Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976)—one of the greatest Bangla-language poets and one of the most formidable revolutionary poets in “world literature”—may well be characterised by inaugurations in more senses than one. His twofold rebellion—literary and political—was spectacularly staged through a series of epoch-making ruptures. Indeed, with his iconic and incomparably insurrectionary poem “Bidrohi” (“The Rebel”), Nazrul inaugurated an entirely new mode of poetic expression in the history of Bangla literature.
Electrically charged with revolutionary energy, “Bidrohi” was unprecedented not only in its thematic audacity and political imagination, but also in its stylistic exuberance, rhetorical éclat and élan, and even mind-boggling metrical experimentation. Nazrul seemed almost instinctively to take to heart—despite having had no familiarity with it in his own time—Karl Marx’s injunction, relatively recently discovered: “[…] rub your conceptual blocs together in such a way that they catch fire!” “Bidrohi” is a poem animated by the fierce dance of the dialectic—a poem at once of negation and affirmation—and thus a momentous, unparalleled gift to the Bangla language.
Now, “Bidrohi” did not merely announce the arrival of a new poet; it announced the arrival of a new poetic consciousness—one profoundly and productively informed, inspired, and inflected by the great trinity of modern revolutions: the Turkish Revolution (1919-1923), the Irish Revolution (1912-1923) and, above all, the great October (Russian) Revolution of 1917. In my 2022 book Path: Shobdo o Noishobder Rajneeti (Readings: The Politics of Sound and Silence), I wrote something to this effect: had Che Guevara—that legendary Argentine-Cuban revolutionary who himself wrote poetry in both words and blood—known our Kazi Nazrul Islam, Che would have carried not only the verses of the great Latin-American communist poet Pablo Neruda in his pocket, as he famously did, but also Nazrul’s trailblazing poem “Bidrohi” (“The Rebel”), the very poem that earned him the moniker of “the Rebel Poet.”
But, over the years, I have argued in my writings—both in Bangla and in English—on Nazrul that he was far more than a “rebel poet”; that, indeed, by virtue of his own declarations, ideological commitments, and historical praxis, he was fundamentally a revolutionary poet. I would now go even further: Nazrul stands out as the first revolutionary poet—in the fullest historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic senses of the term—in the entire history of Bangla literature. He was also the first major Bangla poet to emerge from the rural proletariat, a fact of enormous historical, cultural, and political significance for understanding both the social grounding and the insurgent energies of his literary imagination.
And indeed, his was a revolutionary, anti-Eurocentric modernism—exemplified in his relatively under-engaged essay on so-called “world literature”—which is fundamentally distinct from the derivative, aestheticist modernism of the 1930s associated with figures such as Buddhadeva Bose, Sudhindranath Dutta, Amiya Chakravarty, and Bishnu Dey. Nazrul’s modernism was neither imitative of European literary fashions nor confined to rarefied aesthetic preoccupations; rather, it was insurgent, anti-colonial, internationalist, and dialectically responsive to the historical contradictions of colonial modernity itself.
And it was Kazi Nazrul who, for the first time, introduced the ghazal form into Bangla poetry. And it was he who became the first Bangla poet to experiment with Arabic and Persian metres such as Motakarib, Motdariq, Hajaz, Rajaz, and Mashaquel, thereby inaugurating a new and exciting chapter in the history of Bangla metrical innovations. And it was he who became the first Bangla poet to write ghazals in Urdu and bhajans in Hindi, attesting to his unprecedented poetic multilingualism (in addition to his native Bangla, Nazrul knew at least six languages: English, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, and Sanskrit). And it was he who most successfully and creatively foregrounded a politically significant and aesthetically stimulating mélange of elements drawn from both Hinduism and Islam, thereby blasting open the historical continuum of the dialectic between colonialism and communalism in so-called British India. And it was Kazi Nazrul who, for the first time, publicly demanded the full independence of India from British colonial rule in the pages of his revolutionary magazine Dhumketu. This list is by no means exhaustive.
