Kazi Nazrul Islam: The Rebel Poet of Bengal

Kazi Nazrul Islam packed several lifetimes into one. A mosque muezzin's son who called the faithful to prayer as a boy, he became a soldier in the First World War, then the most explosive literary voice of colonial Bengal — a poet whose single poem, "Bidrohi" (The Rebel), made him famous across the subcontinent at twenty-two. He went on to write poetry, novels, plays and essays at a furious pace and to compose thousands of songs that remade Bengali music. At the height of his powers in 1942, illness took away his speech and memory, and the loudest voice in Bengali letters fell silent for the remaining thirty-four years of his life. In 1972 the newly independent Bangladesh brought the old, silent poet to Dhaka and received him as its national poet. He died there in 1976, and his grave beside the Dhaka University mosque remains a place of pilgrimage for Bengali culture.

Early Life

Nazrul was born on 24 May 1899 in Churulia, a village in the Burdwan district of Bengal, in what is now West Bengal, India. His father, Kazi Fakir Ahmed, was the imam of the village mosque and the caretaker of its adjoining mausoleum; his mother was Zahida Khatun. The family was poor, and the boy — remembered by the nickname "Dukhu Mia", the sorrowing one — grew up close to the mosque and the maktab, the religious primary school where he passed his lower primary examination.

When his father died in 1908, the nine-year-old took over his duties, serving as caretaker of the mausoleum and as muezzin of the mosque to help feed the family. The work grounded him in the Quran and in Islamic practice, which surfaced throughout his later writing. But the village could not hold him. He ran away to join a travelling leto troupe — the folk theatre of rural Bengal, mixing song, dance and verse — acting in its plays and learning to compose songs and folk dramas on the spot. Through the troupe he also absorbed the stories of the Hindu Puranas, the second great stream of his imagination.

His schooling came in broken stretches, always interrupted by poverty: Raniganj Searsole Raj School, then Mathrun, where the poet Kumudranjan Mallik was headmaster. Between schools he worked as a cook for a railway guard and then at a tea stall at Asansol, until a police inspector, Rafizullah, rescued him and took him to Trishal in Mymensingh, where he entered Darirampur School in 1914. Back at Searsole Raj School, gifted teachers fed his appetites for classical music, Persian literature and revolutionary politics. He studied up to class ten — and then, at the end of 1917, instead of sitting the examinations that would have taken him to university, he walked away and enlisted as a soldier.

The Soldier-Poet: War and the Rebel Voice

Nazrul joined the 49th Bengal Regiment of the British Indian Army and was posted to Karachi. He served about two and a half years, rising to havildar — battalion quartermaster — before the regiment was disbanded in the spring of 1920. Karachi changed him: a Punjabi maulvi of the regiment taught him Persian, opening the world of Hafiz and Omar Khayyam; he practised music with fellow soldiers; and he began to write in earnest. His first prose piece, "Baunduler Atmakahini" (Autobiography of a Vagabond), appeared in Saogat in May 1919, and his first published poem, "Mukti" (Freedom), followed that July. As Banglapedia puts it, it was at Karachi cantonment that his literary activity truly began.

Back in Bengal in 1920, he settled in Calcutta at the office of the Bangiya Mussalman Sahitya Samiti on College Street, sharing a room with Muzaffar Ahmed, the future communist leader. His journalism began with the evening daily Nabajug, launched in July 1920 with A. K. Fazlul Huq as nominal editor and Nazrul doing the real editorial work; one fiery article of his cost the paper its security deposit, and his epistolary novel Bandhan Hara was serialised to acclaim. In October 1921 he travelled to Santiniketan and met Rabindranath Tagore, beginning a close association that lasted until Tagore's death.

The year 1921 also carried the great emotional upheaval of his youth. Visiting Comilla, he was drawn into a marriage arranged at nearby Daulatpur with Nargis, the niece of his publisher Ali Akbar Khan. On the wedding day itself, 18 June 1921, the match collapsed: the bride's family publicly insisted that the marriage contract bind him to live at Daulatpur, and Nazrul walked out of the ceremony. The episode left a wound that echoes through his love poetry. On the same Comilla visits he met Pramila Devi, a young woman of a Brahmo Hindu family — the woman who would become his wife. Then, in December 1921, back in Calcutta, he wrote the poem that changed everything.

