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ADRUDDIN Umar — our foremost Marxist politician, intellectual, historian, and critic in Bangladesh and South Asia — departed this world on September 7, 2025, at the age of 93. And yet, who among us can claim with carking certitude that his death was more real than his blazing, truth-telling, incessantly insurrectionary life?

The story of Badruddin Umar is, in many ways, the story of an exception. In a country where opportunism and compromise have been too often elevated to the level of virtues, Umar chose to tread a different path. He took the harder, riskier, lonelier road — that of a revolutionary committed to the cause of the people. But who are the ‘people’ for Umar, really? No, the ‘people’ for him are not empty rhetorical invocations or abstract phantoms, endlessly mouthed as they are by middle-class politicians, their obedient lackeys, and corporations themselves. Yes, all of them never tire of speaking in the name of the ‘people.’ But, for Umar, the ‘people’ decisively come to mean workers and peasants — the tireless toiling masses who alone embody the living ‘majority’ (not in a majoritarian sense) of this land. In his own way, Umar represents a paradigmatic combination of theory and practice, gnosis and praxis, conviction and courage. His very life stands as a rebuke to what he himself calls the ‘lumpenbourgeois political culture’ that he otherwise so acutely and accurately analyses in his work, unmasking its hollowness, its opportunism, its incurable anti-people character and content.

It is no surprise that Umar’s contributions remain underacknowledged, even though a Festschrift — a commendable commemorative volume of essays called Badruddin Umorer Jeebon o Kaaj (The Life & Work of Badruddin Umar, 2022) — was published on the occasion of his 90th birthday to celebrate his life and work. And it is nothing short of ironic and even deeply revealing that it took an entire mass uprising — our July Uprising of 2024 — for Umar’s relevance to be openly acknowledged. True, Umar could foresee this uprising. Now, suddenly, even those who once spat venom at his name are busy draping themselves in his banner, a spectacle that exposed with comic clarity the hypocrisy of middle-class activists and writers — precisely the breed that Umar characteristically and even clinically dissects in his work.

In any event, Umar’s remarkable contributions to the fields of history and historiography, politics, culture, and what one may call ‘the sociology of the everyday’ have never been adequately evaluated, partly because such evaluation would force a confrontation with the ideological bankruptcy of the ruling classes and their middle-class intellectual allies and apparatuses. But Umar’s work lives on as a ‘resource of hope,’ a source of illumination, or a guidepost of reason for all those who seek transformative knowledge and politics in the making of a ‘new’ Bangladesh — a call that resounded during our July uprising itself — one that is grounded in the core principles of our national liberation movement of 1971: equality, justice, and human dignity.
Born on December 20, 1931, in Bardhaman, West Bengal, Badruddin Umar earned his first degrees in philosophy from Dhaka University, where he briefly taught as a part-time faculty member before proceeding to Oxford University to receive his honours degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. On his return, Umar joined Rajshahi University in 1963 as the founding chair of the political science department, later co-founding the sociology department, at the remarkably young age of 32. His decisively interdisciplinary formation — encompassing such fields of study as philosophy, political science, sociology, and economics — endowed him with a breadth of vision that would variously inform and inflect, and even shape, his subsequent theoretical interventions.
Umar began making those interventions in the mid-1960s — a heady historical conjuncture across Asia and Africa, marked by national liberation struggles, anti-colonial movements, and the insurrectionary pulse of Marxism. It was within this politically charged milieu that Umar emerged as a radical, ‘oppositional’ intellectual — exactly in the sense later articulated by the Palestinian public intellectual and ‘postcolonial’ theorist Edward Said (1935–2003). Umar’s trilogy of works — Sampradayikata (Communalism, 1966), Sangskritir Sankat (Crises of Culture, 1967), and Sangskritik Sampradayikata (Cultural Communalism, 1969) — broke new ground. These works theorise, with superb rigor, the dialectics of mutually imbricated politics and culture, the intersections of colonialism and communalism, and the crises of identity in East Pakistan, among other constellations of concerns.
It is here that I must quickly but emphatically underline Umar’s first notable conceptual contribution made via his celebrated trilogy: even without having read the Italian Marxist revolutionary Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Umar is able to formulate, in his own terms, the Gramscian contention that culture itself is political, and to mobilise that insight with real, transformative effect. It is characteristic of Umar to interrogate the politics of culture as much as the culture of politics. Yes, Umar continues to teach us that culture has its politics — and politics, its culture. And it is he who, for the first time, introduces and theorises the very concept of political culture in our part of the world — a groundbreaking intervention, powerfully exemplified as it is in his book Bangladesher Rajnoitik Sangskriti (The Political Culture of Bangladesh, 1997).
But it is Umar’s trilogy that initially established him as the first serious theorist of communalism and culture in our context and, by extension, as an early theorist of ‘Bengali’ nationalism itself. Although by no means a nationalist himself, Umar — in his trilogy — lays bare the structures, fissures, and fractures of communal politics, while at the same time providing us with a solid conceptual framework to grasp nationalism itself and even morphing it into a weapon of analysis. In doing so, Umar nonetheless helped shape a nationalist consciousness, an insurgent necessity in the era of anti-imperialist and anti-neo-colonial struggles; and, in our specific instance, in our struggles against the historically specific form of Pakistani neocolonial domination and exploitation. In effect, Umar’s interventions cast him as a cultural freedom fighter even prior to 1971 about which Umar has written at least six remarkable books.
To be precise, as early as 1968, Umar’s anti-colonial antagonism sharpened into an irrevocable rupture with Pakistan through his confrontation with East Pakistan’s governor Abdul Monem Khan. This very confrontation led to a choice that is rare and exemplary: Umar abandoned an extraordinarily promising academic career in order to dedicate his entire life to political struggle. Here was the astonishing story of an Oxford graduate and university teacher, poised for prestige and recognition, who instead became a full-time revolutionary, committed wholly to the toiling masses — workers and peasants. This transformation itself embodied one of Umar’s deepest convictions: that the meaning of intellectual life does not reside in careers, accolades, appointments, or prizes, but in revolutionary practice. And for Umar, of course, the borderlines between his intellectual life and his political life dissolved decisively, giving rise to a new rhythm of living, knowing, acting, and becoming-and-being in a world characterised by capitalism, imperialism/neocolonialism, racism, and patriarchy — theÌý interconnected systems of oppression that Umar’s work continues to confront, challenge, and combat in a variety of ways.

