Munier Chowdhury: Playwright of Kabar and Martyred Intellectual

Munier Chowdhury (1925–1971) packed several lifetimes into forty-six years: professor of English and Bangla at the University of Dhaka, linguist trained at Harvard, literary critic, designer of a Bangla typewriter keyboard, and the playwright who changed Bengali theatre with a one-act play written in a prison cell. That play, Kabar (The Grave), was composed behind bars after the Language Movement killings of 1952 and first performed by political prisoners, by lantern light, on the first anniversary of the martyrdom it mourns. On 14 December 1971, two days before Bangladesh's victory in the Liberation War, Chowdhury was abducted from his home and murdered in the planned killing of the country's intellectuals. He remains the defining figure of the teacher-playwright in Bangladesh: a man whose scholarship and whose conscience were never separate things.

Early life and education

Munier Chowdhury was born on 27 November 1925 in the town of Manikganj, the second of fourteen children of Khan Bahadur Abdul Halim Chowdhury, a district magistrate whose ancestral home was in Noakhali district. He matriculated from Dhaka Collegiate School in 1941 and crossed to Aligarh Muslim University for his Intermediate of Science, before returning to Dhaka to read English at the University of Dhaka, where he took his Honours degree in 1946 and his MA in 1947.

The university years made him. As a student he fell in with the Anti-Fascist Writers and Artists Union in 1943 and then with the Communist Party, and his leftist politics cost him his place in Salimullah Hall, the residential hall to which he belonged. By the time he passed his MA he had already found a reputation as a playwright, and he earned money writing plays for Dhaka radio. During the communal violence that swept Dhaka in 1947, the young graduate is remembered for risking his own life to protect Hindu neighbours — an early statement of the humanism that runs through everything he later wrote.

A teacher at Dhaka University

Chowdhury's teaching career began at B. L. College in Khulna, where he taught from 1947 to 1950, followed by a short stint at Jagannath College in Dhaka. In 1950 he joined the University of Dhaka as a lecturer in English — the institution that would remain his professional home for the rest of his life. Politics interrupted almost immediately. He had been imprisoned once already, in 1949, for his Communist Party involvement, and had bought his freedom by promising to dissociate himself from politics. The promise could not survive February 1952.

After his release from the long detention described below, Chowdhury rejoined the university and in 1955 transferred to the Department of Bangla, so that he taught in both of the university's great language departments. He became a Reader in 1962 and a Professor in 1970, and in 1971, the last year of his life, he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts. Students of that generation remembered a teacher of wit and exacting standards, as ready to act in and direct a play as to lecture on one.

Prison, the Language Movement and Kabar

When police fired on students demanding state-language status for Bangla on 21 February 1952 — the events at the heart of the Language Movement — Chowdhury protested, and on 26 February 1952 he was arrested along with two other university teachers and held under the Preventive Detention Act. His detention in Dhaka Central Jail lasted, with a brief interruption and a second arrest, until 1954. In his cell, known as the Dewani, he was one of fifteen to twenty political prisoners. In the jail's larger cell No. 2, sixty to seventy political prisoners were held — among them Ranesh Dasgupta, the litterateur and journalist.

As the first anniversary of the February killings approached, Dasgupta smuggled a note to Chowdhury: would he write a play that the prisoners of cell No. 2 could perform on the night of 21 February 1953? The conditions were dictated by the prison itself. The performance had to begin after ten at night, when the lights were ordered out; it would be lit by eight to ten hurricane lanterns borrowed from student prisoners who kept them for their studies; and every female character would have to be played by a male inmate. Chowdhury accepted the conditions and turned them into the play's very design. He completed Kabar on 17 January 1953.

The play is set in a graveyard at night. A political Leader and Inspector Hafiz, the police officer who serves him, have come to bury in secret the bodies of protesters shot by the police that afternoon, before the public learns the true number of the dead. Their only obstacle is Murda Fakir, a half-mad mendicant who lives among the graves. Then, in the play's famous turn, the dead rise from their graves and refuse to be buried. Chowdhury himself acknowledged the influence of Irwin Shaw's anti-war play Bury the Dead (1936); Kabar is no translation, but an original Bengali work in which the borrowed device is made to speak directly to February 1952.

On the night of 21 February 1953, a little after ten, the inmates of cell No. 2 performed Kabar by lantern light, directed by Fani Chakrabarty, with Nalini Das as Murda Fakir, Dhananjay Dash as Hafiz, and Ajay Ray as the Leader. Chowdhury, confined in a different cell, never saw the first performance of his masterpiece. It stands as one of the earliest and most remarkable acts of prison theatre anywhere — a play about the refusal of the dead to be hidden, staged by men the state was itself trying to hide. Prison gave Chowdhury a second gift as well: he sat for his MA examination in Bangla from jail and stood first in the first class.

