Bangladesh National Museum: History, Galleries and the Nation's Collection

The Bangladesh National Museum at Shahbagh is where Bangladesh keeps its memory in physical form. Behind its long modernist facade in the middle of Dhaka stand more than a century of collecting: Pala sculpture and Sultanate coins, Dhaka muslin and embroidered quilts, the relics of the Language Movement and the Liberation War, and the famine sketches of Zainul Abedin. The institution began in 1913 as the Dhaka Museum, with a government grant of two thousand rupees and, when it first opened its doors to the public, just 379 objects in three rooms. Today its collection runs to well over ninety thousand artefacts, most of them — as its own keepers now publicly complain — locked away in storage for want of space. Its story is the story of a museum that grew with the country through three regimes, and of the unfinished work of preserving what it holds.

A Museum Promised at Northbrook Hall

Dhaka had wanted a museum for a long time. As early as November 1856, The Dhaka News was reporting a public demand for one, but nothing came of it under the distracted administration of the mid-nineteenth century. The breakthrough came half a century later, in the charged aftermath of the annulment of the Partition of Bengal. Curzon's 1905 partition had made Dhaka the capital of a new province; its annulment in December 1911 took that status away again, and the imperial government offered Dhaka a series of consolations — a university, a high court, and, as it turned out, a museum.

On 25 July 1912 the Governor of Bengal, Lord Carmichael, attended a conversazione at Northbrook Hall in Dhaka, where the city's elite placed the museum demand before him. Carmichael responded favourably and sanctioned a grant of Rs 2,000. The proposal moved quickly after that: the Governor in Council formally approved the setting up of a Dhaka Museum, and the approval was published in the official Gazette of 5 March 1913. The museum was formally established on 20 March 1913, and on 7 August 1913 Carmichael inaugurated it at the Secretariat — the government office complex whose buildings now stand within the Dhaka Medical College area. A thirty-member executive committee was formed to run the institution, chaired by F. C. French, the Commissioner of Dhaka Division, with H. E. Stapleton as secretary.

It took another year to arrange the displays. On 25 August 1914 the Dhaka Museum opened to the public with 379 objects in three rooms. In July 1915 it was moved out of the Secretariat to roomier quarters at Nimtali — the Baradari and gatehouse of the former Naib Nazim's palace — and handed over to the Naib Nazim of Dhaka. There, under its first curator, it began the slow work of becoming a real collection.

Nalini Kanta Bhattasali: The First Curator

The Executive Committee appointed Nalini Kanta Bhattasali as Curator on 26 June 1914; he joined on 6 July 1914 and stayed for thirty-three years, until his death on 6 February 1947. Bhattasali was a historian and epigraphist of formidable energy, and the Dhaka Museum was essentially his creation. Banglapedia singles out his contribution as outstanding: he personally supervised archaeological excavations across Bengal, travelling to sites, reading inscriptions and physically carrying back sculpture, coins and manuscripts to enrich the museum's holdings. Under him the provincial collection grew from a few hundred curiosities into a serious repository of Bengal's ancient and medieval past — the foundation on which everything at Shahbagh still rests.

His death exposed how much the institution had depended on one man. The Dhaka Museum went about four years without a curator at all, and through the Pakistan period it subsisted as a respectable but neglected provincial museum in its Nimtali home. In 1970 the East Pakistan government regularised its status under the Dacca Museum (Board of Trustees) Ordinance, but the transformation Bhattasali's successors hoped for had to wait for a new country.

Independence, Ordinance and a New Home at Shahbagh

The Liberation War of 1971 changed the museum's meaning before it changed its name. During and after the war, exhibits from museums and historic houses damaged in the fighting — among them Dinajpur Rajbari and the Baldha Museum — were transferred to Dhaka for safekeeping, and the museum began collecting the material record of the struggle that created Bangladesh, a task its historians pursue to this day (see the Liberation War of Bangladesh). In the new state, the case for elevating the old Dhaka Museum into a true national museum became irresistible.

The legal instrument was the Bangladesh Jatiya Jadughar Ordinance, 1983 (Ordinance No. LIII of 1983), promulgated on 20 September 1983. It established the Bangladesh Jatiya Jadughar — the Bangladesh National Museum — as the successor to the Dhaka Museum and repealed the 1970 Board of Trustees Ordinance. The ordinance has since been replaced by the Bangladesh National Museum Act, 2022, under which the museum is now governed and its leadership appointed.

A national museum needed a national building. On 8.63 acres at Shahbagh, in the city's cultural quarter near the University of Dhaka and Bangla Academy, rose a purpose-built four-storeyed home designed by architect Syed Mainul Hossain, with a total floor space of 202,116 square feet. The Bangladesh National Museum was formally inaugurated there on 17 November 1983, seventy years after Carmichael had opened its predecessor in the Secretariat. Banglapedia counts 44 galleries in the building, alongside a large library, three auditoriums and two exhibition halls. The museum is led today by its Director General, Tanzim Ibn Wahab, who took office in August 2025 and was reappointed for a further one-year term in September 2026; in December 2024 the architect Marina Tabassum agreed to chair its governing body.

Inside the Museum: Departments and Galleries

The collection is organised under four curatorial departments, supported by a conservation laboratory and a public education department. The largest is the Department of History and Classical Art, which holds the political, religious and artistic record of the past: sculpture in stone, bronze and terracotta from the Buddhist, Hindu and Jain traditions of ancient Bengal; inscriptions and manuscripts; and a numismatic hoard of more than 52,000 coins within a departmental holding of over 65,000 objects. It is this department that collects and keeps the relics and mementoes of the Liberation War.

