Shamsur Rahman no more
Rafiq Hasan
Shamsur Rahman no more

Photo Courtesy: Nasir Ali Mamun  
  


"I'll soon be gone, quite alone/And quietly, taking none of you along/On this aimless journey. Useless/To insist, I must leave you all behind. No, I'll take nothing at all/On this solitary journey...", wrote Shamsur Rahman in his poem "Before the Journey".

Shamsur Rahman has gone leaving the whole nation in a deep shock.

The eminent poet breathed his last at 6:30pm at Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University Hospital (BSMMUH) yesterday.

Dr Iqbal Ahmed Chowdhury, assistant professor of BSMMUH, formally declared the country's top poet dead at about 6:45pm. The poet died as his blood pressure fell to the lowest level, he told newsmen at the hospital.

Rahman's blood pressure had been deteriorating since 3:00pm and the doctors could not bring it back despite administering heavy doses of medicine, he said.

The doctors removed the close relatives of the poet from the intensive care unit (ICU) and told poet Abu Bakar Siddique about Rahman's death.

Shamsur Rahman was admitted to hospital on August 6 with serious illness and kept at the ICU.

He left behind wife, a son, three daughters, two brothers and four sisters. His only son Faiaz Rahman works at a private firm and daughters Fousia Rahman and Sheba Rahman live abroad.

"We could not realise what a great gift poet Shamsur Rahman was for the country as well as Bangla language," said Abu Bakar Siddique.

Poet Shamsur Rahman has earned a permanent place in Bangla poetry and will be remembered forever, said poet Samudra Gupta, general secretary of Jatiya Kabita Parsihad.

Meanwhile, a few litterateurs and relatives of poet Rahman were critical of the government for dillydallying in sending him abroad for better treatment. They termed the government's assurance of sending him abroad "only a political stunt".

As the death news of the country's premier poet spread, a large number of people, including poets and writers, university teachers, cultural and social activists, political leaders, admirers and relatives, gathered at the BSMMUH to pay the last tribute to their beloved poet.

The body of Shamsur Rahman was taken out of the ICU on a stretcher amid heavy crowd of journalists, camera crew from electronic media, relatives and visitors. The body of Rahman was then taken to his house at Shyamoli.

His first namaz-e-janaza was held at the SOS Shishu Palli Jame Mosque at 10:30pm. His body was kept at the Birdem mortuary.

The poet's body will be kept at the Central Shaheed Minar from 10:30am to 12:30pm for people to pay tribute.

The second namaz-e-janaza will be held at the Dhaka University central mosque after the Juma prayers today.

Later, the poet will be laid to rest at the Banani graveyard beside his mother's grave.

A condolence meeting on poet Shamsur Rahman will be held at the Shaheed Minar on August 22.

Prime Minister Khaleda Zia and Leader of the Opposition Sheikh Hasina in separate messages expressed deep shock at the death of Shamsur Rahman.

Awami League (AL) leaders Nuha-ul-Alam Lenin, Abdul Mannan Khan, Yafes Osman, Dr Mostafa Jalal Mohiuddin and Asim Kumar Ukil placed floral wreaths at the dead body of poet Rahman last night on behalf of Leader of the Opposition and AL President Sheikh Hasina, said a press release.

AL leaders Tofail Ahmed, Amir Hossain Amu and Asaduzzaman Noor went to the poet's Shyamoli residence to see the poet for the last time.

PROFILE
Shamsur Rahman was born on October 23, 1929 at Mahuttuli in Dhaka. He was the fourth among thirteen children of late Mokhlesur Rahman Chowdhury. Rahman studied at Pogos School from where he passed his matriculation in 1945. He passed the intermediate from Dhaka College.

Rahman started writing poetry after graduating from Dhaka College at the age of 18.

He studied English literature at Dhaka University (DU) and passed the BA in 1953. He also received his MA securing the second place in second class.

Rahman had a long career as a journalist and was the editor of the now defunct Dainik Bangla and weekly Bichitra.

Shamsur Rahman started composing poetry at a time when most people, particularly the Bangalee Muslims, were not aware of the development of modern poetry. He started on the ground prepared by the poets of the 1930s and developed and added new features to Bangla poetry.

He popularised modern Bangla poetry among the general mass by successfully expressing their emotion about the country, its people and their language.

A prolific writer, Rahman authored nearly 100 books, of which more than sixty are collections of poems.

Rahman won numerous awards including the Bangla Academy Award in 1969, Ekushey Padak in 1977 and the Swadhinata Award in 1991.

RAHMAN AND BANGLA POETRY
With the geographical division of the Bangla province in 1947, the Bangla literature also got divided. One group was dominated by writers based in Kolkata, capital of West Bengal, and another by those in Dhaka, the new capital city of the then East Pakistan.

The Dhaka-based Bangla poetry was also divided mainly in two groups. Ahsan Habib and Abul Hossain led the progressive group who were deeply influenced by the West and Bangalee poets of the 1930s. The other group led by Farrukh Ahmed and Syed Ali Ahsan was termed pro-Pakistan group.

Later, Shamsur Rahman, Al Mahmud and Shaheed Quadri emerged as the most influential poets in the progressive front during the '50s-'60s of the last century.

Rahman was the most active in this group and relentless in composing poetry.

Actually, the new capital city of Dhaka gave birth to Rahman, and he is the poet of Dhaka in a true sense. Probably, he is the only successful poet in modern Bangla literature who was born and brought up in Dhaka and spent his entire life here.

Rahman also loved Dhaka very much. He wrote memories of his childhood in a book titled "Smritir Shahar (the reminiscent city), which is considered as a classic document of Old Dhaka.

In his over-half-a-century literary career, he also wrote five novels, a number of short stories, many patriotic songs.

The poet was deeply rooted in his own tradition.

He successfully reflected the colloquial language of Dhaka in his works, especially in the poetry. His poem "Ei Matowala Rait" (this drunken night) is full of idioms and dialect of the Dhakaites. Rahman prominently used Old Dhaka's dialect, which is a mix-up of Urdu, Persian and Bangla words.

Urban themes, symbols, signs and resemblance also widely figure in his poems.

As he was born and brought up in Old Dhaka, his use of those foreign words never seems irrational. Rather, Rahman's use of Urdu and Persian words adds an extra favour and a new taste in Bangla poetry. Through this, he virtually enriched Bangla language.

As a poet and a citizen of Dhaka he could not refrain himself from the political development of the then East Pakistan leading ultimately to the emergence of Bangladesh. Although he was never active in politics, he composed a number of political poems, which were particularly devoted to the country's struggle for freedom and independence.

One of his most popular poems in this group is "Asader Shirt" (Asad's shirt) where the poet gives an emotional description of the death of a young demonstrator, who was brutally killed in police firing at a protest rally against the despotic army rule.

"Like bunches of blood-red oleander, like flaming clouds at sunset/Asad's shirt flutters/In the gusty wind, in the limitless blue./To the brother's spotless shirt/His sister had sown/With the fine gold and thread/Of her heart's desire/Button which shone like stars/How often had his ageing mother/With such tender care/Hung that shirt out to dry/In her sunny courtyard."

These lines excerpted from the poem translated by Syed Najmuddin Hashim helped spread the anger quickly among the people against the Pakistani autocratic regime. Rahman was always vocal against the tyrannical rule and suppression of the people by the West Pakistani rulers.

After the independence of Bangladesh, Rahman emerged as the most powerful poet of the country, reflecting the true spirit of independence and the Liberation War. He successfully used the terms and words related to independence.

Rahman composed a number of poems which got immense popularity among the mass people and were highly acclaimed by the critics.

"Swadhinata Tumi" (To Independence) is one of his most popular poems, in which the poet tries to reflect the heartfelt urge and describes the true meaning of independence and freedom.

As he writes in the poem: "Independence, You are/Like un-decaying poems and immortal songs of Rabindranath/Independence, you are/Like waving of long curling hair of Kazi Nazrul/Great man, vibrating with the joy and happiness of creation..."

Rahman was also very active during the struggle against the autocratic rule of HM Ershad. He even took the risk of losing the editorship of the government-owned Dainik Banlga and joined the protest rally against Ershad regime.

His famous poem "Odbhut Uter Pithhe Cholechhe Swadesh" (the country riding a peculiar camel) is about the misrule and political stagnation prevailing in the country during the Ershad regime.





____________
"I am a dreamer,I collect all the smiles from My yesterday,
Neatly pack them into words and hide them in my heart,
I call them "MEMORIES" Music has no boundary.

Asad's Shirt



Like bunches of blood-red Oleander, Like flaming clouds at sunset
Asad's shirt flutters
In the gusty wind, in the limitless blue.
To the brother's spotless shirt
His sister had sown
With the fine gold thread
Of her heart's desire
Buttons which shone like stars;
How often had his ageing mother,
With such tender care,
Hung that shirt out to dry
In her sunny courtyard.
Now that self-same shirt
Has deserted the mother's courtyard,
Adorned by bright sunlight
And the soft shadow"
Cast by the pomegranate tree,
Now it flutters
On the city's main street,
On top of the belching factory chimneys,
In every nook and corner
Of the echoing avenues,
How it flutters
With no respite
In the sun-scorched stretches
Of our parched hearts,
At every muster of conscious people Uniting in a common purpose.
Our weakness, our cowardice
The stain of our guilt and shame-
All are hidden from the public gaze
By this pitiful piece of torn raiment Asad's shirt has become
Our pulsating hearts' rebellious banner.

[ Asader shirt (Asad's Shirt) - by Shamsur Rahman, Translated by Syed Najmuddin Hashim]





____________
"I am a dreamer,I collect all the smiles from My yesterday,
Neatly pack them into words and hide them in my heart,
I call them "MEMORIES" Music has no boundary.

Translated from Bengali by Shankar Sen)

Would anyone now at this late hour
     stretch his hand to me?

In the thickets around my recollection
a deer weeps in sheer desolation.
Dry leaves crushed inside my chest.
     The night like poison, bitter and sour.

Undecided I stand,
a culvert close at hand.
I turn my eyes and see
      the culvert falls like a crumbling tower.

Shall I happily enter this homestead?
On a doorframe I hit my head.
I stand outside my face dejected.
      Baring sharp fangs the wolves glower.  

Lovemaking in a stolen
afternoon; with unspoken words the eyes are
      swollen,
made to hear a song of sheer disaster.
      Is this an accidental death of magical power?

Would anyone now at this late hour
stretch his hand to me?


Shamsur Rahman, born in 1929 in Dhaka, and considered by many the greatest living poet in Bangladesh.





____________
"I am a dreamer,I collect all the smiles from My yesterday,
Neatly pack them into words and hide them in my heart,
I call them "MEMORIES" Music has no boundary.

Shamsur Rahman
Bangladesh



Shamsur Rahman is the unofficial “poet laureate” of Bangladesh and has published over 60 books of poetry. He chaired a national committee of editors, writers and artists dedicated to resisting fundamentalist forces opposed to individualism and democracy.

Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islam was named as being behind his attempted murder in early 1999, as part of a plot to kill at least 28 prominent Bangladeshi intellectuals. Harkat was described as a group allied to bin Laden; its members style themselves as the "Bangladeshi Taliban."

Rahman was attacked in his home. Three men affiliated with Harkat stormed into his apartment wielding pickaxes. Rahman's wife was seriously injured, but he was not hurt. Neighbors in his apartment building apprehended the men and held them until police arrived. The attackers admitted that they intended to kill the poet. They also stated that their group planned to attack more intellectuals like Rahman, who holds outspoken secular views.





____________
"I am a dreamer,I collect all the smiles from My yesterday,
Neatly pack them into words and hide them in my heart,
I call them "MEMORIES" Music has no boundary.

Shamsur Rahman

Visionary poet of Bangladesh's freedom struggle, without vanity or affectation

William Radice
Friday September 15, 2006
The Guardian


Shamsur Rahman at a rally in Dhaka University, Bangladesh. Photograph: Pavel Rahman/AP
  
Shamsur Rahman, the greatest Bengali poet of his generation, who has died aged 76, was a man of paradoxes. The author of more than 60 books of poems and many prose works, he gave in his writing an impression of effortless eloquence. Yet in speech he was hesitant, with a slight impediment.
Although always willing to appear on public platforms and speak up for any number of progressive, secular, liberal and democratic causes, he never seemed fully at ease in that role. His poetry was frequently political, yet he was not by nature a political animal. He was international in his vision and range of poetic allusions, but rarely travelled outside Bangladesh and made no bid for publicity abroad.



No poet has been more closely associated with the painful birth and perilous maturing of Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, yet he resisted the mantle of "national poet". Unlike the majestic figure of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), he was without vanity or affectation.
Rahman was born in Dhaka, a city he loved and was always reluctant to leave. The fourth of 13 children, he gained an English degree from Dhaka University in 1953. From 1957 he made his living as a journalist in print and on Radio Pakistan, becoming editor of the government-owned daily newspaper Dainik Bangla (1977-87).

Rahman often clashed with reactionary, undemocratic, or religious forces. Some of his most famous poems were powerful contributions to the campaign that began with the Bengali language movement of the 1950s, resisting the adoption of Urdu as the national language of East as well as West Pakistan, and culminated in Bangladesh's 1971 war of liberation from Pakistan.

Asad's Shirt turns the tattered, blood-spattered shirt of a young demonstrator killed by the police into a banner of the freedom struggle. In Alphabet, My Sorrowful Alphabet, his love for his mother tongue reaches even to its letters, implying passionate rejection of the suggestion - by the Hamoodur Rahman commission in the mid-1960s - that Bengali would only be "integrated" into the Pakistani nation if it was written in Roman or Arabic script.

But the break-up of Pakistan meant no respite in Bangladesh from the struggle for democracy, secularism and the rule of law, and Rahman never ceased to take part, supporting it with a stream of uncompromising poems. Risking his job as editor of Dainik Bangla, he joined protest rallies against President Hussain Muhammad Ershad in the 1980s, and characterised the corruption and misrule of that era in one poem as "the country riding a peculiar camel". The growth of Islamist extremism in Bangla- desh in the 1990s almost cost him his life: in 1999 three members of Harkatul Jihad burst into his apartment with axes, and would have killed him if his wife, Zohra Begum, had not stood in their way.

As a poet, Rahman expressed an infinite variety of moods. He could turn out a perfect sonnet, but he preferred a freedom and flexibility of form that never, however, seemed uncontrolled. His vast vocabulary incorporated the Perso-Arabic influenced dialect of Old Dhaka as well as the Sanskrit tradition. His images could be fanciful, even surreal. He could be noble and classical in poems such as Telemachus or Electra's Song, erotic, as in Odalisque, or touchingly domestic, as in Some Lines on a Cat. The secular, often witty romanticism with which he began as a poet in the 1950s - and which at the time was not common among Muslim Bengali poets - never left him.

Freedom of language and freedom of poetry are at the heart of everything he wrote. In Swadhinata Tumi (You, Freedom), written during the liberation war, he defines freedom in a series of images ranging from the heroic and political to the rural and intimate, ending with "You are a garden room, the koel-bird's song/ the old banyan tree's gleaming leaves/ my notebook of poems written just as I please."

