Explore the historical significance, cultural heritage, and vibrant events of Lal Dighi in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Discover its political role, traditions like Boli Khela, and much more!
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Laldighi is a pond of 2.70 acres at the very centre of old Chittagong — the largest pond in the metropolitan area, and by local accounts a survivor of more than 250 years. It lies in Ward 32 of the City Corporation, at the end of Jail Road in Kotwali, ringed by the landmarks of the colonial and modern city: the Lalkuthi hill and the Metropolitan Police headquarters to one side, Chittagong Central Jail to the east, Government Muslim High School and the Zilla Parishad building around it, a mosque dated 1939 on its northern bank, and to the south the open ground of Laldighi Maidan. Few single acres in Bangladesh hold so much layered history. The maidan beside the pond hosts Jobbarer Boli Khela, the country’s most famous traditional wrestling tournament; it was also where Chittagong’s first Shaheed Minar rose and fell in 1952, and where one of the darkest episodes of the Ershad years unfolded in 1988. The pond itself has survived a city that has filled in thousands of its water bodies — though not without a fight, conducted in courtrooms as recently as this century.
The name is a colonial artefact, and unusually for such names, its origin is reasonably documented. When the East India Company took control of Chittagong in 1761, the administrative cluster beside the pond acquired a coat of red paint: the Entekali Kachari, the land office that is now the Metropolitan Police headquarters, was painted red and known as Lalkuthi, the “red house”; the nearby jail was likewise painted red and called Lalghar; even the hillmen who guarded the buildings wore red turbans. A small pond beside these buildings was enlarged into a proper dighi in the early period of British rule. Banglapedia concludes that the name Laldighi — the “red pond” — is “certainly linked to the symbol of the police during British rule, which was lal or red”; locally, the pond is simply explained as the one that lay between the Lalkuthi and the Lalghar.
Around that documented core, local tradition has grown its own explanations, and they deserve recording as traditions rather than facts. One holds that the afternoon sun, striking the red walls of Lalkuthi, reflected onto the water and made the pond itself look red. Another tells of a Lal Begum, a king and a battle near a Portuguese fort, in which the water turned red. A third account credits the pond’s excavation to the direction of a British woman. None of these can be verified, but all of them testify to how long the pond has sat at the centre of the city’s imagination.
The pond’s recorded owners give a glimpse of old Chittagong’s society. The historian Abdul Hoque, in his Port City Chittagong, recorded that Rai Bahadur Raj Kumar Ghose — a landlord of Akyab in Burma, originally from Chikdair in Raozan — owned the dighi and later handed it over to the municipality. A later guardian, Taqi Ismail Muhammad, himself a landowner from Chikdair who spent his days by the pond, is recorded as having transferred its ownership to Muslim High School; his name, with the year 1939, is inscribed on the dome of the Laldighi Shahi Jame Masjid that stands on the northern bank.
The pond’s banks accumulated the furniture of a colonial station. On the western bank stands the masonry landing known as Ricketts Ghat, named — Banglapedia records — after the then Commissioner of Chittagong, identified by The Daily Star as Sir Henry Ricketts, a 19th-century holder of that office. It is a bathing and landing ghat on an inland pond, built for the residents of the quarter. On the southern side a mooring and hall were raised in memory of the English magistrate Buckland, and a statue of Queen Victoria stood by the water until it was destroyed during the anti-British movement. The Daily Star has described the dighi as a witness to the movement against British colonialism, to the Language Movement and to the Liberation War — a shoreline, in other words, where the city’s political life has repeatedly gathered.
South of the pond lies Laldighi Maidan, and its biography is inseparable from the pond’s. The ground was once part of the British-era Municipal Maidan, a broad open space between the police headquarters hill and Court Hill; in the second half of the nineteenth century a north–south road cut it in two, and the eastern half became first a public playground and then the playground of Government Muslim High School — the maidan of today. The low hill between the pond and the school was once known as Marcott Saheber Pahar, Mr Marcott’s hill, with the red Lalkuthi standing on top of it.
