NE of Umar’s enduring preoccupations is — understandably — the politics of the left, the tradition he claims as his own. But he has never been blind to its lacunae, loopholes, weaknesses, and betrayals. On the contrary, he is almost notoriously famous for his sustained, devastating critique of the so-called ‘left’ — a critique that set him apart early on in his political career. His critique of the left — in various contexts and configurations — can be found in a range of his works — particularly from Bangladeshe Communist Andoloner Somoshsha (The Problems of Building a Communist Movement in Bangladesh, 1974) and Baamponthee Mohole Onoikko o Gonotantrik Oikko Prosonge (Concerning the Disunity of the Left and the Democratic Unity, 1991) to Bangladesher Raajnoitik Songskriti (The Political Culture of Bangladesh, 1997),Ìý Bangladesher Bampontheera Ebong Ekattorer Shadhinota Juddhe Communistder Rajnoitik Bhumika (The Left in Bangladesh and the Political Role of the Communists in the Liberation War of 1971, 2000). And perhaps no one in Bangladesh can match the scale, scope, and rigor of Umar’s dissection of this so-called left (and taking cues from Umar himself, I keep asking: how can one possibly call them ‘left’ at all, ones who always-already lean right while busily licking its shoes, to invoke Umar’s pet metaphor?).
It is by no means incidental, then, that in a couple of newspaper interviews in 2021, Umar responded to questions such as ‘What is the future of the left, and what is the role of the left?’ with characteristically biting candour and cutting brevity: ‘The future of the left? No future, really! And their role? Licking the feet of the [so-called] bourgeoisie!’ Yet Umar’s contempt here is reserved for impostors. In his writings he insists that to be genuinely of the left is difficult and challenging, arduous and exacting, and certainly a matter of permanent struggle and commitment, cautioning us not to be carried away by the label ‘left’ itself, while, however, registering a caveat that in criticising the left, we must remain careful not to play into the hands of the right which is always-already ready to cash in on the left’s weaknesses — real or imagined.
One could still go on, for the list of Umar’s preoccupations provided above is far from exhaustive, as his formidable body of work attests. Indeed, his monumental two-volume Emergence of Bangladesh — published by Oxford University Press in 2004 and 2006 — would further demonstrate the reach, the range, and the rigor of his thought — a work that traces the trajectories of class struggle in our region since 1947, the genesis and contradictions of nationalism, and the eventual birth of Bangladesh as a sovereign, independent state.
But any discussion of Umar’s work will always remain unjustly inadequate if it does not pay serious attention to his monumental, pathbreaking, three-volume historiographical opus Purbo Banglar Bhasha Andolon o Tatkalin Rajniti (The Language Movement in East Bengal and the Politics of the Time) that appeared in 1970, 1976, and 1981. It is here, above all, that one discerns Umar not only as a historian but also as a historiographer—for historiography, after all, is about the very politics of writing history itself. And to describe Umar as simply an important historian of our Language Movement is but a paltry, impoverished recognition of the full magnitude of his achievement.
For Umar’s true contribution resides in having mobilised — indeed for the first time in our land — a radically sustained, organically rooted approach that insists on seeing history from below. This approach — predicated on, if not exclusively confined to, oral historiography that Umar first systematically and successfully practises in our part of the world — recognises the workers and peasants, the toiling masses themselves, as the genuine protagonists of our collective history. Inaugurating a rupture with the conventions of the traditional or individualist, bourgeois, elitist, and colonialist versions of history, Umar’s work demonstrates — empirically, historically, analytically — that the Language Movement was never merely the preserve of a few middle-class leaders or enthusiasts or even a few student leaders, their enormous and glorious sacrifices notwithstanding. Rather, according to Umar, it was a movement of the masses, a movement in which their own liberationist and emancipatory consciousness broke through, giving the struggle a profoundly democratic character.