Rahman's death has produced an outpouring of tributes even from his ideological enemies. "A poet has no religion," he said in a 1993 interview with the Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) Statesman. "His true religion is to protest against anti-human activities. I believe in democracy." His balanced, rational, yet mercurial vision will itself spare him from being turned into an icon. His great poem Mask, translated by Kaiser Haq, ends with a plea against that. "Look! The old mask/ under whose pressure/ I passed my whole life,/ a wearisome handmaiden of anxiety, has peeled off at last./ For God's sake don't/ fix on me another oppressive mask." His wife, two daughters and one son survive him. Another son predeceased him.

Osman Jamal writes: I first met Shamsur Rahman in 1949, the year that he joined the Progressive Writers and Artists Association. Loosely linked to the recently outlawed Communist party, the small group of youthful PWAA members usually held their literary meetings in the relative freedom of "Madhu's canteen" at Dhaka University. This teashop in a corrugated tin shed, supported on timber and bamboo pillars and open on three sides, lay abandoned on Sundays. There, Rahman read his first efforts to a fraternal but critical audience. He would have known some Eliot and Yeats by that point, but his first volume of poems, Prothom Gan Ditio Mrittur Age (First Song, Before the Second Death, eventually published in 1960), owes more to a schooling in the poetry of the first generation of Kolkata-centred modern Bengali poets of the 1930s.

Though PWAA did not survive long into the 1950s, Rahman carried its spirit of enlightenment and modernity to the end of his life. Years later, he wrote a poem, Hasan and the Winged Horse, addressing a close friend from those times, the poet and essayist Hasan Hafizur Rahman, who had recently died. It looked back to, among other things, the language movement protest in Dhaka in 1952, when four students were killed on February 21. "Do you remember today / the trumpet of an irate goddess called politics? Remember sitting up all night / Reading countless underground tracts? Remember the impatient kiss / On 52's red lily of terrible beauty? Alone you went/ To the dark press to light up forbidden lamps/ And at the alleyway's head looking bright-eyed for a winged horse,/ I spent my evenings and so many midnights."

· Shamsur Rahman, poet, born October 24 1929; died August 17 2006.





____________
"I am a dreamer,I collect all the smiles from My yesterday,
Neatly pack them into words and hide them in my heart,
I call them "MEMORIES" Music has no boundary.

Cover Story

Shamsur Rahman
Verses from the Heart

His was a simple life but far from ordinary. It was spent being totally devoted to his love without any breaks or deviation. It was his uninterrupted passion to write poetry that has made sure that he will be remembered as an icon of Bangla literature, as an authentic painter of the Bangali soul. Shamsur Rahman will no doubt be missed for being a tangible assurance of Bangali identity. But he will remain immortal for his soul-lifting verses that have earned him the adoration and reverence of his compatriots.
It was not just poetry-lovers who admired him but poets too who were inspired by his mode of writing. While his poetry thrived on urban dreams and disillusionment he was just as weak towards rural utopia and charged by the cultural spirit of post-independence. An abiding voice of the generation that shaped the political and cultural map of Bangladesh, Rahman has left behind a treasury of over 3000 poems that will continue to inspire his present admirers and those who will take their place in the future.

Although his ancestry lay in a village called Paratuli in Narshingdi district, Shamsur Rahman was a true Dhakaite, being born on October 23, 1929 in Mahuttuli in the old part of Dhaka. Rahman was born in a middleclass family and was the fourth among 13 brothers and sisters. He was a quiet child attending the Pogos School where he was an average student with little sign of the brilliance that would bloom in his later life.

Funnily enough, he wasn't even all that interested in literature but at age 18, after completing his Intermediate from Dhaka College, his mind was pretty much made up regarding his future. All he wanted to do was to write poetry as if it were the only thing that was worth pursuing.

His first poem was on the Bangla New Year and opened a floodgate for more poetry to come. "I was hardly aware whether what I was writing was poetry at all. I just felt like writing and went on", described the poet in an interview.

It was another gifted young man who also lived in the same neighbourhood as the poet, who goaded Rahman into getting his work published. This was the artist Hamidur Rahman who became the poet's closest friend and had his own share of glory as one of the main architects of the Shaheed Minar.

With his friend Hamidur constantly encouraging him, Rahman, with much trepidation went to the office of weekly 'Sonar Bangla' to meet its editor. His first poem was published on the first of January, 1949. While Rahman was ecstatic, his father was rather sceptical about his son's literary achievement. Writing poetry as a livelihood did not have much prospect especially to the stern father who was a mid-ranking police officer with little patience for what seemed like a frivolous vocation. "Can you become a poet like Humayan Kabir?" his father challenged him. The young poet impulsively answered: "If I become a poet I will become greater than Humayan Kabir!"He quickly left the scene before his father could retaliate.

With wife, Zohra Begum
Later Rahman's father relented when his son received the Adamjee Award for poetry remarking "He is not as worthless as I had thought." This the poet recalled with much humour during an interview.

Encouraged by recognition as a poet, Rahman wrote with greater vigour. More and more of his poems got printed in 'Shonar Bangla' and 'Juger Dabi'. Meanwhile Rahman got admitted to the English department at Dhaka University and began to read voraciously. His favourites included Premendra Mitra and Budhadev Basu but it was Jibananda Das who became his life-long influence. He was not a serious student, hated classes and didn't think sitting for exams was really all that important. But he did love reading Shelley, Keats and Yeats.

Life could not be more full for the eager poet and consisted of writing poetry, reading and long sessions of adda at Aamtola and Madhur Canteen. Later this adda was transferred to Beauty Boarding in Old Dhaka and the Shaogat office. It was here that other poets gathered including literary stalwarts like Syed Shamsul Huq and Shahid Qadri.

After abandoning his student days, Rahman joined the daily 'Morning Sun' as a sub editor. He had a small stint at the state-owned radio station but went back to his first job because they agreed to pay him a larger amount. In 1968 he joined the then Dainik Pakistan (later renamed The Dainik Bangla) as assistant editor, later being promoted to editor. His journalistic career however, was only a livelihood and never a passion and he believed what one of his favourite poets Sudhindranath Dutta said about journalism - that it is harmful for writers.

On July 8, 1955 Rahman married Zohra Begum. He had seen her for the first time at a wedding and liked her, getting his family to send a proposal as per the tradition. The couple had two boys and three girls. Sumayra Rahman (1956), Fayiaz Rahman (1958), Fauzia Sabrin (1959), Wahidur Rahman Matin (1960-1979) and Sheba Rahman (1961).

Rahman has described the moment of inspiration to write a poem as a kind of flash that can come to you at the most unexpected moment. "Perhaps you will not believe it. But it really happens automatically. I cannot explain it...It happens that I am prepared with paper and pen but cannot write a single line. Sometimes when I am in bed all set to fall asleep when a line or two flashes through my mind. There is no respite then until I get up and start writing."

It is this spontaneity, this acting on an impulse that has produced some of the most

He left behind a sea of fans
Syed Shamsul Huq, a long time friend writes in the condolence book
inspiring poetry from this prolific poet. During the liberation struggle when the Pak army unleashed its wrath on the people of Dhaka on the night of March 25, the city became suffocated by fear and grief. Like many others Rahman was forced to flee the city and rush to his village home for safety. It was while taking refuge in the serene rural setting that provoked one of Rahman's most celebrated poems - Shadhinota Tumi.

"On reaching home we heaved a sigh of relief. One calm mid-day I was sitting by the pond. It was fenced by trees. On the other side of the pond a group of boys and girls were bathing and playing and shouting. A soft breeze wafting along from the south was giving me pleasant tickles. Suddenly two words flashed through my mind.'Shadhinota Tumi'."