The ending divided even its first audience. Dasgupta, who had commissioned the play, was displeased that the rising of the dead dissolves at dawn into what the Leader and Hafiz can tell themselves was a drunken nightmare; he thought a firmer political conviction would have ended it otherwise. Chowdhury kept his ending, and posterity has mostly valued the ambiguity: the nightmare-frame let the play say, first inside a prison and later inside a censorious state, what direct statement could not. Kabar has come to be recognised as the first play written on the Language Movement and remains the most celebrated dramatic work to come out of it.

The playwright beyond Kabar

Kabar made Chowdhury's name, but it is only the centre of a substantial body of work, much of it collected in the three volumes Kabar (1966), Dandakaranya (1966) and Palashi Barrack O Anyanya (1969), which between them hold twelve of his one-act plays. His satirical one-acters anatomise the hypocrisies of contemporary social life — Chithi (The Letter, 1966), for instance, exposes the selfishness and autocracy that flourish in the name of popular movements — and they do so with the lively dialogue and wry humour that made his serious themes playable.

His best-known full-length play, Raktakta Prantar (The Bloody Meadow, 1959), reaches back to the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761 to make the opposite journey: out of history's bloodshed it draws a plea for a common humanity that rises above war and communal strife. Chowdhury also carried world drama into Bangla, translating among others George Bernard Shaw's You Can Never Tell and Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, and he acted and directed for stage, radio, television and cinema. His Ektala-Dotala (1965) holds a small but secure place in media history as the first Bengali play ever telecast on television. The Bangla Academy gave him its literary prize in 1962, and he received the Daud Prize in 1965.

Alongside the drama stood serious criticism. Mir-Manas (1965) re-examined the work of Mir Mosharraf Hossain, the nineteenth-century novelist of Bishad Sindhu; Tulanamulak Samalochana (1969) practised comparative criticism; and Bangla Gadyariti (1970) surveyed the prose styles of contemporary East Bengal. Few writers in any literature have moved so naturally between the stage, the seminar room and the scholar's desk.

The linguist and the typewriter keyboard

Chowdhury's scholarship had a second, quieter life. In 1958 he took an MA in Linguistics at Harvard University, and with the eminent American linguist Charles A. Ferguson he co-authored "The Phonemes of Bengali", a paper that drew the attention of linguists well beyond Bengal. The training fed directly into his teaching of both English and Bangla at Dhaka and into his defence of the Bangla language as an object of rigorous study rather than mere sentiment.

His most tangible contribution to the language was mechanical. Bangla, with its hundreds of conjunct characters, fitted badly onto typewriter keyboards, and in 1965 Chowdhury devised an improved Bangla keyboard layout, developed in collaboration with Remington typewriters of the then East Germany. Marketed as the Munier Optima, it became a standard for Bangla typing for decades — which is why, when the Government of Bangladesh later honoured him, it could plausibly file the playwright's award under science and technology. In the age of the computer he is still cited as a pioneer of Bengali input methods.

A conscience in the sixties

Through the 1960s Chowdhury stood against every official attempt to narrow Bengali culture. When the Pakistan government in 1967 directed that Tagore songs be banned from radio and television, he was among the first — by some accounts the very first — to write in protest, and he also opposed the regime's scheme to reform the Bangla alphabet. The state had decorated him with the Sitara-i-Imtiaz in 1966; during the non-cooperation movement of March 1971, as the Liberation War approached, he publicly renounced the title. After the army crackdown of late March 1971, from which he escaped in the university area, he moved to his parents' house near Hatirpool in Dhaka and stayed there, refusing the urging of well-wishers to flee to the liberated zones.

14 December 1971

On 14 December 1971, with the Pakistani defeat two days away, squads of the Al-Badr and Al-Shams collaborator forces went from house to house in Dhaka abducting the Bengali intellectuals on their lists — teachers, doctors, engineers, journalists. Chowdhury was taken from his parents' home and killed. His body was never found. The date is now observed in Bangladesh as Martyred Intellectuals Day, and his name is among the first read out in its long roll of the murdered. He was forty-six.

Legacy

Bangladesh has not forgotten him. In 1980 the Government awarded Munier Chowdhury the Independence Day Award, the country's highest civilian honour, posthumously. In 1991 a commemorative postage stamp carried his portrait, and in 1989 the theatre troupe Theatre had already instituted the Munier Chowdhury Award in his honour, presented each year around his birth anniversary to figures of the Bangladeshi stage. Google marked his ninety-fifth birth anniversary in November 2020 with a Doodle seen around the world.

The deeper legacy is institutional and artistic. Within the University of Dhaka, where he taught for twenty-one years, Chowdhury modelled a kind of professorship — scholar, artist and citizen in one person — that the Bangla and English departments still invoke. In the theatre, Kabar remains a touchstone: restaged at every anniversary of the Language Movement, it fixed the template of the political one-act play in Bengal, proof that a single act written to be performed in the dark, by prisoners, for prisoners, could outlast the state that imprisoned them all. The dead of his play refused to be buried in secret. Neither, in the end, was he.