As Umar maintains in another of his works — this one in English — on our Language Movement, The Language Movement in East Bengal (2001): ‘The total character of the Language Movement was shaped by not only the aspirations and the struggles of the Bengali middle class but also by the struggles of the peasants, workers, and other sections of the working people. For this reason, the Language Movement contained elements both of bourgeois nationalism as well as the aspirations of the toiling masses. And this gave the Language Movement a certain democratic character which remained unsurpassed during the subsequent political developments in East Bengal.’ Mark Umar’s characteristic Marxist-Leninist accent falling on the ‘total character of the Language Movement’ — or, for that matter, on the very question of totality itself — but it is tempered by acute historical differentia specifica and situational concreteness — qualities that indeed characterise much of his oeuvre, noted also as it is for clarity and cogency and charge that Umar effortlessly brings together in his attempts to capture and stimulate his readership. I should add parenthetically but emphatically that insurgent activism itself remains exemplarily organic to Umar’s substance and style — both. And reading Umar, one finds another famous Gramscian contention reinforced: that even style itself is political and ideological.
Umar also stands out as an uncompromising internationalist in the Marxist–Leninist tradition, with imperialism — above all, US imperialism — constituting one of his defining thematic preoccupations. Thus, his internationalism is not to be conflated with today’s fashionable, free-floating cosmopolitanism. Internationalism is profoundly political. It is a position — even a combative one — that remains opposed to all forms and forces of oppression and exploitation across the world. And it is a position that makes connections among different sites and subjects and scenes of oppression. The political homeland for the internationalist — and for Umar, for that matter — is the whole world of living beings, to put it bluntly. Indeed, Umar is our foremost anti-imperialist writer and activist, consistently and courageously vocal on virtually every international issue that matters to working-class people, peasants, the colonised, and minorities across the globe.
Across decades, Umar has produced a formidable body of work on imperialism itself, from Samrajjobaader Notun Biswabyabostha (The New World System of Imperialism, 1995), to Samrajjobaad o Biswaporisthiti (Imperialism and the Existing World Order, 1998), to Palestine, Afghanistan o Iraq-e Markin Samrajjobaad (US Imperialism in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq, 2004), to Dakhkhin Asiay Markin Samrajjobaad (US Imperialism in South Asia). In these works, Umar rereads V. I. Lenin’s (1870-1924) classic Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) with both creativity and rigor, mobilising a sharp Leninist position without lapsing into mechanical application. He has consistently affirmed, in broad strokes, the Leninist formulation that imperialism is the highest, or contemporary, stage of capitalism, while also reinterpreting and even stretching it in the light of shifting global scenes and signs, vectors and valences.
And this staunch anti-imperialist Umar’s principled stance has been increasingly pronounced in his lifelong militant advocacy of the Palestinian cause. He has been unwavering in his solidarity with Palestine, advancing his powerful critique of Zionist settler colonialism with fire and force, while demystifying the structures of US imperial-military-financial support that sustain it. For Umar, Palestine is not just one national liberation struggle, among others; it is a decisive front in the global battle against imperialism and colonialism themselves, for the era of imperialism, colonialism, and genocide continues to renew itself with a vengeance.
Now I think I would do well to pause and reflect briefly on Umar’s own brand of Marxism — so often, and so mistakenly, dismissed as ‘mechanical.’ Yet in books such as Bangladeshe Marxbaad (Marxism in Bangladesh, 1981), Marxio Darshan o Onnanno Prasanga (Marxian Philosophy and Other Issues, 1986), and Bangladesher Rajnaitik Sangskriti (The Political Culture of Bangladesh,1997) — to cite only three, leaving aside the scores of articles he wrote on the subject — Umar’s contention emerges with striking clarity: Marxism must be continually reinvented in the light of a given country’s actually existing conditions, and it must never become an end in itself. For, as Umar insists, people are not for Marxism; rather, Marxism is for people — a conviction that recalls the words of the great Caribbean poet, theorist, and activist Aimé Césaire (1913-2008): ‘What I want is that Marxism and Communism be harnessed into the service of coloured peoples, and not coloured people into the service of Marxism and Communism. That the doctrine and the movement be tailored to fit humanity, not humanity to fit the doctrine. And, of course, that goes for others besides communists.’
