Humayun Azad: A Profile

Ghulam Murshid

Like all those Bengalis who truly love their language and secular identity and who are extremely alarmed at the increasing Islamisation of Bangladesh, I am, at this moment, too shocked to make a correct evaluation of Humayun Azad as either a scholar or a writer. Perhaps it is not the right time to do one either. I am truly in a state of grieve and would like to share my grief with the innumerable people who loved him.

I am particularly sad at the timing of his death. Had he died immediately after the assassination attempt in February, he would have turned into a martyr and, even though the present time is not favourable for any progressive movements, I suppose, his death or murder would have triggered off such a volcanic and unprecedented anti-Jamayeti movement that that movement would have toppled the unholy alliance between the BNP and the Jamatis, which is now leading our dreamland Bangladesh towards hell. However, ironically and, even, unfortunately, Humayun Azad died after he apparently recovered from that assassination attempt and died in a quiet hotel room in Germany. And, as the preliminary report has revealed, most probably he died of a massive cardiac arrest. So our loss is two fold - on the one hand, we have lost Azad, one of the few brave voices of the nation, and on the other, the Islamists whose relentless struggle and threats against a tired and seriously injured Azad ultimately led him to his death, escaped totally unscathed. I did not hear, but can imagine the thunder-like loud roar of laughter that suddenly cheered up the razakars and the anti-independence forces, including some members in the Bangladeshi government cabinet itself.

Personally, I hardly knew Humayum Azad (b. 1947) - he was several years younger than I. We both did our masters from the same department. He was a bright and talented student. We also had something in common - we were both kind of disciples of the same guru, Ahmed Sharif. With his talent, Azad probably earned more affection of my guru, but the latter was too great not to love all his disciples.

When he left the department, a brilliant student he was, he was expected to become a university professor and a researcher. However, he later proved that he had the ability to surpass the expectations people had about him. He was not just a boring scholar, but had a strong creative talent as well. Again, as a creative writer he could have been interested in a particular genre of literature, but he attained a great deal of success both in different branches of literature.

He began his writing career by publishing an anthology of poems in 1973. He then got a scholarship to do a PhD in linguistics at a Scottish University. However, I suspect, he did not have a passion for linguistics nor was his works relating to linguistics were of a very high standard. After his return from abroad, he continued his teaching career at the University of Dhaka. He also started publishing books on different subjects including a number of novels or novelettes. I hear that he has published dozens of them.

In Bangladesh one of the popular connotations of the word scholar is an essayist who can write pretty much long and descriptive treatise consisting necessary and unnecessary footnotes. Azad was too good a scholar to fall in that category. However, it is rather difficult to identify any extraordinary "contribution" that he might have made to any particular area of scholarship.

On the contrary, Azad was far better known for some of his other qualities which were most certainly extraordinary. The first such quality that comes to my mind is that he was as outspoken as one could be. If he felt that someone whether a friend or a foe deserved any criticism, he would never hesitate to do so. That is most certainly an extraordinary quality particularly in an age when people do not hesitate literally to do anything for some extra money. He did not have any such greed and was through and through an honest person. He would hardly ever make compromises with his principles for money or for a higher position. He was also very brave and was always prepared to take risks where most people would have preferred to be more discreet.

Although Bangladesh was born as a secular state as the culmination of a long secular nationalist movement, now-a-days there are only a small number of people there who are truly secular. Azad was one of these distinguished few. He also had an unrestrained courage to criticise the growing Islamisation in Bangladesh, particularly at the active patronage of the government. This started with the military President Ziaur Rahman towards the end of the 1970s and has flourished since then. Sometimes, one could see it sweeping away everything like a mighty tidal bore and sometimes, such as under the Awami government, like a moderately strong current. Azad, thus, turned many people including many influential members of the Jamati-supported Bangladeshi government into enemies by taking sides with the secularists. He could have certainly gained a "higher" post and a more important position if he was just prepared to extend his support to the BNP-Jamati group. However, he did not do that. It was mainly this uncompromising attitude that led to his premature demise. He was to some extent an egotist and a very proud man. By his rather stinging remarks, which he loved to make, about many of the well-known people, including some of his colleagues, he had also earned more enemies than friends. That did not help him survive in a country where law and order situation is going down the drain everyday and where the government party as well as the opposition have their large contingents of salaried political thugs.

To summarise, he was a fearless outspoken person who would support any issue that the so-called progressive people thought needed to be defended. He was, so to speak, a voice of the conscientious segment of society. His loss will be bitterly felt by his educated countrymen. Possibly he would even be more remembered for this quality rather than for his literary contributions.

