Anti-colonial resistance in Kazi Nazrul Islam’s essays

Famously known to Bengalis as the rebel poet, Kazi Nazrul Islam in most of his poems and verse-lyrics raised a strong voice against every form of oppression the British colonisers, representing the capitalist West, systematically unleashed on their subjects in India. Born and brought up in a colonial world, Nazrul shared an intimate bond with his soil; he and his compatriots were fully aware of the devastating impact of colonialism. In his signature poem “Bidrohi”, Nazrul celebrates “that eternal rebel hero”: “the whirlwind!/ … the plague, the terror of this world” who will rest only when “the oppressors’ swords cease to ring on the battlefield”, as stated in Niaz Zaman’s Kazi Nazrul Islam Selections-1 (Writer’s Ink, 2020). Already suspicious of his doings, British masters were enraged when Nazrul brought out the magazine Dhumketu in 1922, which published his poem “Anandamoyeer Agamone”, evoking the image of Goddess Durga’s advent “to demand complete freedom from British rule in India”.

It is within such a framework that Kazi Nazrul Islam’s essays should be read—not as isolated outbursts of patriotic fervour, but as deliberate interventions against the colonial project of silencing, othering, and subjugation. By directly challenging the coloniser’s narratives, Nazrul refuses the identities imposed by colonial authority and asserts an alternative vision of Bengali subjectivity grounded in dignity, defiance, and divine justice. Despite the absence of direct political victory during his lifetime, his words infused the national consciousness with a revolutionary spirit, demonstrating how literary and discursive interventions can contribute to long-term processes of decolonisation. So formidable was his anti-colonial spirit that it continued to shape and inspire the people of erstwhile East Pakistan, today’s Bangladesh, in its nationalistic struggles against West Pakistani quasi-colonial rule throughout the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the armed Liberation War and ultimate victory following a nine-month-long bloody war in December 1971.

In this article I will, however, limit my discussion to two of Nazrul’s essays; namely, “Bengal of the Bengalis”, a translation of “Bengalir Bangla” (1942) by Ayesha Kabir and “Disposition of a Political Prisoner” which is a translation “Rajbandir Jaobanbandi” (1923) by Radha Chkaravarty. By analysing them through the postcolonial lenses of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, I will try to show how they reveal Nazrul’s anti-colonial position as a synthesis of incisive self-critique, biting satire, prophetic defiance, and steadfast faith, and how in them Nazrul not only resists empire but also anticipates the critical frameworks through which colonialism is understood to this day.

Fanon’s understanding of violence as both a response to oppression and a force for reshaping consciousness, as presented in his theoretical paradigm in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), insists that violence is not incidental but essential to the process of decolonisation. He emphasises its political as well as psychological impact on the colonised, who are degraded and made to feel inferior because of it. For Fanon, revolutionary violence is inevitable, purging, and transformative as it destroys the colonial system, unites the oppressed, restores their dignity, and may give birth to a new nation. Nazrul channels this logic in his insistence that peace under an oppressive regime is itself a form of violence, a “violence of peace” that the colonised must reject through awakening, defiance, and ultimately, revolt.

Said’s Orientalism (1979) offers a complementary lens, revealing how the West invented the East as its necessary “Other” to glorify and assert its own superiority. The Orient, cast as weak, effeminate, and irrational, justified the so-called civilising mission that Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (1899) epitomises and that Kipling termed “The White Man’s Burden.” In this discursive framework, the colonised were not merely conquered but redefined; their identity was rewritten in ways that stripped them of agency. Nazrul’s essays are a direct response to such ideological violence. By mocking, satirising, and openly condemning the colonial project of othering, he resists and reclaims the authority to name reality.

This resistance crystallises in his essay “Bengal of the Bengalis,” where Nazrul turns from critiquing the colonial project at large to reimagining his homeland as sacred and sovereign. The very title asserts a sense of possession: Bengal should belong to Bengalis, despite the domination of foreign powers. In the opening passages, Nazrul imbues Bengalis with deific qualities: “The heart and brain of a Bengali are divine, but the body and mind are hard as stone”. These assertions, coupled with his lush natural imagery— “The sun of Bengal is not harsh. The moon of Bengal is soothing”—situate Bengal as a sacred inheritance, a paradise marred by foreign occupation. Nevertheless, Nazrul directs his sharpest critique inward, towards his own people. He accuses Bengalis of apathy, indolence, and cowardice, saying, “Not only do we fail to protest, we become their slaves, help them plunder us”. By doing so, Nazrul enforces rigorous self-accountability, insisting that the internal erosion of discipline and courage is as dangerous as colonial subjugation itself. Fanon emphasises that colonialism corrodes not only material conditions but also the psyche of the colonised, instilling inertia and self-contempt. Nazrul’s lament over Bengal’s “apathy” precisely reflects this internalised condition, a paralysis induced by domination. Simultaneously, his exaltation of Bengal and its people performs a counter-discursive intervention in Said’s sense, reclaiming the Bengali as dignified, resilient, and heroic, in direct opposition to colonial depiction of the East as weak or effeminate. By juxtaposing these two registers of trenchant self-criticism alongside visionary exaltation, Nazrul captures the duality of the colonial condition: the colonised are simultaneously constrained by internalised oppression and capable of reclaiming their agency.

This excerpt is a shortened version of the author’s chapter entitled “Kazi Nazrul Islam’s Anti-Colonial Resistance in His Essays” from the book Confluence of Words and Worlds: Essays in Honour of Professor Niaz Zaman edited by Fakrul Alam & M A Quayum. Read the rest of the essay on The Daily Star and Star Books and Literature websites.

Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman is professor of English and Director, Kazi Nazrul Islam and Abbasuddin Ahmed Research & Study Centre at Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB).