University of Dhaka: The Oxford of the East and the Cradle of a Nation

The University of Dhaka is the oldest university in Bangladesh, and for much of its first century it was also the country's parliament of ideas: the place where the language movement was organised, where the flag of independence was first raised, and where the demand for a Bengali nation was argued into existence. It opened its doors on 1 July 1921, the product of an imperial bargain — compensation, its founders did not hide, for a political injury. In its early decades it was called the "Oxford of the East", for its residential halls and close tutorial teaching in the British manner. No ranking ever conferred that title, and none was needed: the university's claim on history rests not on comparison with Oxford but on the number of times the nation outside its gates was remade by the people inside them.

A University Promised: 1912–1921

The university was born from the rise and fall of a province. In 1905 the Partition of Bengal made Dhaka the capital of a new province, Eastern Bengal and Assam, and the city briefly flourished. In December 1911 the partition was annulled, Dhaka lost its capital status overnight, and the Muslims of East Bengal — who had seen the province as their one opening to education and government employment — felt the reversal as a betrayal. Nawab Sir Salimullah, the fourth Nawab of Dhaka, had already demanded a university for the city at a public function in August 1911. After the annulment he and his fellow leaders turned the demand into the price of loyalty. On 31 January 1912 a deputation led by Salimullah, with Nawab Syed Nawab Ali Chowdhury and A. K. Fazlul Huq among its members, met the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, in Dhaka; on 2 February the Government of India announced that a university would be established.

In May 1912 the government appointed a committee under Robert Nathan, a London barrister, which — working through twenty-five sub-committees — recommended a university of a new kind for India: unitary, teaching and residential, on some 450 acres of the former provincial capital's estate at Ramna. The scheme was approved in London in December 1913; the First World War shelved it. When the Calcutta University Commission under Michael Sadler took up the question in 1917–19, it endorsed the Dhaka university and sharpened its design. One of the commission's members was P. J. Hartog, the Academic Registrar of the University of London. The Dacca University Act followed in 1920, and Hartog was appointed the new university's first vice-chancellor that December.

Popular memory gives the founding to Salimullah alone, and even credits him with donating 600 acres of his own land. The record is different, and in its way finer. Salimullah died in January 1915, six years before the university opened; the Ramna campus was government estate land, the grounds of the vanished provincial capital — and historians have shown that the 600-acre donation is a later legend. What Salimullah actually gave was the political force that made the university undeniable: the demand, the deputation, and years of public advocacy. His fellow campaigner Nawab Ali Chowdhury carried the cause into the legislature and gave the young university money raised by mortgaging his own estate; the university's senate building bears Chowdhury's name today, and its first hall bears Salimullah's.

When the doors opened on 1 July 1921, the university was small and complete: three faculties — Arts, Science and Law — twelve departments, sixty teachers, 877 students, and three halls of residence, Salimullah Muslim Hall, Jagannath Hall and Dhaka Hall. Its seat was a ready-made campus of the old capital: the secretariat buildings, the house of the former lieutenant-governor, and red-brick Curzon Hall, built as a town hall in 1904–08 and now given to the Faculty of Science. Above all, it was residential in structure and not merely in name. Every student belonged to a hall, lived under a provost, ate, debated, played and organised there; the halls, more than the lecture rooms, were the university's true colleges, and they would shape everything that followed.

The Early University and the Bose Years

Hartog set out to build a university of genuine standard, and the early decades justified the ambition that named it, in popular description, the Oxford of the East. The founding faculty had real distinction. The historian R. C. Majumdar joined as professor of history in 1921, served as provost of Jagannath Hall, and was vice-chancellor from 1937 to 1942. In 1921 the university also admitted Leela Nag to its MA in English — its first woman student, and in 1923 its first woman graduate at that level. Dhaka Hall in time took the name of the linguist Muhammad Shahidullah, and in 1940 a fourth great hall, Fazlul Huq Muslim Hall, opened under Shahidullah himself as its first provost. By 1947 there were five faculties and seventeen departments.

