History bristles with paradoxes and ironies. One such irony is that Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) is our “national” poet. For our national ruling classes and their allies have long come to stand in for almost everything—every system of oppression—Nazrul himself continued to confront, challenge, and combat: capitalism, colonialism, communalism, racism, and patriarchy. Indeed, to re-read Nazrul today is to re-assert the three distinctly pronounced principles of our own unfinished National Liberation Movement of 1971—equality, justice, and dignity. These principles, I argue, deeply inform Nazrul’s entire work. His own line—“Of equality I sing”—constitutes a leitmotif in a number of his poems. But Nazrul is more than a didactic poet of principles. He is one of the major Bengali poets and one of the greatest revolutionary poets in the world, one who manifestly declares in “Dhumketu” [The Comet]: “I’ve come now for the great revolution.” Given that this is the centenary year of the Russian Revolution, it is relevant to recall that this very revolution serves as Nazrul’s fundamental inspiration throughout much of his work. 

I cannot help recalling two conversations surrounding Nazrul’s work in places outside Bangladesh. In January this year, I met a group of black communists in Havana, Cuba. I shared with them Nazrul’s poems that are both explosively political and intimately lyrical. Their immediate response registered their solidarity: “Nazrul is our poet—a Cuban poet as well.” I also had the chance to discuss Nazrul with the great Kenyan writer-activist Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Pullman, Washington, back in 2005. Ngugi wondered if I was talking about a “Kenyan poet.” That Nazrul might sound like a Cuban poet and a Kenyan poet at the same time cannot be reduced to a matter of mere well-meaning solidarity or appropriation. Nazrul was not familiar with either Cuban or Kenyan poetry. But the fact that his lines resonate with other revolutionaries from the "third-world" instructively points to the very character and content of Nazrul’s own work. Such work underlines his internationalism and universalism—a “universalism from below,” to use the Caribbean Marxist CLR James’s phrase. Nazrul is the only major Bengali poet to have come from the rural proletariat, one who effortlessly relates to the oppressed of the world. In his poem “Coolies and Laborers,” just to take one example, Nazrul raises his usual question: “How long will the oppressed be treated like this/ throughout the world?” 

But Nazrul’s universalism is no erasure of the particular. It is the other way around. It accentuates, clarifies, extends, and accounts for, the particular. Also, universalism itself is not exclusively the property of the European Enlightenment. It has long remained in indigenous, Islamic, and revolutionary traditions in different parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It is not for nothing that the major Native American novelist Leslie Marmon Silko eagerly endorses Marx’s articulation of a revolutionary universalism, in the tradition of which, I argue, Nazrul can surely be situated. To see this point, one only need look at his 1925 collection of poems tellingly titled Sammayabadi [The Communist], not to mention his powerful and beautiful rendition of the communist anthem “The Internationale” in Bangla. 

But then Nazrul is first and foremost a poet of his own people—peasants and workers. Organically rooted in his own land, Nazrul offers words and works that are decisively forged in the fire of his people’s struggles against oppression and injustice in colonial India. 

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Nazrul takes poetry itself as a charged site of actions and interventions against different forms and forces of oppression and exploitation. As we would see, he takes poetry as an anti-colonial intervention in particular, given the determinate contradictions of the very historical moment that produced his work. 

Even his early stories, with which Nazrul began his writing career, at least partly attest to that intervention. But his voice as a whole can by no means be characterized quickly and one-sidedly, given his phenomenal productivity and the diversity of his passions, practices, and styles. Of course a poet and a musician in the first place, Nazrul is also a short-story writer, novelist, playwright, essayist, theorist (even a theorist of “world literature”), translator, film-maker, editor, journalist, even a drummer, and an actor. And he was a revolutionary activist, one for whom the borderlines between poetry and politics continued to dissolve at the battlefronts of history. But Nazrul’s productivity and preoccupations spanned a relatively brief period of twenty-four years between the two World Wars—from 1919 to 1942. Of those twenty-four years, Nazrul gave only twelve to poetry, and later increasingly moved on to the world of music, inaugurating—one might argue—an excitingly experimental chapter in the global history of music itself. His musical accomplishments are beyond the scope of this relatively short essay. But I intend to call attention to a few significant aspects of his work that revolutionized Bangla poetry. 