The next lines flowed along effortlessly : Shadhinota tumi Rabi Thakurer ajor kabita.Abinashi gaan... Soon after this poem ended came another famous one: Tomake Powar jonne he shadhinota (It is to get you, this independence).

Nature, human emotions like grief, a sense of displacement or the urge to be free - these are common veins of his poetry.

In his autobiography, Rahman has mentioned a poem that has never been published. It was inspired by the encouragement of Amiyobhushan Chakraborty, a professor of English of the Dhaka University. The professor used to come to the university from Wari on his bicycle. Once Chakraborty took him to Phulbaria Railway Station and pointed out to a row of abandoned rail carriages and alluded to the plight of those living in the empty wagons who had nowhere else to go. They were refugees from Bihar. Chakraborty suggested that the two of them should write poetry about those displaced people. In the end it was Rahman's poem titled ' Koekti Din: Wagon e' (A few days, in a wagon) that found a place in a literary magazine published from Kolkata. The poem hauntingly describes the pathos of a refugee family who have taken shelter in an empty railway carriage, far away from their motherland. The poem describes the bleakness of refugee life, one that is torn with constant hunger, disease and deaths of loved ones and the gradual destruction of hope that is a consequence of displacement.

Rahman belongs to the lucky few who have been recognised for his life's work and has also been blessed by the love and adoration of thousands of fans. Certainly he was one of the most prolific poets with over eighty books to his credit.





____________
"I am a dreamer,I collect all the smiles from My yesterday,
Neatly pack them into words and hide them in my heart,
I call them "MEMORIES" Music has no boundary.

Shamsur Rahman, Bangladeshi Poet, Dies
  

By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: August 19, 2006
Shamsur Rahman, a prominent Bangladeshi poet, journalist and human rights advocate who in 1999 survived an attempt on his life by an Islamic fundamentalist group, died in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Thursday. He was in his late 70’s.

The cause was heart and kidney failure, his family told The Associated Press. Mr. Rahman, who had been in declining health for some time, had been in a coma for the last 12 days.

The unofficial poet laureate of Bangladesh, Mr. Rahman was among the country’s most important political poets during its independence movement in the early 1970’s. (Amid brutal fighting, Bangladesh proclaimed its independence from Pakistan in 1971.) Mr. Rahman wrote in Bengali and helped adapt the language to modern poetic forms.

Mr. Rahman published more than 60 volumes of poetry, only a few of which have been translated into English. These include “The Best Poems of Shamsur Rahman,” published last year in New Delhi; and “The Devotee, the Combatant: Selected Poems of Shamsur Rahman,” published in 2000 in Dhaka.

Shamsur Rahman was born in Dhaka in the late 1920’s. He graduated from Dhaka University with a degree in English literature. For many years he edited the state-run daily newspaper, Dainik Bangla.

An outspoken opponent of religious fundamentalism, Mr. Rahman was attacked in January 1999 by a group of young men who talked their way into his house and tried to behead him with an ax. Mr. Rahman was unharmed, but his wife, who came to his aid, was seriously wounded.

Hearing screams, neighbors rushed in and caught the attackers, who were members of Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, a militant Islamic group. The attack led to the arrest of 44 members of the group.

Information on Mr. Rahman’s survivors was not immediately available.





____________
"I am a dreamer,I collect all the smiles from My yesterday,
Neatly pack them into words and hide them in my heart,
I call them "MEMORIES" Music has no boundary.

Tribute to Shamsur Rahman
Yes to Shamsur Rahman, no to death!Azfar Hussain




Shamsur Rahman -- our foremost poet -- struggled to write against death even when he was sure that death was approaching him. He died on August 17. But the spirit of Rahman's struggle for life stubbornly refuses to die. For that very spirit comes to characterise Rahman's own poetry. Although some of his early works do not range beyond a certain kind of romanticism, Shamsur Rahman hardly romanticises death itself. Rather he tells us unequivocally and even repeatedly: "I don't like death."

That pronouncement reminds me of Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan writer, whom I had the opportunity of discussing with Rahman himself more than a decade ago. In his piece called "In Defense of the Word," written at a time when military dictatorships in Latin America were threatening the freedom of the word itself, Galeano asserts: "One writes in order to deflect death and strangle the spectres that haunt us."

And Shamsur Rahman writes (let me keep using the present tense, yes!) in order to deflect death. In fact, he keeps telling us that life is far more significant than death itself, and that death is uninteresting, unattractive, and always unwelcome. Of course, the word and the world Rahman has offered us keep lending credence to that very message, while making the point that poetry can be a material force, a life-giving force, if it comes to grip the people.


And the people -- known by their struggles against death that ultimately prove their humanity -- are always there in the work of Shamsur Rahman. Certainly, out of a need "to communicate and to commune with" the people, to use Galeano's words again, Shamsur Rahman relentlessly wrote for more than half a century. His first poem appeared in print in 1949. But one had to wait until 1960 to see his first volume of poems published -- Pratham Gan Dityio Mrittyur Aagay (The First Song Preceding the Second Death). As a poet he had been active since then. He had produced more than fifty volumes of poems, including selected and collected works, among other works in prose, accounting for his own diferentia specifica or even carving a distinctive Rahmanism in Bangla poetry. Also, I feel tempted to say that no other living poet in the 'Third World' has been as prolific and productive as Shamsur Rahman. And his productivity, one might say, is probably at once his weakness and his strength. Perhaps it is more strength than weakness. For Rahman's productivity eventually helps the poet bring out the best in him.


Now, given the range and magnitude of his oeuvre, it is impossible here to even touch upon, let alone evaluate, all aspects of Shamsur Rahman's work. However, I intend to raise a couple of questions about certain kinds of critical works hitherto produced on Rahman, while making some observations regarding a few aspects of his work: observations that are admittedly vectored by my interest in the interplay between the aesthetic and the political, or in the dialectic of struggles that bring to the fore what I wish to call -- invoking some politically engaged poets and theorists -- "poetry in the flesh."

One pet assumption of some traditional Rahman critics, then, is that Shamsur Rahman inherits his 'modernism' from the poet of the thirties. It is true that Rahman in his early life enthusiastically contributed to the poetry journal called Kabita edited by none other than Buddhadev Bose himself -- one of the foremost Bengali modernists of the 1930s. It is also true that like those Bengali modernists Rahman was -- at some point at least -- interested in certain canonical motifs and themes: Baudelairean Ennui or Laforguean irony or Hopkinsian-Eliotesque intertemporality or even in a certain Mallarmean predilection for the asemantic, to name but a few. But I'd argue that even the early Rahman evinces productive transactions and tensions with the thirties, while his work -- by and large -- exemplifies almost equally creative tensions and transactions with the entire lyrical tradition in Bangla poetry from Charyapada to the medieval lyrics to Biharilal to Tagore to Jibanananda Das.


Indeed, Shamsur Rahman ranges beyond the aesthetic zodiac of the thirties, particularly, if not exclusively, because Rahman enacts a fiercely animating dialectic not only between the lyrical and even the utterly prosaic as such, but also -- and more significantly -- between the aesthetic and the political in such a way that the separation between the two turns out to be a false one. In fact, Rahman ably evolves a poetic language capable of negotiating a fruitful interface between the two -- evident as that interface is from his second volume of poems Roudro Korotite onwards, and certainly fully orchestrated in such works as Nij Bashbhume and Bandi Shibir Theke.


