Today—June 23—marks the ninety-first birthday of Serajul Islam Choudhury, our foremost intellectual and writer in Bangladesh. A literary and cultural critic, historian, political analyst, educationist, essayist, editor, translator, activist, and organiser, he has been speaking truth to power with clarity and consistency for decades now. In a country where intellectual commitments frequently yield to expediency, he has remained steadfast in his writings and his allegiance to the causes of equality, justice, and human dignity—the three core principles of our national liberation movement of 1971.
Indeed, if one seeks a single thread running through his vast and diverse body of work, it is the question of human emancipation itself. Whether he is writing about literature or history, nationalism or communalism, education or culture, colonialism or capitalism, Choudhury repeatedly returns to the lives and struggles of ordinary people. The author of more than a hundred books and countless essays in Bangla and English, he has produced a corpus of work whose intellectual range remains remarkable in contemporary Bangladesh. Yet, the diversity of his concerns is held together by a coherent moral and political vision: the conviction that all systems of oppression must be named, questioned, and transformed.
For Choudhury, as he reminds us in scores of essays on the roles and responsibilities of intellectuals, the intellectual does not merely interpret society but seeks to understand and transform the structures of domination that shape it. His writings reveal a profound solidarity with workers, peasants, women, religious and ethnic minorities, and other marginalised communities. The category of “the people” in his work is neither sentimental nor abstract. He identifies concretely who the people are, as he identifies equally concretely the systems that oppress them.
Those systems, as Choudhury repeatedly demonstrates, include capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchy. His latest book, Loraita Kintu Pu(n)jibader Biruddhei (2026), is about capitalism again. His work is distinguished by the way it understands these structures not as separate entities but as interconnected systems of oppression and exploitation. It is from this perspective that he has approached virtually every major question confronting Bangladesh, from the unfinished promises of the Liberation War of 1971 to the contradictions of nationalism and the politics of culture. One can therefore say without exaggeration that Choudhury is our major anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and anti-patriarchal writer, and one of the country’s most articulate advocates of socialism.
Indeed, I have written about Serajul Islam Choudhury in this daily on several previous occasions. It is therefore understandable that I repeatedly underline certain aspects of his significance. Repetitions are, in a sense, unavoidable and, of course, necessary, for the subject remains the same and the truth does not obligingly change every year, although it does for those playful postmodernists who seem determined to become novel every day. Yet it is also true that I have by no means exhausted the field of the possible vis-à-vis Choudhury’s work.
One such dimension is Choudhury’s mode of editorial writing itself, a genre that remains regrettably rare in Bangladesh. For many years, Choudhury wrote substantial editorials for his own magazine, Notun Diganta. Those editorials were never mere comments on current affairs. Rather, they were extended intellectual interventions—wide-ranging discourses on contemporary issues whose horizons were simultaneously local and global, or, more accurately, glocal. Moving effortlessly between Bangladesh and the wider world, they brought complex political, economic, social, and cultural developments directly to readers while demonstrating how intellectual inquiry can remain immediately relevant to everyday life.
His landmark work Jatiyotabad, Sampradayikata o Janoganer Mukti, stands as one of the most important examples of his intellectual achievement. At once historical, political, cultural, and theoretical, the book exemplifies Choudhury’s distinctive mode of interdisciplinary inquiry. Combining rigorous scholarship with compelling narration, it traces the trajectories of nationalism and communalism across the Indian subcontinent while foregrounding the struggles and aspirations of ordinary people. The work demonstrates not only his remarkable command of history but also his refusal to separate historiography from the ethical and political question of emancipation itself.
Indeed, interdisciplinarity has always been central to Choudhury’s intellectual practice. Long before the term acquired academic currency in Bangladesh, he was already crossing disciplinary boundaries with ease and purpose. His influential concept of the “social grammar of literature,” developed in Unish Shotoker Bangla Goddyer Samajik Byakaron, remains one of the most original contributions to literary and cultural studies in Bangladesh. For Choudhury, literature is never merely literary; it is embedded in social relations, shaped by historical forces, and implicated in political and ideological struggles.
One of the distinguishing features of Choudhury’s intellectual practice resides decisively in the breadth of its attentiveness. Combining the roles of literary-cultural critic, historian, political analyst, and even sociologist of the everyday, he remains concerned with the entirety of lived human practices. Nothing that shapes human life appears beneath his notice. Such an expansive vision continually enlarges the horizon of our own engagement with society, culture, politics, and history.
Loraiyta Kintu Pu(n)Jibader Biruddhei and another of his recent books, Di-Jaati Totter Sattya Miththya (2026), provide compelling contemporary and historical examples of this very intellectual disposition. Both works demonstrate that Choudhury remains as politically alert, analytically rigorous, and intellectually adventurous as ever. Even in his early nineties, he continues to interrogate dominant narratives, question entrenched assumptions, and direct our attention towards larger structures of power and inequality.
As a literary and cultural critic, Choudhury has exercised a formative influence on generations of readers. He has written extensively on canonical figures ranging from Vidyasagar, Bankimchandra, Rabindranath, Saratchandra, and Nazrul to Conrad, Lawrence, Eliot, and Joyce, to name a few. Yet his criticism remains striking for its refusal either to worship or dismiss. He neither canonises nor demonises. Rather, he seeks to understand literary figures in their historical and ideological complexity while asking what possibilities and limitations they reveal from the perspective of human emancipation.
Another aspect of Choudhury’s achievement that deserves special attention is his prose style itself. His prose is powerful without being ponderous, learned without being obscure, and intellectually sophisticated without becoming inaccessible. It attracts, stimulates, and provokes while remaining eminently readable. For Choudhury, style is a political question, not simply an aesthetic issue. Style is also a beautifully democratic question. Language must communicate, persuade, and move.
On a more personal note, I count myself fortunate to have encountered Choudhury not only through his writings but also as a teacher and colleague. I first knew him as a student in the English Department of Dhaka University, where his lectures on Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Conrad, Forster, and Lawrence left an indelible impression on me. Later, in the 1990s, I had the privilege of working with him closely through Saptahik Samoy. Those experiences taught me that teaching for Choudhury was never confined to the classroom. It was—and remains—a matter of commitment, integrity, and intellectual generosity. As Jahanara Imam once remarked with admiration, “Professor Choudhury teaches us how to remain committed to a cause.” Few observations capture him more accurately.
And there is yet another dimension to him that often escapes notice: his sense of humour. Contrary to the familiar stereotype that Marxists lack humour, Choudhury possesses a lively and often subversive wit. His laughter is generous, his irony sharp, and his conversational style enlivened by a rich repertoire of anecdotes.
Today, as Serajul Islam Choudhury continues to read, write, edit, lecture, and inspire, he remains an exemplary reminder that intellectual life need not surrender either its critical edge or its moral purpose. On this special day, I wish my teacher, Professor Serajul Islam Choudhury, more love, light, and laughter; more productivity and more passion; in the continuing struggle against all forms and forces of oppression and injustice. For if there is one lesson that his life and work continue to teach us, it is that intellectual labour achieves its highest purpose when it serves the cause of human emancipation.
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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