His enormous literary significance notwithstanding, Nazrul continues to remain ignored in contemporary studies of what’s called “World Literature” and even in postcolonial literary criticism today. Furthermore, comparative literary criticism in our parts of the world has hardly done justice to Nazrul's poetic interventions, hellbent as they are on blasting open the continuum of colonial history, while remaining committed to the emancipation of humanity in its entirety. I have pointed out elsewhere how the protocols of comparative literature—the ones that figures like Buddhodev Bose and Sudhin Dutta as well as their acolytes have mobilized—have proven not only outrageously misleading but also terribly Eurocentric. After all, comparison is no neutral thing. Comparison may mystify and even reinforce and reproduce unequal power relations among different subjects and sites and scenes. For instance, it is still customary to compare Nazrul Islam to Byron and Shelley and to even Rudyard Kipling, as Buddhodev Bose so uncritically did, so as to be able to account for Nazrul's “greatness,” while of course making the point that the West is the measure of all things literary and artistic. 

But if one has to make connections between Nazrul and other poets—no, a poet is not a solitary figure in the final instance—one might begin by placing Nazrul in the company of his own predecessors such as Nanok and Chandidas and Lalon on the one hand, and, on the other, in the company of such “third-world” revolutionary poets as Nazim Hikmet from Turkey, Pablo Neruda from Chile, Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Julia de Burgos from Puerto Rico, Faiz Ahmed Faiz from Pakistan, Roque Dalton from El Salvador, Otto Rene Castillo from Guatemala, Kim Chi Ha from Korea, Mahmud Darwish from Palestine, Jose Maria Sison from the Philippines, to name but a few. Comparison here—by making connections and zeroing in on historical specificities—may serve as a means to forging the kind of anti-colonial and insurrectionary solidarity Nazrul's own revolutionary universalism ardently accentuates on more occasions than one. I guess had Che Guevara known Nazrul's volcanic poem “Bidrohi” [The Rebel], Che would have probably kept it in his pocket all the time, where he almost always kept his favorite Neruda poems. 

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Let me return then to Nazrul’s most famous poem called “Bidrohi” [The Rebel] to see its aesthetic and political significance at this conjuncture.

I take “Bidrohi” as a revolutionary signifying intervention on behalf of the toiling masses in particular. Nazrul’s lines keep throbbing and pounding relentlessly like tidal waves in the space of this poem. In fact the entire poem moves at a whirlwind pace without losing its architectonic integrity, aesthetic beauty, and political vision. Nazrul seems to be taking to heart Marx’s famous injunction to writers: “Rub your conceptual blocs together in such a way that they catch fire!” “Bidrohi” to me is a fiery, blood-boiling poem of negation, rupture, assertion, affirmation, inauguration. The poem itself is a dialectical dance of the insurrectionary imagination in the high noon of British colonialism in India. 

An example of both literary and political rebellion, the poem unsettles an entire set of poetic or stylistic norms on the one hand and militantly confronts the oppressor of humanity on the other. One hardly finds a work in Bangla literature that formally and politically anticipates “Bidrohi”—a poem that combines in unprecedented ways a variety of metrical patterns and lexical resources. True, in “Bidrohi,” Nazrul seeks to confront and combat oppression of all forms. True, Nazrul was even sent to prison for writing poetry that fiercely fights the dominant. It is in this context also that one can place Nazrul in the company of some of those “third-world” revolutionary poet-activists I mentioned earlier—Hikmet , Dalton, Castillo, Faiz, Darwish, Kim Chi Ha, and Maria Sison—who all had to go to jail or prison because of their activist poetry that continues to threaten and unsettle the powerful and the dominant. 

While Nazrul’s poetry took him to prison, the language of his poetry ends up breaking the walls of that prison and even sets him free in a certain sense. “Bidrohi” dramatizes and mobilizes his accumulated resistance to the “prison-house of language.” Given this resistance, then, one can also place Nazrul in the tradition of his predecessors I already mentioned—Chandidas, Nanak, and Lalon Fakir—who all radically explore the power and limits of language, while seeking to evolve a new one by advocating the freedom of humanity. 

