Khulna: History, Women, Migration

How history also shapes migration decisions

This is part of an ongoing series drawn from my PhD thesis, "Globalization, Internal Migration and Gender Relations: An Explorative Study on the Women Working at the Ready Made Garment Factories in Dhaka", submitted to the University of Dhaka in 2013. The research was a comparative study of women's migration and work in two different parts of Bangladesh – Netrokona and Khulna. These posts are an effort to share that research experience beyond academic walls.

Khulna was my second field for my doctoral research. I picked Khulna because my pilot study and other initial research showed that it sends far fewer women to Dhaka's RMG factories than Netrokona – my first field. The reasons appeared to be twofold – the distance from Khulna to Dhaka, and the availability of work in the shrimp and fisheries processing factories closer to home.

However, the more time I spent there, the more I realized this was not simply about distance or economics. There was a history behind it. A psychology behind it. The city was still living in the shadow of its glorious past and had never quite recovered from what it had lost.

This post is about that history. I believe it will give readers an interesting insight – a chance to see Khulna as more than what it looks like today. What Khulna once was. What happened to it. And how that past still shapes the way its people feel, think, and act. I have termed it the "emotionally localistic" mindset. A deep, stubborn attachment to a place that no longer offers what it once did. And that attachment keeps people hopeful – and rooted – even in the face of a difficult present.

I must add that what I share in this post is based on my field research findings from interactions with a limited sample over a specific period of time. Mentalities and realities change. Technology, communication, and connectivity between Khulna and Dhaka have improved significantly since my fieldwork. The Jamuna Bridge has considerably reduced commute times, and its impact – economic, social, and psychological – must have reached people in Khulna in ways that were not visible during my research. What I observed then may not fully reflect what is on the ground today. I share it as a field researcher's snapshot of a particular moment – not as a timeless truth.

When Khulna Was Asia's Industrial Pride

Khulna was once one of the most industrially developed cities in Asia. That is not an exaggeration – it is a fact from its own history. Between 1950 and the early 1980s, at least 185 large- and medium-scale industrial units were set up in Khulna. Khulna Newsprint Mills, Khulna Hardboard Mills, Khulna Textile Mills, Khulna Power Station, seventeen jute mills, and Khulna Shipyard – established in 1957 – were all running at full capacity. A large number of locally produced goods from Khulna used to be exported to markets across Asia and Europe.

What I Remember from the 1980s

I have personal memories of this place. In the 1980s, almost every house in the villages around Khulna had a large storage unit to preserve rice – locally called gola – and a manual rice grinding instrument called dheki. Households had cows, goats, and poultry. They had trees of seasonal fruits – mango, jackfruit, guava, tamarind, coconut, papaya. They grew vegetables beside their yards. The houses were made of mud with thatched roofs, but they were clean and well maintained. Families could manage their living – that much was evident from their appearance and their way of life. Their main occupation was agriculture. There were rivers and canals all around. Fishing was readily available. There was poverty, of course, but it could not stop people from meeting their most basic needs. People, in general, looked settled.

That way of life is now only a memory.

When the Factories Fell Silent

A popular daily newspaper in Bangladesh, Prothom Alo, ran a series between March 3 and 6, 2010, titled 'Khulna: The Fall of an Industrial City'. Here is a loosely translated excerpt:

'The smoke of the boiler curling up in the air, the grueling sound of ships, whistles of cargo trains and the ever-busy footsteps of thousands of laborers – all are now a part of the history of Khulna City. According to government statistics, in contrast to other cities in Bangladesh, Khulna is the only city where poverty has increased. An income-expenditure survey conducted in 2005 shows that poverty increased by 2.5 percent in Khulna. Natural calamities like cyclone Sidr in 2007 and Aila in 2009 only worsened the situation.'

'Small and cottage industries located in Shiromoni in Khulna are also under threat. Roads are damaged. Almost all the factories are closed – including one of its largest textile mills, Faridpur Textile Mill.'

'The closing down of large scale factories has impacted people's consumption patterns and spending on basic goods. This in turn has negatively affected small scale factories – ice factories, biscuit factories, plastic factories, flour factories. Small and medium scale industries, which once met the daily demands of thousands of local laborers, have either closed or become sick in the absence of workers and with the sharp reduction in purchasing power.'

The numbers tell the same story. Two economic surveys were conducted to assess the economic conditions of different parts of Bangladesh – one in 1986 and another in 2001-2002. In 1986, the number of factories in Khulna employing ten or more workers was 1,538. Those factories employed 1,17,210 people. By 2001-2002, the number of factories had decreased to 1,201, and the number of employees had been reduced to half – only 54,628. According to a rough estimate, by 2010 the number of workers would not have exceeded 30,000.

The Shrimp Revolution That Wasn't

What replaced the once vibrant industries that had made Khulna the pride of Asia? Shrimp.

Many have termed this transformation the 'blue revolution' – the large-scale commercialization of agriculture through shrimp production, which became Bangladesh's second largest export sector. In theory, this should have opened up new livelihood opportunities for the people of Khulna. In practice, it benefited only the privileged few – landowners, moneylenders, traders and businessmen. Shrimp commercialization came at the cost of hundreds of large and small industries, permanent and steady jobs, and the livelihoods of ordinary people.

As a result of this industrial collapse, unemployment increased manifold over the last decade. Male household members became jobless, putting many families in economic jeopardy. It was in this context that shrimp production stepped in – and with it came new opportunities for women to work in shrimp cultivation and processing. Being left with few choices, women began to step outside their homes and enter shrimp production processes. This transition opened up two things: it made visible the possibility of women working in factories, and it began a slow intra-district migration of women from rural areas to Khulna city to work in factories in town.

