KAZI NAZRUL ISLAM, THE VOICE OF GOD AND MAN ... 2

When I hear 'Durgamo giri, kantaar moru, dustor paraabaaro hey / Longhitey hobe ratri nishithey jatrira hnsuhiaar', I can clearly visualise Netaji making his daring escape to alien land before returning to the gates of India with his army of liberation. The song is pregnant with future possibilities that would within two decades unfold as veritable reality changing the course of the history of our motherland. The solitary soul, Subhas Chandra, working against insurmountable odds, must have envisaged himself as the man of destiny just as the revolutionary poet had depicted the hero of his dreams indistinctly in the song (Ke achho jowan, hawo aguyaan, achhe kaar himmot?).

Such compositions are rare that spell the doom of an exploitative order and usher in a new age of hope and aspiration for a suppressed humanity. Subhas Chandra's unequivocal praise for the inspirational content of the song is the highest compliment that could be paid to the song for it was he who lived out in his life the purport of the poem and gave palpable life to it.

Kazi Nazrul Islam is a much underrated poet than he deserves to be and his works ought to be widely disseminated throughout the world. In India his was the poetic voice of revolution like no one else's and his inspirational contribution to revolutionary activity in Bengal can hardly be over-stressed.

A thing that is often missed out in the appraisal of Nazrul Islam as poet-composer is that he was an active revolutionary himself and endured incarceration for production of what the British called it 'seditious literature'. In prison he protested against prison conditions by launching a 40-day hunger-strike which threatened to sap his life-force away. Even Tagore's entreaty to him to end his self-starvation did not pay dividend. Finally, at the intercession of a beneficent one, he broke his fast.

Another feature of his life was somewhat similar to that of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the constant cohabiting with poverty. An unconcern for frugal living being his hallmark and a generosity beyond bounds, Nazrul loved to live in a carefree manner often which spelled financial disaster for him and in his post-retirement phase following illness forced him to endure a permanent poverty. That the Government of India or of West Bengal post-independence did nothing substantially to alleviate his material misery is a blotch on its status as the protector of national culture and heritage, for Kazi Nazrul Islam of iconic literary status was India's living literary pilgrimage and no less.

What India failed to provide, the newly independent State of Bangladesh did. Its Prime Minister, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, with the permission of the Government of India, took the poet and a section of his family over to Bangladesh in 1972, gave them home and hearth and showered the poet honours and accolades, named him Jatiya kabi (the National Poet), and in his dying year in 1976 the poet was graced with the citizenship of Bangladesh.

In his twilight years Bangladesh gave him what we in India could not and the poet passed into a deeper silence from the silence he had endured for over three decades through illness-induced speech-impairment. And the love which he received from Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was befitting both the recipient and the giver for both were liberators of humanity in the truest sense of the term.

I bow down to the poet in reverential homage, for, an insignificant member of his poetic fraternity that I am, I feel the pulsations of his verses in my blood and am stirred to the depths of my being to compose lines of joy and pathos in his memory. Laho pranam!

To be continued...