Professor Anisuzzaman, born Abu Tayyab Muhammad Anisuzzaman, was known by only one name.
Every December, my reading group chooses a book related to 1971. In 2015, for example, we read A. Qayyum Khan’s Bittersweet Victory: A Freedom Fighter’s Tale (2013) and a few years earlier we read Siddik Salik’s Witness to Surrender (Oxford University Press, 1977).
Defaced image of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein raises questions on women's rights and feminism.
In 1961, the Arts Faculty of the University of Dhaka was still located at the southern end of Dhaka Medical College and Hospital. It was there, under the high-ceilinged rooms with their antique benches that Dr Khan Sarwar Murshid taught the MA English Preliminary students.
I got to know Jowshan Ara better when I visited her home to interview her husband, Mahbub ul Alam Chowdhury, the poet who wrote the first poem on Ekushey.
Masroor ul Haq Siddiqi Bir Uttam (Komol Siddiqi) passed away in the early hours of October 7.
Rabindranath Tagore is perhaps the only poet whose songs were chosen as the national anthems of two countries: India and Bangladesh.
Roquiah Sakhawat Hossein was born in 1880, Kazi Nazrul Islam in 1899. Apart from their difference in gender, there could not have been more differences in the circumstances of their class and upbringing.
Perhaps the starkest image of the Partition, which created the two independent states of India and Pakistan in 1947, is that of the train massacres.
One late December night in 1921, Kazi Nazrul Islam wrote what would be his most iconoclastic poem, the poem that would give rise to his soubriquet, “Bidrohi Kabi,” the Rebel Poet. Inspired by a complex of emotions, Nazrul’s ideas were flowing too fast for his pen to keep pace.
Nazrul’s iconic poem uses both Islamic lore as well as Hindu myths to rebel against all that dehumanises and discriminates against human beings.
In her memoir, translated into English as An Unknown Woman (2016), Jowshan Ara Rahman describes how the first poem on February 21, 1952
My first meeting with Mohiuddin Ahmed was in 1956, at a dinner in his brother's house. His brother, Kabir Ahmed, was what in Bangla we call the "bhaira bhai" of SAM Khan, my father's colleague in the civil service, and the friendship of the two families extended to include him.
In December 1921, almost a hundred years ago, Kazi Nazrul Islam wrote what would be his most iconic poem: “Bidrohi.” The poem would transform him from the Soldier Poet to the Rebel Poet.
A lot of translations are being done in Bangladesh, from English into Bangla and Bangla into English; much of the latter by native Bangla speakers.
The last email that I got from the organizers of the South Asian Festival of Sufism and Buddhism (the word Buddhism continued to be
Mohammad A. Quayum and Md. Mahmudul Hasan, the editors of A Feminist Foremother: Critical Essays on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain,