When the EU Came Knocking

The shrimp export from Bangladesh faced a major setback in 1997 when Bangladesh failed to comply with the quality standards laid out in the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) regulations and was banned by the European Union – twice, in 1997 and again in 2009. The ban had specific implications for women workers. The HACCP regulation made it compulsory to process shrimp in a highly sanitized factory in town instead of at rural depots. As a result, the depots had to shift to urban areas. Women who were maintaining families in the village either had to leave their jobs or shift their base to town. Those who moved began living in rented houses in town. The separation from family back in the village caused not only emotional and physical strain, but also increased the cost of maintaining two households in two different places.

The Psychology of Staying

Despite all of this – the factory closures, the unemployment, the poverty – many people of Khulna did not want to leave. Migration decisions in Khulna are what I came to call 'emotionally localistic.' People stay not because conditions are good, but because they cannot bring themselves to leave a place they once took pride in. For many, it is a matter of dignity. "It is better to starve than to leave my father's place" – a sentiment not uncommon in Khulna.

Migration scholars have long argued that people do not move on purely rational economic grounds. As Parnwell (1993: 28) states, 'economic forces exert the strongest influence on the mobility decisions of people in the Third World but social, cultural, political and environmental factors may determine the characteristics and impact of the resultant movement.' Hardill (2004) similarly argues that non-economic factors – household ties, individual aspirations, cultural capital – are as important as economic ones in shaping migration decisions. And Pedraza (1991) reminds us that social psychological variables – choices, perceptions, feelings and beliefs – are critical factors in the decision to migrate or to stay.

In Khulna, the non-economic factor at work was something I observed repeatedly. People from what was once a prosperous and wealthy city still bore a deep pride – a reluctance to shift their base to a place where they would be nobody. Many saw it as a matter of dignity and prestige. This pride was also visible in how the community viewed women's migration specifically. Villagers in Khulna could somehow accept their women working in nearby shrimp processing factories. But they showed clear uneasiness about their village women going all the way to Dhaka to work in garment factories. The distance was not just geographical. It was social. It was moral. A woman in a factory in Khulna was still within reach – still visible, still accountable, still theirs. A woman in Dhaka was beyond that reach. And that made all the difference. More recent research on place attachment has confirmed this dynamic – individuals with high place attachment develop the intention to remain where they are living, and this attachment can override economic rationality, especially when it is rooted in identity and pride rather than in present conditions (Assfaw and Minaye, 2022).

The economic and emotional disruptions were the same for men and women, but the burden fell differently. It fell on women.

When HACCP regulations forced shrimp processing depots to shift from rural areas to urban factories, men faced a disruption in their livelihood. Women faced something harder – an impossible balancing act between their work and their family. A man moving from his place to a new area, district, or country is an ordinary decision – he is the provider; that is what providers do. But when a woman moves, she negotiates not only with her immediate family but with everyone she is connected to in her social world – her role as daughter, mother, wife, caretaker. I learned that women who stayed in town to keep their factory jobs began maintaining two households simultaneously – their own rented room in the city, and the family home in the village. Letting a woman take up work in the city came with an invisible – and many times a stated – demand that her income would be sent back home to the village. The cost of this arrangement was not just financial. It was physical exhaustion and emotional separation – carrying the weight of two lives in two places.

And yet even under this double burden – even with the financial strain, the social pressure, the physical toll – women in Khulna did not overwhelmingly turn toward Dhaka as an escape. My interactions with women working in the shrimp processing plants made this clear. They had done their own quiet cost-benefit analysis. Dhaka, with its higher cost of living, did not look attractive. Even on double the salary, they calculated, survival there would be harder. Their roots – their family, their community, their sense of self – were in Khulna. Leaving meant becoming nobody in a city that did not know them. Staying, even under difficult conditions, meant remaining someone.

This is the gendered dimension of the 'emotionally localistic' mindset. For men, staying was a matter of pride. For women, staying was a matter of identity, survival, and the impossible mathematics of maintaining two lives at once. The decision not to migrate to Dhaka was not a passive one. It came at a cost – and women paid most of it.

Prothom Alo captured the spirit of this attachment perfectly in the same series. Former machine-man Shahidullah Sardar lost his job when Daulatpur Jute Mill shut down. He set up a small shop selling cigarettes and paan in front of the closed mill. He did not move. He did not look for work elsewhere. He waited – because he still believed, after all those years, that the mill would start operating one day again and he would get his job back.

That image stays with me - a man selling cigarettes outside a dead mill, waiting for the whistle that no longer blows.

For those interested: Key references used in this research

Assfaw, A.K. and Minaye, A. (2022). 'Explaining migration intention from selected psycho-social variables in South Wollo, Ethiopia.' Frontiers in Sociology. Vol. 7.

Bostock, T., Greenhalgh, P. and Kleih, U. (2004). Policy Research – Implications of Liberalisation of Fish Trade for Developing Countries. Natural Resources Institute. University of Greenwich.

Hardill, I. (2004). 'Transnational Living and Moving Experiences: Individual and Couple Strategies.' Population, Space and Place. Vol. 10.

Mahmood. (2010). 'Khulna: The Fall of an Industrial City.' Prothom Alo. March 3-6, 2010.

Parnwell, M. (1993). Population Movements and the Third World. Routledge. London.

Pedraza, S. (1991). 'Women and Migration: The Social Consequences of Gender.' Annual Review of Sociology. Vol. 17.

Pryer, J. (1992). 'Purdah, Patriarchy and Population Movement: Perspectives from Bangladesh.' Journal of Social Studies. Dhaka.