PM Modi will be on a two-day visit to Bangladesh where he will take part in commemorations of some epochal events there. This visit to Bangladesh will reinforce the existing areas of cooperation and will also introduce the new areas of cooperation.  PM Modi had last visited Bangladesh in 2015. Before the visit, in order to reflect the strong ties between the two nations, India also conferred Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman with a Gandhi Peace Prize. The award was highly appreciated by the Bangladesh government.

Bangabandhu shrine in Tungipara

  • Located about 420 kilometers from Dhaka, Tungipara was the place of birth of Rahman, the architect of the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence.
  • This is also the place where he lies buried inside a grand tomb called the ‘Bangabandhu mausoleum’.
  • Millions of people gather here every year on August 15, to observe the day when Rahman was assassinated by a group of disgruntled army officers.

Harichand Thakur’s shrine in Orakandi

  • Thakur was the founder of the Matua Mahasangha, which was a religious reformation movement that originated in Orakandi in about 1860 CE.
  • At a very early age, Thakur experienced spiritual revelation, following which he founded a sect of Vaishnava Hinduism called Matua.
  • Members of the sect were the namasudras who were considered to be untouchables.
  • The objective of Thakur’s religious reform was to uplift the community through educational and other social initiatives.
  • Members of the community consider Thakur as God and an avatar of Vishnu or Krishna.
  • After the 1947 Partition, many of the Matuas migrated to West Bengal.

‘Sugandha Shaktipith’ (Satipith) temple in Shikarpur

  • Modi is also scheduled to visit the Sugandha Shaktipeeth which is located in Shikarpur, close to Barisal.
  • The temple, dedicated to Goddess Sunanda is of immense religious significance to Hinduism.
  • It is one of the 51 Shakti Pith temples.
  • The Shakti Pith shrines are pilgrimage destinations associated with the Shakti (Goddess worship) sect of Hinduism.

Rabindra Kuthi Bari in Kushtia

  • The Kuthi Bari is a country house built by Dwarkanath Tagore, the grandfather of Nobel laureate and Bengali poetic giant Rabindranath Tagore.
  • The latter stayed in the house for over a decade in irregular intervals between 1891 and 1901.
  • In this house Tagore composed some of his masterpieces like Sonar Tari, Katha o Kahini, Chaitali etc. He also wrote a large number of songs and poems for Gitanjali here.
  • It was also in this house that Tagore began translating the Gitanjali to English in 1912, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Ancestral home of Bagha Jatin in Kushtia

  • Jatindranath Mukherjee, better known as ‘Bagha Jatin’ (tiger Jatin) was a revolutionary freedom fighter.
  • He was born in Kayagram, a village in Kushtia district, where his ancestral home is located.
  • Jatin acquired the epithet ‘Bagha’ after he fought a Royal Bengal Tiger all by himself and killed it with a dagger.
  • Jatin was the first commander-in-chief of the ‘Jugantar Party’ which was formed in 1906 as a central association dedicated to train revolutionary freedom fighters in Bengal.
  • This was the period when Bengal was seething with nationalist furore against Lord Curzon’s declaration of Partition of the province.
  • Inspired by Jatin’s clarion call, “amra morbo, jagat jagbe” (we shall die to awaken the nation), many young revolutionaries joined the brand of the freedom struggle that the Jugantar Party represented.

His legend:

  • Jatin is most remembered for an armed encounter he engaged in with the British police at Balasore in Orissa.
  • They were expecting a consignment of arms and funds from Germany to lead an armed struggle when the British found out about the plot and raided the spot where the revolutionaries were hiding. A
  • although Jatin lost his life in the Battle of Balasore, his activities did have an impact on the British forces.
  • The colonial police officer Charles Augustus Tegart wrote about Jatin: “If Bagha Jatin was an Englishman, then the English people would have built his statue next to Nelson’s at Trafalgar Square.”

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