Place · merchant town · Bangladesh
Panam Nagar, Sonargaon
Also known as Panam Nagar, Panam City, Panam Town
The nineteenth-century Hindu Bengali merchant town built on the ruins of medieval Sonargaon, on a single 600-metre street lined with 52 brick-and-stucco houses in a Bengali-colonial hybrid style — European Renaissance cornices and keystones over Bengali chuna-based plaster finishes. The town was built up by Dhaka cotton and jute merchants between 1860 and 1890 when the muslin trade had collapsed and the jute boom was beginning; the houses were abandoned at the 1947 Partition when the Hindu merchant community left for India. The site is on the UNESCO World Monuments Fund's watch list and is one of the subcontinent's clearest surviving examples of a nineteenth-century planned merchant town.
- Date
- 1860–1890
- Function
- Trade & production
- Patron dynasty
- British Raj · Bangladesh
- Tradition
- Standard reference; INTACH, ASI and municipal records; institutional histories.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 23.650, 90.600
Connections (2)
- Site adjacencyDhaka
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 withinSonargaon
Panam Nagar sits within Sonargaon in Narayanganj district, Bangladesh — the 19-century Hindu Bengali merchant town built on the ruins of the medieval Sonargaon Bengal Sultanate capital. The 52 brick-and-stucco houses in Bengali-colonial hybrid style built up by Dhaka cotton and jute merchants between 1860 and 1890 sit within the broader Sonargaon archaeological-historic zone that also contains the Goaldi Mosque (1519), the Folk Art Museum and the earlier Sultanate ruins.