:

Though Dacca as a district is a British creation, the history of the city of Dacca goes back to the early Mughal period. Dhaka became the capital of the Bengal Subah of the Mughal empire during the Subahdari of Islam Khan Chishti (1608–1613) who not only established the capital here but changed its name to Jahangirnagar, after the name of the reigning Mughal Emperor Jahangir. ²⁴

Islam Khan Chishti belonged to the Fatehpur Sikri Sufi family, and was a grandson of Emperor Akbar’s spiritual mentor, Sheikh Selim Chishti. He was Subahdar (or governor) of Bengal, and it is said that he undertook an eastward journey along the Ganges, during which he grew concerned about the military vulnerability of the extant provincial capital, Rajmahal. Built on the riverbank, the town was prone to attack. Islam Kahn sought to move the Mughals’ Bengali capital to a safer location. Eventually, he chose Dhaka.

What factors comprised this choice? In History of Bengal (1813), Charles Stewart argues that Dhaka offered a superior geo-strategic point from which to surveil lower Bengal — especially the southern coastal belt, which had been ravaged by Portuguese pirates and by the Maghs, clans who swept down from the hill tracts bordering Myanmar. More recently, the historian Sirajul Islam has proposed that key considerations were centralization of political power and comprehension of Dhaka’s potential as a trading hub. “The Mughals did not develop the place as a premier city of the empire ex nihilo,” he writes.

The supreme reason was Dhaka’s commercial prospects. If, formerly, the capital cities of Gaur, Pandua, Rajmahal, Ghoraghat, Sonargaon, and others lost their significance and soon became merged with a rural regime, it was because those cities were planned and set up for military purposes alone. None of these places had any connection with the commercial lifeline of the country. ²⁵

Triumphalist identification with the purported Mughal origins of Dhaka remains powerful for historians in East Bengal.

But Dhaka did enjoy such connections. In Oriental Commerce (1813), William Milburn states that Pliny the Younger had observed the “presence of Dhaka’s textiles in the Mediterranean trade as early as 73 A.D.” ²⁶ Dhaka was known along the Silk Road, as muslin and fine embroidery were coveted in medieval European palaces as much in Sultani and Mughal durbars, or royal courts. It is likely that a modest commercial hub developed here in the 11th and 12th centuries, during the epoch of the Hindu revivalist Sena rulers; in the 12th century, Ballal Sen built the Dhakeshwari temple beside the Buriganga, suggesting the existence of a sizable religious community. The settlement remained significant in the 15th and 16th centuries under the independent Sultans of Bengal. It is believed to have been a revenue collection center during the reign of Sultan Barbak Shah (1459–1474); Man Singh (1550–1614) realized the civil and military leverage to be enjoyed from a base in Dhaka and made it a thana, or military district. A mosque erected during the reign of Sultan Nasir al-Din Mahmud Shah I (1433–59) still stands as testament to significant building activities in pre-Mughal times.

Despite these centuries of commercial, political, and religious activity, a general obfuscation of pre-Mughal history — and a correspondingly triumphalist identification with purported Mughal origin — remain powerful for historians in East Bengal. For them, Dhaka was transformed from a rudimentary janapada (or settlement) into a city on that particular date circa 1610, when Islam Kahn is said to have moved his civil and military establishment to the northern bank of the Buriganga River.

It remains a riddle whether this belief is a byproduct of Muslim identity politics, or attests to the scarcity of archival and archaeological sources, or derives from a combination of the two. Granted, in the imaginations of both the northern-India-based Mughals (who would rule in Bengal through the mid-19th century) and the Kolkata-centric British Raj (formally established in 1858), the region was swampy, inhospitable, and corrupt. ²⁷ Such disparaging views of Dhaka’s topography and moral tone alike have long reinforced a general image of city life that was endemic in an agro-pastoral society, i.e., as rife with debauchery and decay.

