Humayun Ahmed

Humayun Ahmed was a Bangladeshi novelist, dramatist, screenwriter, filmmaker, songwriter, scholar and academic, born on 13 November 1948 and died on 19 July 2012 in New York City. He is regarded as one of the most popular authors and filmmakers in post-independence Bangladesh, and the Pakistani newspaper Dawn called him the cultural legend of Bangladesh. ^{1 2}

His breakthrough was his debut novel Nondito Noroke, published in 1972. He wrote over 200 fiction and non-fiction books, many of them bestsellers whose sales topped the Ekushey Book Fair throughout the 1990s and 2000s. ¹

He was born at Kutubpur in Netrokona, Mymensingh district, East Bengal, in the Dominion of Pakistan. His father Faizur Rahman Ahmed was a police officer who was killed in 1971 during the Bangladesh Liberation War, his mother Ayesha Foyez was a housewife, and his brothers Muhammad Zafar Iqbal, a writer and academician, and Ahsan Habib, a cartoonist, are also public figures. ¹

In childhood he lived in Sylhet, Comilla, Chittagong, Bogra and Dinajpur where his father was posted. He passed his SSC from Bogura Zilla School in 1965 and his HSC from Dhaka College. ¹

He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry from the University of Dhaka and joined its faculty, then took his PhD in polymer chemistry from North Dakota State University and returned to teach in the Dhaka chemistry department for several more years. ^{1 2}

He wrote his debut novel during the 1971 independence war while a university student; it was published in 1972 on the initiative of the writer Ahmed Sofa, and from that first novel his themes included the aspirations of middle-class urban families. ¹

He created fictional series with recurring characters — Himu in 21 novels, Misir Ali in 19 novels and 11 short stories, and Shuvro in 6 novels — and wrote novels of the Liberation War including Aguner Poroshmoni, Jochona O Jononir Golpo and Deyal. ¹

His first television drama was Prothom Prohor in 1983, followed by popular serials including Ei Shob Din Ratri, Bohubrihi and Kothao Keu Nei, which the sources describe as creating a historic hype in the nation. ¹

He directed eight films, all adapted from his own novels, beginning with Aguner Poroshmoni in 1994 on the Liberation War, and won the Bangladesh National Film Awards a record seven times, as the article reports, in directing, screenplay and story. ¹

His films Shyamol Chhaya and Ghetuputra Komola were the Bangladeshi entries for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006 and 2012 respectively, but were not nominated. ¹

He composed around 40 songs used in his films and television dramas, based on the folk music of north-eastern Bangladesh. ¹

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources; it is not a verdict by the museum. ¹

Nobel laureate economist Muhammad Yunus assessed his works as the most profound and fruitful that literature had experienced since the time of Tagore and Nazrul, and the poet Al Mahmud held that one golden age of Bengali literature ended with Tagore and Nazrul and another began with Ahmed. ¹

Against this, the author Shahriar Kabir dismissed him in his lifetime for "always speaking for the establishment", and the literary critic Azfar Hussain said he found him ignorant, as the article reports. ¹

Chapters of his forthcoming novel Deyal published in May 2012 drew a High Court suo moto rule over a historical detail, and the court directed that he be given the relevant case documents so he could rectify the writing. ¹

He married Gultekin Khan in 1973, divorced her in 2004, and then married the actress Meher Afroz Shaon; this museum publishes no family detail beyond what understanding his work requires. ¹

The English article states in a single sentence that he was a Sunni Muslim and regarded the Islamic scholar Muhiuddin Khan as a father figure. That is one attestation, uncorroborated by a second independent source, so his school is left unclassified in the museum's record. ^{1 2}

He had open-heart surgery in Singapore, and a cancerous tumour was later found in his colon. On 14 September 2011 he was flown to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York for treatment, and he died on 19 July 2012 at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. He was buried at his estate, Nuhash Palli, in Gazipur. ^{1 2}

He won the Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1981 and the Ekushey Padak in 1994 for his contribution to Bengali literature, and The Times of India wrote that his contribution single-handedly shifted the capital of Bengali literature from Kolkata to Dhaka. ¹

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.