by Mahmud Rahman for AlaloDulal

Badruddin Umar died earlier today in a hospital in Dhaka. He’d made it to 94 and even at this late age, he remained sharp enough to support the uprising last year that brought down the fascist regime of Awami League and politically savvy enough to applaud the post-uprising freer atmosphere in Bangladesh and also recognize its limitations. In his life he had lived through the convulsions of 1947, 1952, 1969-71, 1975, 1991, and he was able to look at 2024 with the historical sweep of his own lived experience.

When someone makes it to 94, I do not mourn their death. Our time on this planet is limited, and he lived longer than most. With his death, people are taking stock of his life, and depending on what each of us knows of him, what we know of his work, and what our own inclinations and prejudices are, we make assessments about his life and work. Today social media is flowing with judgments about Badruddin Umar’s life. From hagiography to vitriol and everything in between.

I have read some of his writings over the years and recall some conversations I had with him in 1985 and 1991. Those were the days when he was an active figure in Purana Paltan where his political trend had an office. I remember attending a meeting where I first learned about Aroj Ali Matubbar from them. From the pages of their journal Shongskriti, I recall reading his observations about the course of the left in Bangladesh. 

I was living in the U.S. and visited Dhaka infrequently. During one of those visits, browsing the used book stalls on the footpaths of Nilkhet I picked up his book Politics and Society in East Pakistan and Bangladesh. It’s a compilation he published in early 1974 of some of his journalistic articles during the late 1960s to the early 1970s, chronicling the change from East Pakistan to Bangladesh. I’m now reading it again in light of the monumental change of July-August 2024 and the year since.

He was quite sharp in his observations and analysis, at his strongest when he looked at the world without some of the tendency he had to fit the world into ideological straitjackets. In his political writings, I had long noticed that contradiction. On one side, there was the ideologically inspired yearning for radical transformation and yet he had to confront the messiness and shortcomings the world threw up. This book collects writings when expectations were still there for social revolutionary change despite the disappointments of post-1971 politics and society.

He is remembered today as an intellectual and an activist-organizer. His legacy includes many books on history and current affairs. At the same time, he belonged to a small political tendency, a Marxist-Leninist group that did not show itself publicly, that operated through fronts and affiliates, all very small but at the same time often sounding quite ambitious. I believe history will remember him more as an observer and thinker than an organizer. His politics in recent decades was largely relegated to committees, declarations, and symbolic protests. 

Even while being engaged in such politics, he himself sometimes recognized the limitations of his activist role. He complained in interviews that he was irrelevant and that no one read him in Bangladesh. In an article about the left in Bangladesh published in 2013, he wrote: 

“I have described here very briefly not the condition of the left movement, but that of the left itself, because this is the most important aspect of the present situation. If we properly understand the character and condition of the left, then the virtual absence of any effective leftist movement and the character of some minor movements led by them will become quite evident. It is not surprising that today, the left in Bangladesh has practically no workers and peasant organizations worth the name and their student and youth organizations are unworkable political instruments for any kind of revolutionary movement. They all operate within the framework of bourgeois politics.

“It, however, would not be proper to say that the entire new generation is totally indifferent to the condition of the people and are unwilling to do anything for them. There are some who try to help exploited, oppressed and distressed people in their individual capacity. There are others who, in small groups, organize some kind of charitable activities. But in spite of their good intentions their efforts are basically non-political and do not contribute in any way to develop democratic and socialist political organizations and movements without which it is not possible to effectively strengthen any struggle for social change.

“At the end it must be mentioned that in the situation obtaining in Bangladesh, as has been described above, there exist very small Marxist- Leninist organizations which operate outside the framework of ruling class politics. In the face of an indifferent people, a hostile bourgeois intelligentsia and press and a fascist ruling class, they are struggling hard. But in spite of great possibilities, their influence on the general political situation is still insignificant.” 

He was willing to acknowledge that the left in Bangladesh, including his own trend, had no mass base among workers and peasants. I do not get the sense he always fully understood why. There may have been a failure to really probe and understand the massive changes in Bangladesh society since the 1980s. In his final years, he often derided the indifference of society and the youth of the current time being consumed by apathy and apoliticism, and yet, in that final sentence he still maintained hope in “great possibilities,” without confronting the full measure of why such possibilities were remote. I appreciate that his hope in possibility did lead him to support the upheaval of 2024, and his radical intransigence kept him clear-headed about the limitations of the post-upsurge developments. 

Mahmud Rahman is author of Killing the Water: Stories (2010, Penguin Books India) and translator of Mahmudul Haque’s novel Kalo Barof / Black Ice (2012, Harper Collins India).