Reviving Heritage:
Panam City
A cultural-heritage event poster for a live exhibition at Panam Nagar, Sonargaon — an art exhibition, light & sound show and cultural performance organized by the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. The brief: explore how graphic systems can communicate heritage in a contemporary context, without leaning on nostalgia. Backed by a field study conducted on site.
Project Overview
This poster was designed to explore how graphic systems can communicate cultural heritage in a contemporary context. Using Panam City as the central subject, the project examines how architectural history can be visually framed without romanticizing the past. A documentary photograph of the Panam Nagar façade is set against a restrained geometric system — circle, line and rectangle — so the building’s own ornament (the arched windows, the brick colonnade) carries the history, while the graphic layer stays contemporary and legible from a distance.
The Site: Sonargaon & Panam Nagar
Sonargaon — from Suvarnagrama, “the Golden Village” — was once the capital and river port of eastern Bengal, world-famous for the impossibly fine cotton cloth called Muslin, woven from a rare cotton called Phuti Karpas along the Meghna River. In the 16th century its chief, Isa Khan, took the title Masnad-i-Ala and ruled the Bhati region from here, resisting the Mughal Empire.
Panam Nagar itself is younger: a merchant town built by wealthy Hindu cloth traders and talukdars during the 19th-century British period, financed through the East India Company’s dadni advance-payment system. Around 1,400 weaving families once lived in and around it. After the 1947 Partition, the 1964 riots and the 1965 India–Pakistan war, its merchants left for India — and never returned. What remains is a single 600-metre street of 52 surviving houses, a genuine “ghost city,” now under the care of the Department of Archaeology.
Fast Facts
Field Study — On Site
Process
The Full Field Study
“The Golden Legacy of Bengal” — the written assignment submitted for ART-6201: Folk & Traditional Culture of Bangladesh, covering Sonargaon’s golden era, the rise and fall of Panam Nagar, its architectural typology, and the folk culture preserved at the Sonargaon museum.
Course Instructor: Professor Dr. Md. Mahbub Hossain, Department of Bangla Language & Literature, Jatiya Kabi Kazi Nazrul Islam University.
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