Photo Courtesy: Nasir Ali Mamun / Photoseum

By Ankush Pal for Alal O Dulal

Badruddin Umar’s death marks the end of an intellectual trajectory that began with the Partition of British India and concluded with Bangladesh’s most recent student uprising. His significance lies not only in witnessing transformations but also in developing a Marxist analytical framework capable of understanding how revolutionary possibilities emerge and disappear within peripheral feudal-capitalist societies.

Bangladesh always systematically marginalised precisely the kind of analysis it most needed. Umar’s approach to political analysis was grounded in historical materialism applied to specific conditions rather than abstract theoretical formulations. His preface to East Bengal Language Movement and Contemporary Politics (Dhaka: Jatiya Grontha Prakashan, 2000) reveals this method clearly. He insisted that isolated incidents from the language movement could never properly illuminate its historical significance.

Understanding required examining the class character as well as the history of the Pakistan movement, along with the development, arrangement and conflict between classes in post-Pakistan period as well as how they expressed themselves in social, cultural and political policies and activities. This was not academic comprehensiveness but revolutionary necessity—movements could only be understood through the class dynamics that produced them.

This method distinguished Umar from both nationalist historians who celebrated popular movements without any critical distance and those on the far left who  dismissed nationalist uprisings. Umar’s analysis of the language movement demonstrates this dialectical approach.

Consciousness and class characters analysed

The 1948 and 1952 phases showed such dramatic differences in consciousness, scope, and organizational activity that they appeared qualitatively distinct. But Umar insisted this transformation could only be understood through examining the economic, social and political developments of the intervening four years.” Revolutionary consciousness did not emerge spontaneously but through the accumulated experience of class struggle.

This understanding shaped Umar’s documentation of the East Pakistan period. His chronicles of peasant uprisings, student movements, and political party formation reveal how genuine democratic aspirations could be systematically channeled into bourgeois nationalism. The Gana Azadi League’s 1947 manifesto declared that “independence of a country and freedom of the people are two distinct matters”—formal political independence could coexist with continued economic subordination. This insight anticipated the entire trajectory of postcolonial development in Bangladesh.

Umar’s analysis of the Communist Party’s disastrous Ranadive line, that was adopted at the Second Party Congress where the Indian National Congress was declared to be a part of the bourgeoisie, illuminated how revolutionary organizations destroy themselves through ultra-left sectarianism. The party’s sudden shift from cooperation with the Pakistani government to armed struggle, without building mass support or organisational infrastructure, isolated it from the populations it claimed to represent. The heroic peasant struggles in Sylhet, Mymensingh, and Rajshahi remained confined to tribal areas where they could be easily suppressed and communally distorted.

The language movement of 1952 provided Umar with his most complex analytical challenge.  genuine mass uprising that transcended class boundaries, bringing together students, railway workers, government employees, and ordinary citizens. The police firing on February 21, 1952, transformed cultural demands into political insurrection. Umar identified this as the greatest democratic movement in East Bengal while it was under Pakistan, but also noting the crucial limitation of the movement, the absence of anti-imperialist content which would enable the Awami League to later co-opt its democratic potential.

This analysis revealed Umar’s distinctive contribution to understanding peripheral capitalism. In societies where formal independence coexisted with economic dependence, national liberation movements could serve either revolutionary or counter-revolutionary functions. The Bengali bourgeoisie’s mobilisation against West Pakistani domination expressed genuine grievances while preserving capitalist social relations. The Awami League’s success lay in its ability to channel mass democratic aspirations into a project of elite accumulation rather than structural transformation.

Umar’s documentation preserved insights that remain relevant for contemporary political practice. His account of how the United Front government collapsed in 1954, how successive Awami League ministries succumbed to corruption and elite accommodation, how each democratic opening became an opportunity for bourgeois consolidation—all reveal patterns that have re-occurred throughout Bangladesh’s political development. The student uprising that toppled Hasina’s government in 2024 faces similar challenges of avoiding co-optation by elite politics.

