The Mughal capital
Dhaka was a small town under the Bengal sultans. In the years 1608–1610 the Mughal governor Islam Khan Chishti, campaigning against the independent chiefs of eastern Bengal, the Baro Bhuiyans, made it his capital and named it Jahangirnagar after the emperor. From here the Mughals extended their rule into the rice frontier of the eastern delta, a process that the historian Richard Eaton has linked with the spread of Islam among the cultivators of eastern Bengal.
Under governors such as Shaista Khan, Aurangzeb's uncle, who governed Bengal for most of the period from 1664 to 1688, Dhaka grew into one of the largest cities in the Mughal empire. The Lalbagh fort was begun in 1678 by Prince Muhammad Azam and left unfinished; it contains the tomb of Shaista Khan's daughter, Pari Bibi. The Bara Katra, a caravanserai, and many mosques date from this period. In 1717 the provincial capital moved to Murshidabad under Murshid Quli Khan, and Dhaka declined in political importance.
Muslin
Dhaka was famous across the world for its muslin, a cotton cloth of extreme fineness spun by hand from a local cotton, which was prized at the Mughal court and exported to Europe. Under British rule, competition from machine-made cloth, the end of court patronage and the Company's trading practices destroyed the industry in the early nineteenth century, and the city's population fell sharply.
Colonial Dhaka
The British took over the administration of Bengal from 1765. Dhaka revived in the later nineteenth century as a centre of trade and of the landholding Nawab family, whose palace, the Ahsan Manzil, stands on the river. The partition of Bengal in 1905 made it the capital of the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, and the All-India Muslim League was founded there in 1906. The partition was reversed in 1911, but the University of Dhaka was founded in 1921 partly in compensation.
East Pakistan and Bangladesh
In 1947 Dhaka became the capital of East Bengal, later East Pakistan. On 21 February 1952 police fired on students demonstrating for Bengali to be made a state language, and the day is remembered as Language Martyrs' Day, now observed by UNESCO as International Mother Language Day. On 25 March 1971 the Pakistani army began a crackdown in the city, beginning the Bangladesh Liberation War, and on 16 December 1971 Pakistani forces surrendered at Dhaka to the Indian and Bangladeshi forces. Dhaka became the capital of Bangladesh and is now one of the most densely populated cities in the world.
Further reading
- Eaton, Richard M. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier. University of California Press, 1993
- Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993
- Metcalf, Barbara D. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2012
See also
- Bengal Sultanate — The Bengal Sultanate ruled the delta for over two centuries from 1352, an independent and prosperous state whose sultans were the first rulers to patronise Bengali as a literary language.
- Nawabs of Bengal — The Nawabs of Bengal ruled the richest province of the Mughal empire from Murshidabad, and their defeat at Plassey in 1757 gave the East India Company the territorial base from which it conquered India.
- Mughal Empire — The Mughal Empire was a Persianate Muslim dynasty of Timurid and Chagatai descent that ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from Babur's victory at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526 until the deposition of Bahadur Shah II following the 1857 rebellion, reaching its territorial and cultural peak under Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb.
- Partition of Bengal (1905) — The 1905 division of the Bengal Presidency by Viceroy Lord Curzon into two provinces along broadly religious lines, an act that provoked mass protest and the Swadeshi movement.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.