Nostalgia for the future in digital dhaka

Itchy feet became scrolling fingers in the great becalming of 2020, and in my more homesick Corona moments I toured digital Dhaka. Not the usual haunts of my real-life visits: online, I escaped Gulshan to visit parts of the city I rarely see. Travelling through online pictures of Dhaka made me feel part of a collective re-imagining of this city, legendarily difficult to live in yet also the ninth-biggest in the world. Perhaps absence made my heart grow fonder, but the pictures took me on a pleasing journey of shared reflections on our city’s past that was both a conversation about the way we live now and an imagining of a more beautiful future.

Four centuries of Dhaka

A quarter of a million people have joined me on the trip through Dhaka – 400 Years: History in Photographs. These pictures lack the framed and filtered perfection of Instagram, and are as grainy or faded as if it were your grandmother’s photo album. Yet I can spend - have spent - hours wandering down this pleasurable tunnel of nostalgia and reflection, pausing to read the responses of others. The commentary is in Bangla, English, and the romanized vernacular of the internet. Intermittently political over ancient battles of truth and treachery, you mostly find a gentle public conversation about how the past looks from the present.

Each time the Lalbagh Fort appears it attracts a thousand or more views. Started but never completed or used in the Mughal 17th century, the Fort was forever ornamental. The pictures let you trace its curiously reversed chronology as an emblem of Dhaka over centuries. Among the earliest images, Zoffany’s ‘The South Gate of the Lalbagh Fort’ (below) shows it already in 1787 as a romantic ruin, long overtaken by ordinary folk and nature. One of several such gorgeous images, its picturesque decay tells a story of political decline: Dhaka is evidently no seat of imperial power by this time. Perhaps it really did look like that in the 18th century. But pictures of Mughal architecture have often been used as weapons of soft power, and it is no coincidence that images of decay and neglect were being produced at the very moment the British East India Company started to make properly political moves on Bengal.      

If pictures of iconic buildings speak of political power, it is telling that the Fort pictured two centuries later in independent Bangladesh appears as if brand new. Syed Sazzadul Hoque’s 2015 depiction (bel0w) shows it post-restoration, resplendent in ice-cream colours and pristine condition. Now drawn into the harmoniously-hued buildings around it, the Fort is embedded in a big and busy city.

Yet the formal gardens in the Charbagh style preserve their reclaimed autonomy, bureaucratically tended and tidy. Here the public, also in candy colours, move around the grounds in their orderly leisure. This is a vision of Lalbagh Fort for a modern Bangladesh, serving nationalist purposes as a site for officially-sanctioned democratic leisure, and a visual connection to a Muslim past of power and prestige.

Vogue in old Dacca, 1947

Neo-Mughal buildings of the Raj era also feature on 400 Years, also usually once restored for nationalist ends. The algorithm reveals pictures of the late 19th century Ahsan Manzil to be popular. The seat of the Dhaka nawabs and perhaps the birthplace of Pakistan, the Pink Palace (as it is now known) appears in moments of original splendour and, very soon after, in a state of decay and decline. Like the Fort, it then resurfaces newly-pinked in the 1990s as a museum for the prospering nation. Pictures of Ahsan Manzil attract wide interest, and one artfully hazy shot from the grounds provides the banner picture for the Facebook group itself.

A rare interior shot of Ahsan Manzil by the late photographer Irving Penn was published in Vogue magazine (US) in November 1947. In its shareable version (below) it shows the Chief Minister of East Bengal in a drawing room with his cousin the Nawab of Dhaka; the Nawab’s wife and sister-in-law are seated stagily at the wings, and Vogue associate editor Allene Talmey hovers behind (she was not in the published picture).

The image accompanied an article called ‘Round the World: 30 Flights’, about a journey across Europe and Asia and back to New York by Talmey and Penn, on Pan American’s first round-the-world route. It marvels on the ‘diminished size of the world’, which means that places as ‘far-flung’ as East Pakistan are on the flightpaths out of what (it goes without saying) is the centre of the world, New York City.  

In fact, it is never quite clear that Vogue grasped what or where East Pakistan was. So recently after Partition, it is perhaps forgiveable that Pakistan is omitted from the article’s initial listing of countries toured. That ‘Dacca’ is the only city visited but not named in its section title reflects on its limited attractions to the outside world, and, despite the shrinkage of the world, its continued marginality: it is close to Calcutta and ‘a side trip at that’.

Despite these slights or oversights, Talmey finds (East) Pakistan to be

a green, fresh, pioneering land that would like to change from primarily a jute-growing country to an industrial economy, helped by foreign investments.

The Premier is ‘a Muslim of enormous power and straightforward charm … educated at Cambridge University’ who stuffs his cabinet with Oxbridge men. (This is presumably a good, or at least a grand, thing).