Also, in terms of literary rebellion, one might compare Nazrul to Michael Madhusudan Dutta, who inaugurated a decisive rupture with the literary tradition preceding him. Yet Nazrul is strikingly different from Madhusudan. Unlike him, Nazrul remains firmly, even organically, tied to his own people—poor peasants and workers. Thus one can easily take Nazrul as an example of Gramsci’s “organic intellectual,” who is different from a “traditional intellectual.” Like a true organic intellectual, then, Nazrul internalizes, articulates, and advances the cause of the oppressed—their aspirations, their nightmares and dreams, their struggle at more levels than one. As Nazrul maintains symptomatically in “Bidrohi:” ‘I am the pain and sorrow of all homeless sufferers/ I am the anguish of the insulted. . ." 

Surely “Bidrohi” can be read as an exemplary anti-colonial text—the kind of text that is animated and energized by opposition and resistance to colonialism. One may certainly profitably compare Nazrul’s “Bidrohi” to Yeats’s poetry of decolonization; Aimé Césaire’s anti-colonial poetry; Frantz Fanon’s liberationist counter-narrative of anti-imperialist resistance, and the works of other “third-world” writers that Edward Said catalogues and values in his Culture and Imperialism: José Martí, José Carlos Mariátegui, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Amilcar Cabral, among others. In fact, in his Culture and Imperialism, Said theorizes the very culture of opposition and resistance at some length, and maintains, “One of the first tasks of the culture of resistance was to reclaim, rename, and reinhabit the land. And with that came a whole set of further assertions, recoveries, and identifications, all of them quite literally grounded on this poetically projected base.” 

“Bidrohi” can certainly be read as a poem of assertions and identifications in the Saidian sense. Nazrul—as an act of identification and assertion—foregrounds, accentuates, enacts, repeats, and even renders ubiquitous the “I” of the poet. The “I” is used more than a hundred times. Also, he uses it with such force and fury that one gets the impression that Nazrul keeps exploding his verbal bombs one after another at the roots of colonialism—in fact at all forms and forces of oppression. Thus “Bidrohi” seems to be anticipating the spirit of one of the opening statements Fanon makes in The Wretched of the Earth: “Decolonization is a violent phenomenon.” And in his penchant for decolonization, then, Nazrul resorts to linguistic counter --“violence” in order to withstand and even completely do away with colonial violence itself in the very interest of building what Nazrul himself calls in the poem a “new universe of joy and peace.” 

But it is unfortunate that while Edward Said in his Culture and Imperialism—particularly in its chapter called “Resistance and Opposition”—invokes a number of anti-colonial poets and writers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, he does not mention our Kazi Nazrul Islam at all. Said commends Rabindranath’s progressive take vis-à-vis nationalism, while rather uncritically placing him side-by-side with the Black theorist-writer-activist WEB Du Bois. But Nazrul remains absent in Said's otherwise massive undertaking. Probably this absence has to do with Said’s own lack of familiarity with Nazrul’s work in English translation. But one can surely argue that a reading of Nazrul’s work could have significantly contributed to the strength of Said’s chapter on anti-colonial resistance and opposition. 

As a text of resistance and opposition, “Bidrohi” first identifies a series of contraries and then morphs them into an aesthetically and politically strategic unity of opposites against colonialism and “communalism.” That strategic unity is particularly signaled and enacted by a movement from the “I” to the “We,” a movement that releases a radiant burst of a collective revolutionary subjectivity towards the end of the poem. 

Also, Nazrul’s style of bringing together different and disparate elements is revealing and instructive. He yokes together certain elements of Hindu mythology with those of Islam. The ways in which Nazrul brings together those different and even apparently contradictory elements do not, however, attest to an unproblematically orchestrated unity of Islam and Hinduism as such. But they strategically point to the tensions and transactions between the two in response to what Fanon calls the “perverted logic” of colonialism that is characteristically divisive. Also, at other levels, Nazrul’s language offers a frequent interplay between the poetic and the prosaic, between the lyrical and the dramatic, between the indigenous and the foreign. Nazrul combines lexical resources drawn from Arabic and Persian and Bangla in ways in which he inaugurates certain exciting relations of language in Bangla poetry itself. He chooses words and even localized idioms from rural Bangladesh, while using Sanskritized words on certain registers. Indeed, Nazrul creates a language that is markedly different from that of Rabindranath Tagore on the one hand, and, on the other, from the language of Bangla literary “modernism,” represented differently by such poets as Jibanananda Das, Sudhin Dutta, Amiya Chakravarty, Buddhadev Bose, and Vishnu Dey.

