[1] Early prominent Bengali writers in English include Ram Mohan Roy, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Begum Rokeya, and Rabindranath Tagore.
[2] Modern writers of the Bangladeshi diaspora include Tahmima Anam, Neamat Imam, Monica Ali, and Zia Haider Rahman.
Ram Mohan Roy was important for motivating the British Raj to establish Hindu college and introducing English as a medium of instruction.
This failed to satisfy the aspirations of enlightened Indians like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who felt that the process would only help to 'load the minds of youths with grammatical niceties and metaphysical distinctions' which had no practical use.To solve this, Ram Mohan Roy aided the native gentry as well as the government to establish a formal institution for teaching secular ideologies, rather than Indian metaphysics and mythology.
Rashid Askari wrote that "Raja Ram Mohan Roy ..., the father of the Bengali Renaissance, was also the 'father of Indian literature in English'".
The year 1830–1976 is characterized by the works of pioneering writers who wrote about traditional Bengali cultural sensibilities with the intellectual literary influences brought about by British colonial rule.
[16] As a teacher at Hindu College in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–1831) emphasized the importance of Western ideas like rationalism and humanism.
Contemporary Bangladeshi English writers write about the details of transnationalism, the Liberation War, political disharmony, massive unplanned urbanization, and identity issues.
[17] These specified characteristic writers have a few things in common in that the Liberation War, political ups and downs, transnational experience, and massive urbanization serve as the background for their writings.
Zia Haider Rahman, a British Bangladeshi novelist, published his debut novel In the Light of What We Know in 2014,[19] which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature in 2015.
Like A Diamond in the Sky by Shazia Omar portrays the psychedelic world of Dhaka's university students, who are caught up in the haze of drugs, punk rock, and fusion.
He has also translated Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's autobiographical works Asamapta Atmajibani (The Unfinished Memoirs) and Karagarer Rojnamcha (Prison Diaries), and Mir Mossaraf Hossain's epic novel Bishad-Sindhu (Ocean of Sorrow).
Sabiha Haq (born January 1, 1977) has garnered a reputation for postcolonial and gender issues, women's writings, and cultural studies.
[28] This book covers roughly 200 years of the 16th and 17th centuries, reflecting the subjective tone and the self-fashioning of the princess under the Mughal regime through the forms of biography, hagiography, and poetry by the four Zenana writers.
[30] Thus, the author, Sabiha Haq, excavates the prominence of Muslim women's writings in pre-modern India, while history supposes to deliberately suppress the contributions of those living at the subaltern periphery.
Jahanara writes a biography on Sufi masters like Hadrat Sheikh Nizamuddin Auliya in Munis-ul-Arwah, and Mullah Shah Badakhshi in Risala-i-Sahibiyah.
[37] The change of currents takes place as Nazneen feels a sense of belongingness in British society along with her two daughters in the absence of Chanu's knowledge on what is going on in the psyche of his wife.
This trilogy attempts to sketch out the family and socio-political ups and downs during the factional periods around the Liberation War, the rise of Muslim militancy and the reign of dictatorship in Bangladesh ranging from 1971 to the 1990s.
The writer has continued this exploration of how "decolonization, independence, and the rise of the nation-state restructured the working lives of peasants, boatmen, itinerant traders, and small businessmen in post-colonial East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) in the 1950s and 1960s".
[43][44] Neamat Imam is a Bangladeshi-Canadian fiction writer (born January 5, 1971) whose name was popularized with the debut novel The Black Coat, a novel that uses a Bangladeshi political setting around 1974 when the Mujib government experienced a famine.
Bangladesh has an influential English-language press, including newspapers The Daily Star, New Age, Dhaka Tribune, The Muslim Times, and The Independent, which bring out regular literary supplements.