Bangla Academy: Guardian of the Bengali Language Since 1955

Bangla Academy is Bangladesh's national academy for the Bengali language — the institution charged with promoting, researching and standardising Bangla, and the custodian of the literary culture that grew out of the Language Movement of 1952. Founded on 3 December 1955 and housed from its first day in Burdwan House, a former chief minister's residence in Dhaka's Ramna area, it is at once a research body, the country's most storied publishing house, the organiser of the Amar Ekushey Book Fair and the giver of the Bangla Academy Literary Award. Modelled on the Académie française, it has spent seven decades compiling the dictionaries, grammars and collected works through which modern Bangla defines itself.

Origins in the Language Movement

The idea of a Bangla academy long predates the institution. At a meeting of the Vangiya Sahitya Parishad in 1925, the scholar Muhammad Shahidullah proposed the use of Bangla for academic and literary purposes; in 1940 he called on the Government of Bengal to set up a translation department, and on 31 December 1948, in his presidential address to the East Pakistan Literary Conference in Dhaka, he proposed the establishment of a language academy outright.

It took the bloodshed of 21 February 1952 to turn the proposal into a public demand. The killings of students asserting Bangla's claim to state-language status made a national language institution a matter of political urgency: the daily Azad argued the case in an editorial on 29 April 1952, and an early initiative at the University of Dhaka came to nothing. The demand was finally written into politics by the United Front, whose 21-point election manifesto for the 1954 provincial elections promised that Burdwan House — the official residence of the very chief minister whose government had ordered the 1952 firing — would be given up first as a student hostel and then as a research centre for the Bangla language. The full story of that struggle is told in our account of the Language Movement of 1947–1952.

The United Front won the 1954 election, but its government was dismissed within weeks and Governor's Rule imposed, freezing the plan. When the Front returned to power in mid-1955, it kept the promise: on 3 December 1955 the new chief minister, Abu Hossain Sarkar, inaugurated Bangla Academy at Burdwan House.

First Years: Directors, Presidents and the 1957 Act

The Academy began modestly, as a government institution run by a committee. On 26 November 1955 the provincial government issued the order forming a preparatory committee for its establishment, and on 2 December the writer Mohammad Barkatullah was appointed its secretary and special officer, effectively its first administrator. On 1 December 1956 Dr Muhammad Enamul Haque, a leading linguist and literary historian, took charge as the Academy's first Director — a distinction worth keeping precise, since the grander title of Director General did not exist until after independence. The presidency, the institution's senior academic office, was first held by Maulana Mohammad Akram Khan, the veteran journalist and politician; among his successors in the 1960s was the scientist and educationist Muhammad Qudrat-i-Khuda, president in 1964–65.

In 1957 the Bangla Academy Act gave the institution the status of an autonomous organisation, financed by the government — the legal footing it still stands on. Its functions and structure were consciously devised on the model of the French Academy: a national body whose main task is the promotion and development of the language itself.

Burdwan House

Few Bangladeshi institutions are as inseparable from their building. Burdwan House was raised in 1906 (some accounts say 1911) as a government guest house, originally known as Sujatpur Palace. It took its lasting name from Bijay Chand Mahtab, Maharaja of Burdwan, who lodged there on his annual visits to Dhaka between 1919 and 1924 as a member of the Governor's Executive Council of Bengal.

From August 1947 to 1954 the house was the official residence of the chief minister of East Bengal — first Khawaja Nazimuddin and then Nurul Amin, who was living there through the Language Movement, when the building stood as a symbol of the administration the movement opposed. The United Front's promise to convert it was therefore rich in symbolism: the palace of the rulers who had resisted Bangla would become Bangla's research home. The building still anchors the Academy today and now also houses its museum collections, including a museum of the Language Movement — a fitting second life for the movement's most contested address.

What the Academy Does

The Academy's working structure was set early and expanded after independence. Its original five divisions — Research, Translation, Compilation, Publication and Library — were joined, after 1971, by Textbook and Folklore divisions, when the former Central Board for the Development of Bengali was merged into it.

Its deepest mark on the language is its reference work. The Academy has compiled and published the standard Bengali-English and English-Bengali dictionaries, the Bangla Banan Abhidhan, a dictionary of Bangla orthography that anchors its official guideline for Bangla spelling, a pronunciation dictionary, a lexicon of Bangladeshi dialects, glossaries of law, economics, sociology, literature and music, a science encyclopaedia and biographical dictionaries of writers and notable lives. Its folklore division holds a major collection of puthis — manuscripts of the ancient and medieval periods — along with folk songs, tales, rhymes and riddles, much of it published. It brings out collected works of the major Bangla writers, textbooks and reference books in Bangla, translations of world literature, history and science into Bangla, and translations of Bangla works into foreign languages.