Finally, Nazrul remains alive and relevant as long as his lines continue to resonate with the wretched of the earth, with the oppressed of the world: “I, the great rebel,/ shall rest in quiet only when I find /The sky and the air free of the groans of the wretched of the earth.” Indeed, it is in the interest of our anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-patriarchal struggles that we need to re-read, remobilize, and even re-invent Nazrul.

Azfar Hussain is Vice-President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS) and GCAS Professor of English, World Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies. He is also Associate Professor of Integrative, Religious, and Intercultural Studies within the Brooks College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University, Michigan and Summer Distinguished Professor of English and Humanities at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. He writes in both Bangla and English.

I think I've always loved mathematics in my own ways.

True, given the kinds of options that were available in my high school, I enthusiastically opted for what was then called the "Humanities Group." But I enrolled in that group—and later majored in literature—not out of my fear or dislike of mathematics as such.

In fact, very early on in my life, I used to look at mathematical symbols—or, say, at certain mathematical "compositions"—as I would look at paintings or even poems with a sense of awe and wonder. The symbols arranged in certain order on a page—or for that matter, patterns rendered visible—simply looked beautiful to me. They still do. Once in my dream, a dream that I vividly recall, I saw how an entire Shakespearean sonnet morphed into a 14-line mathematical equation right under my eyes!

Indeed, way before I began to read the French philosopher Alain Badiou—whose love of mathematics is unmistakable—I had realized in my own way that mathematics is more than just logical proofs; that mathematics cannot always be reduced to conventional logic; and that mathematics at a certain level does not have to do with even computational accuracy but it surely involves the power of our imagination.

As I recall, I even told a mathematics teacher during my Dhaka University undergrad days that there's poetry in mathematics. He laughed out loud, thinking that I was crazy or even stoned out on pot.

But I was surely high on the poetry of mathematics itself.

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The more I read Dante's epic poetry on the one hand, and examine Bhaskaracharya's mathematical works on the other, the more I realize that there has always been some poetry in mathematics and some mathematics in poetry. Of course, poets have long mobilized mathematical imagery, ideas, and insights. Many mathematicians, on the other hand, are known for using poetic lines, images, metaphors. I find it both interesting and instructive that the earliest poet known by name is also the earliest mathematician known by name—Enheduanna. She was the chief priestess of the moon god Nana in the city of Ur and daughter of the Akkadian king Sargon, one who was known to govern the region of Sumer during the period between 2334 and 2279 BCE.

In their book Discovering Patterns in Mathematics and Poetry, Marcia Birken and Anna C. Koon rightly provide other examples of poet-mathematicians that history has witnessed: Eratosthenes of Greece (274-194 BCE), Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), Piet Hein (1905-1996)), among others. All of them—their different styles and approaches notwithstanding—found striking and even stimulating parallels between poetry and mathematics, even anticipating Ezra Pound's crisp contention that poetry is a kind of inspired mathematics, among other things.

As Pound puts it: "Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions." But, then, it is also true that certain kinds of poems—variously known as typographical poems, concrete poems, prometa figurata, or visual poems, or carmen figuratum—directly provide those figures, triangles, and squares Pound speaks of. One can readily think of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the American poet e. e. cummings and even—before them—the great French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, among numerous others, who produced typographical poems, attesting to their geometrical imagination.

We discuss some of their poems in a course called "Creativity" that I teach relatively regularly at an American university. It's an interdisciplinary course predicated on the assumption that creativity is not the territory exclusively inhabited and owned by the privileged few but that creativity is to be found in the entire range of lived human practices. Students in this course explore, among other things, not only the apparent similarities and dissimilarities between mathematics and poetry as such, but also the poetic in mathematics and the mathematical in poetry.

We use the text instructively titled Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics, edited by Sarah Glaz and JoAnne Growney, among other works. That international anthology not only features mathematically inspired poems by such figures as John Donne, Elizabeth Barret Browning, Emily Dickinson, Rafael Alberti, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Duniya Mikhail, but also some great selections from Dante's Divina Commedia (Paradiso: Canto XXXIII).

