Hay Dhaka 2012: Building a future for Bangladesh Before going to Bangladesh I was told there was one spectacular sight that I must not miss. Not a mosque or a market but the capital Dhaka's National Assembly, a modernist building designed by the great American architect Louis Kahn. I managed to spare a couple of hours before the opening of the 2012 Hay Festival in Dhaka and on an auto-rickshaw chugging manfully through the clogged streets, I saw the concrete fortress loom against the blue sky. The building, which houses Bangladesh's parliament, was begun in 1961 when the country was still the east wing of Pakistan; by the time it had been completed 21 years later a terrible independence war had taken place and a new state been formed: Bangladesh. The façade is scored with geometric shapes - circles, semi-circles, triangles - which might symbolise the scars of war and the riven history of Bangladesh. Certainly it is in attractive contrast to the unblemished power most political buildings radiate. On the inside you see that the point of the cut outs is to flood the place with the sun's rays. Solid shafts of light illuminated the wall and floor. In the prayer room it looked like an angel was streaming through the ceiling. I was shown the assembly room itself (faded green carpet, concrete umbrella covering) and even glimpsed the prime minister Shekih Hasina's private rooms next door. The carpet was royal blue and here was a mini-throne for her to sit on. All the tables had ordinary tissue boxes: the PM's one, I noticed, was in a gold-coloured box. Ten years before work began on Louis Kahn and Bangladeshi co-architect Muzharul Islam's remarkable construction, the first stirrings of Bangladesh independence were being registered at the Bangla Academy down the road. It was there that Bengalis forced to speak Urdu by their Pakistani rulers started a campaign to legitimise their native Bangla. It is also where Hay Dhaka is being held for the next two days. At the inaugural ceremony the novelist Philip Hensher - whose latest novel Scenes from Early Life is set in Bangladesh - said how appropriate it was for a literature festival at such a site. With a nod to the Hay Festival's Welsh origins, he mentioned how the Welsh language had been similarly marginalised in the 1950s. So impassioned was Hensher that he was mistaken for a Welshman. Presiding over the opening - which featured performances from the dance group Shadhona and a cross-dressing piece of Bengali folk drama - was the novelist Tahmima Anam. Her novels A Golden Age and The Good Muslim deal extensively with her country's troubled history, and putting on this festival is her way, I sense, of contributing to its renewal. The highlight was Vikram Seth who with a storyteller's ease told us how before he was born his grandmother sent his mother to a Bengali village after she had started saying she wanted to be a nun. "I wouldn't have existed without the land of Bangladesh," Seth said to laughter - adding that this was his first time in the country, and that he had spent the previous days looking for his mother's village. He joked that the he loved the countryside so much he had to drag himself to Dhaka. Thankfully for the many eager to hear Seth speak again tomorrow, the author of A Suitable Boy was present in body and soul.