REFLECTIONS / Moon, memory, manifesto: A personal, lyrical essay on Atrai
These two things—the river and the train—continue to haunt and fascinate me.
21 November 2025, 18:28 PM
ESSAY / Between silence and song: Early Bangla literature and the poetics of the ‘Charyapada’
Pandit Haraprasad Shastri read—and was deeply inspired by—Raja Rajendralal Mitra’s seminal work Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nepal, published in 1882. That book was instrumental in inaugurating a whole new age in the history of Bangla language and literature.
24 October 2025, 19:37 PM
Syed Manzoorul Islam: Teacher, taleweaver, torchbearer, trailblazer
As I write—still devastated by his passing—I hear his voice in my head: telling stories without end, stories that breathe life, stories that dream of a new world,
12 October 2025, 04:00 AM
90th birthday of Serajul Islam Choudhury / Interrogating power, envisioning emancipation
His work does not merely interpret the world; it is involved in the struggle to change it.
23 June 2025, 02:00 AM
Language, land, labour, and liberation: Reclaiming the radical roots of Ekushey
Every time the question of language surfaces it means that a series of other problems are coming to the fore.
20 February 2025, 18:00 PM
Beyond martyrdom and momentum: The matrix of the 1969 mass movement
In the history of Bangladesh’s formation and its war against the military-bureaucratic regime of Pakistan, the 1969 mass uprising is a significant milestone.
31 January 2025, 02:10 AM
Opinion / Uprising, unity, and uncertainty: Power, protest, and politics in 2024
To speak of politics in 2024 is also to recall the entire history of political culture that has unfolded in Bangladesh since 1972.
30 December 2024, 02:00 AM
Our Victory Day and the questions of equality, justice, and human dignity
Bangladesh's hard-won independence, achieved through the Liberation War in 1971, remains the most defining political event in our history.
16 December 2024, 02:00 AM
Michael Madhusudan Datta: Resistance, Rebellion, Rupture
Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-1873) is widely regarded as the first modern Bangla poet. Well before Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), Madhusudan is even reckoned as the first rebel poet in Bangla literature, although he is by no means a revolutionary like Nazrul.
24 January 2022, 18:00 PM
Our foremost peasant leader and revolutionary
He was described as an epic hero. His life was intimately involved in the land, labour and language of the poor peasant.
16 November 2021, 18:00 PM
Fakir Lalon Shah: Love, life and liberation
One cannot decisively introduce—much less sum up—the life and work of Fakir Lalon Shah (c. 1772-1890).
16 October 2021, 18:00 PM
Kazi Nazrul Islam: Poetry, Politics, Praxis
The only major Bengali poet to have come from the rural proletariat and the first one to have raised—in public—the demand for the total independence of colonial India in 1922, Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) enacts insurrectionary ruptures and breaks with certain old traditions in Bengali poetry while inaugurating new ones.
28 August 2021, 18:00 PM
Kashinath Roy: A teacher, poet and mentor of extraordinary stature
My teacher Professor Kashinath Roy (1947—2021)—poet, short story writer, essayist—died on January 17, at 74. Or did he die?
22 January 2021, 18:00 PM
Badruddin Umar: Our leading Marxist revolutionary
December 20 marks the 89th birthday of Badruddin Umar.
18 December 2020, 18:00 PM
Remembering and Rereading Rokeya: Patriarchy, Politics, and Praxis
December 09 marks both the birth and death anniversaries of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932). The Rokeya Day in Bangladesh also falls on December 09. Indeed,
4 December 2020, 18:00 PM
Fakir Lalon Shah: Subjects, Sites, and Signs
Fakir Lalon Shah—who orally composed thousands of songs in Bengali —died on October 17, 1890—on Kartik 01, 1297 (the Bengali year).
6 November 2020, 18:00 PM
Mathematics and Poetry: Some Impressions
I think I’ve always loved mathematics in my own ways.
18 September 2020, 18:00 PM
Nazrul’s Nonfiction Prose and the Question of Human Emancipation
Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976)—one of the greatest Bengali poets—has by now been fully assimilated into the literary canon and even into public discourse in Bangladesh.
29 May 2020, 18:00 PM
Some Issues in Medieval Bangla Literature: Baru Chandidas and Vidyapati
It is undoubtedly a challenging task to characterize the world of medieval Bangla literature, given its rich diversity and staggering magnitude.
17 January 2020, 18:00 PM
Jibanananda Das: Poetics, Politics, Political Economy
Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) is widely regarded as one of the greatest poets in the Bengali language. His poetry in particular has already made possible a staggering range of interpretive adventures and hermeneutic excavations, although he wrote 21 novels and 110 short stories that were discovered after his death.
18 October 2019, 18:00 PM
Of Itching and Scratching
I, an itching palm?
—William Shakespeare
10 August 2019, 18:00 PM
Serajul Islam Choudhury: Our leading literary and cultural critic
Life is all about enjoying work,” said Serajul Islam Choudhury on his eightieth birthday. Widely acclaimed as our foremost intellectual and as our leading literary and cultural critic, Choudhury exemplifies nothing short of phenomenal productivity. Today—June 23—
22 June 2019, 18:00 PM
Kazi Nazrul Islam and Our Struggle for Emancipation
I am a poet of the present, and not a prophet of the future. […] My birth in this country and this society does not mean that I shall remain constricted and confined to them. No, I belong to all countries and to the entirety of humanity.
—Kazi Nazrul Islam
24 May 2019, 18:00 PM
Serajul Islam Choudhury - Our Leading Intellectual and Inspiration
He confronts, challenges, and combats the world with words. But his words become more than words. They morph into weapons in our struggles against oppression and injustice. For him, of course, writing is fighting. But, then, he is more than a combative writer.
22 June 2018, 18:00 PM
Kazi Nazrul Islam: Some Questions and Concerns
In his voice we continue to hear the cadences, inflections, and accents of resistance and even revolution.
25 May 2018, 18:00 PM
Two Poems
You taught me language, and my profit on't
18 May 2018, 18:00 PM
From Dhaka and Dirty Dialectics:
But, Dhaka, I hear your sepoy in the attic say, as he fashions his life after the size and shape of a solitude more tenacious than my
4 August 2017, 18:00 PM
Confronting life, love, and liberation with a style
Mahmudul Haque wrote and remained silent equally remarkably in his lifetime. And when he wrote, he wrote productively, even intensely, with a peculiar passion untrammeled by momentary vicissitudes. He wrote most of his novels at one stretch, taking a week or two. He wrote one novel even in a single day.
23 July 2017, 18:00 PM