Dhumketu, Bidrohi and Prison

"Bidrohi" was published in the weekly Bijli on 6 January 1922, and it detonated. Nothing in Bengali poetry sounded like it: a single thunderous voice declaring itself the rebel, drawing its images impartially from Hindu epics, Islamic tradition and Greek myth, and proclaiming the dignity of the human being against every throne and altar of oppression. The poem was reprinted again and again, and its author was fixed for ever as the Bidrohi Kobi — the Rebel Poet. It led his first book of poems, Agnibeena (The Fiery Lute), published later in 1922.

In August 1922 he launched his own periodical, Dhumketu (The Comet) — the word he also took as his pen name — with a verse of blessing from Tagore printed on its masthead. Dhumketu called openly for complete independence and armed revolution at a moment when the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat movements had collapsed, and it became in practice the mouthpiece of Bengal's revolutionaries. The colonial government struck within weeks. His poem "Anandamoyeer Agomone", published in Dhumketu that September, brought proscription of the issue; his essay collection Yugavani was banned; and on 23 November 1922 he was arrested at Comilla.

Tried for sedition, he delivered his own defence — "Rajbandir Jabanbandi" (Deposition of a Political Prisoner), a statement of 7 January 1923 that is still read as literature. On 16 January 1923 he was sentenced to a year's rigorous imprisonment. Tagore dedicated his musical play Basanta to the jailed poet. Transferred to Hooghly Jail in April 1923, Nazrul began a hunger strike against the treatment of political prisoners that lasted nearly forty days; Tagore telegraphed him — "Give up hunger strike, our literature claims you" — though the message was never delivered, and public pressure finally forced the authorities to improve conditions and persuade him to eat. He was released on 15 December 1923.

Four months later, in April 1924, he married Pramila Devi in Calcutta. It was a marriage across the communal line — a Muslim poet and a Brahmo Hindu bride — and orthodox voices on both sides condemned it; the couple simply carried on, setting up home at Hooghly. The state had not finished with him: in 1930 he was convicted again, over his book Pralay-Shikha, and sentenced to six months, though freed on bail, after which the case was dropped under the Gandhi–Irwin Pact.

The Prolific Years: Poetry, Song and Film

The two decades after 1922 produced one of the most astonishing bodies of work in Bengali literature. In poetry came Bisher Banshi (The Poison Flute, 1924 — promptly banned), Samyabadi (The Egalitarian, 1925), with its hymns to workers, peasants and human equality, and Sindhu Hindol (1928). He wrote novels — Bandhan Hara, Mrityushudha, Kuhelika — short stories, essays and plays, and translated the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and the Rubaiyat of Hafiz, the latter composed at the sickbed of his little son Bulbul, whose death from smallpox broke his heart. In politics he helped build the Sramik-Praja-Swaraj Dal, a forerunner of the Workers and Peasants Party, and edited its weekly Langal (The Plough), whose manifesto demanded complete independence for India.

Above all, there were the songs. The body of work known as Nazrul Geeti, or Nazrul Sangeet, has no agreed total: popular accounts credit him with around four thousand songs, while catalogues of the texts that actually survive count something over two thousand, and Britannica places his compositions between the two figures. What is not in dispute is their range. He effectively created the Bengali ghazal. He wrote stirring patriotic and revolutionary songs; love songs of great tenderness; Islamic songs — hamd and naat in praise of God and the Prophet — and, with equal devotion, shyama sangeet addressed to the goddess Kali, along with kirtans and other Hindu devotional pieces. A Muslim poet composing some of the most beloved Hindu devotional songs in the language, and a Muslim readership singing them, embodied his lifelong creed: humanity above creed. Musically, he wedded the folk base of Bengali song to the ragas of North Indian classical music.

The new media of the age carried his work everywhere. From 1928 he worked for the Gramophone Company of India (His Master's Voice) as lyricist, composer and trainer of singers; after a spell with the Megaphone company he returned to HMV in 1933 as its exclusive composer, and by 1950 the companies had issued more than a thousand records of his songs. He composed for some twenty Calcutta stage plays and from 1939 directed innovative programmes for All India Radio in Calcutta, among them Haramani, which revived forgotten ragas. In cinema, for Bhakta Dhruva (1934) he acted as the sage Narada, directed the picture and composed seventeen of its eighteen songs, going on to work on films such as Vidyapati and Sapurey.

Fame did not bring money, and his household — he and Pramila had four sons, two of whom died young — lived close to poverty. But Bengal knew what it had. In December 1929 Bengal accorded him a civic reception at Albert Hall, Calcutta, where Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray presided and Subhas Chandra Bose declared that when they marched to war or to prison, it would be to Nazrul's songs.