It is also customary to assume that Shamsur Rahman progresses from the lyrical and empirical 'I' to the historical and political 'we'. One usually refers to the poem "The Manuscript of an Autobiography," including his first volume of poems, and to his later, proverbially famous, poem "Freedom You Are," in order to account for a linear, sequential movement from the presence of the 'I' to its absence in Rahman's poetry. I think this is a misleading characterisation of Rahman's own dialectics of thematic and stylistic struggles. For Rahman's 'I' and 'we' remain differentially responsive to one another in such a way that one's presence cannot be seen at the expense of the other. Certainly Rahman is never a so-called 'classicist' in a way that he would 'annihilate' or eliminate the 'I'; nor is his 'I' ever romantically celebratory of the 'egotistical sublime' as such (ah, egotistical sublime!); nor is his 'I' confessionally exposed in bare or cubic detail; nor is his 'I' immensely dwarfed into even a tiny spek of dust in an existentialist fashion. And his 'I' by no means can be taken as an example of what some have come to call 'self-fashioning.'

In fact, Rahman's 'I' resists fixity and closure, although it is possible to say that his 'I' remains variously alive to and active in the world -- or variously opposed to death -- by renewing and re-energising its contact with the living beings or people themselves, as can be seen in his works ranging from at least Nij Bashbhume and Bandi Shibir Theke, through, say, Deshodrohi Hote Icche Kore and Buk Taar Bangladesher Hridoy, to his very last poem. His 'I'/eye and his works -- taken together -- then seem to be exemplifying what Galeano says: "What one writes can be historically useful only when in some way it coincides with the need of the collectivity to achieve its identity. In saying 'This is who I am,' in revealing oneself, the writer can help others to become aware of who they are."

And Shamsur Rahman makes us aware of who we are -- particularly who the middle-class folks are, insofar as Shamsur Rahman specifically, if not exclusively, gives voice to middle-class experiences on different registers. Some Rahman critics have already characterised him as a poet of middle-class Bengali nationalism. It is true that some of his works explore and mobilise not only nationalism itself, but also its anti-colonial character and content; and that almost his entire oeuvre remains rooted in the past, present, and even future of Bangladesh. But by no means does Rahman underwrite and advocate the kind of chauvinist, self-fetishising nationalism -- let alone reactionary indigenism -- that Edward Said critically interrogates and even fiercely contests in Culture and Imperialism. In a number of ways, Shamsur Rahman is also an internationalist -- responsive as he remains to different forms and forces of creative human interventions and to various social movements at both local and global levels.


In closing, let me quickly sum up a few -- only a few -- of Rahman's numerous contributions. In the first place, he decisively shapes diction in post-Tagorean and post-Jibananandian Bangla poetry. Also, Rahman offers us the kind of poetry that effectively traverses a wide range of middle-class experiences, while making some politically significant inter-class connections in the interest of animating and inspiring broad-based struggles against oppression and injustice, although his perspective remains inflected by a progressive and robust version of liberal humanism. "If events are the real dialectics of history" -- as Antonio Gramsci once put it -- then certain crucial events like our Language Movement of 1952, our Liberation Movement of 1971, our anti-Ershad movement in the late eighties and early nineties, and other movements of the people -- including many apparently small incidents constituting and characterising our history of struggles and life -- all forge a particularly significant dialectic in Shamsur Rahman's work that in the final instance asserts and celebrates life and humanity against the forces of destruction and death. In fact, what my favourite poet Audre Lorde says about poetry can be applied to our foremost poet Shamsur Rahman: "Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of life within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought."

And Shamsur Rahman's work can certainly be taken as a vital example of poetry-as-praxis and of a struggle to name the nameless in the Lordean sense. Above all, Rahman's work inspires us to see how it is life that is more abiding and more powerful than death. Yes to Shamsur Rahman and his poetry, no to (his) death!



Dr Azfar Hussain taught English and comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University and Bowling Green State University in the US before his recent move to North South University where he teaches English.





____________
"I am a dreamer,I collect all the smiles from My yesterday,
Neatly pack them into words and hide them in my heart,
I call them "MEMORIES" Music has no boundary.

BBC News

Thousands mourn Bangladeshi poet  
  
Rahman was one of Bangladesh's most acclaimed poets
About 5,000 grieving Bangladeshis paid their respects to poet Shamsur Rahman at his funeral in Dhaka.
Rahman, one of Bangladesh's most acclaimed poets, died on Thursday after being in a coma for more than a week. He suffered kidney and liver failure.

He had 60 poetry books to his name and was known for his campaign for political and social justice, which made him an icon among liberals.

His body was laid to rest beside his mother's grave in the capital.

Iconic figure

Rahman's body was taken to Shahid Minar (Martyr's Monument) on Friday morning, where it was kept for public viewing for two hours. Many leaders were among those who came to pay their respects to the poet.

Following funeral prayers at Dhaka University mosque, he was buried in the afternoon at a city graveyard.

  
Thousands of people gathered to pay their respects to the poet

Rahman was a leading literary figure for more than 30 years and his works were also critically acclaimed in India.

He began writing poetry at the age of 18, before starting a career as a journalist which saw him become the editor of a national daily, Dainik Bangla.

Initially a romantic poet, Rahman began writing on political and social issues after a military coup in Pakistan in 1958.

His secular beliefs almost cost him his life in 1999, when he narrowly escaped assassination by a group of suspected Islamist extremists.

Shadhinota Tumi (Freedom, you) is considered to be his most famous poem which he wrote in 1971, during Bangladesh's war of independence.

He won many prestigious awards, including Bangladesh's most prestigious literary award - the Ekushey Padak in 1977.





____________
"I am a dreamer,I collect all the smiles from My yesterday,
Neatly pack them into words and hide them in my heart,
I call them "MEMORIES" Music has no boundary.

View of Nawabpur Road in Old Dhaka
THIS CITY

by Shamsur Rahman
This city holds out a wizened hands to the tourist,
wears a patched kurta, limps barefoot,
gambles on horses, quaffs palm beer by the pitcher,
squats with splayed legs, jokes, picks lice
from its soul, shakes off bed-bugs,

This city is a cut-purse, scoots at the sight
of a policeman, looks about with eyes like the flaming moon.

This city raves deliriously, teases with riddles,
bursts into lusty song, sheds the sweat
of its brow on its feet in tireless factories,
dreams at times of cradles,
ogles the pretty girl standing quietly on the verandah.


In scorching April or monsoon-drenched June
this city puts its mad shoulder to the wheels
of pushcarts, makes for the brothel at nightfall,
burning with desire to celebrate the flesh,

This city is syphilitic, it tosses and turns
between the white walls of a hospital ward,

This city is a suppliant at the pir's doorstep,
wears charms and talismans
on its arms, round its neck,

Day and night this city vomits blood,
never tires of funeral processions,

This city tears its hair in frenzy, dashes its head
on the walls of dark prison cells,

This city rolls in the dust, knowing hunger
as life's solitary truth,

This city crowds into political rallies,
its heart tattooed with posters.
becomes an El Greco reaching for lofty azure,

This city daily wrestles with the wolf with many faces.

Shamsur Rahman is one of the leading poets of Bangladesh (Translated by Kaiser Haq).





____________
"I am a dreamer,I collect all the smiles from My yesterday,
Neatly pack them into words and hide them in my heart,
I call them "MEMORIES" Music has no boundary.

Farewell, the civic poet

Shamsur Rahman (77) was one of the most acclaimed poet of Bangladesh. With more than 60 books to his credit, he was the most popular contemporary poet and nicknamed the civil poet. To know Shamsur Rahman’s poetry is to know his people and his country. He started at age 18 and was a career journalist in some of the leading Bangla newspapers.

He was vocal against the religious fundamentalists of the country since long which had cost him a failed assassination attempt by the bigots in 1999. But he had to go this time because of kidney and liver failures. Yesterday he died and no state funeral was given as he was not well in terms with the government for their partnership with the religious parties. But Bangladesh will remember him always. Here is one of his poems:

Before the Journey

I'll soon be gone, quite alone
And quietly, taking none of you along
On this aimless journey. Useless
To insist, I must leave you all behind.