It is not for nothing that I have elsewhere situated Umar within the tradition of ‘Third World’ Marxists — for instance, the African revolutionaries Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) and AmÃlcar Cabral (1924-1973) as well as the Latin American (Peruvian) revolutionary José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930) — in my paper called ‘Tricontinentalism on the World Stage: Re-reading Mao, Che, Cabral, and Umar in the Era of Tele-techno-electro-mediatic Capital’ that I presented at the fifth Rethinking Marxism international conference held at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA, in November 2003. In that paper, I argued — among other things — how Umar, true to form, clung on to the idea of the ‘mass uprising,’ championing it as early as the 1970s as an alternative to the armed underground politics valorised or even idolised and romanticised by so many communists at the time. Umar abandoned the line of ‘annihilation of class enemies’ as ill-suited to the concrete contexts and shifting conjunctures of Bangladesh, insisting instead that real revolutionary change must arise from organised mass movements — ‘national-popular’ struggles, to borrow Gramsci’s phrase — where workers, peasants, and students converge in the streets and factories of urban centres, rather than from the shadows of secret armed cells. His voice, uncompromising and insistent, dissuaded many young activists from the destructive illusions of underground militancy. (I confess here, as a Maoist, I too suffered from those illusions in my teens, although by no means do I reduce Maoism to armed conspiracies alone.) For Umar, it was clear: mass uprisings — 1969, 1990, and 2024 — could shake states, dismantle regimes, and even bring them crashing down. But without a conscious revolutionary program that decisively moves in the direction of inaugurating a complete rupture with the existing order of things, they would remain uprisings, not revolutions.
Let me now make a few observations on Umar’s personality and character. I had the rare privilege of working with him closely during my years in the 1990s as the acting general secretary of Bangladesh Lekhak Shibir, and I watched Umar — often daily, always intently. If his intellectual contributions were monumental, so too was his integrity.
Courageous, uncompromising, principled to the core, Umar never once sought refuge in the corridors of power, never once bartered his convictions for the cheap comforts of compromise. To Umar, indeed, one could well apply Gramsci’s famous assertion: ‘I’ve become convinced that even when everything is or seems lost, one must quietly go back to work, start again from the beginning. [...] I believe that I’m simply an average person who has his own deep convictions and will not trade them for anything in the world.’ Simplicity, clarity, and honesty were not mere traits but constituted the very organic texture of his life. And it was Umar — Umar alone — who could turn down prize after prize, ‘prestigious’ ones at that: from the Adamjee and Phillips prizes to the Itihas Parishad Award, from the Bangla Academy Award to the Ekushey Padak, and even the vaunted Independence Award of 2025. With every rejection, he reminded us that such honours are never politically and ideologically innocent or neutral, that they come stamped with the fingerprints of institutions complicit in power one way or another.
In this refusal, as in his writings, Umar continues to emerge as the exemplary threat to a society bloated with sell-outs and sycophants — those legions forever ready to grovel, to lick the shoes of politicians and even the most mediocre of bureaucrats. Against the spectacle of their prostration or against the bootlicker’s pathetic creed, Umar stands as a militant negation, an unsettling embodiment of resistance: proof that integrity itself can be revolutionary, that the act of saying ‘No’ can rattle the very foundations of a culture built on flattery, cowardice, and betrayal.
Here I should call attention to a rather ‘clever’ conceit — so aggressively prevalent in our middle-class milieu — that honesty and intellect are separate faculties, that one can be impeccably honest and yet hopelessly, intellectually dull, as if honesty were the preserve of fools or simpletons. But Umar’s life shows that honesty is not merely a moral issue but an intellectual force. For one cannot be truly honest without the sharpness of intellect to distinguish right from wrong, just from unjust; and one might even say that Umar’s brilliance flowed from this very distinct dialectic of reciprocity: he was intellectually fierce because he was honest, and he was honest because he was intellectually fierce. In other words, for Umar, honesty is not the folly of the simple — it is the intelligence of those who refuse to kneel.
Finally, let me recall — with something more than delight — one of the most memorable evenings of my life: the night of January 12, 2016, when, after nearly five years of absence, I once again found myself in the company of Badruddin Umar, seated in his own home, listening, learning, breathing in the fierce clarity of his beautiful presence. The poet Alfred Khokon accompanied me. What unfolded that very night was nothing short of extraordinary: a living demonstration of Umar’s intellectual vigour, warmth, humour, and unflagging revolutionary spirit.
