Interrogating power, envisioning emancipation

Serajul Islam Choudhury turns 90 today. "Life is all about enjoying work," he said on his eightieth birthday, a deceptively simple line from a man whose lifelong labour—epic in both dimension and direction—has been nothing short of monumental. At 90, he is still remarkably active, while standing out as our foremost intellectual and literary-cultural critic—one whose productivity, passion, and political commitment have few parallels in the country. As a teacher, writer, editor, columnist, historian, translator, activist, public speaker, and even organiser, Choudhury has sustained an intellectual—and politically engaged—struggle that is as rigorous as it is radical. He has authored as many as 115 books and countless articles in both Bangla and English. His work does not merely interpret the world; it is involved in the struggle to change it.

A direct teacher of mine in the English Department at Dhaka University, Choudhury shaped my intellectual formation in more ways than I can count. But beyond the personal, he continues to serve as a committed thinker and writer rooted in the people's struggles, offering a steady stream of critical interventions across literature, culture, history, and politics, all while persistently aligning himself with those cast to the margins—peasants, workers, women, indigenous communities, and the oppressed in all their forms. Indeed, to read Choudhury's writing is to encounter a relentless resistance to different forms and forces of oppression, and a deep, unyielding belief in the possibility—and necessity—of human emancipation.

Serajul Islam Choudhury redefined the very act of literary criticism in Bangladesh. He did so by emphatically eschewing the formalist insularity of New Criticism and instead insisting that literature is never autonomous from the material world. Literature, in his view, is a contested site—a space of ideological struggle, shaped by and shaping the socio-political forces of its time. Choudhury is perhaps the first Bangladeshi critic to propose and practice what he himself calls "the social grammar of literature"—a formulation that draws simultaneously on the dialectics of the social and an acute sense of historical specificity.

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What makes this approach so generative is its commitment to interdisciplinarity—not as academic fashion but as an intellectual and political imperative for understanding and transforming the world. Drawing on history, culture, social studies and politics, and even political economy, Choudhury has exemplarily demonstrated how literature emerges from, and participates in, the dense and often antagonistic textures of lived experience. His readings of canonical figures like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Kazi Nazrul Islam, and Jibanananda Das—to mention but a few—are not just literary interpretations; they are ideological engagements, full of contestations over class, culture, gender, and power.

In this regard, Choudhury's work has inaugurated an entire school of what we might call oppositional criticism—criticism that neither genuflects before literary canon nor shies away from exposing the reactionary undercurrents within otherwise celebrated authors. Yet he is never dismissive. His critical gaze is sharp, but never cynical. He does not unthinkingly deify nor hastily demonise; rather, he interrogates. Even when criticising canonical giants like Rabindranath or Sarat, Choudhury recognises their brilliance and contributions while subjecting them to rigorous ideological scrutiny. He politicises the aesthetic without aestheticising politics.

In many of his seminal works—such as Bangla Goddyer Samajik Byakaron, Sreni Somoy Sahittyo, and Rabindranath Keno Joruri—Choudhury compellingly demonstrates how literary texts encode the contradictions of their historical conjunctures. These texts not only reveal the deep imbrications of culture with class but also indicate literature's potential role in building emancipatory consciousness. For Choudhury, literature is, of course, to be enjoyed or admired; but it is also to be mobilised.

But literature is only one of Choudhury's many battlegrounds. His literary criticism consistently morphs into cultural criticism, and here again, his project is avowedly political. In Choudhury's analysis, culture is never confined to the arts—it encompasses the totality of lived human practices, from everyday rituals to structures of feeling. And this culture, too, is a terrain of struggle—a site where ideologies contend, where the dominant seeks to naturalise itself, and where the oppressed also resist.

Take, for instance, his collection Pa Rakhi Kothay, in which Choudhury turns his attention to issues as varied as the distortions of developmentalist rhetoric, the failures of our colonial education system, the indifference to political responsibility, and the legacy of the October Revolution. These essays also unmask the cultural contours of capitalism—its capacity to uproot people, commodify life, destroy environment, and normalise violence. Choudhury sees clearly that capitalism is not only a global economic system but also a cultural regime—a way of organising desire, aspiration, perception, and language. In response, he calls for a culture of resistance, one that not only criticises the existing order of things but envisions alternative futures. For him, the alternative is socialism. He is our major socialist writer.

Choudhury must also be acknowledged as a sociologist of the everyday. Through his once-nationally-popular columns such as "Somoy Bohiya Jay" and his editorial work with journals like Notun Diganta and—earlier—Saptahik Samoy, Choudhury brought intellectual rigour to the seemingly ordinary. He has a remarkable capacity to zoom in on what may appear trivial—a conversation on the street, a piece of political rhetoric, a ritual at home—and extract from it insights into the structures of power that shape our lives. He understands that the truth of a society often lies in its smallest ostensibly insignificant details. And in exposing those details, he never loses sight of the larger systemic forces—class exploitation, state repression, patriarchal domination, cultural erasure—that structure them. He has been anti-fascist precisely because he is anti-capitalist, having long recognised the fascist tendencies of capitalism pushed to its extremes. He views the liberation struggle of 1971 as our most defining and most glorious achievement without diminishing the significance of the unprecedented July uprising of 2024 in Bangladesh.

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And for him the question of style is not merely an aesthetic but a political question. His prose is lucid, forceful, evocative—at once intellectually substantial, immensely readable, and thus widely accessible. He does not write for a small coterie of academics; he writes for the people. His language grips, moves, and provokes. It is, in the deepest sense, a democratic language—one that makes knowledge available, not arcane.

Despite the sheer breadth of his work—from the ancient Greeks to Bangladesh's working-class and peasant struggles, from Socrates to Sophocles to Shakespeare to Said, from Beowulf to Bhasani—Choudhury's focus remains unwavering: the production of oppositional knowledge for the purposes of liberation. In his magisterial Jatiyotabad, Sampradayikata o Janoganer Mukti, he surveys vast historical terrain only to return again and again to one central question: How do we free ourselves—from communalism, from capitalism, and from its highest stage, imperialism?

Even now Serajul Islam Choudhury continues to teach, speak, write, and organise. He already initiated a forum for socialist intellectuals in Dhaka—a powerful reminder that the work of liberation is never done—as he's a convener of Bangladesh's National Palestine Solidarity Committee. In a world where the tyranny of capital is as much economic as cultural, Choudhury remains among the few who persistently connect the dots—between aesthetics and ideology, between language and labour, between everyday life and planetary injustice. Serajul Islam Choudhury is, in the truest and fullest sense of the word, an intellectual—one who intervenes in the world with the intent to remake it. And for those of us who have learned from him, worked with him, or merely read him with care, Choudhury remains not only a teacher but a source of inexhaustible inspiration. As the Latin American poet Otto René Castillo put it, it is beautiful "to love the world with eyes that have not yet been born." Serajul Islam Choudhury's work continues to help us imagine those eyes—and the worlds they might one day see. I wish my teacher a happy birthday and a life ever more filled with love and light and laughter.

Dr Azfar Hussain is currently summer distinguished professor of English and Humanities at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB). He is director of the graduate programme in social innovation and a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, US, and vice-president of the US-based Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS).

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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