Beleaguered Dacca, 150 miles northeast of Calcutta, India, on the Burhi Ganga River, has been—in recent, more tranquil times—a city where a visitor could briefly imagine himself removed from the past.

With modern buildings rising, with new streets under construction, with the latest in jetliners flashing overhead, no feat of imagination was necessary to believe Dacca a capital of a nation with no history before 1947.

But beyond the immediate signs of the 20th century —the Intercontinental Hotel, the airport, the striking second‐capital complex created for East Pakistan's capital by the Philadelphia architect Louis I. Kahn — Dacca's antiquity, traceable at least to the seventh century, cannot long be concealed.

True to the Westerner's concept of Asia, it is a city that swarms with people, perhaps a million of them. There are winding, teeming little streets crowded with shops and permeated with evidence of profound poverty. Unemployment, hunger and disease are commonplace. Water as an enemy is everywhere—during the monsoon season much of the city is flooded; water as a friend—for drinking—is scarce.

Mosquitoes, Malaria and Mold

In summer, the temperature hovers around 100 degrees, and in the winter it ranges between 50 and 70. The 35‐square‐mile city is drenched with about 100 inches rain annually. With the rainy season—from June to August—come mosquitoes, malaria and mold.

But life continues. The battered taxicabs with meters that never seem to work twist through the streets as do the rickshas. Classes go on at the university. Worshippers attend the 700 mosques.

Like other cities in the area, Dacca is noted for trade in rice, jute, oil seeds, hides and sugar cane and for the manufacture of muslin, silver filigree and glass.

In the days before the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, young men from the villages of what is now East Pakistan used to go to Calcutta to seek their fortunes. But after partition, Dacca became their goal. It took on the name Little Calcutta.

On the subcontinent, it has long been accepted that the best sweets were Bengali, and East Bengali at that. To most Indians, Dacca brought visions of the curd confections, soaked in syrup, made by the Hindu minority. “Sweet shops are to Dacca what pubs are to London,” a Pakistani remarked in more peaceful times.

Last March, when the Pakistani army moved to crush the autonomy movement in East Pakistan, huge fires were touched off in various parts of Dacca, including the university area. Months later, but before the war between India and Pakistan, block upon block of the city once crowded with flimsy huts had been transformed into empty, dusty fields with only occasional heaps of debris to indicate that anything had once stood there. At the university, there had been much patching and painting, and the Hindu shopkeepers who made and sold sweets had either fled or been killed. Their shops were given to non‐Bengali Moslems and others who sided with the Pakistani army.