Humayun Ahmed: Creator of Himu and Misir Ali

No writer in independent Bangladesh has been read, watched and mourned quite like Humayun Ahmed (1948–2012). A chemistry professor who wrote his first novel while still a student, he went on to publish more than two hundred books of fiction and non-fiction — Banglapedia counts his total writings at over three hundred — and to create Himu and Misir Ali, two fictional characters who slipped out of his pages and took up permanent residence in the culture. He then did something no Bangladeshi novelist had done before him: he carried that readership first to television and then to the cinema, reshaping both. For decades his new titles were the main attraction of the Ekushey Book Fair, and publishers openly credit him with building the mass middle-class readership on which modern Bangladeshi publishing stands.

A Netrokona Childhood Shadowed by 1971

Humayun Ahmed was born on 13 November 1948 at Mohanganj in Netrokona district, at his maternal grandfather’s home; the family’s ancestral village was nearby Kutubpur, a landscape of haors and rivers that would return again and again in his fiction. He was born Shamsur Rahman — his father later changed the children’s names, and Shamsur Rahman became Humayun Ahmed, the eldest of six siblings. His father, Faizur Rahman Ahmed, was a police officer with a literary bent who published articles and a book of his own and encouraged his children to write; his mother, Ayesha Faiz, would herself publish a memoir in later life. Creativity ran through the whole family: Humayun’s younger brother Muhammad Zafar Iqbal became the country’s best-known science-fiction writer, and his youngest brother Ahsan Habib a leading satirist.

Because of his father’s postings, Humayun’s childhood was spent in a succession of district towns — Sylhet, Bogura, Comilla, Rangamati, Pirojpur among them — an itinerant upbringing that stocked his imagination with the small-town and village Bangladesh he later wrote about so intimately. He was a brilliant student: at Bogura Zilla School he stood second in the combined merit list of the Rajshahi Education Board in the 1965 School Certificate examination, and he passed his Intermediate from Dhaka College in 1967.

Then came 1971. During the Liberation War his father was serving as the sub-divisional police officer of Pirojpur, and he was killed by the Pakistani military. Humayun himself was detained by the Pakistan Army and tortured before being released. The war never left his work: across four decades he returned to it in novels such as Aguner Poroshmoni, 1971 and Jochona O Jononir Golpo, and the grief and pride of 1971 form the emotional bedrock of his writing. On his family’s land at Kutubpur he later founded a school, the Shaheed Smriti Bidyapith, named in the spirit of that sacrifice.

The Chemist Who Wrote a Novel

Humayun Ahmed’s formal training had nothing to do with literature. At the University of Dhaka he read chemistry, taking his BSc (Honours) in 1970 and his MSc, with first class, in 1972, living as a student in Mohsin Hall. He began teaching at the Bangladesh Agricultural University in Mymensingh in 1973, moved to Dhaka University as a lecturer in chemistry in 1974, and later went to the United States, completing a PhD in polymer chemistry at North Dakota State University in 1982. He rose to professor at Dhaka before retiring from teaching in the mid-1990s to write full time. The scientific training stayed visible throughout his career: he pioneered science fiction in Bangladesh, wrote popular science for young readers and even produced a Bengali book on quantum chemistry.

The novel came before the career. While still a student he wrote Nondito Noroke (In Blissful Hell), a short, searing novel about a lower-middle-class Dhaka family, published in 1972 after the writer Ahmed Sofa championed the manuscript and placed it with Khan Brothers. It was an immediate success, and a second novel, Shonkhonil Karagar (1973), confirmed that a major new voice had arrived. What followed was one of the most productive careers in Bengali letters: novels and short stories, Liberation War narratives, historical novels such as Modhyanha and Badshah Namdar, ghost stories, satire, memoirs and children’s books, written in a lucid, witty, dialogue-driven prose deliberately unlike the ornate literary Bengali of his predecessors. The honours came early and kept coming — the Lekhak Shibir Prize in 1973 and the Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1981, with the Ekushey Padak following in 1994.

The range widened every year. His science fiction began with Tomader Jonno Bhalobasha in 1973 and grew into a shelf of novels that made the genre respectable in Bengali; his memoirs — Hotel Graver Inn (1989), Amar Chelebela (1991) and a string of later volumes — were bestsellers in their own right; his ghost stories, satires and books for children and adolescents each commanded their own readerships. Few writers anywhere have worked so many forms at once, or held them all to the same standard of clarity. By the time he laid down his university post, Humayun Ahmed was no longer one author among many in Dhaka’s Bangla Bazaar publishing district: for booksellers, the year’s trade rose or fell with his titles.

Himu and Misir Ali: Two Characters Who Moved Into the Culture

In 1985, in the novel Debi, Humayun Ahmed introduced Misir Ali — a part-time lecturer in psychology at Dhaka University, a frail, chain-smoking rationalist who is presented with apparently supernatural mysteries and patiently dismantles them with logic. The character had first come to him years earlier in Fargo, North Dakota, and across nineteen novels and a sheaf of short stories Misir Ali became the beloved patron saint of Bengali scepticism: whatever the ghost story, Misir Ali would find the human machinery behind it — though Ahmed, mischievously, did not always let logic have the last word.

