Azfar Hussain

Every time the question of language surfaces it means that a series of other problems are coming to the fore.

In the history of Bangladesh’s formation and its war against the military-bureaucratic regime of Pakistan, the 1969 mass uprising is a significant milestone.

To speak of politics in 2024 is also to recall the entire history of political culture that has unfolded in Bangladesh since 1972.

Bangladesh's hard-won independence, achieved through the Liberation War in 1971, remains the most defining political event in our history.

Lalon is an exemplary anti-casteist, anti-patriarchal, anti-colonial figure in undivided Bengal in the19th century.

Serajul Islam Choudhury is the author of more than a hundred books and numerous essays.

May Day is customarily credited with originating in 1886 from the eight-hour workday movement in the United States, but the Polish-German Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg provides a distinct perspective on its genesis.

When we cease to have rhythm, we are dead. And we cease to have poetry, we are spiritually dead, one way or another.

To speak of place is to speak of the topical, the toponymical, and the topographical.

There is far more to be said about Serajul Islam Choudhury's significance as an intellectual and literary-cultural critic.

Today – June 23 – marks the 87th birthday of Serajul Islam Choudhury.

Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) has been customarily characterized as a rebel poet, particularly, if not exclusively, because of his 1922 poem called “Bidrohi” (the Rebel)—a poem that fiercely stages his political, linguistic, even metrical rebellion all at once.

The question was already raised by some: Did Shakespeare write mainly for children? So-called "pop" Shakespeare criticism answered that question in the affirmative. 

Today—March 14—marks the 46th death anniversary of Jasim Uddin (1903-1976). Popularly called “palli kabi” (folk poet), Jasim Uddin is also considered a major Bangla poet.

Our Bhasha Andolan—the Language Movement—was undoubtedly a major event in our political history.

Today—February 17—marks the 123rd birth anniversary of Jibanananda Das (1899-1954), recognised today as one of the greatest Bengali poets of all time.

Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-1873) is widely regarded as the first modern Bangla poet. Well before Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), Madhusudan is even reckoned as the first rebel poet in Bangla literature, although he is by no means a revolutionary like Nazrul.

He was described as an epic hero. His life was intimately involved in the land, labour and language of the poor peasant.

One cannot decisively introduce—much less sum up—the life and work of Fakir Lalon Shah (c. 1772-1890).

The only major Bengali poet to have come from the rural proletariat and the first one to have raised—in public—the demand for the total independence of colonial India in 1922, Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) enacts insurrectionary ruptures and breaks with certain old traditions in Bengali poetry while inaugurating new ones.