On that ground, on 23 February 1952, two days after the language martyrs fell in Dhaka, Chittagong built its first Shaheed Minar. Pakistani police demolished it within three days. In 1909 the maidan had already acquired the event that still defines it: Abdul Jabbar Sowdagar’s Boli Khela, the wrestling tournament held every 25 April that draws a hundred wrestlers and a four-to-five-day fair (three days in recent editions) to the streets around the pond — a fair that spreads a kilometre or more from the maidan, from Kotwali Mor towards Anderkilla, and that in 2022, while the ground was being renovated, spilled onto the Zila Parishad premises nearby. The ground’s political history darkened on 24 January 1988, when police opened fire on a procession led by Sheikh Hasina, then the opposition leader, as she made her way to a rally at the maidan; twenty-four people were killed and more than two hundred injured, on the orders of the metropolitan police commissioner. Justice took thirty-two years: a case was filed only in 1992, and in January 2020 a Chittagong court sentenced five former policemen to death for the massacre. The maidan also saw the anti-autocracy movement and the 1990 mass uprising, and Laldighi’s name was linked again to the events of the July 2024 uprising.
The pond sits inside the densest cluster of old Chittagong’s institutions. To the east stands the jail that began as the red-painted Lalghar: Chittagong Central Jail, founded in 1885 as the district jail, renamed a central jail in 1999, spread over 16.87 acres with a capacity of 1,753 prisoners — the country’s second-largest jail by inmates — and a place of national memory, for it was here that the revolutionary Surya Sen and his comrade Tarakeswar Dastidar were hanged on 12 January 1934. A Tk 58 crore expansion was completed in 2011, yet the jail remains chronically overcrowded: the day before one 2011 report it held 4,349 prisoners against a then capacity of 1,715. From July 2022 its nineteenth-century British-era buildings were being demolished for a new jailhouse. Reports that the jail has been shifted out of the old city are premature: it still operates beside the pond, though in October 2026 the Home Minister announced a government decision to relocate it to Jungle Salimpur, where 72 acres have been acquired — a move that, if completed, will change Laldighi’s eastern edge for the first time in a century and a half. Around the pond stand, too, the Muslim High School, the Zilla Parishad building, Anderkilla to the north-west, and the courts on Court Hill — the administrative heart of the port city as it was laid out under the British.
Laldighi’s survival was not guaranteed. Development schemes came first: in 1996 the City Corporation began a facelift around the dighi — a planned “silent zone” and modern recreation centre for children, with walkways and designed light and shade — only for the project to stall in 1998 for lack of funds; a revised design was inaugurated in the caretaker-government period and the dighi opened to the general public. Then, in 2010, the City Corporation advanced a far more dangerous plan: to replace almost a third of the pond with a modern swimming pool and another portion with a performing stage — although the city’s own Detailed Area Plan, approved in January 2009, had recommended conserving the area for its heritage and tourism value. Environmental and heritage organisations, led by the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association, fought the scheme, and the High Court ordered it stopped; The Daily Star reported in 2011 that a piling wall the corporation had built across the dighi still stood in defiance of a court order, and credited the pond’s survival to the movement by rights groups and environmentalists. The plan did not proceed, and the pond survives whole. Today Laldighi Park, developed along its eastern, southern and western banks with walls and walkways and open in the morning and evening hours, draws the walkers and exercisers of the old city daily. The maidan, meanwhile, was renovated in 2020–21 under an Education Engineering Department project of about Tk 4.17 crore — its design themed on the movements the ground witnessed, anti-British struggle, Language Movement, six-point movement, the 1969 uprising and the Liberation War, with a stage commemorating the six-point declaration, thirty-six benches and a 368-metre walkway — and after nearly three years of closure it was inaugurated in December 2022 and reopened to the public on 2 January 2023, with political rallies returning that May. The ground belongs to Government Muslim High School and is managed by an official committee, the City Corporation keeping it clean.
Chittagong has filled in thousands of its ponds over two decades of building; Laldighi is the rare survivor, and the only one that functions as the old city’s civic heart. Its significance is cumulative — a name that preserves the red paint of 1761, a ghat that preserves a commissioner’s memory, a schoolboy’s wrestling ground that preserves an anti-colonial merchant’s defiance, a maidan that preserves, in sequence, the language martyrs, the dead of 1988 and the crowds of every movement since. Each generation has tried either to defend the place or to build over it, and so far the defenders, armed with court orders and stubbornness, have won. If the jail’s long-discussed move to Jungle Salimpur proceeds, Laldighi will face its next reinvention; the pond’s two and a half centuries suggest it will meet that, too, as what it has always been — the still water at the centre of Chittagong’s public life.
