Nazrul : The Poet Remembered
"Kazi Nazrul Islam\'s story is a story of triumph in the world of letters. He may have died in the year 1976, but his real death-a demise of his expression, falling prey to a terrible illness-had come about much earlier, in 1942. Until then, he had churned out an overwhelming body of work encompassing poetry, drama, music, prose and letters. Such a prolific output as Nazrul Islam\'s, concentrated within such a narrow space of time, gives one the impression of a wild storm let loose on the literary firmament of Bengal on the verge of modernity that managed to uproot old practices and infused a new vigour.
Nazrul was already an established poet by the time he was twenty one years of age. Before evaluating his work, one must also remember the struggles of a young Nazrul Islam in the degenerate and impoverished land, their uncertainties and social deadlocks which called for an untiring spirit and often led to unfortunate compromises which may have affected the consistency of his vision. However, the sheer magnitude of his corpus attests for a genius and places him alongside some of the greatest writers of the 20 century.
All great poets have to deal with great tragedies. Nazrul was afflicted by a crushing tragedy that robbed the artist of his faculties at the very prime of his life-when a poet can only grow more mature and nuanced. In other words, a symbolic death had already visited Nazrul when he was barely forty three years old. Thus, we can never assume to have received the full flowering of Nazrul\'s talent unlike the great Rabindranath, Goethe or Omar Khayyam. In spite of his early literary demise, Nazrul managed to ask provoking and searching questions of great political, social and religious importance. The nature of his questions reveals a bold and fearless artist who fought intrepidly against the imbalances of power, intolerance and injustice in society. The more one thinks about his life, one is forced to reckon with the disorganization and rush with which he conducted his affairs. Many of his songs and poems have been lost or suspected to be inauthentic because they were seldom collected in an orderly manner for publication or preservation. This confusion greatly exacerbates an effort to arrive at a cohesive body of work for study and scrutiny. As Nripendrakrishna Chattopadhyay has said: "Nazrul is not just another good poet among many others, another good singer among many others or another composer in the world of Bengali literature and music. Nazrul had no Godfathers. He stands there all alone - a completely new literary personage and entity."
In spite of his short span as a creative artist, Nazrul\'s life was varied and complicated: both professionally and personally."
