121 years of burying the forgotten: How Anjuman Mufidul Islam stayed relevant

Every year, thousands of people in Dhaka die with no one to claim their bodies. Most cities would let that number disappear into a statistic. In Dhaka, one organisation has spent over a century making sure it does not. 

Anjuman Mufidul Islam was founded in 1905 in Calcutta, by a Surat-based businessman named Sheth Ibrahim Mohammad Dupley. Its original purpose was narrow and unglamorous: bury unclaimed Muslim dead with dignity, instead of letting them go unmarked. Khawaja Nazimuddin, A.K. Fazlul Huq and Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy — names that would later define Bengali politics — all served as its presidents in those early decades. 

Partition split the organisation along with the subcontinent. In September 1947, officials including S.M. Salahuddin and Abdul Haque Faridi set up a Dhaka branch on S.K. Das Road in Gandaria. By 1950, it had become fully independent. Habibullah Bahar Choudhury, Justice Hamoodur Rahman and later A.B.M.G. Kibria — president from 1993 to 2011 — expanded it from a single-purpose burial society into, by most accounts, the largest welfare organisation of its kind in the country. 

It is still registered under the Societies Registration Act of 1860, a piece of colonial law now running an organisation built entirely around the people that law never protected. 

Mufleh R. Osmany, a former foreign secretary of Bangladesh, has led the Anjuman as president since 2019. Abdul Jalil, its executive director, runs daily operations. 

"Anjuman Mufidul Islam's greatest achievement is earning people's trust and faith," Jalil told The Business Standard. "Since our founding in 1905, we have stood by helpless people regardless of religion, caste, or class." 

More than burial 

Ask most people in Dhaka what the Anjuman does, and they will say one thing: they bury the unclaimed dead. They are not wrong. Between July 2025 and April 2026, the organisation buried 521 unclaimed bodies and transported another 184 free of cost, alongside 2,357 patients carried by its ambulances. At its Mugdapara centre alone, 746 bodies received ritual bathing before burial. 

But Jalil is quick to push back on the idea that this is all the Anjuman does. 

"Burial service is one of our primary identities, but it is not our only activity," he said. "Besides burial of unclaimed bodies, we provide free ambulance service, run orphanages, offer free

vocational training, healthcare services, mobile medical care, disaster relief, and winter clothing for the poor and helpless." 

The Anjuman currently shelters 345 orphans across one boys' and four girls' homes in Dhaka, providing free education, food and lodging. In Tangail, Naogaon and Khulna, nearly 30,000 patients received free primary treatment and medicine this fiscal year through mobile clinics. Girls leaving its orphanages are often given a sewing machine and some capital to start earning. Some receive help for their weddings too. 

"Our goal is not just to ensure a dignified farewell after death," Jalil said, "but to contribute to improving the quality of life of helpless people while they are alive." 

The organisation runs more than thirty ambulances — air-conditioned and otherwise — and three freezing vans for transporting bodies. Most were donated by individuals and institutions. In December 2025, Midland Bank handed over a new ambulance funded through its Islami Banking Compensation Fund, one of several recent corporate donations the Anjuman has received as banks increasingly route their CSR spending toward it. 

Funding still comes largely from zakat, money raised from selling sacrificial animal hides during Eid, donations collected on Shab-e-Barat, trust funds, and rent from donated properties — a model that has not changed much in structure since the organisation's early decades, even as its operations have multiplied many times over. 

Reading the gaps before they widen 

What is striking about the Anjuman in 2026 is not simply that it has lasted 121 years. Plenty of charitable trusts outlive their founders through sheer inertia. What stands out is that its leadership keeps trying to anticipate where Bangladesh's social gaps are heading next, instead of resting on its name. 

Asked about the next five to ten years, Jalil laid out a list that reads less like a charity's wish list and more like an attempt to get ahead of the curve. A planned "Anjuman Motor Driving School," to be built on five katha of donated land in Purbachal, aims to train a skilled, employable workforce — driving remains one of the more accessible, semi-formal job markets for working-class men in the country. An engineering college named after Jamilur Rahman signals a push from charity work toward credentialed education. 

The most telling shift, though, is toward elderly care — a need that barely registered in Bangladeshi welfare planning a generation ago. The Anjuman plans a small women's elderly home at its Dr. Roksana Huda Girls' Home in Tejgaon for the 2026–27 fiscal year. Its bigger ambition is a larger, "internationally standard" home for destitute elderly women, to be built on 64.64 katha of government-allotted land in Purbachal. 

"We believe that with the cooperation of society's wealthy and humane people, and all well-wishers, Anjuman Mufidul Islam will be able to carry forward this tradition of human service even more extensively in the future," Jalil said.

As Bangladesh's fertility rate falls and families urbanise and scatter, elderly destitution — especially among women without pensions or property — is emerging as a welfare gap with almost no institutional response built for it yet. The Anjuman appears to be positioning itself to meet that need before it turns into a crisis, rather than reacting once it already has. 

The organisation's technical institutes have followed a similar logic. The Anjuman Mokhlesur Rahman Polytechnic Institute in Shyamoli, along with vocational centres in Noyatola and Gopibag, now offer diploma-level training in civil, computer, electrical and automobile engineering, alongside shorter courses in housekeeping, driving, and tailoring. These are not relics of a charity model frozen somewhere in the 1950s. They are a response to an economy that increasingly demands certified skill, even at its lower rungs. 

A mission that never needed rebranding 

There is something unusual about an organisation whose founding purpose — burying the forgotten — has stayed the same for over a century while almost everything around it changed: empires, borders, governments, currencies. The Anjuman never rebranded that core identity, and it never let it calcify into irrelevance either. 

It still buries the city's unclaimed dead with roughly the same commitment it had in 1905. It has simply kept asking what dignity requires of the living too, and answered with orphanages, ambulances, polytechnics, and now, plans for an elderly population Bangladesh has not yet figured out how to care for on its own. 

In a country where civic institutions tend to move in five-year election cycles or donor-funded project timelines, an organisation that measures its own continuity in twelve-decade stretches offers a different kind of lesson. The most durable welfare work is often the least dramatic kind — repeated, unglamorous, and aimed at the people everyone else has already stopped counting.