Munier Chowdhury: Playwright of Kabar and Martyred Intellectual
Munier Chowdhury (1925–1971), Dhaka University playwright who wrote Kabar in a prison cell in 1953 and was killed in the massacre of 14 December 1971.
Jasimuddin (1 January 1903 – 14 March 1976) was a Bangladeshi poet, lyricist, composer and prose writer whom Bengal knows simply as the Palli Kabi — the pastoral poet, the poet of the village. At a time when modern Bengali literature was turning towards the city, Jasimuddin built his art almost entirely out of the materials of rural life: the speech of peasants, boatmen and gypsies, folk tales and folk songs, the paddy fields, rivers and embroidered quilts of the Bengal delta. His two long narrative poems, Nakshi Kanthar Math (1929) and Sojan Badiar Ghat (1933), are widely regarded as two of the finest lyrical works in the Bengali language, and both carried his name far beyond Bengal in translation. Alongside his own writing, he spent years travelling the villages of East Bengal collecting its folk literature, and is credited with preserving more than 10,000 folk songs. No other Bengali writer of his century made the countryside so completely his subject — or wrote about it so completely from within.
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Early Life and Education
Jasimuddin was born on 1 January 1903 in his maternal uncle's house in the village of Tambulkhana in Faridpur district, in what was then the Bengal Presidency of British India. His full name was Jasim Uddin Mollah. His father, Ansaruddin Mollah, was a schoolteacher whose own home was at Gobindapur, another Faridpur village in the Ambikapur area, on the bank of the Kumar River; it was that ancestral homestead, and the village world around it, that formed the young poet's imagination.
He studied for a time at Faridpur Welfare School and matriculated from Faridpur Zilla School in 1921. He completed his Intermediate at Rajendra College, Faridpur, in 1924, then moved to Calcutta, taking his BA in Bengali from the University of Calcutta in 1929 and his MA in 1931. The move to the great city did not make him an urban poet. The University of Calcutta at that period was the centre of a Bengali literary culture still dominated by the legacy of the nineteenth century and by the electrifying new voice of Kazi Nazrul Islam. Jasimuddin, arriving from Faridpur, chose a different register altogether: the cadence of the folk ballad and the village storyteller.
His talent showed early. While still a college student he wrote Kabar ("The Grave"), a poem spoken by an aged villager who has buried, one after another, his wife, his children and his grandchildren, and who asks only to be laid in the same earth. Told in simple language modelled on village speech, it became one of the most loved poems in Bengali. It brought him an honour few students have ever received: the poem was included in a Bengali textbook prescribed by the University of Calcutta for its entrance-level students while its author was still studying at that university.
His first book of verse, Rakhali ("The Shepherd"), followed in 1927. Together, Kabar and Rakhali announced the programme of his whole career — poetry that took its metres, its imagery and its moral world from the folk tradition of East Bengal, and returned them to print without polishing away their roughness.
Collecting the Folk Heritage under Dinesh Chandra Sen
From 1931 to 1937 Jasimuddin worked at the University of Calcutta as a Ramtanu Lahiri research fellow under Dinesh Chandra Sen, the great scholar of early and folk Bengali literature. The work was fieldwork: travelling through the villages of East Bengal, listening to singers and storytellers, and writing down ballads, songs and tales that had never existed in print. He was one of the compilers of Purbo-Bongo Gitika (Ballads of East Bengal), the landmark collection produced under Sen's direction, and across these years he collected, by the usual estimate, more than 10,000 folk songs. Some of that harvest appeared much later in his own edited collections Jari Gaan (1968) and Murshida Gan (1977).
Sen, who understood exactly what his young assistant was doing, wrote of Jasimuddin's poetry that it "appears like the breeze from the countryside that cools the sighs and sweat of urban living", and congratulated him for creating a new school of poetry. The collecting and the composing fed each other: the ballads he rescued from village singers taught him the narrative architecture of his own two masterpieces. It was also in these Calcutta years, in 1931, that the poet Golam Mostofa introduced him to Abbasuddin Ahmed, the singer whose voice would carry Jasimuddin's songs — among them "Amar Sonar Moyna Pakhi" and "Amay Bhashaili Re" — to listeners across Bengal.
Nakshi Kanthar Math
Nakshi Kanthar Math — "The Field of the Embroidered Quilt" — was published in 1929, when its author was twenty-six. It is a narrative ballad in fourteen sections, telling the story of Rupai, a young peasant of a Bengal village, and Saju, the girl he loves and marries. After a violent clash with a rival party, Rupai is forced to flee his home. Saju waits for him, and as she waits she embroiders the story of their life together — its joys and its sorrows — into a quilt, a nakshi kantha, working at it night after night. Worn out by grief and waiting, she dies, asking her mother to spread the embroidered quilt over her grave. Rupai at last returns, by night, and finds the grave covered with the quilt that tells his own story; he dies beside it. The field where she lies is called, from that time, the field of the embroidered quilt.
The poem's power lies in its method as much as its story. The quilt — a piece of women's domestic art, stitched from old cloth in village homes — becomes the narrative itself, so that the ballad is told the way the folk tradition tells things: through a made object, a song, a remembered scene. Written in the metres of the old ballads but with a modern poet's control, it was recognised at once as a masterpiece, and it remains the single work with which Jasimuddin's name is most closely joined.