No, I'll take nothing at all.
On this solitary journey, you're stuffing
My bags for nothing; don't squeeze my favorites books
Into that beer-bellied suitcase.
I won't ever turn their pages.
And let the passport sleep on in the locked drawer.

Only let me have a look at the harvest
From my ceaseless toil, the quietly ripening fruits
Of my talent. But what on earth
Are these wretched things you bring?
Did I lie drunk with smugness in my little den
At having produced this inert, unsightly crop?
My soul screams in mute desolation
At the thought of carrying this sight with me,
I beg you, don't add to the burden of this journey.

Translated by Kaiser Haq






____________
"I am a dreamer,I collect all the smiles from My yesterday,
Neatly pack them into words and hide them in my heart,
I call them "MEMORIES" Music has no boundary.

Mahbub Husain Khan

I began my last week's column thus: "August is the 'cruellest month' for us as a nation." When I wrote this line our legendary poet, Shamsur Rahman was hovering between life and death. Within hours after I handed in my column at the Holiday office, he had joined the ranks of the immortals after death. Since then, another legend of the Indian subcontinent, Ustad Bismillah Khan died - he who played his Shehnai on the occasion of the first Independence day of the Indian subcontinent. And as of now, our National Professor Dr Nurul Islam is still in a critical condition at CMH.
While there have been no fireworks in the political arena of the metropolis this week, being mostly a week of mourning, the possibility of an one-on-one dialogue between Jalil and Mannan Bhuyia seems brighter. At the same time the younger leaders of the BNP are proposing amendment to the Constitution, before 27th October - when the ruling party is to hand over power to the non-party caretaker government. The amendment proposed by some young stalwarts of BNP - is Tareque Rahman amongst them? - is supposedly for an institutional mechanism for any void in constitutional continuity in the event of a political impasse if the Awami League and the 14-party combine may not take part in the elections.
Meanwhile, as I write this column, Ershad has made the announcement that he would field candidates for 300 seats at the elections, if Awami League does not contest the elections. What does this mean? Will Jatiya Party contest in coalition with BNP if Awami League and 14-party contest in the elections, and will it be in opposition to BNP if Awami League does not contest, or is this part of the bargaining strategy of Ershad? Only the next weeks will reveal Ershad's ultimate strategy.
An important conference of the Health Ministers of South East Asian Region (SEAR) was held this week, organised by WHO, at a local hotel in the city, on healthcare for all in South and South East Asia. Our Prime Minister inaugurated the meeting, stressing the need for removing healthcare inequities in the region, and called for the development of new health and medicine technologies, manufacture of drugs at affordable prices and the necessity for a well-trained and socially dedicated public-health workforce.
The countries in the region must innovate financing methods to make healthcare affordable to all households. There should be greater cooperation among the countries in the region for resolution of the problems and obstacles to affordable healthcare and sharing of knowledge and experience acquired by development partners and affluent nations. This is a very critical juncture of the healthcare scenario in the region. While the rich in South East Asia can pay for the best of the healthcare facilities in the region as well as in the advanced countries, the poor are always neglected. Poverty causes neglect of healthcare, and neglect of healthcare increases poverty as the chronically sick or those afflicted by dread diseases, among the poor, cannot work actively for a decent living. This is a vicious cycle and the people of South East Asia have to get out of this situation. WHO, UNICEF and UNFPA, have to launch a campaign to eradicate epidemics and provide assistance for development of drugs to fight HIV/AIDS, dengue and other infectious vector-borne diseases, and also help organise public awareness campaigns for health professionals and the public in general. The richer nations have to transfer their technologies to the poor nations, particularly in South East Asia, and also assist in the development of the potential of doctors and health professionals in the region. Healthcare is a basic human right, along with food and shelter. We cannot, in Bangladesh, and elsewhere in the region, further neglect the problems arising in this vital sector.

Poet's journey to eternity
Shakespeare has been quoted for the last four centuries all over the world. I now quote Shakespeare on the death of a literary personality who, we feel, would also be quoted for centuries hence, wherever Bengali is spoken and read.
"He died as one that had been studied in his death / To throw away the dearest thing he owed /As 'there a careless trifle."
I have been reading Shamsur Rahman's poetry and stories since the nineteen-fifties. But it was over twelve years later that I actually met him in the company of common friends Rabiul Husain, Rafiq Azad, Belal Choudhury, and Mahmudul Haque. Since that day we have met at poetry readings and social evenings, and I enjoyed every minute of those sessions. Unfortunately, I have not been meeting him since the late nineteen-nineties, and the loss is mine.
Shamsur Rahman has come to the end of a brave and savage life. Bangladesh isn't producing any more writers who have a galvanising place in the cultural life of a nation. He came of age at a time when ideas mattered and intellectuals were the central ground in the imaginative life of the nation. He had a wholly distinctive poetic voice. All poets must sound like themselves, not like some one else. But Shamsur Rahrnan's voice is not only distinctive, it is also elusive. His cadences stay with you for life altering the way you feel. They're the sound of a mind communing with itself, resigned, scrupulously honest. The subject he returns to most often is his sense of something indecipherable. It is this that makes him a symbolist writing intense but often puzzling poems with an absence at their heart.
On Pahela Baishakh 1413 (14th April, 2006, I read his poem, Shantir Shrotey Bheshey Gelo (Swept Away in the Currents of Peace): If just lift my eye / I see my father's two eyes/ His gaze indicating annoyance at his son / At other times his fatherly gaze makes me his favourite scion / Whose profession counts among the peoples of the world. ...."
He had written in his poem 'Bibechana' (Consideration), for just this occasion: 'When I die, what day of the week will it be, difficult to say./ Friday? Wednesday / Saturday?' Whatever day it is, / The city must not be awash with rain , the slimy mud! Shall not gather at the end of the lane. If the streets flood on that day,/ The pious carriers of my coffin will be irritated."
For all of his life, Shamsur Rahman believed that true evenhandedness meant that those in need always were allowed more. As he left us, he did so with that most elusive of qualities charm. We of his friends, readers, admirers, and family who remain, have a special burden. We have lived with nobility. He was a person who regarded life as one long attempt to provide a happy moment or so for another person, whether through his poetry, or other writings, or his company. Always he was outraged by those who rushed about, shouldering past others, their sides lathered with effort, horses in some cheap race, as they pawed for material success. He knew that life belonged to those who seek out the weary, sit with the defeated in life and work, understand the clumsy. And do this not as some duty. But do it with the cheerful realisation that we are part of it all.
He thought the word 'duty' meant that each day there should be a word or gesture that would cause someone else to smile over the life about them. His contempt was reserved for those who did not attempt this. Who are you, he would say, to go through a day, knowing another day is to follow, and another after that, and knowing that it is all ceaseless, and still you refuse to join with us and help soften the path of those about you?
He was a poet and writer utterly unspoiled. I thank Allah for the high privilege of having known him and spending happy moments with him. He leaves us with a tradition of decency that we must attempt to carry on. His strength was such that even if those of us here today stumble now and then, I think the line of decency of Shamsur Rahman will reveal itself time after time in whatever generations there are to come.
As was said of other aristocrats before him:
Earth received an honoured guest.
As my readers know, I normally end this column with some light-hearted banter, amusing anecdotes, my quizzical views about life. Today I cannot end this column without quoting T.S. Eliot (only partially):

The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the collonade,
And we went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you:
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
-The Waste Land, 1922.