But Nazrul’s inaugural ruptures do not stand as isolated singularities. They are matched by the staggering range of his pursuits and preoccupations—a range rivalled only by that of Rabindranath Tagore in the history of Bangla literature. Even Nazrul’s nicknames suggest a kind of restless multiplicity: in his village, he came to be known as Dukhu Mia (because he grew up amid acute poverty), Najar Ali (because of his striking physical appearance), Nuru (an elliptical form of “Nazrul”), and Tara Khyapa (because of his fiercely passionate and restless temperament). A poet and musician first and foremost, Nazrul was also a short-story writer, novelist, playwright, essayist, theorist, translator, editor, journalist, filmmaker, actor, and even a drummer and a dancer. Further, Nazrul was a political activist, revolutionary organiser and even, to boot, a founder of a political party.
I cannot possibly do justice to the range, rigour, and richness of Kazi Nazrul Islam’s entire oeuvre in a short piece like this. Yet, the pressing question remains: where does Nazrul’s relevance lie today? The three foundational principles proclaimed during Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War—equality, human dignity, and social justice—remain, tragically, far from realised in the country even now. The July uprising of 2024 embraced those emancipatory ideals with remarkable fervour, but its aftermath has unfolded as a series of political disasters, to say the least. And yet, these very principles had already occupied a central place in Nazrul’s literary and political imagination decades earlier. Indeed, his commitment to the revolutionary politics of equality and to the dignity of the oppressed, as well as to social justice, found powerful expression in two of his landmark poetry collections: Samyabadi (“The Communist”), published in 1925, and Sarbahara (“The Proletariat”), published the following year.
Globally, Kazi Nazrul Islam anticipated, in striking ways, the Caribbean revolutionary theorist-activist Frantz Fanon’s theorisation of colonialism’s “perverted logic”—a logic that has by no means reached the end of its history. Long before the leading African writer-activist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s famous call for “decolonising the mind,” Nazrul warned against what he himself called “moner golami”—“mental slavery.” And then came his ringing call: “Rise, ye unconscious! Know yourself” (translation is mine). Indeed, Nazrul’s work foregrounds four intertwined sites of anti-colonial—and broadly emancipatory—struggle: land, labour, language, and the body, inclusive of the mind itself.
Thus, Nazrul passionately confronted communalism and racism, linking them structurally to colonialism, while also articulating a radical ecological consciousness far ahead of his time. As early as 1920, he warned against humanity’s war on nature. In his remarkably prescient piece “Roj Keyamat” (“The Day of Doom”), he exposed the environmental devastation wrought by coal projects, uncannily prefiguring what Naomi Klein today calls “disaster capitalism.” Throughout his nonfiction, Nazrul relentlessly identified and opposed the interconnected systems of capitalism, colonialism, racism, and patriarchy in pursuit of nothing short of total human emancipation. His writings also address cultural reclamation, non-hierarchical leadership, resistance to all forms of oppression, education, the politics of everyday life, and even the contested terrain of world literature itself.
Ironically enough, he is celebrated as the “national poet,” even as Bangladesh’s patriarchal, right-wing, reactionary ruling classes have historically come to stand for nearly everything Nazrul remained opposed to throughout his life and work. And, of course, there remains a profound difference between the actual content of Nazrul’s writings and the routine, stereotypical, fetishised, commodified, and institutionalised celebrations of Kazi Nazrul Islam. Indeed, had the Bangladeshi middle class taken Nazrul’s work seriously, Bangladesh might well have witnessed by now a genuine social revolution—a possibility continually deferred by a class that, by and large, keeps rolling back the wheel of history.
Dr Azfar Hussain is director of the graduate programme in social innovation at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, US, where he also teaches interdisciplinary studies. He is also a summer distinguished professor of English and Humanities at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) and vice-president at the US-based Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS).
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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