Nazrul's love for the common man

Kazi Nazrul Islam

Nazrul believed that the more oppressive the state machinery became, and the more supportive the native elites were towards the centre, the more they showed their weaknesses. Not only moral, for what they did the oppressive measures they took--were morally indefensible, but the ebbing of the strength was also physical. After a series of peasant uprisings weakened the zamindars of North Bengal in the 1920s, for example, the zamindars employed private guards and security to ward off any possible attack on them, thus severing the last link with their people. Many chose to settle in Calcutta and become absentee landlords. The peasants, on the other hand, although hunted down by the police, rarely left their land. Fugitives they became, but not migrants. Migration was a later phenomenon, whose reasons were economic rather than political.

Nazrul 'voiced' these subalterns, not through a patronising, 'speaking on their behalf' attitude, but by actually speaking with them. What he spoke was what they spoke; besides, his poems articulated what the subaltern had always spoken out, in his supposedly inarticulate and inaudible voice. There was no invention involved here, no gap between his and their voices, or any self-satisfaction that at last people had spoken through him. What impresses one most about the protest poems of Nazrul is the absolute honesty of his approach.

For lack of space, and also for the fear that listing all the protest poems of Nazrul would make the exercise a bit tedious, only a small selection of them would be discussed here; but these will be quite adequate to support our main argument. The selection includes the following poems: 'Bidrohi' (The Rebel) from Agnibina (1922), 'Chor-Dakat' (Thieves), 'Barangona' (The Whore), 'Nari' (Women) and 'Kuli-Majur' (Labourers and Workers) from Samyabadi (1925); 'Chashar Gan' (The Song of the Peasant) from Nirjhar (1938); 'Otho Re Chashi' (Wake Up, O Peasant) from Natun Chand (1945); 'Agneyogiri Banglar Jouban' (Bangla's Youth the Volcano) from Shesh Showgat (1958); and 'Krishoker Gan' (The Song of the Peasant) [not published in any collection of poems]. Except for 'Bidrohi' however, the other poems do not contain the element of protest as their most visible aspect, but the protest assumes substance as the poems draw to a close. The protest implies first a rejection of the condition of poverty, neglect and servitude, and secondly a call to arms. In many poems, the tone is openly hostile and dismissive of the authority/power, in others, Nazrul instigates the subaltern to take up arms to end exploitation.

'Bidrohi' (The Rebel), perhaps the best known poem of Nazrul, and the one that instantly provided him with the eponymous title 'Bidrohi,' was written in 1921. It is a meticulously crafted poem with a perfect control on rhyme and rhythm, a more passionate version of Whitman's 'Song of Myself.' The bidrohi of Nazrul's poem is the eternal crusader against injustice, falsehood and oppression: he is the defender of the poor and the powerless the marginalised magnitude of rural Bengal/India. And on the level of immediate action to right all wrongs, the bidrohi is a swadeshi--a patriot fighting the British Raj. The double meaning implied in the bidrohi's iconoclastic pronouncement: 'I etch my footprint on the bosom of God, could not have been lost on the authority, since Bhagaban (God) also meant the ruler of the land, an ironic term that problematised and directly questioned the legality of colonial rule.

The 139 - line long poem, spoken in first person by the bidrohi, begins with the assertion of his herohood, and a series of impossible actions that are pretty much routine for him. 'I tear all bonds, all rules and regulations / I don't care for any laws," he says, since "I am Bedouin, I am Chengis / I don't bow to anyone else other than myself." The poem pulsates with the raw energy and passion of the bidrohi. He is both an individual and the magnitude, both man and god, love and hatred, victim and victimiser, proto-subaltern and the man who will empower the subaltern. 'Bidrohi' is finally a vindication of the subaltern position, since the bidrohi categorically says:

Great war-weary rebel

I, shall be be quiet that day

When the cry of the oppressed will no more resonate in the air

The oppressor's sabre will not rattle in the fierce battlefield

War-weary rebel

I shall be quiet that day

The other poems mentioned above have different themes; their perspectives are also different; but these are united by a common understanding of the subaltern--his condition, his pangs and pains, and his victimhood. The four poems from Samyabadi celebrate the four groups of subaltern: thieves and robbers, labourers and workers, the prostitutes, and women. Thieves and prostitutes carry with them the social taboo and a permanent seal of disapproval, while labourers and workers are condemned to a life of drudgery. However, it is the women who have to fight against multiple domination. If men had to contend with domination and colonisation on a social and political level, the women had to endure an equally pernicious domestic colonisation. In the protest part of this and other poems, Nazrul wishes these various forms of domination and colonisation to go. He also quite categorically rejects the elite society's classifications and convenient labelling of these outcasts and subalterns.

The protest in Nazrul's poems lies with a total rejection of the social and human conditions, and in offering an alternative in the form of a society based on equality, fairplay and justice, where the subaltern will be the arbiter of his own destiny.

Voicing the subaltern, for Nazrul, was an attempt to transcend a condition of historical situatedness and claim the lost identity of the dalits and the marginalised. It was both a critique of the elitist idea of social progress as well as a justification for subaltern protests and uprisings to firmly establish their identity in a perpetually shifting ground of social and political realities.

Dr Syed Manzoorul Islam is professor of English, Dhaka University.