We had numerous discussions surrounding those works, making all sorts of points vis-à-vis the relationship between mathematics and poetry while one consensus had already emerged: that all the poets I've cited above have what my students themselves came to call a "strong mathematical imagination." I then shared with them the words of the great nineteenth-century mathematician Karl Weierstrass: "It is true that a mathematician, who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician."

Weierstrass suggests that both poets and mathematicians pay utmost attention to language itself, avoiding what's unnecessary or even inelegant, and that both cannot operate without using their imagination, striving for the highest excellence at the levels of both language and imagination. The nineteenth-century English mathematician Augustus de Morgan even puts it bluntly: "The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning but imagination." 

Remaining attentive to the power of both imagination and language, students in my "Creativity" class further explored certain connections among poetry, music, and mathematics, while even choreographing some lines from Dante's Divine Comedy—lines that deploy geometrical images and metaphors with superb effects! Our conversation surrounding the metaphor of "squaring the circle" led to a fascinating discussion concerning numbers themselves—numbers that are rational, irrational, algebraic, even transcendental. And I was then continuously thinking of Pablo Neruda's poem called "Ode to Numbers" side by side with Alain Badiou's book Number and Numbers as well as the American poet Carl Sandburg's poem "Number Man," while we also talked about the effects of what are called "logarithmic spirals"—ones famously described by the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes and ones abundantly available in nature itself.

And, finally, the class as a whole, I thought, experienced the sheer beauty of mathematics itself, as we watched and discussed a few videos about the infinite geometry of doodling itself, making the point that to doodle is to produce an infinite number of beautiful spatial patterns—patterns that can even sing, dance, act. Is geometry itself then music spatialized? The answer in the class was in the affirmative. And speaking of patterns, I recall the English mathematician G.H. Hardy: "A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns."

Now one might still wonder what is actually so poetic about mathematics. The writer JoAnne Growney (whom I mentioned earlier) brings up certain examples of fine poetry within mathematics in the form of rhetorical questions: "Is Euclid's proof of the infinitude of primes poetic? What about the Pythagorean Theorem or the equation that asserts that the sum of all negative powers of 2 is equal to 1?" She offers her own choice that I find agreeable. It's the "Pigeonhole Principle," which, as she succinctly puts it, "is a statement that, like a mantra, and like a good poem, takes on new meaning again and again: if the number of pigeons residing in your pigeon house is more than the number of pigeonholes, then at least one pigeonhole must have more than one pigeon."

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Let me now categorically and quickly make a few more points concerning the relationship between mathematics and poetry, while also keeping in mind the question of music as well as the world in which we produce our poetic, mathematical, and musical works.

To begin with, basic things like rhythm, rhyme, order, pattern, symmetry, symbols—ones that variously obtain in poetic production—immediately involve the mathematical itself. Moreover, while both poetry and mathematics deliver their "truths"—as Emily Dickinson once put it: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant"—it is also true that both mathematics and poetry also continue to suggest and provoke all possible combinations and configurations of symbolic and tropic phenomena, which, however, remain anchored in the material world in the final instance.

And, of course, music and mathematics—as many musicologists have shown—speak to one another in various ways. But their exchanges do not merely reside in how they symbolically represent our world, but also lie in the ways in which both 'make' and mobilize abstractions that—however heightened and 'pure'—cannot simply free-float out of the horizon of human history.

Further, as far as mathematics in particular is concerned, it cannot but function rhetorically ('rhetoric' being the art and science of persuasion). Think, then, of the ways in which mathematics, like poetry, uses analogies, homologies, contiguities, substitutions, equivalences, and so on—or, say, simile, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and so on—while also mathematics, like music in particular, uses refrains and repetitions—also to be found in poetry—while even improvising so many different kinds of syllogisms in their attempts to persuade.

But all mathematical and poetic tropologics—if you will—finally remain anchored in the material world insofar as the act of making connections and combinations—an act that is of course common to both mathematics and poetry—cannot operate in vacuo, but certainly needs a base. And that very base is constituted by the body and nature.

Azfar Hussain teaches in the Integrative, Religious, and Intercultural Studies Department within the Brooks College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Grand Valley State University in Michigan, and is Vice-President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies, New York, USA.