I ONCE asked Shahriar Kabir: ‘As children, you were our favourite fiction writer. How did such a creative soul become entangled in such barren, uncreative circles?’
He answered: ‘This country has turned into a place where, if you wish to work, you must belong to one of two great circles. Refuse them, and you stand alone, like Badruddin Umar.’
Bangladeshi intellectuals dread solitude. That is why they huddle under the shadow of press releases endorsed by ‘101 eminent intellectuals.’ Yet in this mimicry they forfeit the essence of intellect. They pretend to stand for the people, but always seek the shelter of their circles.
Badruddin Umar refused such shelter. He studied at Oxford, founded the Department of Sociology at Rajshahi University, and resigned in defiance of Pakistan’s military regime. From Ayub Khan’s Pakistan to Hasina’s Bangladesh, intelligence agencies kept summoning him, always with the same indictment: ‘You are inciting people against the government.’
To speak truth dispassionately, to strip power and greed bare, was always branded ‘incitement.’ In the dictionary of chair-hungry men, truth itself becomes provocation.
Amid South Asia’s obsession with titles, ranks and medals, Umar lived a grander life. He spurned the Independence Award, the Bangla Academy Award, and countless others, saying that the two-inch scale of inert institutions could never measure his height.
He chronicled a century and a half of this land’s history with unsparing clarity. Partisan and sectarian narratives crumbled in his words. Falsehoods, endlessly repeated until they hardened into ‘truth,’ dissolved under his fearless gaze.
Through his 150-year canvas, he showed how peasant and worker uprisings were stolen by profiteers. He turned away from Dhaka University, believing that under British, Pakistani and Bangladeshi rule alike, the university produced only servants of power. Sons of peasants and labourers entered, only to return as politicians, bureaucrats and intellectuals, oppressing their own origins, parading as Kolkata’s ‘babus,’ eager to raise their children as ‘British sahibs.’
In 1950, communal hatred torched his ancestral home in Bardhaman. His family crossed from West Bengal into East Bengal. Yet Umar never drowned in Partition grief, nor fashioned tragedy into narratives of ‘minority persecution’ to please interventionists. The longing for a ‘lost haveli’ was, to him, a toy for sentimental men, not for thinkers.
He abandoned the comforts of class, choosing instead a middle-class life in Dhaka, devoting himself to the labour of the mind. On a cane sofa, clad in shirt and lungi, he eclipsed the glitter of the bourgeoisie in their silks and three-piece suits. The contrast between power-seekers and Umar, the seeker of the people, was like Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar: the nouveau-riche contractor against the old aristocrat, faithful to classical music. While parliamentarians squandered the nation at ‘Lailatul Election,’ Umar was immersed in the politics of peasants’ rights.
His book on permanent settlement and Bengal peasants revealed a reality that still stalks Bangladesh, where ‘permanent settlements’ of power endure. He gave us the lens to see the present through the past. In his book Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and 19th-Century Bengali Society, that same lens exposed Dhaka’s self-styled progressives, the cultural uncles and aunts who forged a hollow ‘upper class’ while scorning the dispossessed.
In his book Partition of Bengal and Communal Politics and Indian National Movement, he placed the burden of Partition upon Congress leaders, shattering the false lessons of communal hatred taught as history.
From the Language Movement to the uprising of 1969, from Liberation War to half a century of post-war politics, Umar chronicled all with the gravity of Thucydides. His thought inspired the July Revolution of 2024. Soon after he thundered that fascists must be overthrown, it came to pass. Yet even in triumph he warned: profiteers will always hijack the people’s victories. Umar knew the flies in the milk of power.
Awami League zealots called him ‘Bad Umar.’ Religious zealots branded him an atheist. It was the old Lilliputian game of measuring giants with a two-inch tape, a comic obsession handed down through ages.
Meanwhile, Facebook intellectuals, with their dull clichés and cow-dung quarrels, taught their disciples to hurl muck instead of ideas.
But Badruddin Umar, seer of three ages, bequeathed a political biography of Bangladesh that remains inexhaustible. To read his books is to walk through a museum: wax idols of false heroes melt before your eyes, while the megalomaniac chatter of social media shrinks to nothing.
His lament still echoes: ‘I have done so much, yet nothing is written about me. Here, volumes are written about so many, but not about my books, not even my work on the Language Movement. In Kolkata, my writings are widely discussed. Distinguished figures like Kazi Abdul Odud, Maitreyi Devi, Narayan Chowdhury, Annadashankar Ray, Bishnu Dey, Samar Sen, Binoy Ghosh and Ashok Mitra have all spoken of me. Regardless of politics, they wrote of my work. But here, regardless of politics, I have only been neglected.’
In our society, every camp demands conformity. People must be like shoes, stamped out in one factory, identical in size and shape.
Umar refused such conformity. In the 1972 Constitution, he saw the armour of autocracy. He warned that the fall of one-party rule would summon military dictatorship. In the partisan retelling of liberation, he saw a marketplace of myths, fairy tales of stolen credit. When famine devoured lives in 1974, he denounced the regime’s failure and elite plunder. Later, Amartya Sen confirmed what Umar had long said: it was a man-made disaster.
For this, the Awami League raged at him.
Though a communist himself, Umar rebuked Bangladesh’s leftists for parroting Western dogma instead of crafting socialism from their own soil. Thus he became an outcast in the salons of compromise, the Inus and Menons who nestled in ruling laps. Leaders who drifted from left to Awami League or BNP never felt comfortable with Umar. He would not offer sweetmeats at the shrine of bipartisan politics. And when he struck at the pirs of ‘Lalsalu,’ dozing in their shrines, his bluntness was treated as blasphemy. He became the lone figure in the crowd.
John Stuart Mill once wrote, ‘How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of a great mind is agreeing with the opinions of small minds?’
After Pakistan’s freedom from Britain, and Bangladesh’s freedom from Pakistan, Umar saw no true liberty. Without freedom of expression, without justice for peasants and workers, independence remained a painting on the wall. The Muslim League in Pakistan, and later the Awami League in Bangladesh, built feudal fiefdoms in the name of freedom. The colonial system endured. Umar refused to be satisfied with paper independence.
Watching Hasina’s fifteen-year rule, he observed with disbelief: ‘Mujib never obeyed India in everything. Hasina governs only by India’s command.’ In this loss of sovereignty, Umar longed for true liberation. After August 5, 2024, he welcomed the return of free expression, but warned of the swelling right wing. He despised religion-based politics, as he had in Pakistan’s time, and for that the religious despised him in turn.
This was the paradox of Umar: a book in which one chapter offended the Awami League, another the BNP; one the left, another the right. He was not born to please the brokers of politics. He wanted to see the meaning of independence translated into the lives of peasants, workers and the toiling masses. Until then, Umar himself remained a manifesto of liberation. And thus, in death, Umar grows ever more alive in the public imagination.
The way he uttered truth — fearless, impartial, transparent, detached — makes him, for a new generation, an eternal source of courage in the struggle for a Bangladesh free of injustice.
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Maskwaith Ahsan, editor-in-chief of E-SouthAsia, is a writer, journalist and educator.