It also travelled. In 1939 E. M. Milford's English translation, The Field of the Embroidered Quilt, was published in Calcutta by Humphrey Milford for Oxford University Press, with a foreword by the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, who confessed that he did not know whether the poem could be classed as folk poetry, "but it is obviously poetry about the folk". Translations into many other languages followed, making Jasimuddin one of the very few Bengali poets of his generation read around the world.
Sojan Badiar Ghat
Four years later came the second of the twin peaks of his work. Sojan Badiar Ghat — "Sojan the Gypsy's Wharf" — published in 1933, is set in Shimultali, a village on the Gorai (Madhumati) river where Hindus and Muslims live side by side in easy intimacy. Its heroes are children of that harmony: Sojan, the son of a Muslim farmer, and Duli, a Hindu girl of the Namasudra community, playmates from childhood who grow into love. What destroys them is not each other but the world around them: a scheming estate manager (the nayeb) whips up suspicion between the two communities, communal violence breaks out, the lovers elope, Sojan is caught and jailed, and Duli's family marries her to another man in a distant village. Released from prison, Sojan finds his home broken and takes to the boats of the bede, the wandering water-gypsies. Years later he finds Duli again — and the reunion ends with both of them taking poison, united only in death.
Where Nakshi Kanthar Math is a tragedy of separation and waiting, Sojan Badiar Ghat is a tragedy of a society poisoning itself: the poem is a sustained lament for the communal harmony of the Bengali village and an indictment of those who profit from dividing it. Its English translation, Gipsy Wharf by Barbara Painter and Yann Lovelock, published in London in 1969 under UNESCO's translation programme, carried that warning to an international readership.
A Wider Body of Work
Although the two ballads overshadow everything else, Jasimuddin wrote prolifically in almost every form available to a Bengali author of his time. His poetry and song collections include Baluchor (1930), Dhankhet (1933), the song book Rangila Nayer Majhi (1935), Matir Kanna (1951), Suchayani (1961) and Padma Nadir Deshe (1969). For the stage he wrote plays such as Padmapar (1950), Beder Meye (1951), Pallibadhu (1956) and Gramer Maya (1959), several of them dramatising the same riverine and gypsy worlds as his poems. His single novel, Boba Kahini (1964), is a picture of life in his native Faridpur.
He wrote for children, most famously in the verse tale Dalim Kumar; he retold the comic folk tales of Bengal in Bangalir Hasir Galpa, which reached English readers as Folk Tales of East Pakistan; and he recorded his own life and times in memoirs including Jader Dekhachi (1951), Jibonkotha (1964) and the posthumously published Smaraner Sarani Bahi (1978). His travels abroad produced travelogues — Chole Musafir (1952), Holde Porir Deshe (1967) and Germanir Shahare Bandare (1975). And through it all he continued to write songs: pieces such as "Nodir Kul Nai Kinar Nai" and "Rangila Nayer Majhi" passed into the common stock of Bengali music, sung by people who may never have opened one of his books.
Lecturer, Government Official and Cultural Activist
Jasimuddin's working life was spent in public service. In 1938 he joined the University of Dhaka as a lecturer in Bengali, teaching there for five years. In 1944 he left the university for the government's Department of Information and Broadcasting; after the Partition of 1947 he continued in the information service in East Pakistan, and he remained in government service until his retirement in 1962, by then a deputy director. He was also a familiar voice on the radio, both as a broadcaster and through the songs he wrote for it.
Official employment did not blunt his convictions. He was an ardent supporter of the Bengali Language Movement, and in the 1950s and 1960s he was regarded as one of the pioneers of the progressive, non-communal cultural movement in East Pakistan — the same conviction that had animated Sojan Badiar Ghat two decades earlier now expressed in cultural politics. His independence of mind could be pointed: in 1974 he declined the Bangla Academy's literary award.
Honours and Awards
Honours came from three successive states. Pakistan gave him the President's Award for Pride of Performance in 1958. India's Rabindra Bharati University conferred an honorary D.Litt on him in 1969. Bangladesh awarded him the Ekushey Padak in 1976, the year of his death, and, posthumously, the Independence Day Award — the country's highest civilian honour — in 1978.
Death and Legacy
Jasimuddin died in Dhaka on 14 March 1976, aged seventy-three. (Some older references, including the Banglapedia entry, print 13 March; Bangladesh's official anniversary observances, held each year at Faridpur, follow 14 March.) In accordance with his wishes he was taken home to Faridpur and buried in the family graveyard beside the ancestral house at Gobindapur, in the Ambikapur area, under a pomegranate tree a short distance from the Kumar River — the landscape of his poems. The house and grave are now preserved, with a Jasimuddin museum complex developed beside the homestead, and every January a fortnight-long fair, the Jasim Mela, gathers at Gobindapur around his birth anniversary. In January 2018 Bangla Academy announced the Jasimuddin Literary Award, a biennial honour for lifetime contribution to Bangla literature, to be given in his name.
His place in Bengali letters is secure and singular. Among the major Bengali poets who remade the tradition in the twentieth century, he alone took the village not as scenery but as a complete moral and imaginative world, and wrote of it in its own voice. Where Jibanananda Das hymned the same delta country in Rupasi Bangla as a landscape of private, haunting lyricism, Jasimuddin's countryside is communal and sung aloud — in ballads, work songs, jari and murshidi chants, wedding songs and lamentations. Generations of Bangladeshi schoolchildren have met poetry first through Kabar; generations of readers have wept over Saju's quilt. The Palli Kabi did not merely describe rural Bengal. He preserved its voice, and made that voice literature.