The Waste Land was T.S Eliot's first major poem, using an essential allusive and elliptical technique to put across the view that urban civilization was sterile and insatisfying. As we all know T.S. Eliot went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, for, as his Nobel citation says: "...his outstanding contribution to present-day poetry." Shamsur Rahman's contribution to present day poetry in Bangla is also outstanding, but he could not win the Nobel Prize, though all of us wished he had.


Last edited by sur on 18 Jan 2007 01:21; edited 1 time in total




____________
"I am a dreamer,I collect all the smiles from My yesterday,
Neatly pack them into words and hide them in my heart,
I call them "MEMORIES" Music has no boundary.

Shamsur Rahman turns seventy-five
Shahriar Salam
?Bachchu tumi, Bachchu tui, Chole jao, chole jaa shekhane
Chechollish Mahuttulir Khola Chade
Ekhon tor Shange, Tor Shange Bakkalap Korar Moton
Ektuo Shomoy nei??
?O thy Bachchu?. Fly, fly away there,
upon the wide roof of 46, Mahuttuli. busy, I?m the busiest
Now I can?t spare a single moment to meet you ..dear bachchu
(?Duhshomoer Mukhomukhi? by Shamsur Rahman)

Here Bachchu is none other than our white haired, but evergreen, Shamsur Rahman. This is a poet who doesn?t need any introduction. We know him through his extra tactile sensitivity and the emotional nature of his poems. But are we aware of the Bachchu in him (Bachchu is the nickname of Shamsur Rahman)? This renowned poet has just turned seventy five, and almost walked an entire lifetime. His poems are his most significant weapons with which we can explore him, our country, our life, our senses and what not?
The nineteenth century is marked as the Renaissance of Bangla poetry. The poets of the era attempted to venture into a new way in literature. The movement thus began to stand on its own feet. On the basis of such a principle, we can safely place Shamsur Rahman in the line of tradition inaugurated by Jibananda Das. He has proved himself not only the most popular, but also the principal poet of our time. His first poem was published in 1949. The blossoming period of his poetry was in contradiction to the politics and culture of the times.
In the early1969, he suddenly started moving off from his earlier track, and went for a different strategy in his writing. The spark of patriotism touched his poems at that time. Besides, human emotions and feelings like love, solitude, revolution, the concentration of personal life and many other social sensations began to be reflected in his poems in ever-increasing circles.
Shamsur Rahman has never tried to deduce poetic themes from his surroundings. His themes have always followed his inner approaches, rather than from an examination of reality. But he was greatly influenced by his home, Dhaka; he sacrificed himself as a great credit to the city. This city was the one of the main elements in making him a poet. His literature in the subsequent stages was aimed at raising the spirit of agitation among the people against autocracy and repression.
Rahman?s poems will always hold a symbolic meaning, for they embrace the turmoil and disorder that prevail in our society. The red shirt of Asad flutters as a revolutionary flag in his poem. In 1971, Dhaka was not only a besieged city; to Shamsur Rahman it was also the capital of a deadly and bold people.
He voiced protests against the genocide committed by the Pakistani military junta. The poems which he wrote then projected our hunger for independence and stimulated our love for the motherland.
?Freedom,
You?re the remarkable poems of Tagore
Freedom,
You?re Kazi Nazrul, the vigorous man with endless power ...?
Or
?To attain you, Shadhinata,
How many days we have to shower in the ocean of blood?
How long we have to tolerate heinous agitation??
These poems are outstanding contributions to our literature. He continues his journey of writing poems till today. This literary genius planted a tiny little seed in the field of Bangla literature many years ago, which has now grown into a huge tree that bears more and more leaves everyday. We all know that if and when he passes from the scene, a splendid era of our poetry will be lost to us. As votaries of poetry, indeed of culture, we all wish him a very happy birthday, and implore him to live a couple of centuries more to continue to portray our many loves and our diverse longings.
Long live Shamsur Rahman!


Last edited by sur on 18 Jan 2007 01:19; edited 1 time in total




____________
"I am a dreamer,I collect all the smiles from My yesterday,
Neatly pack them into words and hide them in my heart,
I call them "MEMORIES" Music has no boundary.

OBITUARY: SHAMSUR RAHMAN
The poet is dead, long live the poet

by Mubin S Khan


portrait by Nasir Ali Mamun
Shamsur Rahman was born on October 23, 1929, at 10:00am on a Wednesday at 46 Mahuttuli, Dhaka — his maternal grandparents’ house. His father was the late Mukhlesur Rahman Chowdhury and mother the late Amena Begum. His mother was his father’s second wife after his first wife passed away. He was the fourth amongst his parents’ thirteen children. Nicknamed Bachchu, he never used his family name — Chowdhury — in his professional life.
Originally from village Pahartali, thana Raipura, Narsingdi, Rahman spent his childhood in Mahuttuli. This semi-urban place left a deep impression and later had much influence on Rahman’s poetry. In those days, despite being a part of Dhaka, Mahuttuli had very little concrete structures and motor vehicles and was instead a neighbourhood of mud houses, horse-drawn carriages, tea stalls and kerosene lamps. Rahman in his poetry later on, especially ‘Smritir Shohor’ and ‘Rouddro Korotite’, reminisces about the sheulitala behind Armanitola school, about Janmashthami celebrations, Muharram processions, the glass sculptures of gods and goddesses in the shops in Babubazar, pictures of kananbala, Tagore, and the famous brothels of Babubazar from his childhood.
Rahman started school at the Pogose School at class II in 1936 and finished his matriculation examinations from the same school in 1945, securing second division. In 1947 he finished his intermediate from Dhaka College once again securing second division. The same year, he moved out of Mahuttuli and started living in 30, Syed Aulad Hossain Lane, Dhaka 1-A.
Incidentally, his first work of literature was not poetry but prose. It was a piece written on the untimely death of his younger sister, who died of small pox, and influenced by ‘Chinnamukul’ by Shotendranath Dutta. It was apparently read out to his family members who were left in tears. His first poem ‘Tarpar De Chhut’ was written in 1949, published in weekly Sonar Bangla, edited and published by Nalinikishore Guha.
Though he enrolled in the department of English at the University of Dhaka in 1947, he refrained from sitting for any examinations for many years, preferring a bohemian life. He finally graduated from the university in 1953 with a BA pass course degree. He enrolled for Masters at the same department later on, and though he finished second class second in the first part, he failed to pass the second part.
Shamsur Rahman married Zohura Begum, a distant relative and old acquaintance, in 1955. Together they had five children, two sons and three daughters. Sumaira Rahman was born in 1956, Faizur Rahman was born in 1958, Fouzia Rahman was born in 1959, Wahidur Rahman Matin was born in 1960 and Seba Rahman was born in 1961.
Matin, his younger son, was mentally disabled and died after drowning in their village pond in 1979. Rahman, who was deeply shocked by this loss, would later write many poems including ‘Pitaputra’, ‘Phire ay uttaradhikari’, ‘Thor kach theke dure’ and ‘noishoprohore parashpar’ in memory of his deceased son.
By profession Rahman was a journalist for more than three decades. From 1957 to 1958 he worked as a sub-editor at the Morning News. From 1958 to 1960 he was programme producer with the Dhaka centre of Pakistan Radio. From 1960 to 1964 he once again worked with the Morning News, this time as senior sub-editor. In November 1964, he joined the then Dainik Pakistan (later Dainik Bangla) as an assistant editor and remained in that position till 1977, till he was named editor of the now-defunct Dainik Bangla as well as the weekly Bichitra. He left the newspaper in 1987.
He also edited a little magazine called Kabikantha and headed the editorial board of the publication in 1956. He edited the short-lived Adhuna in 1987. He joined Shaptahik Muldhara as chief editor in 1989 and worked till 1991. He was made chairman of the Bangla Academy in 1996 and remained there till 1999.
Shamsur Rahman, alongside Al Mahmud and Shaheed Quadri, was one of the most influential poets in this part of Bengal in the latter half of the last century. The poet and his work were deeply rooted in his own tradition. He successfully reflected the colloquial language of Dhaka in his poetry. Rahman also used Old Dhaka’s dialect, which is a mix-up of Urdu, Persian and Bangla words. Urban themes, symbols, signs and resemblance also widely figure in his poems. As he was born and brought up in Old Dhaka, his use of those foreign words, including Urdu and Persian, added a new flavour to Bangla poetry.
The poet was also deeply intertwined with the political development of the then East Pakistan leading ultimately to the emergence of Bangladesh. Although he was never active in politics, he composed a number of political poems, which were particularly devoted to the country’s struggle for freedom and independence.
One of his most popular poems is ‘Asader Shirt’ where the poet gives an emotional description of the death of a young demonstrator, who was brutally killed in police firing at a protest rally against the despotic army rule. Rahman was always vocal against the tyrannical rule and suppression of the people by the West Pakistani rulers.
He was a familiar figure for his picket lines and efforts in anti-fundamentalism movements. He became a signatory to a statement that advocated the airing of Tagore songs on radio which was banned by then information minister Khwaja Sahabuddin on June 22, 1967.
After the independence of Bangladesh, Rahman emerged as the most powerful poet of the country, reflecting, in his work, the spirit of independence and the Liberation War. Rahman composed a number of poems which got immense popularity among the masses and were highly acclaimed by the critics — ‘Swadhinata Tumi’ being the most well-known.
Rahman was also active during the struggle against the autocratic rule of HM Ershad. He took the risk of losing the editorship of the government-owned Dainik Banlga and joined protest rallies against the Ershad regime. He wrote the famous poem ‘Odbhut Uter Pithhe Cholechhe Swadesh’ (the country riding a peculiar camel) about the misrule during the Ershad regime.
Shamsur Rahman wrote for about 55 years, has more than 60 publications, mainly volumes of poems, and composed about 2,000 poems. His first collection of poems, Pratham Gan, Dvitiya Mrityur Age was published in 1960.
Among the honours he won was the Adamjee Award in 1963, Bangla Academy Award for Literature in 1969, Jibanananda Das Award in 1973, Ekushey Padak in 1977, Abul Mansur Ahmed Memorial Award in 1981, Nasiruddin Gold Medal and Padavali Award in 1981, Maulana Bhasani Award in 1982, Swadhinata Padak in 1991, and Ananda Award of India in 1994. Three Indian universities also conferred DLit degrees on him.
Shamsur Rahman, a doyen of the Bangla poetry of the latter half of the twentieth century, died at Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University in Dhaka on August 17. He was 77.


