Dhaka
A red-brick building from 1905 that blends European and Mughal styles.
Curzon Hall sits in the heart of Dhaka’s student life. On 21 February, International Mother Language Day, people walk past it in their thousands to lay flowers at the Central Shaheed Minar nearby, and the campus fills with songs and alpona painted on the roads.
Curzon Hall is the red-brick landmark of the University of Dhaka. It is named after Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, who laid its foundation stone in 1904, around the time Bengal was partitioned and Dhaka became the capital of the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. It was planned as a town hall.
The design mixes European and Mughal styles: horseshoe and cusped arches, small domes and kiosks on the roofline, and deep verandas, all in red brick with lighter trim. When the University of Dhaka was founded in 1921, the building became part of it, and it has housed the Faculty of Science ever since.
Curzon Hall also has a place in the country’s history. In 1948, students here protested when Muhammad Ali Jinnah declared at a university convocation that Urdu alone would be the state language of Pakistan — one of the first sparks of the Language Movement.
Walk around the building and its lawns to see the arches and domes from every side.
A few minutes away, the memorial to those killed in the Language Movement of 1952.
The roundabout with its sculpture of the magpie robin, the national bird, beside the old buildings of the campus.
End the afternoon with tea and fuchka among the students.
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October to March, in the late afternoon, when the light warms the red brick.
On the University of Dhaka campus. The nearest metro station is Dhaka University.
