Panam Nagar

One street, 600 metres long and five metres wide, lined with the abandoned mansions of cotton merchants.

Panam Nagar sits in Sonargaon Upazila in Narayanganj District, Bangladesh, near modern Dhaka, and it holds the only surviving relics of the old Panam area. The settlement traces to the 13th century, and Banglapedia records that the site is said to have been the Hindu capital city of Sonargaon, emerging in the seventh decade of that century. The Panam area later formed part of the Muslim metropolis built to the south of the old city, and may have been where the early Muslim governors lived.

After the Mughal conquest of Sonargaon in 1611 the area was tied into the ruling metropolis by new highways and bridges. Three Mughal brick bridges still stand.

The town was a thriving commercial centre until the 17th century, when the capital moved away from Sonargaon and Panam declined with it. Its revival came in the 19th century under British colonial rule, when wealthy Hindu merchants redeveloped the street and made it a hub of the cotton fabric trade. That is the Panam Nagar you can see: a narrow winding road flanked by canals on both sides, the northern one called the Pankhiraj Canal, with buildings in three distinct architectural styles across two periods, Mughal, British colonial, and a hybrid of the two.

The partition of India and riots in 1964 emptied it. It was occupied afterwards, then eventually cleared and declared an archaeological site in the 2000s.

What stands now is a run of dilapidated buildings along a single street, with restoration work continuing. It is the rare abandoned place where the reason for the abandonment is written into the century rather than into a legend.