The feeling is rather queer. To read on one of our great poets in English, and that too written by a non-Bengali. We are not used to reading articles by foreigners on our poets and writers, let alone a full-length book. Though Bengali is the eighth-largest spoken language in the world, and its literature has a rich history for nearly thousand years, and in Tagore, a Nobel prize winner, yet in terms of global perspective we have very few litterateurs known worldwide. And our national poet, rebel poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, arguably the second-best poet after Tagore is even much less known than he deserves. Translation of his works, to my knowledge, is shamefully scant, and research studies on him are only emerging, and when such is the scenario, a brave effort has been taken up by Dr Winston E. Langley, a senior American professor of International Relations, who has written a book on Kazi Nazrul Islam, entitled The Voice of Poetry and the Struggle for Human Wholeness, published by Nazrul Institute, Bangladesh, this year (2007), detailing why and how Nazrul should be assessed as one of the most important poets of this age.

The book is an attempt to place Nazrul in a theoretical framework and also to highlight his importance in a global perspective. In both these orders the writer is successful, and as he has pointed out in his Introduction that while he was reading critical works on Nazrul, he was constrained by a lack of theoretical framework, so he supplies a critical paradigm, more or less a postcolonial one, to judge his works in addition to doing the job of relating Nazrul to poets, philosophers, essayists and theoreticians belonging to many ages and many cultures. The cross-references are too many judging by the slim size of the book (184 pages), and they are quite often sweeping and hurried too, but this one single lapse is made good by the writer's sincere desire to speak about a poet who wrote in a language he is not familiar with.
Preceded by a "Foreword" by Prof. Rafiqul Islam, Chairman, Nazrul Institute Trusty Board, the book contains a "Preface" by the writer and eight main chapters and an "Introduction" and a "Conclusion."
In the "Preface" the writer, by way of how he was introduced to Nazrul, says that he first happened to listen to Nazrul's music and he was so much charmed by it that he instantly decided to write a book on him. But starting to do so, he felt that "assessments of Nazrul were burdened by limited conceptual treatment." Hence grew his desire to create a critical paradigm for Nazrul.
The "Introduction" tells us how the writer finds relevance of Nazrul for the twenty-first century in some vital areas such as development, multiculturalism, nationalism, globalism, post-modernism, the environment, and human nature and capabilities. Nazrul, Langley says, is prompted by an urge to see human unity, and, therefore, his works oppose the idea of "clash of civilizations" and the rise of terrorism based on religious bigotry and segmentism. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. Nazrul appealed to the intellectuals to attempt to establish social justice by becoming "one with the struggle of the oppressed" (p. 17). Langley at this point takes a swipe at the culture of democracy, which, borrowing a phrase from Anatole Frances, he says denies basic rights to the poor in the name of "majestic equality" (p. 17). Thus Langley finds reason to praise Nazrul for his drive at waking up the sleeping conscience of the intellectuals and mobilizing their morality. The "Introduction," therefore, rightly places Nazrul where he belongs in our view too: the fighter for the cause of the oppressed.
The first chapter, "Nazrul: The Voice of Poetry," is where Langley establishes Nazrul's voice for the oppressed on a critical tract expounded by one famous political scientist and philosopher of the twentieth century, Michael Oakeshott, who judged in his essay, "The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Humankind," that the distinctive voice of poetry lay not in the idea of its being " 'a regrettable distraction from the business of living'," (p. 20), but in the fact that it engages human activity, and its images and metaphors are shaped out of this engagement. Thus Langley provides a critical paradigm to judge Nazrul which, so far as my knowledge goes, has been lacking in Bengali criticism on Nazrul.

In the second chapter, "Nazrul's Broader View of Poetry's Voice," is largely a continuation of the previous chapter but the added idea it deals with is to what extent Nazrul is a romantic or not. Acknowledging the fact that Nazrul is sensuous like Keats, Langley then furthers the idea by mainly finding a resemblance between Nazrul and the great Urdu poet Allama Iqbal, and then suggests that Nazruls's sensuousness goes beyond sensory perceptions as he, like Iqbal, is capable of identifying himself with spiritual senses. Langley asserts that Nazrul's transcending capacities can furthermore be coupled with the Confucian concept of the " 'continuity of being' (p. 33)" on the one hand, and Islamic belief in " 'no conceptual discontinuity . . . between the realms of the divine, of nature, and of humanity'," (p.33) on the other.
The third chapter, "The Spirit of Rebellion and Creation" is most fulfilling in which Langley elaborates on Nazrul's rebellious spirit by drawing on the colonial history as well as studies that cross refer to both the British hegemony of India and how the subject-hood was denied to the Indians by a ploy that today constitutes the theoretical basis for post-colonialism studies. The ploy is to continually circulate the idea that the Indian is a non-entity.
Langley chalks out five areas in which Nazrul's rebellious spirit has provided service to his oppressed countrymen. These are effectiveness, identity and rootedness, self-respect, orientation and unity.