The university's most astonishing early story, though, belongs to physics. In 1921 a twenty-seven-year-old Reader named Satyendra Nath Bose arrived to teach in the new physics department at Curzon Hall. He is not to be confused with his older namesake Jagadish Chandra Bose, the wireless pioneer of Presidency College — Satyen Bose's field was the quantum theory, and what he did at Dhaka changed it. In June 1924, lecturing on Planck's radiation law, he found a new way to derive it: by counting the states of light particles as if the particles were indistinguishable from one another. He sent the four-page paper to Albert Einstein, who recognised its importance at once, translated it into German with his own hands and placed it in the leading physics journal. Einstein then extended Bose's method from light to atoms, predicting a new state of matter — the Bose–Einstein condensate, finally produced in a laboratory in 1995. The whole class of particles that obey the statistics Bose invented is called, after him, bosons.

Bose returned from two years in Europe to become professor and head of physics in 1927 and dean of the Faculty of Science, and he stayed until 1945, building the department in Curzon Hall into a research school. That a university three years old, at the far edge of the empire's map, produced one of the foundational papers of quantum mechanics is the standing answer to anyone who asks what the Dhaka experiment was for.

The University of the Language Movement

Partition in 1947 made Dhaka the capital of East Pakistan, and the university the province's intellectual headquarters — which meant, almost at once, its opposition headquarters too. The instrument was the students' own organisation. Founded in 1922–23 as the Dhaka University Students' Union and renamed the Dhaka University Central Students' Union (DUCSU) in 1953, it would come to be called the country's second parliament, and the Language Movement was its first great session. The movement's first organiser was one of the university's own teachers: Abul Kashem, a lecturer in physics, founded the Tamaddun Majlis in September 1947, weeks after Pakistan's creation, and its pamphlet asking whether Pakistan's state language should be Bengali or Urdu was the first printed shot of the campaign. Students met on the campus that December to demand Bengali; a strike followed in March 1948. On 24 March 1948 the Governor-General, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, stood in Curzon Hall at the university's convocation and told the students that the state language could "only be Urdu" — and the hall answered him, in the middle of his speech, with cries of "No, no".

The campus radicals of those years were not marginal men. Among the law students was Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, expelled in 1949 for backing an agitation of the university's fourth-class employees — an expulsion the university withdrew sixty-one years later, in 2010, when the student it had punished was remembered as the founding father of Bangladesh. The argument over language ran on until it reached its climax on 21 February 1952. That morning, with gatherings banned under Section 144, students assembled beneath the mango tree at Amtala on the campus, resolved to defy the ban, and marched out in small groups into police batons, tear gas and finally bullets. Abul Barkat, a master's student of political science at the university, was among the young men killed. Beside the campus, students of Dhaka Medical College built the first Shaheed Minar overnight; the police demolished it within days, and it rose again, as it keeps rising, in the nation's memory. The full story belongs to this site's history of the Language Movement; what matters here is that it was, from first pamphlet to last procession, substantially a movement of this campus. In 1956 Pakistan's constitution recognised Bengali as a state language. The same post-Partition years quietly widened the university's cultural estate: in 1948 the artist Zainul Abedin founded the Government Institute of Arts and Crafts in Dhaka, the seed of what is now the university's Faculty of Fine Arts.

1969–1971: Uprising, Searchlight and Survival

The pattern set in 1952 repeated at a higher pitch. Ayub Khan's military regime had already, in 1961, imposed an ordinance on the university that its teachers resented as a leash on their autonomy. In January 1969 the all-party student action committee, convened by DUCSU's vice-president Tofail Ahmed, issued the Eleven-Point Programme that fused student demands with the autonomy programme of the Six Points; the campaign's moves, by the participants' own accounts, were planned over tea at Modhur Canteen, the campus canteen that served as student politics' unofficial cabinet room. On 20 January 1969 police shot dead Asad, a final-year history master's student, in front of Dhaka Medical College. The killing detonated the province. Within weeks the Agartala Conspiracy Case was withdrawn and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman walked free; within two months Ayub Khan had fallen.

