Panam Nagar

Panam Nagar is one street, several hundred metres long, lined on both sides with the mansions of Hindu cloth merchants who grew rich on the muslin trade and built here in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The houses mix Mughal, colonial and local motifs, with columns, plaster mouldings, coloured glass and decorated parapets, and after their owners left the buildings were abandoned to the weather. Fig roots have taken several facades, plaster has fallen away to expose brick, and the whole street stands in an eerie state of arrested decay. It sits within the wider Sonargaon area, a medieval capital of the region, where a folk art museum occupies a restored palace nearby.

History

Panam, from a Persian word for shelter, was part of the capital of Sonargaon under Hindu rule in the late 13th century, and Isa Khan, leader of the Baro-Bhuyans, made it his capital in the region of Bhati; the Mughals built bridges and a highway linking it to their capital, but when the capital moved to Dhaka in the 17th century Sonargaon declined. In the 19th century the cotton and muslin trade under the East India Company brought wealthy Hindu merchants, who renovated and built the mansions that line the street, and a school opened in 1900; by 1947 the wealthy families had largely left for Calcutta and by the mid-1960s the town was empty, and after restoration began in 2001 it was declared a protected site in 2003 and named on the World Monuments Watch list in 2006 (Wikipedia, Panam Nagar).

What to look for

• The street of mansions - the full row of decaying merchant houses on both sides.
• Facade detail - plasterwork, coloured glass and mixed Mughal and colonial motifs.
• Sonargaon folk art museum - regional crafts in a restored palace nearby.
• The surrounding tanks and bridges - remains of the older medieval capital.

When to go

November to February for cool dry weather and better light. It works as a half-day trip from Dhaka, though traffic out of the city can consume much of the morning.

Good to know

The buildings are genuinely unsafe and most are fenced or barred, so this is a walk down a street rather than an explore. Conservation has been slow and several houses have partly collapsed. Getting there from Dhaka takes far longer than the distance suggests because of traffic, so start early.

Nearby

Sonargaon's museum is adjacent; Dhaka's old city is an hour or more back to the northwest.

Key facts