Dhaka

Where it is

Dhaka stands on the Buriganga, a channel of the lower Ganges–Brahmaputra system, near the middle of the Bengal delta. The city is a few metres above sea level on ground the rivers made and still remake; it is ringed by rivers on most sides, and the low ground between them floods. It is among the most densely populated large cities in the world, and the constraint on it is not land in the abstract but land that stays dry.

The land and water around it

• The Burigangariver

  The river the old city faces. It is severely polluted by tannery and industrial discharge, and dry-season flow is low, so what it carries is concentrated rather than diluted.

• The delta floodplaindelta

  Flat, low and wet. Roughly a fifth of the country floods in a normal year and far more in a bad one, which makes flooding a routine condition rather than an emergency.

• The Madhupur tractplateau

  Slightly raised older ground the city was founded on and has grown along. In a delta a few metres of elevation is the difference between a district and a floodplain, so the city's shape follows this terrace.

Its history, in short

Dhaka was the Mughal provincial capital of Bengal from 1610, when Bengal was among the wealthiest regions of the empire and its muslin was traded across Eurasia. The capital moved to Murshidabad in 1704 and the city declined; under Company and then British rule the muslin industry collapsed, for reasons argued over ever since. Dhaka became the capital of East Pakistan in 1947 and the focus of the Bengali language movement, whose 1952 killings are commemorated internationally. It became the capital of independent Bangladesh in 1971. Since the 1980s a garment industry has made it a centre of global clothing manufacture, with the growth, the migration and the industrial disasters that came with that.

Timeline

Dates are shown on a timeline rather than as changing shapes on the map. The globe draws modern boundaries only, and tinting a modern outline to stand for a historical one would state something we cannot source.

Places that carry meaning

• The Shaheed Minar1963, rebuilt

  The monument to those killed in 1952, and the focus of 21 February each year. It has been demolished and rebuilt more than once, which is itself part of what it commemorates.

• Lalbagh Fort1678, unfinished

  A Mughal fort abandoned mid-construction after the governor's daughter died, according to the traditional account. It marks the city's Mughal high point and its interruption in the same structure.

• The Historic Mosque City of Bagerhat15th century

  A fifteenth-century city of mosques in the delta's south-west, built by a Muslim saint-administrator and later swallowed by forest. Inscribed as World Heritage in 1985.

Learn the language here

1. 1Understand which languages are spoken hereDhaka is multilingual. Start with which languages are used, by whom, and for what — the phrase list only covers one of them.Written by Globe Quest
2. 2Learn 11 phrasesCurated everyday phrases for Dhaka, with audio and a written form.Written by Globe Quest
3. 3Say them out loudSpeaking practice with pronunciation feedback, one phrase at a time.Globe Quest material, your own additions
4. 4Come back to themSpaced review, so what you learned this week is still there next month.Written by Globe Quest

Check yourself

• What makes Bangladesh's founding unusual?

  It was founded substantially on a language claim rather than a religious one

  The 1947 partition was religious; the 1971 war that separated East from West Pakistan was not.

• Why has Dhaka grown along the Madhupur tract?

  It is slightly raised, so it stays dry

  In a delta a few metres of elevation decides what can be built on. The city's shape follows the terrace.

Worth arguing about

• A city that makes a large share of the world's clothes, at prices set elsewhere. Where should responsibility for a factory's safety sit?
• Two death tolls, orders of magnitude apart, for the same war. How should a reference work handle that?

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