After the election of 1970 and the refusal to transfer power, Dhaka moved towards confrontation, and the university stood at its front. The flag of an independent Bangladesh — green, with a red disc bearing the country's map — had been designed by student leaders in a room of Iqbal Hall in June 1970. On 2 March 1971, as the non-cooperation movement began, DUCSU's vice-president A. S. M. Abdur Rab hoisted that flag publicly for the first time at the Bot Tola of the Arts Faculty. Three weeks later the army answered. On the night of 25–26 March 1971, opening the crackdown it called Operation Searchlight, it made the university one of its three principal targets in Dhaka, alongside the police lines at Rajarbagh and the rifles headquarters at Pilkhana. From about half past eleven, tanks, mortars and machine guns were turned on the halls. Iqbal Hall — since renamed for Sergeant Zahurul Haq, an accused in the Agartala case killed in custody in 1969 — was the headquarters of the student movement, and the British journalist Simon Dring, who reached the campus days later, reported some two hundred students killed there. At Jagannath Hall, home to many of the university's Hindu students, soldiers lined students up in the field and shot them; a teacher from the neighbouring engineering university secretly filmed the killing from his window. The philosopher Gobinda Chandra Dev, a former provost of Jagannath Hall, was shot in his quarters; the hall's provost, Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta, died of his wounds five days later; the statistician A. N. M. Muniruzzaman was killed with his son and relatives. Later estimates by the university community put the toll of that night at at least two hundred students and ten teachers, though the Pakistani authorities claimed far fewer and no exact count exists. It was the first night of the Liberation War, and the university began it as a target because the army understood its role exactly.

For the nine months of occupation the university's academic life ceased; its teachers and students scattered into exile, resistance and hiding, and many did not return. On 14 December 1971, two days before the surrender, the Al-Badr militia abducted and murdered a roll of Bengali intellectuals, among them Munier Chowdhury — the university's playwright-professor, who had himself been jailed for the Language Movement twenty years before. After victory on 16 December, the survivors came back to a campus that held unmarked graves in its hall grounds.

Autonomy and the Modern University

Independent Bangladesh gave the university back its self-government almost as a first act of state. The Dhaka University Order, 1973 — President's Order No. 11 of 1973, effective from the first anniversary of victory — reconstituted the university, repealed Ayub's 1961 ordinance, and restored the autonomy the teachers had demanded for a generation: a Senate and Syndicate with elected teacher representation, and a vice-chancellor chosen from an elected panel. The Order remains the university's charter (its 1987 amendment finally replaced "Dacca" with "Dhaka" throughout). The decades since have been ones of great expansion and recurring argument. The twelve departments of 1921 have become eighty-three; faculties multiplied from three to thirteen; institutes and research centres were layered onto the residential core. DUCSU, whose elections were suspended for twenty-eight years at a stretch, voted again in 2019 and held its thirty-seventh election in September 2025. In 2021 the university turned one hundred, the oldest in the country by a generation.

The University Today

The university's own published profile today counts thirteen faculties, eighty-three departments, twelve institutes, twenty residential halls and three hostels, and more than fifty research centres, with about 37,000 students and some 2,000 teachers on a campus of about 600 acres at Ramna. The landmarks of that campus are a syllabus in themselves. Curzon Hall, the red-brick town hall that never was, still houses the sciences where Bose taught. The Teacher-Student Centre — TSC — built in 1961 to a design by the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis, is the campus's social heart, all adda, rehearsals and debate. The University Library, which began in 1921 with 18,000 books inherited from Dhaka College and the Law College, is now the largest in the country, with more than 600,000 volumes and some 30,000 manuscripts. Modhur Canteen still pours its tea a short walk away. Among the halls, Rokeya Hall — the oldest women's residence, begun in 1938 — carries the name it was given in 1964 in honour of Begum Rokeya, whose statue stands in its grounds, watching generations of women students do the thing she spent her life demanding they be allowed to do.

Conclusion

Most universities are founded to serve a state; the University of Dhaka was founded as a consolation to a people, and then spent a century helping that people become a state. Its halls produced the organisers of the Language Movement, the strategists of 1969 and the first flag of 1971 — and paid for that role in the massacre of its students and teachers on the war's first night. Its laboratories, meanwhile, produced the statistics that bear a Dhaka Reader's name in every physics textbook on earth. The "Oxford of the East" was always a fond exaggeration. The truth underneath it — a small residential university on the Ramna that became the cradle of a nation — is not an exaggeration at all.