Joaquim Magalhães de Castro
In Dhaka, traffic is hellish, a crazy mixture of pedal rickshaws and motorized ones. And many pedestrians, in a frantic search of space to be able to move on. There are also camouflaged military men under umbrellas and Tourist Police agents on powerful motorcycles. The honks are constant and the colors are of all shades and the most varied shifting. The prolonged traffic jams that we all experience in a day-to-day stupor reaches an unimaginable dimension in Dakha. Taking advantage of the chaos, drivers and passengers mitigate the thirst with gulps of water using a technique that prevents touching the bottle with the lips. In the course of this delicate operation, there are those who moisten their hair by applying the precious liquid as if it were gel.
The advertisements stamped on the walls of the buildings encourage, among other things, to go abroad, a suggestion to which only a tiny part of the millions of people who live there can ponder. In Dhaka everything is transported and everything is prone to be carried. Cars and vans rehearse slaloms among thousands of multicolored rickshaws with floral motifs engraved on a silver plate. They are, without doubt, the most common form of transportation.
The different trades are distributed through the streets and in the open spaces cricket fields are improvised, as it is the national sport of Bangladesh. The heat is hellish. Impossible to keep a dry shirt, such is the amount of sweat expelled.
Chronicler João de Barros introduced a map of Dhaka for the first time in his Decades of Asia (1550), and there is knowledge of Portuguese communities established there at least since 1580. Six years later, the English traveler Ralph Fitch pointed out the involvement of merchants in the transportation of rice, cotton and silk products.
As a result of a prolonged missionary work – especially on the part of the Augustinians – several churches would be erected in honor of Our Lady of the Rosary, Our Lady of Mercy, St Nicholas of Tolentino and the Holy Spirit.
Another foreign visitor passing through the city in 1682 mentioned the existence of 600 men of arms of Portuguese origin, designated as “topazes.”
Until the arrival of the Mughals in 1608, Dhaka was successively run by Turkish and Afghan governors, representatives of the Sultanate of Delhi. Until then, and still at the beginning of the reign of Emperor Akbar (1556-1605), Dhaka was referred to as a simple military post, or thana, in the local language. During the run of the Mughal general Shaista Khan the town would have expanded its area considerably, to the point of becoming one of the largest and most flourishing cities in the Indian subcontinent, the center of the muslin trade. Muslin was a transparent material commonly used in the manufacture of women’s clothing. Although the term “muslin” refers us to one of the major sales outlets (the Iraqi city of Mosul), this product came from the Indian subcontinent. From Masulipatan, in the province of Andhra Pradesh (occupied by the Portuguese between 1598 and 1610), but mainly of the region of Bengal. It would be during Khan’s regency that many other Portuguese, hitherto residing in Chatigan and Arrakhan, would decide to settle in an area of Dhaka from then onwards and till this day known as Ferringhi Bazaar. There were them throughout the region of various sorts and professions, including privateers on the island of Sundiva (Sandwip) who throughout the 17th century terrorized the coasts of the Noakhali region. Many of them would marry the women of the region converting them in the process to Catholicism. Even today, the Christians of Noakhali claim Portuguese origin and there are remnants of the language of Camões in the various local dialects.
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