In 1969, then, already armed with Marxist theory and militancy, Umar joined the East Pakistan Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) and edited its weekly organ, Saptahik Ganashakti (Weekly Ganashakti). His editorial leadership itself was a tour de force, traversing issues of theory and history with remarkable acuity. During the Liberation War of 1971, however, Umar opposed his party’s line, producing two historic dissenting documents. He resigned in December 1971 and turned to reconstructing peasants and workers’ movements in Bangladesh, while also nurturing progressive cultural organisations on the left. He served as president of both the Bangladesh Krishak Federation (Bangladesh Peasants Federation) and Bangladesh Lekhak Shibir (the country’s oldest national organisation of writers, artists, and activists on the left) and later of the Jatiya Mukti Council (National Liberation Council). He was also one of the founders — and an active member — of the Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Fascist Committee in Bangladesh.

Unusually productive and prolific as he was, while noted for his boundless intellectual energy, Badruddin Umar has authored more than a hundred books and countless articles in both Bangla and English. The scale, scope, and reach of his interests and engagements are simply staggering. And by no means do I claim to offer a comprehensive evaluation of Umar’s wide-ranging work, given particularly the limits or exigencies of space here. However, I intend to tabulate and underline certain high points of his work that I find significant, while conveying at least a sense of the totality of his oeuvre.
Across the sheer sweep of his writings — relentlessly spanning over six uncompromising decades — one can still hear the steady beat of Umar’s abiding concerns. He characteristically and tirelessly returns to the question of class, tracing the tangled genealogies of our ruling and middle classes along with those of our peasants and workers. And, of course, he stubbornly deals with the very theory of politics itself, drawing conceptual resources and strategic strength from Marxism-Leninism as a living, dialectical arsenal of analysis and action. He maps what the philosopher John Protevi once called the ‘political physics’ of mass uprisings — peasant revolts, workers’ strikes, national liberation struggles — that shook not only our own land but also what the Argentine-Cuban Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara (1928-1967) once famously called the ‘tri-continent’ (Asia, Africa, and Latin America). Further, in his work, Umar confronts head-on the rise of fundamentalism and the menace of religious fascism, in both India and Bangladesh. Umar also lays bare, with clinical precision, the rot of the lumpen-bourgeois political culture that has long corroded the country from within. For Umar, these were never fleeting fixations; they were the lifeblood of a political activist and intellectual who consecrated his existence to the dream of a democratic and socialist transformation.

