Place · Mughal provincial capital · Bangladesh
Dhaka
Also known as Dhaka, Dacca, Jahangirnagar, Ḍhākā
Capital of Bangladesh since 1971 and of East Pakistan from 1947 to 1971, and the Mughal Bengal capital from 1610 to 1704 when Islam Khan Chishti moved the subahdar's seat from Rajmahal to the Buriganga's bank. Dhaka's walled core holds the Lalbagh Fort of 1678, Star Mosque, Ahsan Manzil pink palace, the Armenian Church and the Dhakeshwari temple that gives the city its name. The Dhaka muslin tradition — grown on Phuti karpas cotton along the Meghna — was the city's defining pre-industrial export until the English East India Company's 1780s restructuring destroyed it. The 1971 Liberation War turned the city into Bangladesh's founding geography; Mujib's 7 March 1971 Race Course speech and the Dhanmondi 32 assassination site are its central modern memorials.
- Date
- 1610–None
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Bengal Sultanate · Mughal · Awami League
- Tradition
- Standard reference; INTACH, ASI and municipal records; institutional histories.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 23.810, 90.412
Connections (5)
- Site withinDhākeshwarī
Dhakeshwari — the Shakti pitha and patron goddess of Dhaka whose temple gives the city its name — sits in Dhaka proper within the modern municipal limits. The tenth-century Sena-period foundation and the city's own founding are tied: the pre-Mughal settlement grew around the temple before the 1610 Mughal capital shift. The modern reconstruction after 1971 made Dhakeshwari Bangladesh's national temple.
- Site withinLalbagh Fort, Dhaka
Lalbagh Fort — the unfinished Mughal fort of 1678 with Pari Bibi's tomb — sits in the Lalbagh area of old Dhaka along the Buriganga's north bank, within walking distance of the pre-Mughal Dhakeshwari temple and the colonial-era Ahsan Manzil to the east. The fort was the defining Mughal monument of Dhaka's half-century as the Bengal subahdar's capital.
- Site withinBaitul Mukarram, Dhaka
The Baitul Mukarram national mosque of Bangladesh sits in central Dhaka's commercial district, at the heart of the modern capital — the state Islamic civic centre around which the national Eid prayers and official Islamic occasions are staged. The 1960s construction and 1970s completion ran through the 1971 Liberation War and the mosque's final galleries were added under the Bangladesh state after independence.
- Site adjacencyPanam Nagar, Sonargaon
Panam Nagar — the nineteenth-century Hindu merchant town at Sonargaon 25 kilometres east of Dhaka — sits in the greater Dhaka metropolitan region, in the same river-based political-economic geography that made Mughal Dhaka a Bengal subahdar's capital. The 1947 abandonment of Panam Nagar's merchant houses and the 1971 war's redefinition of Dhaka are linked chapters of the same Hindu-Muslim-majority twentieth-century Bengal history.
- Site adjacencySonargaon
Sonargaon — the pre-Mughal Deva dynasty capital of Bengal and Ibn Battuta's 1345 Bengal landing point — sits 25 kilometres east of Dhaka on the Meghna river, within the greater Dhaka metropolitan region today. The Mughal capital shift of 1610 was from the older Sonargaon-adjacent political geography to Dhaka proper.