In 1991, the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh held an international symposium titled Dhaka: Past Present Future. ²⁸ The book that resulted opens with Abdul Karim’s essay “Origin and Development of Mughal Dhaka.” But not a single authoritative article on the urban history of pre-Mughal Dhaka is included. Today, more than 30 years later, world-class research on the site before the arrival of the Mughals remains in short supply. Why? What drives this hesitance to consider the pre-Mughal settlement a city? Is it merely the absence of enterprising historians who would be willing to undertake the arduous archival, archaeological, and epigraphic research? Is it intellectual indolence? Or is the knowledge gap a curious reflection of surrender to hegemonic identity politics embedded in an Islamizing historiography? These questions provoke still broader inquiries about urban historiography, in that a void in historical knowledge can speak volumes about a city, its people, and their political worldview. Gaps in knowledge can themselves become an epistemology. ²⁹ Such lacunae shape the limits of what we can or are willing to know.

A Battle Between Land and Water

In 2014, I took a boat ride, organized by my colleague Akter Mahmud, an urban planner, along the Turag River. The Turag is chameleonic, changing its personality with the seasons. During the monsoon, river and floodplains merge to form what looks like a sea. During the dry season, the river shrinks to its monsoon-opposite and sinks into its channel. The human geographer Amitangshu Acharya has memorably written: “In the Bengal delta, land exists where water allows it.” ³⁰ Dhaka used to exist where rivers, rivulets, canals, wetlands, and floodplains allowed it. No more. Today a developmentalist mindset instrumentalizes land to conquer water, as people and corporations — those with financial and political clout — exploit the shifting land-water line to “colonize” rivers and wetlands. What Mahmud and I saw along the Turag were industrial sites, private residences, colleges, and shopping malls erupting across an existentially challenged riverine geography, in blatant disregard for the city’s fundamentally aquatic persona.

Bengal’s rivers have traditionally shaped the personality of its people. As the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen writes in his memoir:

Thoughts about the challenges of living around course-shifting rivers took root in my mind, and the intimate combination of beauty and danger would continue to fascinate me. But at the same time I was gripped by the physical grandeur of the rivers and the excitement of life on them. This dual attitude to rivers … is innate in the minds of many people in east Bengal. ³¹

Most historical accounts similarly describe Dhaka as a hydro-ecological settlement. In his A Sketch of the Topography & Statistics of Dacca (1840), the civil servant James Taylor compared it with Venice:

The city stands upon the northern bank of the Boorigonga [Buriganga], about eight miles above its confluence with the Dullaserry [Dhaleswari]. The river, which is here deep and navigable, by large boats, expands in the season of inundation to a considerable breadth, and give to Dacca with its minarets and spacious buildings, the appearance, like that of Venice in the west, of a city rising from the surface of the water. ³²

In 1906, during the inchoate period known as the Partition of Bengal (a territorial reorganization under the viceroyalty of Lord Curzon), Dhaka became the capital of the newly formed province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. A British diplomat noted:

Variable as its site has been, the chief city of Eastern Bengal for over two thousand years has never been far removed from the junction of the great rivers where Megna and Ganges, Brahmaputra and Ishamutti meet at the head of the delta, a hundred miles from the sea … here to-day, scarce 20 miles away, still stands the time-worn city of Dacca — the once imperial capital of all Bengal, which, so long fallen from its early greatness, now again assumes the proud position of a capital. ³³

More than a hundred years later, Saunders described the city’s political ecology of water in regard to aquatic threats faced constantly by the marginal classes: “Here, on the fast-expanding southwest corner of Dhaka, on the edge of an island that was swampy farmland a few years earlier, the houses are built up on bamboo stilts, east Asian style, so the inevitable floods won’t wash them away.” ³⁴

Frenzied gentrification supersedes ecological preservation. Demand for buildable sites gives rise to wetland-filling and river encroachment.

Activist movements in favor of environmental protection did emerge near the turn of the last century. The Bangladesh Environmental Network (founded in 1998) and the Bangladesh Poribesh Andolon (or Environment Movement, founded in 2000) have built popular awareness regarding threats to ecological health. In 2000, the government ratified the Natural Water Reservoir Conservation Act to stop mafioso-style land-grabbers. Despite this important act, the Bangladesh Institute of Planners reports that, since the era of independence, Dhaka has lost a whopping 36 percent of its water bodies, as illegally created “land” is built up with housing, industries, institutions, clubs, and pleasure gardens. In 1991, the Real Estate and Housing Association of Bangladesh, or REHAB, was formed with eleven members. By 2015, according to one estimate, more than 1,500 real estate companies were operating in the nation. Earlier this year, the Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation — an organization meant to be at the forefront of agricultural modernization and, by extension, the country’s water management — filled in eleven acres of ecologically precious floodplains for construction of its own office building! (Fortunately, as a result of public interest litigation by the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association, the High Court stopped this construction.)