This being Vogue, there is a natural interest in the dresses and doings of rich women, so we learn that

the delicate, chic, Nawab Begum goes to the English-Indian country club to swim, play tennis and bridge, to dance on Saturday nights. Hidden in a royal-blue purdah robe with a seductive blue chiffon face veil, she rides there in her own jeep.

Vogue describes Ahsan Manzil as a ‘great white palace’, and I was among many who enjoyed this unexpectedly glamorous peek at our city’s erstwhile elite. Yet Ahsan Manzil was already in decline in 1947. One sharp-eyed commentator on Dhaka-400 Years points out the cheap jute sacking serving as carpet at the front of the image. Others are unimpressed for other reasons. Traitors and leeches, some comment of the aristocratic lineage. High culture and high politics, suggest others; our history was forged in these very drawing rooms.

The Ahsan Manzil museum has been one of the more successful efforts to restore and protect Dhaka’s labyrinthine Old Town as history and heritage; other valiant campaigns to protect over 2,000 historical buildings there have run aground on the wall of official indifference, public apathy, and the very real livelihoods and lives that persist in buildings which elsewhere would be preserved as museums or monuments.

The Urban Study Group, a collection of architects and historians, continues in its campaign to ‘Save Puran Dhaka’. Each illegal factory fire in those cramped, busy sites issues elicits heartfelt calls for conservation and preservation, rehabilitation and protection. Yet Old Dhaka remains much as it was, in a permanent state of lively decline, unreadable to the outside world, unmarketable as a heritage site.

otherworldly romance

Luckily, reality is no bar to the lush and often dark imaginings of the Dhaka Yeah! collective, whose work is billed as ‘An Illustrated love letter to Dhaka’. These fairytales (best viewed on Instagram) draw me again and again with their otherworldly romances and subversive flourishes. The illustrations seek out moments of beauty: the risky rendezvous, an overflowing flower market, the elegance of women wearing saris. Some, like A Quiet Boishakh, tell of the tranquil pleasures of festive moments properly marked. Others show innocently illicit behaviour: moonlit trysts, a dozing police officer, young women relaxing in public.

A melancholic image of young girls and ghosts at Lalbagh Fort reimagines this much-pictured monument yet again, this time by and for a generation reared on 21st century gothic.

Dhaka Yeah! abandons the traditional lime and mustard green palette of Sonar Bangla for rich shades in the red family, with nighttime scenes cast in shady aubergine and midnight blues. The city is recognizable but somehow more vivid, with the imagined human comedies, cunning resistance, and ghostly legacies of treachery and violence putting into pictures our otherwise fleeting thoughts about life in the many layers of Dhaka.

Some tell tales worthy of Angela Carter. The trio of witches preparing to poison the patriarchy and the runaway bride are particularly sumptuous visions of feminist defiance in a city so unaccommodating of women’s desires for autonomy, and so often dangerous to those seen to transgress. I am reminded of the commentary on Dhaka-400 Years whenever older pictures of young women are shown, and the earlier absence of the now-common hijab is noted. Have we gone backwards? some ask. But women move around Dhaka more and more easily than in my own young days, and I can only see this as an advance. Dhaka Yeah!’s more feminist fairytales confirm that feeling: women can own the city, too.  

My favourite in the Dhaka Yeah! oeuvre, a print of which sits in a frame on my desk, is Discover Dacca, a fanciful imagining of the riverfront in old Dhaka as a location for glamorous tourist travel. Ostensibly a travel poster, it nods slyly to the Bangladesh Parjatan (Tourism) Board’s enduringly oblivious ‘Visit Bangladesh Before the Tourists Come’ campaign. It even features a Bangladesh Biman logo in one corner, to confuse the viewer further (is this actually a real advert?). Glamorous tourists are seated by the river being served by a turbaned waiter; they view a scene of pleasure boats and the romantic columns and curves of the Pink Palace on the far bank.

The scene also nods to the more established tourist pleasures of a waterfront dinner in more popular tourist destinations. At a squint, this could be Bangkok’s Chao Phraya overlooking the Oriental Hotel, or an evening cruise on the Nile in Cairo. Perhaps this is meant to draw in the affluent cosmopolitans likely to have tasted such delights. Your mind asks, is this meant to be Dhaka? Why have I never seen it like this? The pleasing confection would be quickly dispelled by the smelly and noisy excitement of the actual riverside. Yet even when reality intrudes, I am left with a sense of a richness of stories and images and possibilities, of a city of grand monuments, space of calming nature and respite, safe and full of undiscovered pleasures. It makes me hope that we are part of a collective reimagining of our city to be more beautiful and more liveable. We can afford such dreams now.  

NB: Many thanks to Dhaka-400 Years in Photographs and Dhaka Yeah! for everything they do, and for the permission to share their links and images here.