Around this core sits a busy public institution: six journals, including the quarterly Bangla Academy Patrika and Uttaradhikar; seminars, lectures and cultural programmes; Bangla language courses for foreigners; research scholarships; and a young writers' project. Banglapedia describes it as the biggest publishing house in the country — by July 2000 it had already published 4,034 books and journals.

The Bangla Academy Literary Award

Bangladesh's senior literary honour is the Academy's own. The Bangla Academy Literary Award — the Bangla Academy Sahitya Puraskar — was introduced in 1960, recognising six categories: poetry, the novel, the short story, the essay, juvenile literature and translation. From 1985, further awards were added for overall contribution to Bangla language and literature, and the list of categories has since widened to take in drama, folklore, research, biography and writing on the Liberation War, among others.

The first awards, in 1960, went to a founding generation of modern Bangla letters — among them the poet Farrukh Ahmad, the satirist and memoirist Abul Mansur Ahmed, the novelist Abul Hashem Khan and the essayist Abdullah Hel Kafi. Six decades on, by the award's diamond jubilee in 2020, more than three hundred writers had received it, and the categories have steadily widened with the country's literature itself.

The awards are woven into the Ekushey season each February: the names are announced in the run-up to the book fair and the prizes presented at its opening. At the inauguration of the 2026 fair, for example, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman presented the 2025 awards to eight distinguished personalities — a measure of how completely the Academy's prize has become part of the national literary calendar.

The Amar Ekushey Book Fair

The Academy's best-known creation began without it. On 21 February 1972, weeks after independence, the publisher Chittaranjan Saha of Muktadhara spread a mat beneath a mango tree on the Academy premises and laid out 33 of his house's publications in homage to the martyrs of 1952 — the day now marked worldwide as International Mother Language Day. Other publishers drifted in unofficially; in 1974 Muktadhara built the first proper stall, a modest eight feet square.

Bangla Academy took over the organisation of the fair in 1978, and in 1979 staged it in its courtyard in collaboration with the Bangladesh Publishers and Booksellers Association. A first attempt at a formally governed fair, planned for 1983, fell through; in 1984 the fair began in earnest under a set policy, bearing the name Amar Ekushey Granthamela — restyled Amar Ekushey Boi Mela from 2021. It has long since outgrown the Academy courtyard and now fills the adjoining Suhrawardy Udyan as well, running through February as the centrepiece of the country's publishing year, when most new Bangla books are launched.

The fair's modern scale is best seen in its most recent edition. The 2026 fair, its start repeatedly rescheduled around the national election and Ramadan, ran in shortened form from 26 February to 15 March under the theme "Multidimensional Bangladesh", inaugurated by the prime minister. According to the fair management committee's closing figures, 584 institutions took part, 570 of them publishing houses, and 2,007 new titles were published during the fair — down from 3,299 the year before. The committee estimated total sales at about Tk 17 crore, extrapolated from the 269 publishers who reported roughly Tk 8 crore between them; a publishers' platform, Prakashak Oikya, publicly disputed the estimate and reported steep falls in sales. Set against recent normal years, those figures show how exceptional 2026 was: in 2024 the fair had seen 3,751 new titles and committee-reported sales of about Tk 60 crore, and 2025 brought 3,299 new titles and sales of nearly Tk 40 crore. Even in a difficult year, the fair remained what it has been for four decades: the single marketplace where Bangladesh's writers, publishers and readers meet.

The Academy Today

Independence reshaped the institution. The director's post was upgraded to Director General, and Mazharul Islam, head of the Bangla department at Rajshahi University, became the first to hold it on 2 June 1972. In the decades since, the Academy has remained the state's principal instrument of language policy and literary patronage, its presidents and directors general drawn from the country's senior scholars and writers.

As of late 2026 the Academy is led by its president, Professor Abul Kasem Fazlul Haq, a former Dhaka University professor of Bangla appointed for a three-year term after the resignation of novelist Selina Hossain in October 2024, and its director general, Professor Mohammad Azam. The institution marked its 70th founding anniversary in December 2025. Its recent work shows the old mandate being carried into new territory: in September 2026 it signed a publishing agreement with the National University to expand academic, research and translation-based publishing, and in October 2026 it launched the Bangla Academy Font, developed under its project on enriching Bangla through information technology. The same month it began a full renovation of the Nazrul Memorial Room inside the Burdwan House estate, recasting the small memorial to the national poet as a modern research space for the year-long Nazrul Year being observed from May 2026. At the opening of the 2026 book fair the prime minister spoke of developing the fair into an international event and of pressing Bangla's claim to recognition at the United Nations — ambitions that would have been familiar to the scholars who first demanded an academy in 1948, and who understood, as the institution still does, that a language's fortunes are never merely linguistic.