And — remarkably, for the first time — Badruddin Umar theorises with brutal clarity the historically determinate form of fascism — its specific emergence and burning particularities — in Bangladesh in his 2001 book called Bangladeshe Fascibaad (Fascism in Bangladesh) — a work that even anticipates some of the insights that the Italian left theorist and critic Alberto Toscano brilliantly articulates in his relatively recent book called Late Fascism (2023). For both Umar and Toscano, ‘fascism, like other political phenomena, varies according to its socioeconomic context,’ to use Toscano’s own words. Of course, Umar characteristically historicises and contextualises fascism in Bangladesh. As he put it — trailblazer that he was — as early as 2001: ‘From 1971 onward, the foundations of fascism in the new state were laid by relying on foreign powers such as the Soviet Union, India, and the United States. Whether these states are described as social-imperialist, expansionist, or imperialist, it is upon their support that Awami-Baksali fascism, then the military fascism of Zia and Ershad, and subsequently the fascism of BNP and Awami League’s elected governments, have been established and made effective’ (translation mine). And, of course, Umar — like other ‘third-world’ Marxists such as Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), and Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973) — links fascism to the macrologics and micrologics of neocolonialism and imperialism, and thus, to capitalist mode of production itself.
But Umar — in Bangladeshe Fascibaad (Fascism in Bangladesh) — primarily speaks of fascism in brutal specificities within the Bangladeshi context: ‘At this conjuncture in Bangladesh, a novel version of the Awami-BAKSALi government has assumed power. They cannot be described as merely the political representatives of fascism in the neo-colonial era; rather, their fascism has a specific character — one that idolises Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family as the bearers of certain ideals and principles, which, from the very founding moment of Bangladesh, had been designated as ‘Mujibism.’ Under this banner, they have established a reign of extreme repression and oppression. [...] This fascism must be resisted. But by no means would it be appropriate to understand it merely as the fascism of a single party. [...] This fascism belongs not only to the Awami League itself, but also to the Jatiya Party, the BNP, and Jamaat-e-Islami all at once. Against this newly formed ruling class, divided into different parties but united in essence, there is no alternative to a broad-based, united resistance by the peasants, workers, and all working people of the country — together with students and the entire progressive educated section of the country. Keeping this goal in view, the people of this country must continuously fight against Bangladeshi fascism’ (translation mine).

In other words, Badruddin Umar develops a distinct understanding of fascism in Bangladesh, identifying its coordinates and contours most clearly in the Awami League’s politics of chauvinistic Bengali nationalism, monopolisation of Liberation War history, suppression of minorities and dissent, and dependence on India’s fascist-colonialist backing. He argues that while fascism in Europe historically derived its strength from domestic mass bases, the Awami League’s unprecedentedly brutal and murderous authoritarianism in Bangladesh survived largely, if not exclusively, through external support. Umar also saw Jamaat-e-Islami as bearing fascist characteristics because of its historically proven drive to impose religious absolutism, in addition to perpetrating different forms and forces of anti-people violence. Although committed to ‘national liberation’ in language, education, and economy, Umar consistently warned that extreme nationalism tends to degenerate into fascism, making his theoretical framework the earliest and sharpest intervention in the history of the country’s political thought.
And, of course, Umar consistently accentuated the need for an anti-fascist mass uprising. It is not for nothing that he was among the founders of the Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Fascist Committee in Bangladesh. Umar, in fact, underscores the need for a permanent struggle against fascism itself. And this was not merely theory: it was an uprising he had long foreseen and, more than two decades later, lived to witness in the July Uprising of 2024 — an uprising he actively supported and hailed as the largest and most remarkable in the political history of Bangladesh. It is worth noting, too, that during this turbulent conjuncture, the very term fascism — consistently used by Umar over the years — gained sharper currency and wider use, culminating in the dismantling of Sheikh Hasina’s fascist government itself.

One can surely extend further the catalogue of Umar’s intellectual and political preoccupations. For instance, to his relentless focus on the class question in our part of the world — and on the historical formation of Bangladesh’s ruling classes, along with other classes like workers and peasants — one must add his sustained critical interrogations of the political economy and culture of capitalism in both global and local contexts; his probing inquiries into the dilemmas and prospects of socialist movements across the world, and into the crises and possibilities of reconstructing the communist movement in Bangladesh. One should also add Umar’s analysis of the pervasive phenomena of militarism and military dictatorship in the Third World; his critically interventionist exposure of the entanglements of politics, business, and the law in a wider regime of criminalisation; and his investigations into the politics of education, knowledge, and pedagogy.

Equally significant are Umar’s reflections on the role of the middle-class, including its intellectuals and writers. And then one must underline his steadfast attention to the struggles of religious, ethnic, and linguistic minorities in Bangladesh and beyond; his insistence on ascribing centrality to the ‘woman question’ in our discursive and political practices as such; and even his subsequent sustained engagement with ecology and environment. In fact, as the years rolled on, Umar turned with ever sharper focus to what I would call a critical trinity of urgent questions — the woman question, the minority question, and the environmental or ecological question — each of which, though relatively ignored and sometimes even elided in his earlier work, came to occupy a remarkably more significant place in his later interventions.

To be continued.

Ìý

Dr Azfar Hussain is Director of the Graduate Program in Social Innovation at Grand Valley State University, Michigan, USA, and Vice President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies (USA), where he is Professor of English, World Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies.