Literature and national consciousness

On 'Martyred Intellectuals Day 2020' in The Daily Star, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

"Professor Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta was a Bangladeshi educator and humanist. In 1971, he was a Reader at the University of Dhaka, as well as provost of Jagannath Hall. On the black night of March 25, 1971, Pakistani military officers broke into his flat and shot Professor Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta in cold blood after cordoning off the entire Dhaka University campus with tanks, mortars and armed vehicles. The wounded intellectual died of his injuries on March 30, 1971. This article was originally published in 1962 in 'Matters of Moment' and was later reprinted in 'Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta Sharokgrantha'."

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"Starting about a century earlier, thanks to their acceptance of western rationalistic tradition, the men of the Bengali Renaissance found time enough to lay an effective philosophical foundation for the Hindu national movement. In the case of the Muslim national movement, the task remained unfinished. Not that such a task can ever be really finished. What I want to say is that our intellectual preparation for a modern Muslim state was rather inadequate. We were racing against time and wishfully thought that deficiency in critical thought could be made up by an overbalance of action. But we are, on the whole, on the right track. We know that we are weak but not weak enough to be infected by the "terrible frenzy" of the Arab world which has yet to find a crystallisation of its national aspirations in an organised political society."