Shamsur Rahman: Poet of Independent Bangladesh

Shamsur Rahman (1929–2006) is the poet in whose verse modern Bangladesh first heard its own voice. Across more than sixty collections he chronicled the Language Movement's afterlife, the mass upsurge of 1969, the Liberation War of 1971 and the long struggle for democracy that followed, and he did so in a diction that belonged unmistakably to Dhaka — its streets, its middle-class drawing rooms, its processions and its grief. Bangladesh has no official poet laureate, but through the second half of the twentieth century the role was filled, by common consent, by Shamsur Rahman. He was, in the phrase that has attached itself permanently to his name, the poet of independent Bangladesh: the writer who had celebrated the country's birth in some of the most quoted lines in the language, and who never stopped addressing the nation he had helped imagine.

Early life and education

Shamsur Rahman was born on 23 October 1929 in his grandmother's house at 46 Mahuttuli, in old Dhaka, the third of thirteen children of Mokhlesur Rahman Choudhury and Amena Khatun. His ancestral home was the village of Paratoli, near Raipura in Narsingdi district, on the bank of the river Meghna — a landscape that would return in his poetry whenever the city poet needed the country's other face. Dhaka, however, was his ground. Admitted to Pogose School at the age of seven, he passed his matriculation in 1945 and took his Intermediate of Arts at Dhaka College in 1947. In the leisure after matriculation he read Rabindranath Tagore's story collection Golpo Guccho, an encounter he later said carried him into an extraordinary world and changed him altogether.

At the University of Dhaka he read English literature, studying for three years without sitting the final examination, then, after a break, took his BA in the pass course in 1953; he later began MA studies in English but did not complete the degree. The university mattered to him less as a curriculum than as a milieu: among his contemporaries were future poets, critics and journalists such as Zillur Rahman Siddiqui, Hasan Hafizur Rahman and Abu Zafar Obaidullah, the circle in which Dhaka's post-Partition literary culture was being made. He had begun writing poetry at eighteen, just after leaving Dhaka College, and in 1949 his first published poem, "Unishsho Unoponchash", appeared in the weekly Sonar Bangla. Five of his poems were included in the 1950 anthology Natun Kavita, and the appearance of his poem "Rupali Snan" in Buddhadeb Basu's Calcutta journal Kavita announced his arrival to the literary world of greater Bengal.

The first books and a new diction

Rahman's first collection, Prothom Gan Dwitiyo Mrityur Aage — First Song Before the Second Death — was published in 1960 and at once established him. It won the Adamjee Prize, and its poems showed a young writer absorbing the legacy of the great Bengali modernists of the 1930s, above all Jibanananda Das, and refashioning that inheritance for a new city and a new state-in-waiting. Through the decade the collections followed in quick succession: Roudro Korotite (1963), Biddhosto Nilima (1967), Niraloke Dibyoroth (1968) and Nij Bashbhume (1970), the last dedicated to the martyrs of a Bengal already in turmoil.

His characteristic music was a free verse carried on the traditional poyaar rhythm — a supple, speech-like line able to hold both a whisper and a slogan. Critics of the time noted how completely he had moved out of the shadow of the 1930s masters: where their modernism had often been private and oblique, Rahman's was civic. The city entered his poems not as scenery but as a cast of characters — beggars outside toy shops, processions, office-goers, the lame man and the ditch, symbols that recur through his early work. Alongside contemporaries such as Begum Sufia Kamal, he was building a Bengali poetry that could register public life without ceasing to be lyric.

His themes, from the beginning, were the ones that would define him: liberal humanism, the claims and frailties of human relationships, the romanticised rebellion of youth, and an instinctive hostility to every form of bigotry. He was also a tireless experimenter with inherited story — fairy tale, Greek myth and scripture are laid over contemporary Dhaka throughout his work, so that a sick king and a third prince from a Bengali folktale can stand in the same poem as Icarus or Electra. During the Liberation War he would superimpose the biblical Samson, tearing down the pillars on his captors, upon the imprisoned leadership of 1971. This double register — the local and the mythic, the street and the archetype — became his signature, the quality that let a poem written for one day's procession be read, decades later, as if it were about the reader's own time.

The poet of the movements: 1969 and the language

Rahman's civic voice found its defining subject in the gathering storm of the late 1960s. When, in 1967, Radio Pakistan stopped broadcasting Tagore's songs on a minister's order, he joined the teachers and writers who signed Munier Chowdhury's protest statement. When Ayub Khan floated the idea of a common Latin script for Pakistan's languages, forty Bengali writers, artists and journalists issued a statement of protest on 31 August 1968 — and Rahman answered with "Barnamala, Amar Dukhini Barnamala" ("Alphabet, My Sorrowful Alphabet"), a lament and a vow addressed to the Bengali letters themselves. The poem bound his name permanently to the cause for which the martyrs of 1952 had died, the story told in Wiki Bangla's account of the Language Movement.

Then came the mass upsurge of 1969. On 20 January that year, police firing killed the student activist Amanullah Mohammad Asaduzzaman — Asad — and a vast procession carried his blood-stained shirt aloft through the streets of Dhaka. Rahman saw the shirt pass. He went to his office, could not work, returned home with a heavy heart, and that night wrote "Asader Shirt" ("Asad's Shirt"). Few Bengali poems have fused an image and a moment so completely: a young man's bloodied shirt, held high like a flag, became in Rahman's lines the standard of a whole people's refusal. The poem made him, overnight, the tribune of the upsurge; poems such as "February 1969", "Police Report" and "Hartal", and the 1970 collection Nij Bashbhume, dedicated to the martyrs, completed a body of work in which the street and the page are one territory.

