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Written
By- Mohammad B. Ahsan
Bangladesh is located between 26041'
and 20034' north latitude and 8800
1'; and 92041' east longitude.
Its area of 55,598 square miles covers the
northeastern edge of the Indian sub-continent surrounded
by Indian and Burmese territories on three sides and the
Bay of Bengal on the fourth.- Prior to its independence in
1971, it was the eastern wing of erstwhile Pakistan and
was known as East Pakistan. Before that it was a part of the Bengal province of British
India until 1947, and was known as East Bengal.
Further back in time Bangladesh was the part of a
subah under the Mughal and even before that, a region
divided into small kingdoms by Hindu rajas and Muslim
sultans.
History
does not hold any record as to the exact size of ancient
and medieval Bengal.
'Me Bengal under the British had a territory of
77,521 square miles spread between 2704 I' and
20050' north latitude and 86035' and
92030' east longitude.
During the partition of India in 1947, 51,500
square miles of territory from British Bengal-and 4621
square miles of territory from the Province of Assam were
dovetailed to create East Pakistan.
The territory added from Assam is the greater
Sylhet district.
The earliest history of the land starts from the 4th century
A.D. although much of it is primarily a guesswork based on
evidences received from copper-plates, holy writs and
other archaeological sources.
This was perhaps due to the fact that the
initiative for compilation of history of this region came
very late when a great deal
of archaeological
materials must have already perished underground or
destroyed by people who were unaware of their importance.
In 1875, Bankim Chandra was the first Bengali
thinker ever to express concern for the absence of an
organized account of history of the land.
Long after that, Ramprashad Chandra actually took
the initiative in 1911 to compile the complete history of
Pre-Muslim India which was abandoned after some time.
Following year, Lord Carmaichael asked Haraprashad
Shastri to preoare a scheme for writing the history of
Bengal. Nothing,
however, came of that also.
In 1914 Rakhaldas Banerjee on his own wrote a
comprehensive history of Bengal which mainly dealt with
the political affairs amd military exploits of the kings
of ancient Bengal. Twenty
years after Banerjee's work, Dhaka University undertook in
1934 the writing of a virtually complete history of Bengal
covering for the first time, all aslkcts of the life and
achievements of its people.
Therefore, the readers must know in advance that
there are many gaps and much vagueness in the history of
Bengal as a result. The
names of kings, their titles, the period of their reigns
and their accomplishments and failures are not always
precise and historians and archaeologists have often
resorted to guesstimation for judgements on those points.
But the occasional usage of such discretion by
historians and archaeologists did not, however, distort
the mainstream of history or diminish its credibility in
any significant manner.
The
earliest record of history shows that Bengal was divided
into a number of independent kingdoms ruled by independent
kings. These kingdoms were largely under the sway of Maurya empire
which was mostly effective in northern India.
'Me uneven authority of the Mauryas over its vast
Indian territory prompted a chieftain named Chandragupta
to make himself the master of Ganges-Jamuna plain in
eastern India stretching as far as Prayag, the modem
Allahabad. Eventually,
Chandragupta would displace the Mauryas and have himself
crowned as emperor according to Orthodox Brahman rites in
A.D. 320.The geographical propinquity of Gupta capital to
Be . ngal enabled the emperor to exert more influence over
the kingdoms of Bengal than his predecessor and he
gradually incorporated them into his empire. The last kingdom of Bengal to loose its independence to the
encroachment of the Guptas was Samatata in the
southeastern region in 507 A.D. |
