Cover and in-text image: Photograph of a scene in Dhaka by visual artist Md. Shajedul Islam, specifically selected to accompany this piece by Haroon Zaman.
Dhaka is one of the fastest-growing mega-cities in the world, an urban organism expanding in all directions with a restless, sometimes chaotic energy. Scholars of urban studies have long pointed out how population growth has outpaced planning, leading to infrastructural collapse, slum expansion, traffic congestion, and environmental degradation (Panday, The Face of Urbanization and Urban Poverty in Bangladesh, 2020). A United Nations report (2018) noted that nearly 40% of Dhaka’s residents live in slums, often without secure tenure, reliable sanitation, or access to clean water. The numbers are staggering, but numbers alone cannot capture what it feels like to inhabit such a city—what it means to breathe its toxic air, to feel trapped in its endless traffic jams, or to dream in the shadows of concrete high-rises.
Here, literature becomes indispensable. Literature allows us to experience the city not only as a built environment but also as an existential condition. Philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the “right to the city” is useful here. Lefebvre argued that urban life is not just about shelter and services, but about the right to shape and experience the city itself. When vast sections of Dhaka’s population lack access to safe housing, green spaces, or clean air, alienation becomes structurally embedded. Literature gives voice to this alienation, showing how it infiltrates the soul and reshapes identities.
In Selina Hossain’s novel Hangor Nodi Grenade (though set during the Liberation War), the river emerges as a source of life, identity, and continuity. For her characters, the river is not only geography but also history, memory, and survival. Reading this against contemporary Dhaka creates a painful contrast. Today, the Buriganga and Turag rivers have turned into toxic drains, their life-giving role negated by reckless urban “development.” The loss is more than ecological—it is existential. It symbolizes the death of intimacy with nature, of the very rhythms that once shaped Bengali life. Where Hossain’s characters found refuge and identity in rivers, today’s Dhaka dwellers are confronted by poison and stench. Literature thus reveals not only what is present but also what has been irretrievably lost.
If Selina Hossain reminds us of a vanished ecological intimacy, Syed Shamsul Haq exposes the psychic solitude of urban existence. In Ekjon Maya O Ekti Tisha, Haq depicts the profound isolation of individuals caught in the city’s chaos. His characters are surrounded by thousands of people, yet feel utterly alone. This paradox—crowded loneliness—has become the essence of modern Dhaka. Haq’s narrative style often mirrors this alienation: fragmented, restless, marked by sudden silences. His work suggests that alienation in Dhaka is not accidental but systemic, built into the very architecture of the city’s expansion.
The most brutal face of this alienation, however, is visible in the lives of Dhaka’s workers. Work in garment factories, for instance, often reduces human beings to cogs in global supply chains. The city’s economy thrives on their labor, but their humanity is invisibilized. Literature again gives us a language to feel this. Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim, set partly in post-independence Dhaka, dramatizes estrangement in both public and private life. The protagonist Maya finds herself disillusioned in a city where the ideals of liberation dissolve into corruption, violence, and consumerism. The novel shows how collective dreams fracture, and how women in particular experience the city as both opportunity and suffocation. Anam’s portrayal echoes Marx’s notion of alienation under capitalism, but refracted through Dhaka’s specific history of war, migration, and survival.
Bangladeshi literature consistently voices this paradox of Dhaka: a place of ambition and despair, of dazzling dreams and suffocating realities. Kaiser Haq, Dhaka’s quintessential poet, captures this tension with rare wit. In his famous “Ode on the Lungi”, he juxtaposes traditional cultural identity with the absurdities of modern urban life. Humor becomes a survival strategy in a city that overwhelms its residents with absurd contradictions. Yet elsewhere in his poetry, Haq mourns the “beautiful Dhaka” lost to overgrowth, noise, and pollution. His poems are urban elegies—songs for a city that once was, and perhaps never will be again.
Other writers have approached Dhaka indirectly, yet their works resonate with the city’s crisis. Syed Waliullah’s Lalsalu, though rural in setting, critiques the erosion of faith and rootedness under modern pressures. The insecurity and dislocation faced by Waliullah’s villagers echo the uprootedness of Dhaka’s migrants, who arrive from rural Bengal only to find themselves trapped in slums, their traditions eroded by the city’s relentless pace. By contrast, Niaz Zaman’s The Dance and Other Stories explicitly depicts women in Dhaka negotiating both freedom and suffocation. Her characters often face contradictory pressures: the lure of education and modern jobs, but also the surveillance of patriarchy and the suffocating expectations of middle-class respectability. The city becomes both a liberating and a claustrophobic space, and literature exposes this ambivalence.
