Kazi Nazrul Islam

Kazi Nazrul Islam was a Bengali poet, writer and musician, born on 24 May 1899 at Churulia in Bengal and died on 29 August 1976 in Dhaka. He is the national poet of Bangladesh and is titled the "Rebel Poet" (Bidrohi Kobi). ^{1 2}

He produced a large body of poetry, music, stories and novels with themes that included equality, justice, anti-imperialism, humanity, rebellion against oppression and religious devotion. ¹

A note on the date: the English and Arabic articles both give his birth day as 24 May 1899, while many secondary listings give 25 May 1899; the record follows the two articles and records the conflict. ^{1 2}

He was born into a poor Bengali Muslim Kazi family at Churulia. His father Kazi Faqeer Ahmed was the imam and caretaker of the local mosque and a shrine in it, his mother was Zahida Khatun, and as a child he was nicknamed Dukhu Mia, "the one with grief". ¹

He studied at a maktab and madrasa run by a mosque and a dargah, studying the Qur'an, Hadith, Islamic philosophy and theology. After his father's death in 1908, the ten-year-old took his father's place as caretaker of the mosque to support his family, and also worked as its muezzin. ^{1 2}

He joined a travelling folk theatre group run by his uncle, learned to act and to write songs and poems for its plays, and through it began studying Bengali and Sanskrit literature. ¹

He studied up to grade ten at several schools, then in 1917, aged eighteen, joined the British Indian Army. He served with the 49th Bengalee Regiment posted to Karachi, rose to havildar (sergeant), and never saw active fighting. ¹

In the army he read Rabindranath Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and the Persian poets Hafez, Omar Khayyam and Rumi, and published his first prose work in 1919. ¹

He left the army in 1920, settled in Calcutta, joined the Bengali Muslim Literary Society, and published his first novel, Bandhan-hara, that year. ¹

He reached the peak of his fame in 1922 with "Bidrohi" (The Rebel), published in the Bijli magazine and received alongside the Non-Cooperation Movement against British rule, followed the same year by his anthology Agni-veena (Lyre of Fire). ¹

On 12 August 1922 he started the bi-weekly Dhumketu (The Comet). After a political poem the police raided its office; he was arrested on 23 January 1923 and charged with sedition, fasted forty days in Hooghly Jail against mistreatment, and was released in December 1923. ¹

The British Indian government banned many of his writings in the 1920s, among them Bisher Banshi (The Flute of Poison) of August 1924, which was read and distributed in secret after the ban. ¹

With Muzaffar Ahmed he helped organise the Workers and Peasants Party, and from 16 December 1925 he published the weekly Langal (The Plough) as its chief editor. ¹

He wrote and composed nearly 4,000 songs, many recorded by the Gramophone Company of India and collectively known as Nazrul Geeti; the exact number is uncertain and complete texts of 2,260 are known. ¹

He introduced ghazal songs into Bengali, transforming a form written mainly in Persian and Urdu, and is known for his extensive use of Arabic- and Persian-influenced Bengali words. ¹

From 1928 he worked as lyricist, composer and music director for the Gramophone Company of India, and his songs were broadcast on radio stations across India. ¹

He wrote Islamic devotional songs that are popular during Ramadan in Bangladesh, including his song on the end of the Ramadan fast, and he also wrote over 500 Hindu devotional songs and hymns to the goddess Kali, for which Muslims and Hindus each criticised him from their own side, as the article reports. ¹

He entered Bengali theatre and the young film industry; his film Dhruba made him, as the article reports, the first Muslim director of a Bengali film, and from 1939 he worked for Calcutta Radio supervising its music programmes. ¹

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

He criticised the Khilafat Movement as hollow religious fundamentalism, and criticised the Indian National Congress for not embracing outright political independence from the British Empire. ¹

The English article's religious-beliefs section describes him as born a Muslim who engaged in religious syncretism so often that laymen saw him as a proud pluralist. It records his 1920 editorial calling Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and Christians to transcend all barriers, and his 1922 article holding that religious quarrels were between priests and imams, not between individual Muslims and Hindus. ¹

He criticised religious fanaticism, denouncing it as evil and inherently irreligious, wrote about human equality, and advocated women's rights in poems such as "Naari" (Woman) and "Barangana". ¹

His condemnation of extremism and of the mistreatment of women provoked condemnation from Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists who opposed his liberal views on religion. ¹

In 1942, at the age of 43, he began to be affected by an unknown disease, losing his voice and memory; a medical team in Vienna later diagnosed it as Pick's disease, a rare incurable neurodegenerative disease. ¹

He was taken to Bangladesh on 24 May 1972 at the invitation of its government and with the consent of the government of India; his family relocated with him to Dhaka. Bangladeshi citizenship was conferred on him on 18 February 1976. He died on 29 August 1976 and was buried beside the Central Mosque of the University of Dhaka. ^{1 2}

He married Nargis Ashar Khanam in 1921 and Pramila Devi in 1924, and had four children; this museum publishes no family detail beyond what understanding his work requires. ¹

He received the Jagattarini Medal in 1945, the Padma Bhushan in 1960, the Ekushey Padak in 1976 and the Independence Award in 1977, after his death. ¹

His writings inspired Bengalis of East Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War, and his work made Bengali Muslims more comfortable with the Bengali arts, which had been dominated by Bengali Hindus. ¹

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• This is the single record for this poet; his name also appears in a later section of the harvest queue and must not be built again.