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"I am a dreamer,I collect all the smiles from My yesterday,
Neatly pack them into words and hide them in my heart,
I call them "MEMORIES" Music has no boundary.

Shaheed Dibas: International Mother Language Day
HRCBM Press Release 21 February 2003

Human Rights Congress for Bangladesh Minorities (HRCBM) commemorates the 51st Anniversary of Shaheed Dibas (Martyr Day), which is also popularly known as the Ekushe in Bangladesh. This Bengali Language Martyr Day is universally known as the “International Mother Language Day” since 1999. On this day, 51 years ago in 1952, the students of Dhaka protested the denial of Bengali, the language of the majority in the then Pakistan, as the national language and the imposition of Urdu as the sole official language of the country. The protests that sparked off on that day ultimately led to the War of Liberation that resulted in the birth of Bangladesh, a secular and democratic people’s republic, in 1971. HRCBM pays homage to the martyrs of the 21st February 1952 and all the brave souls who made the ultimate sacrifice for the liberation of Bangladesh and for safeguarding the conscience of Ekushe.



Ekushe - The Fountain of Bengali Conscience


Let us pause for a moment from our daily routine and reflect upon the spirit of Ekushe that guided us through numerous struggles and pay homage to the valiant martyrs of language movement who braved the streets of Dhaka and made the ultimate sacrifice on this day of the 21st February 1952. Let us commemorate innumerable martyrs who carried the torch, sacrificed their lives for a free, peaceful, and prosperous Bangladesh, “Sonar Bangla”, where all her citizen will be treated equally with dignity, where the pillars of the constitution, Bengali Nationalism, Secularism and Democracy, will be upheld. If we, those of us who belong to the Ekushe generation and those who have personally participated in the movement for recognition of Bengali as our national language and the War of Liberation, and those who believe in freedom, human rights and justice for all, close our eyes we can vividly see the procession of barefooted thousands from all walks of life wearing black badges and singing the immortal Ekushe theme song “Amar bhaiyer rakte rangano Ekushe February, Ami ki bhuleete paree.” “How can I forget thee, Ekushe February, colored with the blood of my brother,” streaming to the Central Shaheed Minar (Central Martyr's Monument) through the Ajimpur Grave yard to pay tributes to the memory of the martyrs. What started fifty-one years ago this day as the Language Movement of the Bengalis is now celebrated by all member countries of UNESCO as International Mother Language Day. Mother tongues (languages) are not only an essential part of humanity's cultural heritage, but the irreducible expression of human creativity and of its great diversity. We all should be proud of our heritage.



As the nation celebrates the 51st anniversary of the Ekushe, the fountain of our Bengali conscience, we at home and abroad, need to reflect upon the spirit of Ekushe, which was clearly the spark of what we are today and what we strive to be. Today, as we look back we have many accomplishments as a nation and many failures and challenges ahead of us. We live in a global, connected world and no matter wherever we are, we have a role to play and we need to vow at this crucial moment of our national history to do our part to the fulfill the dreams of the martyrs, restore secularism-a corner stone of the conscience of the Ekushe, safeguard human rights and bestow justice and dignity to all citizens of our motherland.



Although 31 years have passed since our independence we have a long way to go for our national and social emancipation. Bangladesh, a nation free from social injustice and discrimination of all kinds, is yet to be achieved. Secularism, one of the four pillars of the constitution of Bangladesh, has been abandoned. The defeated forces of 1971 are better organized than ever and up in arms. They are spreading communal hatred, perpetrating heinous crimes against religious minorities, threatening and attacking the progressive forces and voice of the conscience, and destroying the spirit of Ekushe. Even on the eve of the celebration of Ekushe members of the Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal (Nationalist Student Party), student activists of the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party, dare to stop sale and display of a book on the Liberation War, titled “Bangladesh Genocide and World Press” at the Book Fair held during the month of February (The Daily Star, 09 February 2003). The ghost of communalism is rampant and still exerting its malignant influence on the people of Bangladesh, inflicting inhuman atrocities on the innocent people (particularly the minorities), threatening the secular forces, the thinkers, intellectuals, poets, artists, writers, journalists, historians and those who uphold freedom and the conscience of Ekushe. The pogrom of minorities that was unleashed immediately after the October 2001 general election is still raging all over the country.



Let the spirit of Ekushe, our national conscience, that led us through the momentous events of 1952, ‘62, ‘66, ‘69, ’70, ’71 and beyond, unite us in our struggle for justice and defeat all right wing communal forces once and for all. Let us resolve in the words of our national poet Shamsur Rahman that we will stand upright (Rhriju danrhiye thankte chai) and uphold the principles of Bengali conscience. Let us resolve to uphold the spirit of Ekushe and continue our fight for a secular Bangladesh where freedom, equality and justice will ring forever unhindered!





Dhiman Deb Chowdhury

President, HRCBM


Last edited by sur on 18 Jan 2007 01:16; edited 1 time in total




____________
"I am a dreamer,I collect all the smiles from My yesterday,
Neatly pack them into words and hide them in my heart,
I call them "MEMORIES" Music has no boundary.