The methodological sophistication of Umar’s work emerges clearly in his approach to sources. He combined documentary evidence with oral interviews while maintaining critical distance from both. His preface describes the difficulties of documenting political movements when participants systematically destroyed records out of fear, when government repression eliminated archives, when political actors exaggerated their own roles while minimizing others’ contributions. This source criticism reflected a deeper understanding of how power relations shape historical memory.

Umar’s political trajectory embodied the contradictions of revolutionary intellectuals in peripheral societies, like the Global South. The Marxist-Leninist groups he belonged to maintained theoretical commitment to revolutionary transformation while operating at complete remove from mass politics. They produced manifestos and organized symbolic protests but built no sustainable connections to workers or peasants. Umar acknowledged this honestly, by commenting how despite great possibilities, the influence of the Marxist-Leninist groups was unfortunately insignificant.

This capacity for self-criticism distinguished Umar from intellectual traditions that substitute revolutionary rhetoric for strategic thinking. Rather than blaming mass “indifference” for leftist marginalisation, he gestured toward understanding structural reasons for political disengagement. The massive changes in Bangladeshi society since the 1980s created new forms of social experience that existing leftist organisations had not learned to address.

Enduring cycles of disappointment

The 2024 uprising that Umar supported in his final year tested these insights. The student movement mobilised hundreds of thousands across class and regional lines, demonstrating that mass political action remained possible. A year later, just on the eve of Umar’s death, this mobilisation now faces the fate of previous democratic movements and worse—elite capture, institutional co-optation, fragmentation along identity lines, further deepening of communal politics. I can imagine that Badruddin Umar left earth with a feeling of revolution deferred, once again.

His intellectual legacy poses challenging questions about the relationship between revolutionary theory and political practice. Umar’s generation produced sophisticated analyses of imperialist penetration, capitalist development, and class struggle in peripheral societies. But they failed to build organisations capable of sustaining mass movements beyond moments of crisis.

Whether this reflected theoretical inadequacies, organisational incompetence, or structural impossibilities remains contested. What seems clear is that Umar’s analytical framework illuminates contemporary Bangladesh’s predicaments better than the political strategies of his contemporaries. His understanding of how bourgeois nationalism absorbs and redirects popular democratic aspirations explains the cycles of mobilisation followed by disappointment that characterise Bangladeshi politics.

The conversion of genuine grievances into electoral opportunities, the systematic exclusion of working-class interests from political discourse, the subordination of democratic participation to elite competition—all these patterns that Umar identified in the 1950s continue shaping political possibilities today.

The challenge for intellectuals following Umar involves building on his insights while avoiding the political isolation that characterised his later years. This requires neither abandoning revolutionary perspective nor retreating into academic irrelevance, but developing forms of political practice capable of sustaining mass organising over time. Whether such practice is possible depends partly on circumstances beyond individual control, but also on the willingness to experiment with organisational relationships that Umar’s generation never successfully established.

Contemporary Bangladesh faces crises that demand systematic analysis: deepening inequality, environmental collapse, authoritarian governance, and imperialist integration. The 2024 uprising demonstrated that popular resistance remains possible, but avoiding co-optation requires building institutions capable of sustaining democratic participation beyond electoral cycles. This work needs both the theoretical sophistication that marked Umar’s writing and the organisational commitment that eluded his political practice.

Umar’s death removes a voice that refused accommodation with existing power while maintaining hope in revolutionary transformation. The generation inheriting Bangladesh’s political future must develop methods for understanding and challenging forces that produce exploitation and domination.

Umar’s analytical tools remain indispensable for this work, but their application requires moving beyond critical observation toward the uncertain terrain of building alternative institutions. The revolutionary possibility that animated Umar’s entire intellectual project may require precisely the patient, unglamorous organising work that never attracts theoretical attention. It means constructing forms of social life that can sustain democratic participation rather than simply opposing existing arrangements.

Whether such transformation remains possible is the question that Umar’s legacy poses to anyone committed to the revolutionary vision that guided his work, even as it remained beyond his generation’s organisational capacity to realise.

Ankush Pal is a sociologist trained at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who researches the representation of Bengal and its culture, social movements, and urban spaces.