The theatre of Selim Al Deen adds another dimension. His plays, like Chaka, dramatize the circularity of human suffering. Though not set directly in Dhaka’s concrete jungle, the existential absurdity he portrays resonates deeply with the lives of Dhaka’s anonymous millions. In Chaka, the endless rolling of a wheel mirrors the endless grind of daily survival in a city where millions labor without hope of transformation. Literature here becomes allegory: the wheel is not just a wheel, but the very machinery of an alienating urban modernity. Contemporary narratives have also turned to new forms of expression. Mahruba T. Mowtushi’s research (The Urban Experience of Displacement, 2018) highlights how street art and graphic narratives in Dhaka reclaim visibility for the marginalized. The graffiti on Dhaka’s walls is literary in spirit: it inscribes the alienated voices of the slum-dwellers, garment workers, and street children directly onto the city’s surfaces. These forms bypass official publishing and reach the public eye immediately, transforming walls into pages. They show that literature is not confined to novels or poetry but includes all forms of storytelling that reimagine the city.
To understand the full weight of urban alienation, one might also turn to Jibanananda Das. Although he wrote decades earlier and often evoked Bengal’s pastoral landscapes, his poetry now functions as counter-memory. His images of rivers, paddy fields, moonlit nights, and silent rural paths remind us of what Dhaka has cost us. Reading Jibanananda in Dhaka today is to feel the ache of dispossession: the knowledge that pastoral peace has been replaced by concrete suffocation. His poems act as an ecological and cultural critique of urban alienation, even though he never directly wrote about Dhaka’s sprawl. By reading the city through literature, we understand alienation not just as sociological data but as lived human pain. When Kaiser Haq mourns Dhaka’s lost beauty, or when Tahmima Anam’s characters stumble through post-war disillusionment, they voice what statistics cannot: the loneliness in the crowd, the silence beneath the noise. Literature makes palpable what policy reports abstractly describe: the way a city can wound the soul, fracture dreams, or turn community into solitude.
At the same time, literature resists despair. It reminds us that the city is not only a space of alienation but also of imagination. By remembering rivers, mocking absurdities, or inscribing graffiti on walls, writers reclaim the “right to the city” in Lefebvre’s sense. Literature insists that Dhaka is not only a place of suffering but also of possibilities—possibilities for reimagining belonging, justice, and beauty.
Thus, literature is both testimony and resistance. It testifies to the wounds of urban modernity, but also resists by imagining alternatives. It humanizes the dehumanizing city, remembering what was lost, questioning what is, and reimagining what could be. Reading Dhaka through its literature, we glimpse not only a dystopia of overgrowth and alienation but also the fragile hope of a city where its urban poor and marginalized might one day feel they truly belong.
Bibliography
Anam, Tahmima. The Good Muslim. HarperCollins, 2011.
Das, Jibanananda. Selected Poems of Jibanananda Das. Translated by Fakrul Alam, University Press Limited, 1999.
Deen, Selim Al. Chaka. Dhaka: Theatre Publications, 1990.
Haq, Kaiser. Published in the Streets of Dhaka: Collected Poems 1966–2006. University Press Limited, 2007.
Haq, Syed Shamsul. Ekjon Maya O Ekti Tisha. Dhaka: Khan Brothers, 1982.
Hossain, Selina. Hangor Nodi Grenade. Dhaka: Ananya, 1976.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Right to the City. Translated by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, Blackwell, 1996.
Mowtushi, Mahruba T. The Urban Experience of Displacement: Dhaka in Transition. Dhaka: Academic Press and Publishers Library, 2018.
Panday, Pranab Kumar. The Face of Urbanization and Urban Poverty in Bangladesh. Springer, 2020.
United Nations. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2018.
Waliullah, Syed. Lalsalu. Dhaka: Khan Brothers, 1949.
Zaman, Niaz. The Dance and Other Stories. Writers’ink, 2013.
Haroonuzzaman, born on January 13, 1951, in Dhaka, is a distinguished Bangladeshi translator, novelist, poet, researcher, and essayist. He has amassed over three decades of teaching experience both domestically and internationally, including positions in Libya and Qatar. For two decades, he served as a faculty member in English Language and Literature at Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB). Beyond academia, Haroonuzzaman has been actively involved in journalism, contributing to both print and broadcast media in Bangladesh and Qatar. Notably, in 1992, he became the only Asian to work as an English news broadcaster for Qatar Broadcasting Service. His literary contributions are extensive and varied, encompassing translations, novellas, and research works. Since 2005, he has focused on preserving Bangladesh’s cultural heritage, producing several research publications and a five-book Bangla Baul Series, which have received widespread acclaim. Among his notable works are translations like “Lalon,” “Radharomon,” “Shah Abdul Karim,” “Hason Raja,” “Jalaluddin Kha” and “Chronicles of 1971,” as well as original novels, such as “The Distant Shore,” “Inseparable,” and “Juddho.” He has also co-authored “Preservation of Endangered Languages of Bangladesh LAHRA,” reflecting his dedication to safeguarding lost and near-lost indigenous languages and culture of Bangladesh.
