If you ever wanted to experience the living reality of the idiom ‘when it rains, it pours’, Bangladesh is the place to be. During the yearly south Asian monsoon, almost all the water collected by the Himalayas in Nepal, north/northeast India and Bhutan transits through Bangladesh on its journey to the Bay of Bengal, depositing life-giving minerals to the soil all along the Ganges Delta, the largest river delta in the world. It is here that the mountains literally crumble to the sea. This has resulted in Bangladesh’s flatland alluvial topography, which is the defining characteristic of the country except in the hilly regions of the southeast and northeast. The mighty Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers are called the Padma and the Jamuna in Bangladesh, and both of these massive rivers join several other smaller tributaries to eventually become the Lower Meghna, forming the great Gangetic Delta. At its widest point near Bhola Island, the river stretches to a yawning 12km-wide breadth on its final leg towards the sea. Seen from a boat, the distinctions between land, river, ocean and sky become decidedly uncertain.

If you come from a temperate climate you might be surprised to discover that despite the fact peak temperature varies between 20°C and 40°C, Bangladeshis recognise no fewer than six seasons over their landscape. Mostly these can be grouped into three smaller seasons. In the winter months of late October to February, conditions are comfortable and dry, with temperatures staying somewhere between 15°C and 25°C, except in December and January, when cold spells grip the land and impenetrable fogs linger well into the morning. From March to May, the heat and humidity build to a point where nearly everything is sweating and hot, and temperatures climb sometimes upwards to a stifling 40°C. Finally, everyone breathes a sigh of relief when the rain bladder breaks and the monsoonal rains reduce temperatures to a more tolerable level through the months of June to September. Each season has a brief transitional period, giving rise to the reason Bangladeshis name six seasons.

Bangladeshi terracotta is visible on its many Hindu and Buddhist temples.

To see the Bangladesh of today against its glorious history, it is both enlightening and depressing to imagine that Bengal used to occupy such a place of glory and power in the subcontinent. During the 16th century, its wealth supported the Mughal Empire, and at its zenith in the mid-18th century, Bengal’s cotton and silk textiles were in demand worldwide with Dutch, Portuguese, British and French traders landing on its shores. However, the late colonial period marked a substantial change as the British proved themselves successful at draining Bengal of its wealth and destroying its cotton industry. Despite its past triumphs, 1943 proved to be the watershed year in this demise, when a terrible famine gripped the people, leaving an estimated three to five million dead from starvation, a tragedy from which modern Bangladesh has yet to fully recover. To understand such atmospheric heights and catastrophic falls, let us start from the beginning.

The British in Bengal

Europeans began landing on south Asia’s shores during the 16th century in an attempt to circumvent trading middlemen throughout central Asia. Other than establishing the region’s first foreign trading ports, the Portuguese managed to earn themselves reputations as fierce marauders but they never became anything more substantial than that. They were soon followed by Dutch, English and French traders, who fought wars with one another all over the subcontinent for positions of trading power. By the 17th century, the British East India Company had gained the upper hand in this conflict and had established a growing trading port in Calcutta. Despite the disintegration of the Mughal Empire through the early part of the 18th century, strong leadership in Bengal kept it economically powerful, further strengthened by its European trading connections.

Liberation War

After the initial conflict broke out, a new government was formed in exile on the Indian border, and the freedom fighters, taking the title Mukti Bahini, began a guerrilla war. Although the fighters were never a cohesive force that could actually stop the Pakistani rampage, they instead served to harass them at every turn. The fighters were also aided by small pockets of anonymous resistance that remained hidden among the general populace and achieved small victories, including cutting Dhaka’s power in a daring raid.

After so much blood was shed in the creation of Bangladesh, it is now promising to see that after almost four decades, the young political system has advanced and evolved, as its latest leaders have at least managed to finish their political terms without being assassinated. Indeed, the governance system of the country still has a long way to go.

