KAZI Nazrul Islam placed love above all other attributes of man. A revolu tionary in conviction and in all.he did and aspired to do. love was something to him much higher than revolution and patriotism. Justice and fairness, creativity and sacrl flee. He proclaimed In resounding words hf had come to this world to love and in return to be loved And till his last moments of sanity, he believed while he had never for a moment faltered and failed in giving love, he was withdrawing from the world In abysmal disappointment — in untranslatable teebro abhiman. that is — as his love had not been returned tn any measure

There was a nineteenth century fictional work by Chandrashekhar Mukhopadhyay called Udbhranta Prem — Love Gone Berserk — which by universal agreement dripped raw emo tion and was enough to con sign the heads of all young people to eternal damnation We of the twentieth century think that we have known a far more intense epitome of both love and emotion than Udbhranta Prem Haven t we known Nazrpl and seen how that tome pales before the life and loves, the struggles and achievements of Nazrul? And did we not almost dismiss Nazrul s valedictory words of disappointment as penned tn a feverish fit of emotion — the outpouring of an overwrought man at hta tether s end — bit ter bitter, bitter?

On this the 95th year of Nazrul s birth. 52nd after he all but physically died and 18th after he was Interred inside the Dhaka University Mosque, compound fMasJderl paste amaar kabar dtyo bhai jaeno gorer theke muazzuter azan shunte paai — bury me by the side of a mosque so that from my grave can I hear the muazan s call lor pr ayer — was one of his celebrated Islami songs in which unsuspected by communal sestets. he went the whole hog on the way to the bhaidi cult of the subconti nent). It would be a good idea to look arpund In search of at least one soul In this land where he has been named the

national poet who indeed thinks of him with love. He has. been made into a mascot by fundamentalist goons who would never read him nor listen to him lest their delusion should pass Nazrul. a mascot or a presiding spirit for communal intolerance and arrogance? If there was any who ever loved him. this should have been enough for him or her to shout denunciation sending shivers down the spine of the culprits Not a voice has been heard in protest over the long 47 post partition years denouncing this act of desecrauon of a man s whole being

It was the then Pakistan which .started the mean- ploy of standing an evidently Muslim . Nazrul against a reputedly Hindu Rabindranath in the hope of cutting the umbilical chord that bound th« Bengali Muslims to die great heritage of Bengali Iwrature which is what nurtures Bengallnesa In who is only a Bengali speaker They thought by diminishing Rabindranath that chord could be effectively cut Nazrul wanted ail his life to be known

by his identity of a human being and not of only a Muslim. He was shorn of everything true and real, everything that spoke of his •humanity and of his strivings to hold high the man-in society and In history — and was made into a puffed up bag of a crudely false Muslim-only stereotype

Worse, he was made to serve ends he had all his fife battled to oppose Colonial ex ploitatlon. autocratic dictation from above, discrimination and privileges, curtailment of man s liberty and fettering the mind of man with shackles of prejudice and ignorance — these were things he fought against with all his being And precisely these were things he was used by Pakistan to underwrite and promote - a tool almost a stool pigeon, for those enemies of culture and history and society in their wily designs to perpetuate their hold on the Bengali people Nazrul was pronouncedly socialist — a diehard believer In social economic and pollti cal equality of all men — in his political persuasion He was aq egalitarian bordering danger ously on being an anarchist

Look at him drawing as it a draught beast the chariot ridden by unlawfully established immoral governments assiduously cutting at the very roots of a people's being. This he was doing in effect without physically doing it for almost all of the half-century that he lived and yet lived not. after the partition of the subcontinent.

How about his songs? Rabindranath has a celebrated quote to the effect that the Bengali people will of necessity keep singing' his songs and that of all his creations only songs would perhaps endure. Nazrul is not on record as expressing similar sentiments about music — after all there was nobody around him who would take down whatever Issued from his mouth. But one can very confidently say. without any fear of being controverted. that Nazrul felt the same way about his songs, if not more strongly. And if Rabindranath's claim to musical glory lay also in his being the father of modern subcontinental music. Nazrul has an equally strong claim as the progenitor of what has for the last half a century been called the Bengali Adhunik Gaan.. And Nazrul composed at least 3000 songs within a span of Just 16 years. That could be some welcome information for the Guiness people. But these are the least important aspects of his songs His songs are a treasury of all immortal north Indian melodies that were still extant at the ustadi khandan level and now are nowhere to be found anymore — for which we of the immediate posterity — or those of the long removed

— can feel eternally grateful to him. And this fantastic achievement is also quite beside the true essence of his music. His incorrigibly — unabashedly too — romantic tunes couching bodies of words as tangible as a pet dove on the hand or the slumbering darling by the wakeful lover on a midsummer night — cqll for only one thing — not critical appreciation and not aesthetic evaluation — love. They do not elevate you as do most Rablndrasangeet, .they do not impact you physically as do the best of the beat songs of the bands. They have a certain pathos, wafting to our modern minds from times long past — sad remembrances of impossible dalliances and longings. To get to the spirit and beauty of these you must first get past the ghazals. Alas, the practitioners of his songs stress only the lame-duck gait of a song of contrived off-beat and keep on Jousting with non-existing vocal arabesques, and never arrive at a point where they can see his soul. And the listener, cursed with having his Nazrul only from such singers, get him all distorted and wrong. His songs yearn to be loved — nothing less and noticing more. It would be less than one step's distance from loving his songs to loving the man — the most disconsolately unfortunate man we have ever known. And this we haven't been able to do.

Our loveless going through the motion of ' revering the poet has made us all Impervi ous to the indignities heaped on him. How prophetic was he in his disappointed withdrawal from this world without love