Azfar Hussain

My teacher Professor Kashinath Roy (1947—2021)—poet, short story writer, essayist—died on January 17, at 74. Or did he die?

December 20 marks the 89th birthday of Badruddin Umar.

December 09 marks both the birth and death anniversaries of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932). The Rokeya Day in Bangladesh also falls on December 09. Indeed,

Fakir Lalon Shah—who orally composed thousands of songs in Bengali —died on October 17, 1890—on Kartik 01, 1297 (the Bengali year).

I think I’ve always loved mathematics in my own ways.

Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976)—one of the greatest Bengali poets—has by now been fully assimilated into the literary canon and even into public discourse in Bangladesh.

It is undoubtedly a challenging task to characterize the world of medieval Bangla literature, given its rich diversity and staggering magnitude.

Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) is widely regarded as one of the greatest poets in the Bengali language. His poetry in particular has already made possible a staggering range of interpretive adventures and hermeneutic excavations, although he wrote 21 novels and 110 short stories that were discovered after his death.

I, an itching palm? —William Shakespeare

Life is all about enjoying work,” said Serajul Islam Choudhury on his eightieth birthday. Widely acclaimed as our foremost intellectual and as our leading literary and cultural critic, Choudhury exemplifies nothing short of phenomenal productivity. Today—June 23—

I am a poet of the present, and not a prophet of the future. […] My birth in this country and this society does not mean that I shall remain constricted and confined to them. No, I belong to all countries and to the entirety of humanity. —Kazi Nazrul Islam

He confronts, challenges, and combats the world with words. But his words become more than words. They morph into weapons in our struggles against oppression and injustice. For him, of course, writing is fighting. But, then, he is more than a combative writer.

In his voice we continue to hear the cadences, inflections, and accents of resistance and even revolution.

You taught me language, and my profit on't

But, Dhaka, I hear your sepoy in the attic say, as he fashions his life after the size and shape of a solitude more tenacious than my

Mahmudul Haque wrote and remained silent equally remarkably in his lifetime. And when he wrote, he wrote productively, even intensely, with a peculiar passion untrammeled by momentary vicissitudes. He wrote most of his novels at one stretch, taking a week or two. He wrote one novel even in a single day.

If “life is lived forward but understood backward”—as the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once put it—Choudhury can look back and easily say in the words of the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet: “This is how you must love the earth/so you can say 'I have lived.'”

I visited Havana, Cuba, in January this year. I was invited there to give a lecture on the significance of Fidel Castro and the reception of

Today - June 23 - marks the 80th birthday of Serajul Islam Choudhury. He was my teacher in the English Department of Dhaka University.

Things are material in the hardest sense of the term. Things have shapes, textures, structures, and even timbres. Things have tones,