Yet another book of about 235 pages printed in 1993 by Indiana University Press, in their Essential Asia Series, by James J. Novak, “Bangladesh: Reflections on the Water.” The book succinctly examines the ancient, archaeological and anthropological origins of Bangladesh and its people. In Novak’s words, “about 2500 years before Christ, 1900 years before Buddha, and 3100 years before Prophet Muhammad, there lived in the Indian Subcontinent a people of Mongoloid, Austric, or Dravidian descent.” Despite building no pyramids and other monuments, like the ancient Egyptian civilization, he claims, “they (the people of Bangladesh) had developed arts, agricultural wealth and trade.” And “trade,” as mentioned above and will be explained further with the map posted below, flourished, and the Bengal Delta prospered as an affluent region, thus attracting foreign superior sea powers.

Routledge Contemporary South Asia series added another publication titled “Bangladesh’s Maritime Policy, Entwining Challenges,” written by a former faculty member of Dhaka University, Mr. Abul Kalam. In this book, the author emphatically mentions that Bangladesh is distinctively a maritime state. To portray Bangladesh’s maritime cultural dynamics, he devoted a chapter where maritime legacies and the vision of Bangladesh are briefly discussed.

“Bangladesh has a strong maritime legacy. Very few know this! To understand the country’s role in maritime space, it is important to see it as a maritime nation. Bangladesh has a sea area of 1,18,813km2 with a coastline of about 710 km. The area increases manifold if the other related and connected inland and uneven coastlines are added in the calculation. For centuries, Chittagong port was for Arab European and Asian traders. The BoB is popularly considered the third neighbor, and the Indian Ocean is the ‘fourth frontier’ of Bangladesh.” Like many other organizations and individuals, the KRF Center for Bangladesh and Global Affairs endorses such popular coinage of the terms.

Almost all historians agree that since time immemorial, human beings have been doing trade and commerce, like with different destinations around the globe, for prosperity. Being the cheapest means of transportation, the sea is widely used for maritime trade and commerce. Seaports and shipping, with various services, have always played a significant role in the economic development of countries worldwide, from ancient times to medieval times and present times, and are unlikely to change. Though it is yet to be internalized by many people, the fact remains that Bangladesh is a maritime country, and seaports provide the gateway for seaborne trade with the outside world. All our seaports are playing a vital role in accelerating the economic development of the country that the country has been experiencing since independence. However, seaport infrastructure, maritime transportation facilities, and human resource development are yet to be good enough to handle the growing trade demand in the foreseeable future.

Most Bangladeshis are oblivious of their relatively rich strategic maritime culture and legacies of sea voyages and oceanic journeys streaming from the experience they gained since childhood from the natural reflections on waters around the township where they grew up in the country. Until recently, everyone in Bangladesh lived by a river, a haor, or a lowland. Almost one-third of the population lives near the coast. Thus, their childhood amusement traditionally includes swimming in ponds and rivers, catching fish, and rafting banana trees or bamboo. In their adulthood, some of them inherited family workmanship of building indigenous country boats, some others gradually leaned towards and joined the business of building different types of watercraft. They continue to inherit moderate shipbuilding skills and earn livelihoods from water-related activities and marine and nautical life. They do carry also trade heritage even from far-flung lands. But as their nationality is defined and redefined with the change of rulers over many centuries, it wouldn’t be justified to conclude that Bangladeshis are not seafaring and Bangladesh is not maritime. After the glorious war of liberation in 1971, when this part of the Bengal Delta became Bangladesh, the citizens officially became Bangladeshi.  However, it is also true that the national leadership is yet to demonstrate resolve to develop a comprehensive national nautical/maritime vision that will provide the maritime community at large with the money for policy formulation and subsequent implementation to pursue their maritime journey to individual affluence to contribute to collective national prosperity.

An Arab geographer, Mas‘udi (d. 956), recorded the earliest known information about Muslims residing in Bengal. Long-distance traders, probably Arabs or Persians, were involved in the overseas export of locally produced textiles residing not in Pala dynastic domains but in Samatata, in the southeastern delta, then ruled by another Bengali Buddhist dynasty, the Chandras (ca. 825–1035). This is likely because kings of this dynasty, although much inferior to the Palas in power and never contenders for supremacy over all of India, like their larger neighbors to the west, were linked with Indian Ocean commerce through their control of the delta’s most active seaports. Moreover, while the Palas used cowrie shells for settling commercial transactions, the Chandras maintained a silver coinage that was more conducive to participation in international trade.

Mas‘udi’s remark about Muslims residing in Pala domains is significant in the context of these commercially and politically expansive Buddhist states, for by the tenth century, when Bengali textiles were being absorbed into wider Indian Ocean commercial networks, two trade diasporas overlapped one another in the delta region. One, extending eastward from the Arabian Sea, was dominated by Muslim Arabs or Persians; the other, extending eastward from the BoB, by Buddhist Bengalis. The earliest presence of Islamic civilization in Bengal resulted from overlapping these two diasporas.