The Department of Ethnography and Decorative Art tells the story of ordinary life: rural Bangladesh and its rivers, the boats that ply them, the peoples of the plains and the Chittagong hills, pottery and dolls, musical instruments, wood carving and ivory work. Its textile galleries preserve the fabrics that once made Bengal famous — gossamer Dhaka muslin, jamdani saris and nakshi kantha embroidered quilts. The Department of Contemporary Art and World Civilization holds the modern masters alongside international galleries devoted to China, Korea, Iran and Switzerland, while the Department of Natural History opens the visitor's route with the land itself: rocks and minerals, the flora and fauna of the deltas, and the gallery of the Sundarbans with its Royal Bengal tiger.

The numbers tell the scale of the accumulation. The museum's own published highlights list recorded 82,475 objects by June 1998; Banglapedia put the exhibits collected up to 2009 at about 86,000; by 2017 the collection had reached 91,287 artefacts, and museum sources cited in 2025 put it at 93,936.

Signature Exhibits

For most visitors the emotional centre of the museum is the floor given to the nation's birth: the galleries of the Language Movement of 1952 and the Liberation War of 1971, where photographs, documents, weapons and the personal effects of martyrs carry the narrative from protest to independence. The History and Classical Art department's own summary lists objects of the Liberation War and relics of the Language Movement martyrs among the museum's most significant holdings — a reminder that this is a national museum in the fullest sense, keeper of a revolution's evidence as well as of antiquities.

Art lovers make for the Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin gallery. The museum holds roughly 800 works by Zainul Abedin — sketches, watercolours and scrolls — among them the searing Famine Sketches of 1943, drawn in Chinese ink on cheap packing paper, the 28-foot Monpura scroll recording the 1970 cyclone, and the 65-foot Nobanno scroll celebrating the harvest. Exhibitions from this reserve, mounted in the museum's Nalinikanta Bhattasali Gallery, named for the first curator, regularly draw works by Abedin, Quamrul Hassan and SM Sultan out of storage and before the public.

Other highlights are named in the museum's own published list: petrified wood some two and a half million years old from Lalmai–Mainamati; the tenth–eleventh-century black-stone Naga Darwaza, a serpent doorway from Bangarh in Dinajpur; coins of the emperor Sher Shah; and, in the world civilization galleries, fragments of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — a quiet, devastating footnote to the twentieth century.

Folk culture is not treated as a dead past here. The ethnography department's galleries and its recurring craft fairs bring living artisans into the museum, displaying jamdani weaving, nakshi kantha, traditional shokher hari — the painted earthenware pots of village festivals — and the exuberant rickshaw paintings of Dhaka's streets, a folk form the museum went out to document on film at Rayer Bazar as early as 1999.

A Family of Museums

The Shahbagh headquarters is the head of a small family. Banglapedia lists four branch museums under the Bangladesh National Museum, opened across four decades. The oldest is the Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin Sangrahashala in Mymensingh, established in 1975 in the town where the artist grew up, which holds his paintings and personal effects under the national museum's care. The Osmany Museum in Sylhet followed in 1987, commemorating General M. A. G. Osmani, commander-in-chief of the Liberation War forces. In Dhaka itself, the pink palace of Ahsan Manzil — acquired by the government in 1985 and restored — was brought under the national museum on 20 September 1992 and opened as a museum of the Nawabs of Dhaka. The Zia Smriti Museum in Chittagong dates to 1993. The museum's own later accounts add two more branches: the Pallikabi Jasim Uddin Sangrahashala at Faridpur (2016) and the Kangal Harinath Memorial Museum at Kushtia (2017).

One famous Dhaka museum site does not belong to this family, despite frequent assumptions: Lalbagh Fort, for all its prominence, is administered not by the National Museum but by the Department of Archaeology.

The Work, and the Warnings

The museum's public role extends well beyond its galleries. Its public education department runs programmes for students and visitors; it has published catalogues and research since 1978; and in December 2022 it opened a Centre for Art History and Museology to train a new generation of museum professionals. A long digitisation effort, begun in 2012, has built a database of the collection — UNESCO's policy review notes nearly 100,000 artefacts recorded — and since April 2017 a 360-degree virtual gallery has carried selected exhibits to anyone with an internet connection, with e-ticketing added in 2018.

Yet the institution's own staff describe a deepening strain. Reporting by Bonik Barta in 2025, citing museum sources, found that of 93,936 artefacts only about 4,150 could be put on display; more than 95 per cent of the national collection is invisible to the public it belongs to. The museum has just fifteen storage rooms, and its keepers say the storage does not meet international standards: in Bangladesh's humid climate, without precise temperature and humidity control, paper, textiles and other organic materials are exposed to fungus, bacteria and insects, and damaged artefacts are periodically struck off the collection. "We are working within many limitations," keeper Asma Ferdousi told the paper. "Out of 94,000 artefacts, we can display only about 4,000. We also need a properly equipped, modern storage facility." A former director general, Faizul Latif Chowdhury, has pointed to a sharp decline in visitor numbers, and a Daily Star investigation as far back as 2008 found the museum still checking its treasures manually, without modern technology even to authenticate objects.

The branches share the pressure. In October 2026, New Age reported a preservation crisis at the Zainul Abedin Sangrahashala in Mymensingh, where 189 irreplaceable items — 62 masterworks and 127 personal articles of the artist — face temperature and humidity swings without modern micro-climate protection; activists there also recalled the gallery's darkest episode, the 1982 theft of seventeen paintings, ten of which were recovered in 1994 while seven remain untraced.

None of this diminishes what stands at Shahbagh: a museum founded on a two-thousand-rupee grant that now holds the material memory of a nation — its ancient sculpture and its revolutionary relics, its finest muslin and its starkest famine drawings. The task its second century sets is plain enough, and its own keepers state it: to give the ninety-five per cent in storage the space, the science and the audience they deserve.