True, there are always those ‘Marxists’ who refuse to laugh until the Revolution dawns. But recall Marx himself — the one whom the Caribbean revolutionary C.L.R. James (1901-1989) so assertively described: ‘Marx is a very funny man, very comic in a very profound way.’ Umar, too, broke apart the stiff mask of those so-called serious Marxists that night. To be sure, Umar was famous for bearing the image of an angry man — people saw him that way, and he himself insisted that anyone not outraged enough was simply not paying attention. Yet beneath that image of an angry man lived another Umar, one by no means less real: an Umar of humour, sharp and disarming, laughter rising like an unexpected song in a battlefield, so to speak.
That night, even at 84, Umar radiated an energy that was contagious. To borrow Marx’s words, he continued to ‘[…] rub his conceptual blocs together in such a way that they catch fire.’ He spoke with zest and clarity, recalling events from his life, some of which did not appear even in his magisterial five-volume autobiography Amar Jeebon (My Life).Ìý At one point, he began to recite — first Madhusudhan Dutta (1824-1873), then Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), and finally, with astonishing force, Urdu verses from Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869), and Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984). Umar’s memory and enunciation were phenomenal.
Umar particularly spoke of the great Urdu poet Faiz — of meetings and exchanges, of the letter Faiz had sent Umar all the way from Algeria, which he still cherished. He also reminisced about his conversations with Ernest Mandel (1923-1995), the Belgian Marxist political economist and theorist and the author of the groundbreaking work Late Capitalism (1972) and with Paul Sweezy (1910-2004), the American Marxist political economist and co-founder of Monthly Review. Umar did not always agree with them, but his respect for their political commitment was evident, as was their respect for Umar.
Our conversation with Umar ranged widely and even wildly. We talked about numerous things — way more things than I can possibly recount here. At one point when we asked him about his pathbreaking book on Iswarchandra Vidyasagar (1820–1891), he told us how it went almost unnoticed in Bangladesh. But he gratefully acknowledged the enthusiastic responses to his work on Vidyasagar he had received from outside his home country — from such figures as Kazi Abdul Wadud (1894-1970), Annada Shankar Roy (1904-2002), Abu Sayeed Ayub (1906–1982), Bishnu Dey (1909-1982), and, of course, the filmmaker-activist Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976), some of whose ‘drunken’ moments Umar joyously and humorously recalled in our conversation.
And then came laughter. When I slipped into an impersonation of my favourite writer-intellectual Ahmed Sofa (with whom I was quite close at one point) — the same Sofa who proclaimed with characteristic boldness: ‘I feel proud of being alive in the time of Umar’ — Umar himself let out a loud guffaw — the kind of laughter that lit up the room. Indeed, Umar knew how to laugh with comrades, just as he knew how to laugh at enemies. That evening brimmed with love, light, and laughter; and for me, it revealed the dialectical rhythm of Umar’s thought and temperament: the sharp mind of a militant activist coupled with the generous, beating heart of a comrade. It is not for nothing that our comrade Aijaz Ahmad (1941-2022) — the author of the groundbreaking work In Theory (1992) — told me unequivocally, following his brilliant lecture on the future of Marxism at the office of Bangladesh Lekhak Shibir back in 1994: ‘Umar? Umar is an outstanding man.’
One could trace further the many paths and legacies of Badruddin Umar. What I have hitherto offered here is not a full-scale reckoning but still an overview of his life and work that I feel compelled to place before a new generation at a conjuncture when politics reveals itself to be in tremendous crisis, the July Uprising notwithstanding. And any overview, understandably, is bound to be selective and thus inadequate. Yet I carry the resolve to return to Umar in the fullness he deserves, for his contributions — as a revolutionary thinker and an uncompromising political activist — remain too long neglected. And to remember Umar is never to genuflect before monuments or medals, but to inherit his refusal, his rage, his uncompromising honesty; it is to pick up the weapon he forged, to sharpen truth into struggle. To recall Umar today is by no means a hollow commemoration but a militant call to continue the unfinished struggle for equality, justice, and human dignity — the unfulfilled promise of 1971 and the still unmet demand of the July Uprising of 2024.
Death claimed Badruddin Umar, but it cannot silence his insurrectionary blaze.
(Concluded)
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.
Ìý