“I believe he was a child prodigy,” says musician and archivist Devajit Bandyopadhyay. At 42, he was struck by an ailment of the brain called Pick’s Disease it caused permanent mental and physical damage. It’s time we learnt to appreciate the vast corpus of creativity of this little understood maverick genius.” By way of celebrating the 100th anniversary of Bidrohi, NCSCS has decided to have the poem translated into 100 Indian languages and dialects.įor all its richness, Nazrul’s creative life was quite short-lived, a little over 20 years. Guha continues, “Even his headlines were hard-hitting. Nazrul had written the story in Karachi in 1919 at the time he was a havildar with the Bengal Regiment there. In fact, his foray into the Bengali literary scene was with the short story Baunduler Atma-kahini (Autobiography of a Vagabond) published in one such journal called Saogat (The Gift). Nazrul was the editor of Bengali journals such as Dhumketu (Comet) and Langol (Plough). Says Swati Guha, who is the director of NCSCS, “Nazrul is known for his poems and songs, but very few know about his novels, short stories, essays and editorial pieces from the journals he edited.” The Nazrul Centre for Social and Cultural Studies or NCSCS is in Asansol, near Churulia village where Nazrul was born. Say, Valiant,/Say: High is my head! An exhortation to rebel against all forms of oppression and especially against the British colonialists. I remember his voice sombre, the pronunciation clear, the lyrics throbbing with power and emotion: Bolo bir,/Bolo unnoto momo shir. Till the late 1990s, recordings of Nazrul’s poem Bidrohi - in the voice of his eldest son Kazi Sabyasachi - would be played at puja pandals, political rallies and cultural programmes. The boy from an obscure village in south Bengal, who went on to become playwright, novelist, journalist and freedom fighter. The activist who wielded his pen against colonialism, religious fundamentalism, elitism and fascism. The poet whose creations ushered an Indo-Islamic renaissance of sorts. The man who composed over 3,000 songs, which led to the creation of a genre now known as Nazrulgeeti. The same who earned the sobriquet of bidrohi kobi, or rebel poet, for his eponymous poem written against the backdrop of the non-cooperation movement exactly a hundred years ago. And yet they are the birth and death anniversaries of a genius poet, writer and musician.
To say that May 25 or Jaistha 11 and August 29 or Bhadra 12 don’t ring a bell in these parts any more is no exaggeration.
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