Illness and Silence

In July 1942, aged only forty-three, Nazrul fell ill during his radio work in Calcutta, and the illness gradually took away his speech and then his memory. Treatment at home, and a period in a mental asylum, brought no improvement. Pramila, herself paralysed from the waist down since 1939, nursed the husband who could no longer speak until her death in 1962.

Admirers did not give up. In 1952 a Nazrul Treatment Society raised the means to send him first to the psychiatric hospital at Ranchi and then, in 1953, to London and Vienna. In Vienna, neurosurgeon Hans Hoff diagnosed Pick's disease, a rare and incurable degeneration of the brain; London's specialists had reached the same conclusion. Brought back to Calcutta in December 1953, he remained there as the Pakistan years passed quietly: the poet lived in straitened circumstances, sustained by his family, his admirers and official allowances, while honours arrived for a man who could not know of them — the University of Calcutta's Jagattarini Gold Medal in 1945 and India's Padma Bhushan in 1960. In East Pakistan his songs were sung and his birthdays observed by cultural organisations, but the state on either side of the border had little to offer the silent poet. Banglapedia's verdict is stark: for thirty-four long years, from July 1942 to August 1976, he suffered an unbearable life of silence.

Dhaka: National Poet of Bangladesh

Independence changed his address, if not his condition. On 24 May 1972 — his seventy-third birthday — the government of the new Bangladesh, at the initiative of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and with the consent of the Government of India, brought Nazrul and his family from Calcutta to Dhaka. He was given a house in Dhanmondi, and the government conferred on him the status of national poet that year. It was a fitting homecoming: he had come to a country born of a struggle to defend the Bengali language — the movement honoured every year on International Mother Language Day — the language he had done more than any living writer to enrich.

The honours of the new state followed. On 9 December 1974 Dhaka University awarded him an honorary D.Litt. at a special convocation. In early 1976 Bangladesh granted him citizenship, and on 21 February 1976 he received the Ekushey Padak. The legal formalities of the title took far longer than anyone in 1972 imagined: although later statutes, including the Kabi Nazrul Institute Act of 2018, already named him national poet, the formal gazette notification declaring him National Poet of Bangladesh was issued only on 24 December 2024, with retrospective effect from 1972.

Nazrul died on 29 August 1976 at the Institute of Post Graduate Medicine and Research in Dhaka, aged seventy-seven. He was buried with state honours on the Dhaka University campus, beside the university's central mosque — exactly where he had once asked, in one of his Islamic songs, to be laid to rest: beside a mosque, where from his grave he might still hear the muezzin's call to prayer.

Legacy

Nazrul's voice fell silent in 1942, but his songs never did. "Notuner Gaan" — "Chol Chol Chol", the marching song he wrote in 1928 — was adopted on 13 January 1972 as the national march of Bangladesh, so the new state's soldiers marched to his music. After his death Bangladesh gave him its highest civilian honour, the Independence Award, in 1977. The Kabi Nazrul Institute was established in Dhaka in 1985 to research, compile and publish his work and to fix the authentic texts and tunes of his songs; renamed the Jatiya Kabi Nazrul Institute in 2025, it works from Kabi Bhavan in Dhanmondi, the house where he spent his last years. In 2006 Bangladesh founded a public university in his name, the Jatiya Kabi Kazi Nazrul Islam University, at Trishal — the Mymensingh town where the tea-stall boy had once been rescued and sent to school. India honours him too: Kazi Nazrul University was established at Asansol in 2012, close to his birthplace at Churulia, and his birth anniversary is celebrated across both Bengals.

His deepest legacy, though, is the repertoire itself and the current it set flowing through Bengali music — the proof that folk, classical and devotional streams could run in one channel. Later generations of Bengali lyricists and composers, among them folk voices such as Abdul Gafur Hali of Chittagong, worked in a musical world that Nazrul had made. Generations of singers in Bangladesh and West Bengal alike still earn their reputations interpreting Nazrul Geeti; his two surviving sons, the reciter Kazi Sabyasachi and the composer Kazi Aniruddha, devoted their own careers to performing and preserving his work.

Conclusion

Kazi Nazrul Islam was Bengal's great poet of equality: of Hindu and Muslim in one garland, of worker and peasant against every privilege, of the colonised against the empire, and of the human spirit against every cage built for it. The tragedy of his thirty-four years of silence is real, but so is the defiance of the work itself, which outlived the empire he fought and the illness that silenced him. Bangladesh calls him its national poet; Bengal, on both sides of the frontier, simply calls him Nazrul — and still sings him.