Sunil Gangopadhyay or Sunil Ganguly was an Indian poet, novelist, short story writer, historian, and critic in the Bengali language. He was one of the foremost poets experimenting with new forms, themes, rhythms, and words in Bengali poetry in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1953, along with Deepak Majumder and Ananda Bagchi, he founded the Bengali poetry magazine, Krittibas. He is regarded as one of the most prolific and popular writers in Bengali since Rabindranath Tagore.
Taslima Nasrin is a Bangladeshi writer, physician, feminist, secular humanist, and activist. She is known for her writing on women's oppression and criticism of religion; some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. She has also been blacklisted and banished from the Bengal region, both from Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal.
Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy was a Pakistani Bengali barrister and politician. In Bangladesh, Suhrawardy is remembered as a pioneer of Bengali civil rights movements, later turned into Bangladesh independence movement, and the mentor of Bangladesh's founding leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. He is also remembered for his performance as the Minister for Civil Supply during the Bengal famine of 1943. In India, he is seen as a controversial figure; directly responsible for the 1946 Calcutta Killings, for which he is often referred as the "Butcher of Bengal” in West Bengal.
Lajja (Shame) is a novel in Bengali by Taslima Nasrin, a writer of Bangladesh. The word lajja/lôjja means "shame" in Bengali and many other Indo-Aryan languages. The book was written about the violence, rape, looting and killings of Bengali Hindus that took place in December 1992 after the destruction of Babri Masjid took place in India. The book was first published in 1993 in Bengali and was subsequently banned in Bangladesh. It nonetheless sold 50,000 copies in the six months after its publication, though Taslima fled her native Bangladesh after receiving death threats from Islamic groups.
The Partition of Bengal in 1947, part of the Partition of India, divided the British Indian Bengal Province along the Radcliffe Line between the Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. The Bengali Hindu-majority West Bengal became a state of India, and the Bengali Muslim-majority East Bengal became a province of Pakistan.
Bengali literature denotes the body of writings in the Bengali language and which covers Old Bengali, Middle- Bengali and Modern Bengali with the changes through the passage of time and dynastic patronization or non-patronization. Bengali has developed over the course of roughly 1,300 years. If the emergence of the Bengali literature supposes to date back to roughly 650 AD, the development of Bengali literature claims to be 1600 years old. The earliest extant work in Bengali literature is the Charyapada, a collection of Buddhist mystic songs in Old Bengali dating back to the 10th and 11th centuries. The timeline of Bengali literature is divided into three periods: ancient (650–1200), medieval (1200–1800) and modern. Medieval Bengali literature consists of various poetic genres, including Hindu religious scriptures, Islamic epics, Vaishnava texts, translations of Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit texts, and secular texts by Muslim poets. Novels were introduced in the mid-19th century. Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore is the best known figure of Bengali literature to the world. Kazi Nazrul Islam, notable for his activism and anti-British literature, was described as the Rebel Poet and is now recognised as the National poet of Bangladesh.
Mymensingh Medical College, formerly Lytton Medical School, is a public medical college and hospital in Mymensingh, Bangladesh. The institute was established in 1924 during the British Raj under the former name. Brigadier General Md. Golam Kibria is the present director of the medical college hospital.
Syed Mujtaba Ali was a Bangladeshi writer, journalist, travel enthusiast, academic, scholar and linguist. He lived in Bangladesh, India, Germany, Afghanistan and Egypt.
The Nawab of Dhaka, originally spelt in English Nawab of Dacca, was the title of the head of one of the largest Muslim zamindar in British Bengal and Assam, based in present-day Dhaka, Bangladesh. The title of nawab, similar to the British peerage, was conferred upon the head of the family by Queen Victoria as a recognition of the first Nawab's loyalty and contribution to the social welfare activities.
The culture of Bengal defines the cultural heritage of the Bengali people native to eastern regions of the Indian subcontinent, mainly what is today Bangladesh and the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura, where they form the dominant ethnolinguistic group and the Bengali language is the official and primary language. Bengal has a recorded history of 1,400 years.
Muzaffar Ahmad was an Indian-Bengali politician, journalist and a co-founder of the Communist Party of India.
The Noakhali riots were a series of semi-organized massacres, rapes and abductions, combined with looting and arson of Hindu properties, perpetrated by the Muslim community in the districts of Noakhali in the Chittagong Division of Bengal in October–November 1946, a year before India's independence from British rule.
Mohammedan Sporting Club is an Indian football club based in Kolkata, West Bengal. Currently, the club competes in the I-League, the second-tier of the Indian football league system, as well as Calcutta Football League (CFL), the oldest football league in Asia. Formed in February 1891, it is one of the oldest active football clubs in the country.
The 2007 Kolkata riots took place in Kolkata on 21 November 2007, when Muslim anti-Taslima protesters under the banner of All India Minority Forum blockaded major portions of central Kolkata and resorted to arson and violence. The Left Front led State Government deployed the army in the afternoon of that day.
According to the 2011 census, West Bengal has over 24.6 million Muslims, making up 27% of the state's population. The vast majority of Muslims in West Bengal are ethnic native Bengali Muslims, numbering around over 22 million and comprising 24.1% of the state population. There also exists an Immigrants Urdu-speaking Muslim community numbering 2.6 million, constituting 2.9% of the state population and mostly resides in Urban areas of the state.
The Sylheti or Sylhetis are an Indo-Aryan ethnocultural group that are associated with the Sylhet region. There are strong diasporic communities in Barak Valley of Assam, India, North Tripura, as well as in rest of Bangladesh and northeast India. They speak Sylheti, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language that is considered "a distinct language by many and a dialect of Bengali by some others".
Feminism in Bangladesh seeks equal rights of women in Bangladesh through social and political change. Article 28 of Bangladesh constitution states that "Women shall have equal rights with men in all spheres of the State and of public life".
Moḥammad Abū Bakr Ṣiddīque al-Qurayshī was a Bengali Islamic scholar and the inaugural Pir of Furfura Sharif in West Bengal. He is regarded by his followers, who are scattered across eastern India and Bangladesh, as a mujaddid (reviver) of Islam in the region, due to his significant contributions in religious propagation via the establishment of mosques and madrasas, publication of newspapers and education development in neglected areas. He was the founding president of the sociopolitical Anjuman-i-Wazin-i-Bangla organisation, which advocated for causes such as the Khilafat Movement and Pakistan Movement. Siddique died in 1943, and his shrine is greatly venerated as one of West Bengal's most prominent Sufi centres.
Syed Alimuddin Ahmad, popularly known as Master Saheb, was a Bengali bodybuilder and wrestler. He participated in the anti-British independence movement as an underground activist and revolutionary, as a part of the Dhaka Mukti Sangha organisation. Ahmed rose to prominence after the organisation was absorbed into Subhas Chandra Bose's Bengal Volunteers during the mayorship of Chittaranjan Das in Calcutta.
