REFLECTIONS / Moon, memory, manifesto: A personal, lyrical essay on Atrai
These two things—the river and the train—continue to haunt and fascinate me.
21 November 2025, 18:28 PM
ESSAY / Between silence and song: Early Bangla literature and the poetics of the ‘Charyapada’
Pandit Haraprasad Shastri read—and was deeply inspired by—Raja Rajendralal Mitra’s seminal work Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nepal, published in 1882. That book was instrumental in inaugurating a whole new age in the history of Bangla language and literature.
24 October 2025, 19:37 PM
Syed Manzoorul Islam: Teacher, taleweaver, torchbearer, trailblazer
As I write—still devastated by his passing—I hear his voice in my head: telling stories without end, stories that breathe life, stories that dream of a new world,
12 October 2025, 04:00 AM
90th birthday of Serajul Islam Choudhury / Interrogating power, envisioning emancipation
His work does not merely interpret the world; it is involved in the struggle to change it.
23 June 2025, 02:00 AM
Language, land, labour, and liberation: Reclaiming the radical roots of Ekushey
Every time the question of language surfaces it means that a series of other problems are coming to the fore.
20 February 2025, 18:00 PM
Beyond martyrdom and momentum: The matrix of the 1969 mass movement
In the history of Bangladesh’s formation and its war against the military-bureaucratic regime of Pakistan, the 1969 mass uprising is a significant milestone.
31 January 2025, 02:10 AM
Opinion / Uprising, unity, and uncertainty: Power, protest, and politics in 2024
To speak of politics in 2024 is also to recall the entire history of political culture that has unfolded in Bangladesh since 1972.
30 December 2024, 02:00 AM
Our Victory Day and the questions of equality, justice, and human dignity
Bangladesh's hard-won independence, achieved through the Liberation War in 1971, remains the most defining political event in our history.
16 December 2024, 02:00 AM
Serajul Islam Choudhury: A multi-dimensional teacher
If “life is lived forward but understood backward”—as the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once put it—Choudhury can look back and easily say in the words of the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet: “This is how you must love the earth/so you can say 'I have lived.'”
22 June 2017, 18:00 PM
Thinking about Nazrul in Cuba: Love and Revolution
I visited Havana, Cuba, in January this year. I was invited there to give a lecture on the significance of Fidel Castro and the reception of
26 May 2017, 18:00 PM
Bangladesh's foremost oppositional intellectual
Today - June 23 - marks the 80th birthday of Serajul Islam Choudhury. He was my teacher in the English Department of Dhaka University.
22 June 2016, 18:00 PM
Of Things
Things are material in the hardest sense of the term. Things have shapes, textures, structures, and even timbres. Things have tones,
3 June 2016, 18:00 PM
The Khapra Ward Day: The Moment and the Movement
April 24, 1950. It was a sunlit Monday morning. There were 39—according to some, 42—political prisoners in the famous Khapra Ward
22 April 2016, 18:00 PM