Surma
Surma, generally known as the Weekly Surma, is a Bengali and English-language weekly newspaper published in London, in England, by Surma News Group for the British Bangladeshi community. Based in Whitechapel, in the heart of the East End's Bangladeshi community, it is one of the longest-lived Bengali newspapers in Britain, with copies preserved in Tower Hamlets' local archives from the 1980s onwards. The paper came to international attention in 2022, when Reporters Without Borders reported that the brother of its editor, Shamsul Alam Liton, had been arrested in Bangladesh in reprisal for the paper's critical journalism.
Origins in the 1980s East End
Surma emerged during the great expansion of Bengali publishing in London's East End. A local history of the Bengali East End produced for Tower Hamlets records that Bengali newspapers such as Janomot, established in the 1960s, were joined by Notun Din and Surma in the 1980s, and that these papers helped to reduce language barriers and isolation by enabling Bengalis to find out what was happening in Tower Hamlets as well as in Bangladesh. For a community many of whose members had arrived from the Sylhet region and spoke limited English, a Bengali weekly was not a luxury but a primary source of information about two homes at once.
The archival record supports that dating. Tower Hamlets' Idea Store local history collections hold Surma for the years 1984 to 1994 and 1997 to 2018, a run that places the paper among the small group of Bengali titles substantial enough to be collected and preserved by the borough's archivists. Community researcher Faruque Ahmed, who has donated historic Bengali publications to archives and written histories of Bengali journalism in Britain, likewise lists the Weekly Surma among the established Bengali titles of the London press scene.
Base and publisher
Surma is published by Surma News Group Ltd from Whitechapel in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Its online edition lists the group's address as The Whitechapel Centre, 85 Myrdle Street, London E1 1HL, a short distance from Brick Lane and the East London Mosque, in the streets where British Bangladeshi civic and media life is concentrated. The paper's own online masthead describes it in its English branding as Britain's leading Bengali newspaper — a claim of standing that reflects its longevity among London's Bengali titles.
The paper publishes in both Bengali and English. Reporters Without Borders, in its reporting on the paper, described the Weekly Surma as a Bengali and English-language newspaper based in London, and that bilingual character allows it to address both first-generation Bengali readers and English-reading members of the same community, as well as outside audiences following its reporting on Bangladesh.
Editors and leadership
The paper's online masthead names Farid Ahmed Reza as its chief editor and Shamsul Alam Liton as its editor. Liton is a journalist of long standing: Reporters Without Borders reported that he had been a journalist for three decades, that he served as deputy press secretary to President Iajuddin Ahmed of Bangladesh from 2003 to 2005, and that he then joined the Weekly Surma. That career path — from the press office of a Bangladeshi head of state to the editor's chair of a London community weekly — is characteristic of the London Bengali press, whose senior figures often move between journalism and public life in both countries.
Under Liton, the paper developed a reputation for outspoken coverage of Bangladeshi politics. Reporters Without Borders described the Weekly Surma as very critical of the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, and that editorial stance, exercised from London, eventually drew the paper into an international press-freedom case.
The 2022 arrest of the editor's brother
In September 2022, around fifteen plainclothes policemen went to the home of Nur Alam Chowdhury in the Noakhali district of Bangladesh and took him away without showing a warrant or explaining why he was being arrested. Only when he was taken before a court did he learn that he had been arrested because he was the brother of Shamsul Alam Liton, the editor of the Weekly Surma. He was detained under Section 54 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which permits arrest without a warrant on reasonable suspicion of an offence; police said he was suspected of a possible connection with his brother.
Reporters Without Borders linked the arrest to Liton's journalism and activism, including his work helping to organise a demonstration in front of the British parliament on 30 August 2022 to mark the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. The organisation condemned the arrest as a reprisal against a journalist based abroad, carried out through his family. The case was subsequently recorded in the United States State Department's 2022 Human Rights Report for Bangladesh, which noted press reporting that the detective branch of the national police had arrested Liton's brother as a reprisal for his stories critical of the government and for the parliament demonstration. The episode made the Weekly Surma an example in international reporting of how pressure on diaspora journalists can be exerted at a distance.
Content and community coverage
As a weekly for the British Bangladeshi community, Surma's journalism spans the two poles of its readers' lives: the politics and public affairs of Bangladesh, covered with the critical independence its editor defended, and the community life of Bangladeshis in Britain, in London above all. Its reporters have contributed original news and analysis in Bengali and English about the Bangladeshi community in Britain over many years; one former news editor of the paper, Munzer Ahmed Chowdhury, has been credited with a significant portion of that original reporting in later profiles of his career.
The paper is listed in accounts of British Bangladeshi business and media among the Bengali news titles published from London, alongside Notun Din, Janomot and Potrika. That company is telling: Surma belongs to the generation of London Bengali weeklies that defined the community's media landscape from the 1980s onwards, before satellite television and social media transformed it.
Digital presence
Surma publishes online through its news websites, including the eSurma News site, which carries dated online editions of the paper — its edition pages are organised by date and by section, including a city edition — and gives the group's Whitechapel address and news and advertising contacts. The digital operation allows a weekly print title rooted in one London borough to be read by the Bangladeshi diaspora far beyond it, and it preserves the masthead and identity of the print paper in online form.
Surma and the preservation of Bengali press heritage
The survival of papers like Surma has become a heritage question in its own right. In October 2026 the charity EastHands International launched a twelve-month, National Lottery Heritage Fund-supported project to preserve more than a hundred years of Bangla newspaper history in Britain, with research, a book, a documentary, a digital archive, oral history interviews and exhibitions. The project noted that the history of Bangla newspapers in Britain reaches back to 1916, that the papers had recorded migration, anti-racism campaigns and the memory of Bangladesh's Liberation War, and that many valuable newspapers and documents remained in private collections at risk of being lost.
Surma's own archive — the runs held by Tower Hamlets from 1984 onwards — is exactly the kind of record such projects exist to protect. A weekly produced for a migrant community, easily discarded at the time, becomes decades later one of the few continuous written records of that community's life.
Significance
Surma's significance rests on three things: its longevity, as a Bengali weekly present in the East End since the 1980s; its bilingual reach across the generations of Britain's Bangladeshi community; and its editor's experience in 2022, which demonstrated that a small community newspaper in Whitechapel could attract the attention — and the retaliation — of a government thousands of miles away, and the defence of international press-freedom organisations in response. Few London community titles have a history that connects a Whitechapel newsroom to a presidential press office in Dhaka and a human rights report in Washington; the Weekly Surma does.