The Liberation War and "Swadhinata Tumi"

When the Pakistan army cracked down in March 1971, Rahman remained in Dhaka, living the war as a confined civilian in an occupied city. The poems he wrote under that confinement — smuggled out, circulated, and, as Jahanara Imam recorded, recited in the camps of the freedom fighters — were gathered after victory in Bondi Shibir Theke (From the Prison Camp, 1972), among the most honourable of all the books the war produced. Staying for a time at his ancestral village of Paratoli, he wrote the two poems by which Bangladesh still introduces itself to itself: "Tomake Pawar Jonno, He Swadhinata" ("To Win You, O Freedom") and "Swadhinata Tumi" ("Freedom, You"), that rolling catalogue in which freedom is successively Tagore's deathless songs and Kazi Nazrul Islam, the unkempt-haired rebel, trembling with the joy of creation. In a war whose full story is told in the Liberation War of Bangladesh, Rahman's verses were themselves a weapon and a consolation; after 1971 they became something more — the nearest thing the new nation had to a founding scripture in verse.

Journalism and the editor's chair

For all the poetry, Rahman earned his living for three decades as a journalist. He began in 1957 as a sub-editor of the English daily Morning News, moved in 1960 to Radio Pakistan's Dhaka centre as a programme producer, and returned to Morning News in 1964 as a senior sub-editor. He then joined Dainik Pakistan as assistant editor; after independence the paper was renamed Dainik Bangla, and in 1977 Rahman became its editor, jointly editing the weekly Bichitra as well. For ten years, 1977 to 1987, he occupied one of the most visible editorial chairs in the country — and gave it up on a point of honour. Under the military ruler Hussain Muhammad Ershad, government displeasure at the poets' anti-autocracy stand found a bureaucratic expression: Rahman's name began appearing in his own paper as "Chief Editor" rather than Editor, a gilded title carrying no executive power. He read the demotion correctly, resigned in 1987, and never returned to the profession. He had also edited the monthly literary magazine Adhuna from 1986, and he went on to edit the weekly Muldhara in 1989 — but the editorship of Dainik Bangla, and the manner of its ending, fixed his public character: a shy man, as everyone agreed, who would not bend.

Later life: conscience of the nation

Freed from the editor's desk, Rahman became, if anything, more public. He was one of the thirty-one distinguished citizens who on 30 March 1987 demanded an end to autocratic rule, and he led the country's poets, organised in the Jatiya Kavita Parishad, whose open-air poetry festivals in front of Dhaka University's Teacher-Student Centre in 1988–1990 turned verse into demonstration. His collection Buk Tar Bangladesher Hridoy (1988) memorialised Nur Hossain, the young man shot dead in 1987 with slogans painted on his chest and back. Through the 1990s he spoke with increasing sharpness against religious fundamentalism, and paid for it: on 18 January 1999 militants of Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami attacked him with an axe at his home in Shyamali, Dhaka. He survived; his wife Zohra Begum was seriously injured. The attempt on the life of an elderly poet shocked the country and hardened his standing as a symbol of the secular, liberal Bangladesh his poems had imagined. The work never stopped — by his death he had published sixty-six collections of poetry and nearly a hundred books in all, including novels, stories, children's verse, translations of Shakespeare's Hamlet and of Robert Frost, and the autobiography Kaler Dhuloy Lekha (Written in the Dust of Time, 2004).

Honours, death and legacy

The state's honours followed the people's. Rahman received the Adamjee Award in 1962, the Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1969, the Ekushey Padak in 1977 and the Independence Award — the Swadhinata Dibosh Puraskar — in 1991; abroad, he received Japan's Mitsubishi Award in 1992, India's Ananda Puraskar in 1994 and the TLM South Asian Literature Award for the Masters in 2006. His health, fragile since two major heart operations in the late 1990s, finally failed in the summer of 2006. After twelve days in a coma, he died in Dhaka on 17 August 2006, of heart and kidney failure, aged seventy-six, and was buried in Banani Graveyard. On his eighty-ninth birthday in 2018, Google honoured him with a Doodle; Bangla Academy still holds its commemorations in a hall that bears his name.

Measured against the long arc of Bengali poetry, Shamsur Rahman's achievement is specific and secure. The critics recognised it early: in 1983 Humayun Azad devoted a full-length study, Shamsur Rahman: Nisshongo Sherpa ("Shamsur Rahman: A Lonely Climber"), to his work, and Syed Manzoorul Islam later wrote that Rahman had built on the ground of the 1930s poets but developed it, explored areas they had thought too dark, and "left his footprints all over" it. He took the modernism of the 1930s out of the study and into the street without surrendering its art; he gave a sequence of national emergencies — 1969, 1971, the anti-autocracy years — their enduring poetic record; and he made the ordinary speech and scenery of Dhaka into high lyric material. "Swadhinata Tumi" is recited at every national celebration not because it is official, but because it is loved. That is the whole of his title: in a country that was born within his lifetime and partly in his lines, he remains the poet of independent Bangladesh.