The Padma River is massive and powerful. It is hard to define and harder to contain. By geographic convention, the Padma (or Padda) begins where the Ganges ends near the border between India’s West Bengal province and northwestern Bangladesh. It is one of the so-called three “great rivers,” along with the Brahmaputra or Jamuna and the Meghna, that form the Bengal Delta, delivering torrents of water and sediment from the Himalayas to the sea. Like other deltaic rivers, the Padma is a shapeshifter, changing its course and appearance from season to season and year to year. Its braided channels transform as monsoon rains and mountain snowmelt swell the river, submerging chars or sandbar islands, eroding banks, and forming river expanses more than ten kilometers wide.

The Great Padma: The Epic River That Made the Bengal Delta is a new volume that introduces the power, complexity, and cultural richness of the Padma to a global audience. The Great Padma is edited by Bangladeshi architecture scholar Kazi Khaleed Ashraf. Like the Bengal Institute’s other work, The Great Padma explores and illuminates Bangladesh and the eastern Bengal Delta, a region that has long been ignored or presented as a domain of poverty, vulnerability, and developmentalist intervention. The book, with 400 pages of visual and narrative material from dozens of contributors, depicts the complexity of the Padma in all of its culture-defining, landscape-molding, and devastation-wreaking power. The Great Padma will be of particular interest to readers engaged with the landscapes, built environments, and cultures of the eastern Bengal Delta and South Asia more broadly.

Appropriately, The Great Padma is hard to describe succinctly. Like the river, the book is massive. It is often beautiful and lyrical. It is also occasionally unruly in overflowing expected boundaries and conventions. The Great Padma joins other texts by design scholars exploring the complexities of major rivers and their landscapes, settlements, and cultures, including Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha’s Mississippi Floods (Yale University Press, 2001) and more recently Derek Hoeferlin’s Way Beyond Bigness (Applied Research and Design, 2023) and the Ganges Water Machine (Applied Research and Design, 2015) from Anthony Acciavatti, who also contributed to The Great Padma. The Great Padma includes work from dozens of contributors across disciplines and perspectives, yielding a volume that is both appropriately heterogeneous in tone and occasionally challenging in its divergent perspectives.

The Great Padma is organized into five narrative sections alternating with five albums of visual materials. The albums are organized thematically, including collections of aerial photographs of riverscapes, historical maps of the region, and intimate portraits of the precarity, richness, and beauty of life on the river. The albums are interspersed between narrative sections, many of which are also richly illustrated. The first section features a brief preface by the eminent Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh and an introduction from editor Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, previewing the volume’s major themes. Section Two is a more substantial essay from Ashraf, “When the Ganga Becomes the Padma,” in which he introduces the complex story of the Padma, including: its significance in Hindu mythology and in various poetic and artistic traditions; the river’s patterns of land creation and destruction; and a rapid history of the Padma’s role in shaping settlement, colonial rule, and national identity in the delta.

Section Three, “The Padma Dynamic,” is an extended account of the geography of the Padma, from its geomorphology and hydrology to its ecology and settlement history. Section Four, “Janapada: Settling with the Padma,” presents a journey of over 250 miles along the Padma, featuring maps, photographs, and brief narrative descriptions focused on fourteen settlements along the river, from the ancient capital of Gaur at the border with West Bengal to Hatiya on an island at the edge of the Bay of Bengal. While this transect reveals the changing character of river settlements, readers would benefit from a context map situating all of the sites, more descriptive image captions, and keys on the repeated settlement maps. The fifth and final section features fifteen essays, beginning with environmental historian Iftekhar Iqbal’s discussion of the “Padda process” in the formation of modern Bangladesh.

Scholars of architecture and other built environment disciplines will find several contributions of interest, including Marina Tabassum’s essay on vernacular demountable domestic architectures and the disconnects between static property regimes and dynamic landscapes, Anthony Acciavatti’s essay on sedimentary accretion and erosion on the Padma, and Yves Marre’s account of traditional boat building in the delta region. Appropriately, this heterogeneous volume ends with a radically divergent pair of essays focused on the newly constructed Padma River Bridge. The first is a technical account of the bridge’s design and construction by British engineer Robin Sham. The second features Adnan Morshed’s meditation on the meaning of the bridge. For Morshed, the bridge elicits a complex emotional response, promising economic uplift for many Bangladeshis while also creating an undeniable sense of grief at the notion that technology could “conquer the legendary Padma River” (381).

Across the sprawling volume, several themes emerge. The clearest metanarrative that flows through The Great Padma is the dialectic variously referred to as the “Padda process” or the “Padma dynamic,” characterizing the inextricable linkage between the river’s creative power and its destructive force. Among the domains in which the book’s authors explore this dialectic are: the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore; iconic river-linked foods, including various sweets, ilish or hilsa fish, and a chicken curry made famous over decades of service on river boats; and the works of painters, photographers, and filmmakers. Finally, a third, often less explicit, metanarrative that runs through many of the texts is the relationship between the Padma and the variegated identities and politics of Bengali and Bangladeshi people. While the Padma is essential to the formation of the hydrological and cultural landscapes that link Bangladesh with India and the rest of South Asia, many of the contributions in this volume grapple with the role of the Padma in forming a distinct Bangladeshi identity in the eastern Bengal Delta.

The Great Padma is often powerful, beautiful, and occasionally sprawling and unruly. The volume lays out important terrain for inquiry and exploration by scholars, designers, and artists across media and disciplines. Some of these ideas are rich enough to seed entire new books on their own, including: vernacular building forms and land governance practices that adapt with the Padma’s dynamism; the impacts of climate change on the landscapes, ecologies, and settlements of the Padma; the effects of the Padma Bridge and other infrastructural investments from foreign powers including China; the impacts of transboundary watershed negotiations and infrastructure development in India and other upstream countries; and the evolving meaning of the Padma in contemporary cultural production in the eastern Bengal Delta.

Standing on the shores of the Padma invites an uneasy reverie. The river is rarely frothy and thunderous like its mountain headwaters and its profoundly flat landscapes are subtle in their grandeur. Even so, the bewildering expanse and steady surge of its flow creates a sense of a world in motion. While the Padma is at the center of life for millions of residents of the eastern Bengal Delta, it is less widely recognized than many other “great rivers” of the world, from the Amazon and the Mississippi to the Nile and the Mekong. The Great Padma goes a great distance to remedy that oversight, bringing the Padma and its landscapes, people, and settlements into global view at last.

Zachary Lamb is an assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where his teaching and research focuses on how planning and urban design shape uneven impacts from climate change and adaptation. His research has included investigations of the relationship between water management and urbanization in Dhaka, Bangladesh and New Orleans. He is the author with Lawrence J. Vale of the forthcoming book, The Equitably Resilient City: Solidarities and Struggles in the Face of Climate Crisis (MIT Press, 2024). 

Disclosure of conflicts of interest: Dr. Lamb was a research fellow at the Bengal Institute in 2017.