Five years later came the opposite pole of his imagination. Himu — full name Himalay — first appeared in Moyurakkhi (1990) and went on through twenty-one novels: a jobless young man in a yellow panjabi who walks Dhaka barefoot, owns almost nothing, never lies, never plans, and drifts through other people’s crises with unsettling intuition and total indifference to money, status and common sense. Where Misir Ali trusts only reason, Himu trusts only feeling, and Banglapedia’s judgement that the two are “two sides of the author’s entity” is widely shared. A third figure, the gentle, incorruptible Shubhro, completed the trio. Young readers did not merely read about Himu; some dressed like him, walked like him and quoted him, and the yellow panjabi became a fixture of book-fair crowds — a fictional character functioning as a real cultural uniform. The characters have outlived their creator on screen as well: Debi reached cinemas in 2018 as Debi: Misir Ali Prothombar, with Chanchal Chowdhury as Misir Ali, introducing the rationalist detective to a new generation.

The Television and Film Years

In the 1980s Humayun Ahmed took his storytelling to the one screen every Bangladeshi family shared. His first television play, Prothom Prohor, was broadcast in 1983, and his first serial, Ei Shob Din Ratri (1985), a warm chronicle of an ordinary family, made him a household name. Through Bohubrihi, Ayomoy, Nakshatrer Raat and Aaj Robibar he effectively invented the modern Bangladeshi TV serial, writing middle-class life back to the middle class with humour and ache. The peak of the phenomenon was Kothao Keu Nei and its hero Baker Bhai, a big-hearted neighbourhood muscleman wrongly convicted of murder. When the story moved towards Baker Bhai’s execution, viewers refused to accept it: before the final episode aired, processions came out on the streets of Dhaka protesting the death sentence of a man who did not exist — still the most famous audience revolt in Bangladeshi television history.

Film followed. His directorial debut, Aguner Poroshmoni (1994), drawn from his own Liberation War novel, won the National Film Awards in eight categories, including Best Film and Best Director. He directed eight films in all, among them Srabon Megher Din, Dui Duari, Chandrokatha and Shyamol Chhaya — another war film, later chosen as Bangladesh’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar at the 78th Academy Awards. By the reckoning of his filmography he won the National Film Awards seven times across direction, screenplay and story. Other directors queued to film his fiction too — Toukir Ahmed’s Daruchini Dwip, Abu Sayeed’s Nirantor and Belal Ahmed’s Nondito Noroke among them — and he ran his own production house, Nuhash Chalachitra. He also wrote the songs for his productions, folk-tinged lyrics such as “Chandni Pashare Rate” and “Morile Kandishna Amar Dai” that passed into the repertoire of Bangladeshi folk singers; music, he liked to show, was simply another form his storytelling took. His final film, Ghetuputra Komola (2012), a haunting story of a teenage ghetu singer in the colonial era, was released after his death, won him posthumous National Film Awards for direction and screenplay, and was selected as Bangladesh’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 85th Academy Awards.

Nuhash Polli and the Final Years

Away from Dhaka, Humayun Ahmed built the place that expressed him best. At Pirujali village in Gazipur, on land he began acquiring in the late 1980s and developed over the following decades, he created Nuhash Polli — named after his son Nuhash — a garden estate that grew to some forty bigha of ponds, orchards, sculptures and whimsical buildings, including a medicinal-herb garden planted in memory of a child lost at birth. It became his writing retreat, his film set and, eventually, his chosen resting place. His private life had its own turns: his marriage to Gultekin Khan, begun in 1973 and blessed with four children, ended in divorce in 2003, and in 2005 he married the actress Meher Afroz Shaon, with whom he had two more sons.

In September 2011 he was diagnosed with colon cancer. He was treated at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, underwent surgery in June 2012, and seemed briefly to be recovering before complications set in. Characteristically, he worked to the end: the memoir New Yorker Neelakashe Jhakjhake Roud came out of his treatment days, and a month before his death he wrote his last song, for a telefilm script he had sent home from his hospital bed. Humayun Ahmed died on 19 July 2012 at Bellevue Hospital in New York. The response at home was extraordinary: when his body was flown back to Dhaka, mourners in their hundreds of thousands — police estimates quoted by the press ran into the lakhs — gathered at the Central Shaheed Minar to file past his coffin. On 24 July 2012 he was buried, as he had wished, at Nuhash Polli, under the trees he had planted.

Conclusion

Humayun Ahmed’s historical achievement is demographic as much as literary. Banglapedia credits him above anyone with turning a nation of occasional readers into a nation of book buyers: at a time when Bengali readers in Bangladesh looked mainly to authors from West Bengal, he gave them stories unmistakably their own — their towns, their slang, their family quarrels and their war — in prose anyone could read and no one could put down. His books dominated the Ekushey Book Fair year after year, enriched and stabilised Dhaka’s publishing houses, and his characters — Himu in his yellow panjabi, Misir Ali with his notebook, Baker Bhai on his way to the gallows — remain common cultural property, quoted by people who may never have opened the books. The chemist from Mohsin Hall became, simply, the storyteller of Bangladesh.