Among the Europeans, the Portuguese were the first who successfully found a route to explore the Indian Ocean. In the latter part of the fifteenth century, patronized by Prince Henry, the great Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and reached India in 1498. The Portuguese gradually established dominance in the Indian Ocean and took control of Goa in 1510, becoming an essential hub for regional trade and missionary activities. Goa was regarded as the center of all Portuguese activities in their "Age of Exploration" and achieved a legal basis from the Portuguese empire. However, some private Portuguese traders, adventurers, and pirates were active on the East Indian coast, stretching to the BoB to Malabar and settled there. Their settlement for economic avarice was vested in three major focal points, i.e., (1) the core area of Hugli and Balasore (also called Baleswar in Odisha) served as a hub for feeder navigation via the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, introducing interior goods to regional and global maritime commerce; (2) Portuguese secondary mercantile activities centered on the commercial area of Dacca, where Dacca's rich textiles and other valuable assets attracted global demands; and (3) the core trade hub of Portuguese was evolved around Chittagong or PorteGrande, which served as the hub of both east coast of India, Bengal, Arakan, and Malabar for commercial trading. Most Portuguese colonies and their capital, Lisbon, were also impressed by some essential goods, such as saltpeter, textiles, and spices, from Bengal to Bahia (also known as Salvador da Bahia in Brazil) and Lisbon. In return, famous Bahian tobacco entered India and Bengal and became very popular in inland markets. Local people used tobacco for chewing, smoking, or sniffing. Like Chinese opium, the Bahian tobacco business flourished for Portuguese traders in exchange for saltpeter and textiles, making networking between Bengal with Goa, Bahia, and Lisbon possible. In addition, the tobacco trade gradually spread to neighboring Bengal and in the greater Indian regions.

Historically, EmperorAkbar gave a Farman (an imperial decree) to the Portuguese to settle at Hoogli, which later increased in number to 7 thousand in 1632 with a yearly payment of up to 100,000 tangas or rupees as a customs duty to the Mughal treasure. When Mughal Subadar Islam Khan co-founded Dacca-Jahangirnagar as the capital of Bengal in 1610, the Portuguese already had activities in the BoB in its internal waters, including Portuguese adventurers and pirates linked with Arakan. Their settlement in Dacca's proximity also increased, but their main focus was on the Chittagong port regarding their trading. However, apart from Portuguese settlers who focused on economic and commercial benefits from rich Bengal, a group of renegade Portuguese accompanied by Arakanese pirates were involved in piracy and criminality in the eastern part of the BoB. Such criminal activities threatened trade routes and commercially safe navigation across the BoB. Therefore, settlers communicated with Goa ecclesiastic communities to take action against renegades and criminal Portuguese and to strengthen the connection between Bengal's peripheral geography and Goa's Portuguese power center.

During the seventeenth century, on the one hand, major inland inter-regional trade was facilitated by the Grand Trunk Road, which Sher Shah Suri first constructed in the 16th century. In contrast, maritime trade was done through the internal rivers that connected interior markets to the BoB and from the BoB to beyond its periphery to the world markets. Besides textiles-the world famous muslin, Dacca was a key hub for domestic products, especially rice, which the Portuguese bought and transported to rice-deficit regions along the Indian Ocean and the BoB. Moreover, Pegu and Cochin, two major Portuguese settlements, imported large quantities of rice, and the Portuguese traders supplied rice to the Maldives in exchange for cowries, which were regarded as the local currency of the Maldives at that time, and shipped back to Bengal, Pegu, and Cochin. As a maritime trading entity, Bengal became a more significant supplier of vast quantities of textiles, silk, saltpeter, long pepper, opium, etc. Lac (Shellac from Lac, a chemical compound) and sugar emerged as another significant commodity of enormous demand in the global market, which used to be transported to Golconda (located in present-day Hyderabad), the Karnatic terrains (present-day Tamil Nadu and Karnataka), Arabia, and the Persian Gulf regions. These maritime routes flourished in Bengal's trade with Malabar, Sumatra, Java, and China via Portuguese enclaves across the region, particularly Macao. Bangladesh's textiles and saltpeter were in high demand in China. Bengal inland markets imported almost half of their opium from China in exchange for sacra or rupees.

Additionally, Spanish America and the Spanish Philippines also traded with Bengal. However, saltpeter, silk, cotton textiles, and long-pepper were the primary goods transported from Bengal interior markets to Bengal ports, Goa, and then Lisbon. Bengal was the largest saltpeter supplier to Portuguese empires, colonies, and Brazil. Later, Brazil discovered saltpeter in Bahia in 1694; the ruler of Bahia requested the viceroy of Goa to send some skilled people to Brazil to extract, process, and market the essential commodity. Portuguese also introduced a variety of textile manufacturing companies in Para, Brazil, and requested the Viceroy of Goa to send some skilled weavers from Bengal. The crown of the Portuguese also urged the ruler to send a couple of skilled weavers to its biggest colony, Brazil. Initially, fearing such a long voyage, Bengali weavers rejected the offer, andthe ruler extended more facilities to the offer. The crown also asked for investigation of the initial logistics necessary for weaving in Brazil if the logistics are not needed to be collected from Bengal and Coromandel (present-day Tamil Nadu).


Writer: Commodore Syed Misbah Uddin Ahmad, (C), NUP, ndc, afwc, psc, BN (retd), Director General, Bangladesh Institute of Maritime Research and Development (BIMRAD). Email: misbah28686@gmail.com