Kazi Nazrul Islam is known as the rebel poet of Bengal for his outstanding personality and fierce resistance to all forms of repression. A remarkable poet and patriot, Kazi Nazrul Islam suffered a great deal during India's struggle for freedom. Out of this suffering was born a poetry which has immortalized both the poet and the causes dear to his heart.

Kazi Nazrul Islam was born May 24, 1899, at village Churulia in Burdwan district of what is now West Bengal. Nazrul lost his father when he was only fifteen years old and had to do odd jobs to earn for the family's subsistence. He had earlier passed the Lower Primary examination from the village 'maktab' and had also worked as a teacher there. He then worked successively as a composer of songs for the village folk song party, a domestic servant at the quarters of a railway guard and a hired help at bread shop. But he had already made a mark composing songs, plays and playlets for village troupes and had learnt also to play the indigenous drum. Kazi Nazrul Islam soon emerged as a prolific writer.

Poems, songs, ballads, stories and essays of the belles-letters type poured from his pen in rapid succession. Moslem Bharat, a monthly first published by Moslem writers in April, 1920, was at this time the chief vehicle of publication of Nazrul's writings though he wrote for several other journals as well. Nazrul's first contribution to Moslem Bharat in 1922 was Badhan Hara, a novel in the form of letters. Among his contributions to Moslem Bharat in the first tear were some outstanding poems: Shatil Arab, an ode to the river of that name, Moharram, Korbani, Fatiha Doazdaham, Badal Prater Sharab and allegory entitled Badal Barishane and other poems and songs. Special mention should be made of a poem entitled Kheya Patar Tarani, a wonderful combination of sublimity with resonant rhyme. At Raj High School in Searsole, he came under the influence of Nibaran Chandra Ghatak, a teacher who was connected with the revolutionary Jugantar Party.So, this was not

surprising, considering that he had left school and joined the army also with the political motive of service to his country. It was because he considered it his duty to use his talents in the political cause that, though fundamentally a writer of poems and songs, he readily lent himself to journalism at many periods of his career.

Nazrul's first book of poems, Agni-Veena had appeared in October, 1922. A collection of his editorials in Nabayug was published at the same time under the title Yuga Bani but was, as has been stated before, proscribed. While in jail Nazrul composed a number of romantic poems, most outstanding among which Pujarini. These poems were smuggled out of jail and published in book form under the title Dolon Champa.

After his release from jail, in April 1924 he married Pramila Sen Gupta, a cousin of one of his friends with whose family he had become intimate at Comilla. Though some people demurred to the inter-communal marriage, it did not affect Nazrul's popularity. Soon afterwards, however, he plunged into politics again and collaborated in founding what was at first called the Labour Swaraj Party of the Indian National Congress and subsequently the Workers' and Peasants' Party.

He stayed at Hoogly till the end of 1925. Then he went to Krishnagar another district town, not so far from Calcutta, and stayed there for two years and a half. A number of conferences were held at Krishnagar at the time and each of them Nazrul sang songs, composed by him, suitable for the occasion. Nazrul's music includes a number of satires on hypocrisies in politics, society and religion, the irony in them being of a direct rather than subtle kind. Nazrul was himself a good singer and it was an enthralling experience for young men and women to listen to him singing a song or reciting a poem whenever he appeared before them as he often did. A second volume of Bulbul, Nazrul's first book of songs, had been published in 1952.

It was on the night of July 9, 1942 that fate struck its blow at Nazrul. He was doing a programme at the Calcutta station of A.I.R. when his tongue froze and words failed him. After preliminary treatment for four months at the Ranchi Mental Hospital, Nazrul and his wife were sent on 10, 1953 from Calcutta for medical treatment in Europe. On 29 August 1976 the poet died

at the Institute of Post Graduate Medicine and Research in Dhaka. The national poet of Bangladesh, Kazi Nazrul Islam was buried with state honor on Dhaka University campus, on the northern side of Dhaka University mosque.

Nazrul Islam has been its literary expression as nobody else has been. No great learning was his passport to a literary career; his concern with modern world literature has also been limited. But he imbibed the deep strains of Bengali life and gave expression to them in all their impacts, stances and appeals. It is not wholly known how he came to be integrated with the structure of life of his country in all its projections-religious, social, cultural and political.