History of Narayanganj

The town got its name from Bicon Lal Pandey, a Hindu religious leader who was also known as Benur Thakur or Lakhsmi Narayan Thakur. He leased the area from the British East India Company in 1766 following the Battle of Plassey. He donated the markets and the land on the banks of the river as Devottor or Given to God property, bequethed for maintenance expenses for the worship of the god Narayan. A post office was set up in 1866, Narayanganj municipality was constituted on 8 September1876 and Dhaka Narayanganj telegraph service was started from 1877. The Bank of Bengal introduced the first telephone service in 1882.

Narayanganj District was a subdivision of Dhaka district until it was up-graded to a zila on the 15 February 1984. Narayanganj, the oldest and most prominent river port in the country, became more important with the arrival of the Portuguese and the English traders during the early parts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively. Though the west bank of Shitalakshya was an important commercial centre since the rule of Mir Jumla in the mid-seventeenth century, Narayanganj was not very busy until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first foreign company to start trading jute in the area was the Rally Brothers, which, with the help of an Assamese company, started to export the fiber from the port to the western countries in 1830. There were 20 firms at Narayanganj in 1907-08 engaged in the purchase, bailing and supply of raw jute to Calcutta mills. Of these, 18 were in European and two in Indian ownership. With formation of Pakistan in 1947, things changed overnight. Narayanganj, which was simply a jute market, had to be converted into an industrial centre of jute. All the jute mills and presses in and around Calcutta fell to the share of India. East Pakistan was rich in the golden fibre but had no jute mill and had a very small baling capacity, which had to be increased within a short time to meet the overseas demand. The business community took up the required initiative. The Adamjees of West Pakistan came into the field at this stage and established the biggest jute mill in the world at Narayanganj. This followed establishment of a number of mills in and around Narayanganj that gave the local economy a great boost.