Origins

Bangladeshis come from a small country (144,000 square kilometres) located in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent, surrounded almost entirely by India except for a narrow strip of frontier with Myanmar (Burma) in the far southeast. On its southern flank, Bangladesh faces the Bay of Bengal into which the several mouths of the Ganges (Padma) River empty. In fact, with the exception of the small Chittagong Hill tracts in the extreme southeast, the country is one vast alluvial plain that is part of the largest delta in the world. The plain is made of old and new silt brought down by the various tributaries of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers. Shifting riverbeds, heavy rainfall, and high temperatures in the Bay of Bengal cause frequent storms and flash floods, and, during the rainy season, up to one-third of Bangladesh may be engulfed by water. Major floods occur on an average of every five years.

In this lowland country subjected to the devastating impact of frequent flooding live over 111 million people, making Bangladesh the country with the second-highest population density (534 per square kilometre) in the world. Nearly four-fifths of the population reside in rural areas. Approximately 65 percent of Bangladesh’s inhabitants speak Bengali (Bangla), which belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European languages. Descended from ancient Sanskrit, Bengali has its own script with fifty-seven letter symbols and a rich literary tradition that is more than a thousand years old. Bengali-speakers represent a single linguistic group divided between Bangladesh (East Bengal, with its capital at Dacca) and India (West Bengal, with its capital at Calcutta). The Bengali-speakers in these two parts of historic Bengal are basically divided by religion: those in East Bengal/Bangladesh are Muslim, those in the Indian state of West Bengal are Hindu.

Although 86.6 percent of the inhabitants of Bangladesh are Muslims (primarily Sunni), there are also Hindus (12.1 percent) and smaller groups of Buddhists and Christians. Aside from the majority of Bengali-speakers, numerous languages of the Tibeto-Burmese family are spoken by peoples in the northern, eastern, and hill districts of Bangladesh.

Historic Bengal is mentioned in some of the earliest Hindu texts, and the region was governed by a succession of Buddhist and Hindu rulers in the first millennium of the Common Era. In the early thirteenth century, Muslim armies made their appearance and gradually extended their political control, so that after 1576 Bengal was part of what became the Mughal Empire. It was during the Mughal era that much of the population of East Bengal (Bangladesh) was converted to Islam.

Following the arrival of European colonial powers and the disintegration of Mughal rule, by 1757 all of Bengal became part of colonial British India. Among the most important results of British colonial rule was the widespread adoption of the English language, most especially at the higher levels of education. When, in the twentieth century, it became clear that British colonial rule would eventually end, politically active Bengali Muslims joined the Muslim League, which in 1940 advocated a separate state for Muslims. Hence, when the British did leave the Indian subcontinent in 1947, the mainly Muslim districts of east Bengal became the eastern province of the new state of Pakistan.

The Muslims of East Pakistan soon discovered that they could not agree on many political issues with their non-Bengali fellow Muslims in West Pakistan. In 1971 civil war broke out between the two parts of the country, after which East Pakistan became the newly independent state of Bangladesh. Despite independence, Bangladeshi society continues to be plagued by overpopulation, widespread poverty, and periodic natural disasters - primarily floods – all factors that have driven many Bangladeshis to seek a better livelihood by emigrating abroad.