Introduction to Bangladesh

With roughly 130 million people squeezed into an area the size of Illinois, Bangladesh is among the most densely crowded of the world's countries. With a per capita income of less than $400 annually, it is also one of the poorest countries. These crushing demographic and economic statistics inspired a few decades ago the cruel label "basket case." Cruel, because the country is full of hard-working people.

The curious choice of places shown here, apart from Dhaka (formerly Dacca), can be explained as part of a search early in the 1990s for a pristine, pre-Europeanized countryside somewhere in Asia. That search led from Dhaka to Narayanganj, Mymensingh, Kishorganj, Pabna--and finally to the one-time home of Rabindranath Tagore, near Kushtia. For more on the search, and its results, see the last part of The Spirit of the Place.