Humayun Azad

Humayun Azad (English: // ( listen); 28 April 1947 – 12 August 2004) was a Bangladeshi author, poet, scholar and linguist. He wrote more than seventy titles. His writings against Bangladeshi society-system received both positive and negative reviews. He was threatened and attacked by Islamist fundamentalist groups for his writings.^[1]

Azad was awarded the Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1986 for his contributions to Bengali linguistics. In 2012, the Government of Bangladesh honored him with Ekushey Padak posthumously.^[2]

Early life and education

Azad was born as Humayun Kabir in Rarhikhal village in Bikrampur, Munshiganj on 28 April 1947.^[3] Notable scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose was born in the same village.^[4] He passed the secondary examination from Sir Jagadish Chandra Basu Institute in 1962 and higher secondary examination from Dhaka College in 1964. He earned BA and MA degrees in Bengali language and literature from the University of Dhaka in 1967 and 1968 respectively. He obtained his PhD in linguistics submitting his thesis titled "Pronominalisation in Bangla" from the University of Edinburgh in 1976.^[3][4][5] Azad changed his surname from Kabir to Azad on 28 September 1988 by the magistrate of Narayanganj District.^[3]

Career

Azad started his career in 1969 by joining the Chittagong College. He joined University of Chittagong as a lecturer on 11 February 1970 and Jahangirnagar University in 1972. He was appointed as associate professor of Bengali at the University of Dhaka on 1 November 1978 and got promoted to the post of professor in 1986.^[3]

Literary works

Towards the end of the 1980s, he started to write newspaper column focusing on contemporary sociopolitical issues. His commentaries continued throughout the 1990s and were later published as books as they grew in numbers. Through his writings of the 1990s, he established himself as a freethinker and appeared to be an agnostic. In his works, he openly criticized Islamic extremism, as well as the conservative society-system of Bangladesh.^[6][7]

In 1992 Azad published the first comprehensive feminist book in Bengali titled Naari (Woman). Naari received positive reviews as a literary work and earned Azad popularity as an author. In this work Azad painstakingly compiled the feminist ideas of the West that underlie the feminist contributions of the subcontinent's socio-political reformers and drew attention to the anti-women attitude of some acclaimed Bengali writers including Rabindranath Tagore. The work, critical of the patriarchal and male-chauvinistic attitude of religion towards women, attracted negative reaction from the conservatives. The Government of Bangladesh banned the book in 1995. The ban was eventually lifted in 2000, following a legal battle that Azad won in the High Court of the country.

Assassination attempt

On 27 February 2004, near the campus of the University of Dhaka during the annual Bangla Academy book fair, two assailants, armed with chopping knives, hacked Azad several times on the jaw, lower part of the neck and hands.^[4] Azad was taken to the nearby Dhaka Medical College and Hospital. He was then sent to the Combined Military Hospital (CMH) and later to Bumrungrad International Hospital in Thailand where he recovered.^[4][8]

Azad had been fearing for his life ever since excerpts of his new novel, Pak Sar Jamin Sad Bad (Pakistan's national anthem; Blessed be the Sacred Land) were first published in The Daily Ittefaq's Eid supplement in 2003. In that write-up, he tried to expose the politics and ideology of Islamic fundamentalists of Bangladesh. After that book had been published, he started receiving various threats from the fundamentalists. In an email to Mukto-mona, a website for secularists and liberals, where he was then a member, Azad wrote:

The Ittefaq published a novel by me named Pak Sar Jamin Saad Baad in its Eid issue on December 3. It deals with the condition of Bangladesh for the last two years. Now the (religious) fundamentalists are bringing out regular processions against me, demanding exemplary punishment. The attached two files with this letter will help you understand.^[4][9]

— Humayun Azad

A week prior to Azad's assault, Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, one of the renowned religious leaders of Bangladesh demanded, in the parliament, that Azad's political satire Pak Sar Jamin Sad Bad would be banned and demanded the introduction of the Blasphemy Act on the author.^[4] In 2006, the commander of Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) admitted to the RAB interrogators that his operatives carried out the attack on writer Azad, as well as two other murders, bomb blasts, and attacks on cinemas.^[10]

Death

On 12 August 2004, Azad was found dead in his apartment in Munich, Germany, where he had arrived a week earlier to conduct research on the nineteenth century German romantic poet Heinrich Heine, several months after the Islamists' machete attack on him at a book fair, which had left him grievously injured.^[11] His family demanded an investigation, alleging that the extremists who had attempted the earlier assassination had a role in this death.^[1][12] While alive, Azad had expressed his wish to donate his body to medical college after his death.^[13] But he was buried in Rarhikhal, his village home in Bangladesh as doctors denied to take his body for medical research, as several days had passed to reach his body to Bangladesh from Germany.^[14]

Personal life

Azad married his Dhaka University class-mate Latifa Kohinoor on 12 October 1975.^[15][4] They lived in Scotland for an year before they returned to Dhaka. Together they had two daughters Smita and Mouli and one son, Anannya.^[16]

Bibliography

References

External links

• Humayun Azad on IMDb