However, his literary works were not contrary to his other qualities - they were rather complementary. Although Azad started his literary career as a poet, he showed a growing interest in fiction writing in the 1990s. He had his own distinctive way of looking at things - sometimes even a distorted way - country, nature, people - everything included. His interests and observations on them stand out so very clearly in his novels. He came forward as a novelist, but did not choose the easier way to gain cheap popularity by presenting the same sort of things or ideas that most of the other novelists dealt with. Instead of writing ordinary love stories and thus cater for the need of the growing middle class, he brought forward new elements, elements that he could see everywhere but other novelists either did not see or were not ready to recognise. His novels are full of social consciousness, not for the sake of it, but because he thought that way - it was a kind of self-imposed social responsibility that he carried deep inside him.

As a result, his country and people around him featured so prominently in his novels, particularly the direction he thought people were heading towards. In 1995, he published Chhapanna Hjar Barga Mile (Fifty-six thousand square miles). The title immediately reminds one of Bangladesh, the country as it has an area of fifty-six thousand square miles. He wrote about the country he loved so much, about the country he thought Bangladesh would one day become. However, utterly frustrated as he was, he saw around him the endless misery people were living in, the fathomless greed of the rich and the never-ending ruthless exploitation of women. He also saw the most irreligious exploitation of religions and the enormous corruption in its name. As a result he wrote the story of a society where women are only a cheap enjoyable commodity and a society where people slit other people's throats in the name of religion and thus hope enjoying the heavenly prostitutes called the hoories.

His last novel, Pak Sar Jamin Sad Bad, that created so much commotion was a typical story of this society. In this novel the main character is that of a pir (i.e. religious guru) who considers all women a heavenly gift to enjoy. The story however takes a significant turn when an imbecile Hindu father offers both his daughters as gifts to this fake pir. The pir savours as much human flesh as he possibly could enjoy, but, surprisingly at the end falls in love with one of those daughters. Love turns the inhuman pir into a human character and it is in a chariot of love that they both disappear. It is difficult to say that as a literary work this novel was anything worth mentioning, except the passion with which the novelist writes it and thus makes it readable.

In fact, Azad developed a kind of passion in fiction writing since 1994 when he published his Chhappanna Haajaar Barga Mile. In this novel he depicts aspects of oppressive military rule with which he was not at all unfamiliar. The country we now call Bangladesh had been under successive military regimes with short respite in between. Although he wrote the book a few years after the democratic rule had been established, not many writers, even at that time, had the courage to write about the nature of the earlier anti-people excesses.

Humayun Azad was very much a member of the male dominated society of Bangladesh where the position of women was and still is more or less the same as in others parts of the subcontinent. In this society women are considered to be a very useful animal who at once be a sex partner, housekeeper, cook, bearer of children and a nanny. Women are also considered far inferior to men and even devoid of any intellectual prowess. Azad must have witnessed some cruel examples of exploitation of women and that inspired him to write an academic book on women, called Nari, which was ironically banned by the government of a woman Prime Minister. However, This was unable to dampen his spirits and he wrote successive novels where he showed how men exploited women ruthlessly and without a sense of guilt. Amar Aparadhsamuha (My crimes, 1995), Shubhabrata Tar Susamachar (1997) and Rajnitibidhgan (1998) are such novels.

One might naturally ask a question what inspired him to write fiction when he had begun his career as a poet? I have a feeling that the rapid deterioration of the social condition in Bangladesh immediately after independence, the meteoric rise of fundamentalism and the Islamists, the sheer political exploitation of people in the name of Islam and the end of his dream of what Bangladesh was supposed to be, were strong elements of passion that led him to write the novels and novelettes. I doubt how successful these were as literary works, but they certainly kept him inspired to the last.

I have a feeling that there was also another factor that encouraged him to write fiction. He was a trained linguist and must have developed a love for different aspects of language. However, he wrote his academic books pretty much in what is known as bookish Bengali. He hardly showed any originality or excellence in his linguistic style in these books. On the contrary, when he wrote his novels he suddenly found a plenty of opportunity to write in different styles and more so to experiment. Even if he lacked lofty ideas in his novels, he never stopped experimentation with different styles of Bengali prose in his novels. It is, however, a great pity that he lost his life before he could attain the extraordinary success he had aimed for in both story-telling and linguistic experimentation. And he had to indirectly give his life to the same people he hated the most, the people from whose exploitation he had hoped to free the people he loved, the common run of people around him. It was a shameful defeat of Azad and of us all.

Last updated: August 2004