Frenzied gentrification supersedes cries for preservation of the city’s ecological substrate; the demand for buildable sites has given rise to a senseless culture of wetland-filling and river encroachment. The land-water geography that in the early 17th century attracted Islam Khan — the geography that Amartya Sen describes as “innate in the minds” of the region’s inhabitants — has all but disappeared, while soaring real estate prices have made both legal and illegal occupation of wetlands, rivers, and canals highly profitable.

The governmental agencies responsible for sustainable growth have either misunderstood or ignored the environmental cost of this excessive infill, and the peculiar hydro-geographic fluidity that once characterized Dhaka has been inverted; the more natural drainages are disrupted by development, the more water-logged the city becomes. Many times I have thought that the coming “war” in Dhaka, as in other cities in Bangladesh, will be a struggle over land and water — a struggle to be waged between people and corporations; between corporations and corporations; between corporations and the state. The ecocide I witnessed that day in 2014 has haunted me ever since.

The urban character of Dhaka is precisely the absence of a discernibly unified character; its character stems from its unpredictability.

Even so, it is not possible to assert that all construction in Dhaka is misguided, or that its wildly increasing density is itself a deficit. Consider Khilkhet, an area on the city’s northeastern edge. A zone of intense development on reclaimed lands and low-lying fields, Khilkhet is a frontier of environmental risks, centered on a massive housing estate called Lake City Concord. Such developments, often presented to the public with exotic names, invoke lush greenery, blue water, and familial happiness. The reality, needless to say, is more conflicted. Beyond Khilkhet, a vast prairie of kash bon or low-lying agricultural lands, still striated with swamps and rivulets, has become a postmodern geography of housing-estate signage, sometimes rising straight from water that is soon to be filled in for American-style suburbs.

Yet the dystopian cramming of residents into proliferating apartment blocks is counterbalanced, in places like Lake City Concord, by a city-within-a-city intimacy, a community ethos that pervades the complex. The towers’ ground floors feature convenience stores and other community-oriented zones; pedestrian paths in open spaces between towers, while not the most idyllic, are abuzz with children playing and health-conscious parents waltzing along. How do we reconcile the immorality of building on ecologically fragile hydro-geographical floodplains with the Jane Jacobsian community vibes that flourish at Lake City Concord? I have visited Khilkhet on multiple occasions, and every time I leave, I find myself more puzzled than before.

An Uncertain Coda

A few years ago, I was in a car in Dhaka at night, going to a friend’s house. Suddenly a pickup truck whizzed by, carrying a white horse as its cargo. The beautiful animal stood still, unfazed, leveling a magisterial gaze at the cityscape as it flashed past. I looked on, mesmerized by the surreal whiteness of the horse against the frenzied backdrop of Dhaka noir.

Was it an animal god traversing the unruly city upon a hurtling throne? Was it a chariot in which the roles of vehicle and creature had reversed, symbolizing the city as a stage where dramas unfold without plots or legible meanings? The spectacle reminded me of a popular Dhaka-themed song by the local band Chirkut:

The poet smiles

Money floats

In the city of old Ganges

Sky, why do you cry above mountainous buildings

False smile

False cry

In hidden streets,

Green signal, red wine

From wall to wall …

This city, magic city.

The urban character of Dhaka is precisely the absence of a discernibly unified character; its character stems from its unpredictability. Understanding this city requires the acknowledgment of its uncertainty and, to some degree, its reluctance to fit neatly into a preordained notion of order, while avoiding any romantic tendency to glorify chaos as beauty. Dhaka’s appeal, and repulsion, are exerted through its ever-shifting abilities to adjust within binding matrices, its unfinished and unfinishable stories.