Dhaka, from the air

Since the inception of Bangladesh, the country has received approximately US$40 billion in foreign aid. Today it’s pleasing to acknowledge that economic progress is being made and things are heading in a good direction, despite some unfathomable hindrances and political mismanagement.

In the early days, the country in fact shunned foreign money under the direction of Mujib, and then nationalised a great deal of its industries under his socialist whims, a burden that future political leaders had to painfully shed, with one notable example being the death of Bangladesh’s jute industry in the last decade. Zia, on the other hand, used foreign money to incite economic growth, including the introduction of new infrastructure to aid the process. On balance, foreign aid dependence is now slowly decreasing and Bangladesh’s development initiatives have met with mixed successes.

Development and the evolution of its concepts have long been tied to the fate and history of modern Bangladesh. Any discussion of its effects will be laced with opinions on whether the aid enterprise – and the billions of dollars associated with it – have been effective in improving the conditions of Bangladesh’s millions.

On one hand, 1971 saw a broken, war-battered country with a massive population and no resources or infrastructure to speak of. The government had not yet stabilised, and the billions of aid dollars that poured in surely did land in the pockets of corrupt officials.

Bangladesh’s people are at once its best resource and its most bothersome burden, as the population has skyrocketed over its short history. When Bangladesh was East Bengal in 1905, there were an estimated 29 million people living within its borders, a number which increased to 44 million just 50 years later when the region became East Pakistan. By 1981, the census reported a population of 81 million, and since then that number has almost doubled. Today, estimates range between 151 million and 155 million people, resulting in a population density of over 1,050 souls per km². This makes Bangladesh the most densely populated nation in the world (excluding several city-states like Hong Kong, Singapore or Monaco), and it feels like that when dozens of people crowd to have a gander at the strange foreigner visiting their village. Current projections estimate that by 2080, the population of Bangladesh could be 250 million.

With almost 200 million speakers, Bangla is the sixth most widely spoken language worldwide. Although it is a derivative of Sanskrit and therefore has its closest ties to Hindi, today’s modern Bangla also incorporates a mishmash of influences that represent the region’s history. The script is written from left to right and top to bottom, and thus reads the same as English. Linguists note three major periods in the evolution of the language, with the majority of its modern forms being derived during the 15th–18th centuries. Until the 18th century, there were simply no attempts to document the grammar of Bangla.

Islam is the overwhelmingly dominant religion in Bangladesh, but over its history Bengal has played host to Hinduism and Buddhism as well. Christianity, the smallest of the four religions, is mainly a result of missionaries who arrived in the British period and the Portuguese who came centuries earlier. Worldwide, Bangladesh has the fourth largest population of Muslims in the world, behind Indonesia, Pakistan and India.

While the constitution of Bangladesh mandates religious freedom, you may discover yourself bound to a religion you don’t necessarily follow in practice, as a common question that Bangladeshis have is about your religion. Whatever your orientation is, it is best to pick one of the major religions and stick to it as atheism is a concept not well understood in the country.

Viewed through the lens of the education Millennium Development Goals (MDG), Bangladesh is doing very well compared with some other countries. As government literature is quick to point out, Bangladesh is on track in promoting gender equality and empowering women, the third MDG. As it stands there are now equal ratios of girls to boys in primary and secondary education, and this will hopefully produce a newer generation of better-educated women. The 2007 opening of the Asian University for Women in Chittagong is also a hopeful sign.

What Bangladeshis admittedly lack in terms of material wealth, they certainly make up for in artistic tradition. There are plenty of opportunities for the visitor to engage with both the historic art of Bangladesh and its more modern practitioners.

For a country this size, Bangladesh has been endowed with an extraordinary amount of natural wealth and abundance. While its floods do cause serious calamities to its people, the waters are also the source of rich Himalayan mineral deposits and without the yearly flooding, soil that already bears a heavy agricultural load would never replenish itself.