Defying Macaulay's famous dictum that Indians could not have the position of the subject, Nazrul in his masterpiece Bidrohi ("The Rebel") most eloquently utters "I am irresistible, cruel and arrogant, / I am cyclone, I am destruction, / I am the great fear, the curse of the universe / I have no mercy, / I grind all to pieces," thus giving 'effectiveness' to the so far recognized 'impotence' of the Indian voice. From effectiveness follows the idea of identity and rootedness. The English made the Indians live like aliens in their own land, and it became possible to spread this idea by creating the Macaulay-inspired generations of brown and black sahibs, who were devoting their talents and gifts to the "other side" (Simone Weil's phrase quoted by Langley at page 50), that is the ruling class. Moreover, the British were naming and controlling (Langley's italics) things for the Indians. The absolute denial of recognition of the Indian's own identity reigned supreme. To dismember and dismantle this colonial cultural scaffolding, Nazrul, as Langley quotes Salimullah Khan as saying (page 51), had to act as a 'signifier' and use a transgressive language through such instructive poems as "The Rebel," "The Comet," and "The Complaint," poems that vociferated the true identity of his own countrymen. In doing so Nazrul unified the nation's sensibility, that is, he established what in the words of Eric Erikson, says Langley, denotes the " 'inner population of remembered anticipated sensations and images which are firmly correlated with the outer population of familiar and predictable things and people'," (p.44).
Once the inner cohesiveness of a national psyche is scripted, then self-respect will naturally grow, that is, an individual will know both what to wish and what to be able to do to give effect to one's own conceived plan. This self-respect has to be oriented by confrontation with the imperial forces: "He is loudly calling for the winning of an identity through confrontation with what appears to be omnipotent power" (p. 55).
Nazrul's transgressive language, Langley says, serves to recreate and reconstruct a new voice, a new hero: "I do not salute any body but myself" (Bidrohi), which was not expressed before, and, secondly, to alert the ruling regime that something or someone is resisting, and, thirdly, to occupy a part in the public space "where oppressors seek to exclude that which is unapproved or undisclosed" (p. 56): "Awake O cultivators, you have lost everything / You have nothing more to fear / With our hunger we shall all conquer the world of nectar / We shall make "no" the "yes" of the world . . ." ("The Peasants' Song")
So, Langley's remarks regarding Nazrul's justified use of the transgressive language can be quoted at length: "The 'loud-mouthed' Nazrul was and [is] transgresively impolitely intervening into the public space of accepted discourse, outside the confines of the language approved by the oppressor - outside the oppressor's language, which denied or obscured the wrong that was done to the oppressed" (p. 57).
While the fourth chapter, "The Romantic, the Modernist, and the Post Modernist" and the fifth chapter, "Nazrul: the Global Citizen" are a valiant attempt to adjudge Nazrul as a poet of international stature, they suffer, however, understandably for no fault of the author though, because of the writer's lack of access to sources on Nazrul, and, obviously, he had to satisfy himself with the few translated poems he had at his disposal, and, thus, what could have come out as a sustained comparative discussion between Nazrul and other internationally acclaimed poets fails rather at the level of the premise undertaken.
The sixth ("Nazrul: A Contemporary and A Man for All Seasons"), the seventh ("Development") and the eighth ("Women") chapters point out the inclusive nature of Nazrul.
The "Conclusion" regards Nazrul as most morally provoking. Langley asserts that Nazrul first dispels the idea that the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman West is the cultural centre of the world, and, secondly, he also attacks the notion that Islam is an intolerant religion and, thirdly, Nazrul's sense of patriotism is desirable as it "converts the selfishness (narrowness) of the individual into national egoism" (p. 177). Like Reinhold Niebuhr, Nazrul advocated for utmost altruism, not for unflinching parochial loyalty to one's nationhood.
Langley ends his book by pointing out a unique feature, which so far, and we have to agree with him, has gone unnoticed that when Nazrul is recognized as a rebel poet he is mostly thought of as a poet of destruction, but Langley rightly opines that he is more a poet of conservation than of destruction, because he has, in his poetry, courted for action, transculturalism, and above all aesthetic integrity, all which give testimony to the fact that he was a poet espousing conservation. Like Arnold ("Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!" quotes Langley from Arnold's "Dover Beach"), Nazrul based his belief on the efficacy of love for mankind's final reprieve from coercive social and political forces.
This book, I hope, will prove to be a must-read book in English on Nazrul. One criticism I would like to make, however, is that the writer's immense enthusiasm to prove Nazrul as a global poet has made him rather hurriedly draw analogies between Nazrul and other poets and writers of different cultures and different ages without supplying a cogent basis for such comparisons. Mention has been made of Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristotle, of literary characters like Antigone, of English men of letters like Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Arnold, and among the philosophers Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Eric Fromm and many others, and from the east Confucius and others, and, in fact, there are so many that as a result one might find that Nazrul has been proved extremely fecund and versatile as to include the elements of all good parts of all great poets and writers in one single soul. For example, Langley has remarked that Nazrul shows romantic symptoms of Wordsworth and Shelley as definitely as he reflects some basic tenets of Matthew Arnold. That is, Nazrul is as romantic as he is classic. This is not impossible for Nazrul who lived geographically and politically well away from the immediatProfessor & Head of Pe contexts of English literature to be affected by the clear division between the Romantics and the Victorians held by English canon, but Langley's references are too sudden and too brief to prove a point. It is like he is taking a free ride and cutting across all too happily among all definitely separate zones of literature and philosophy, and literary theory for that matter, and dropping names of writers and poets of quite established different natures in the same breath, and concludes that Nazrul has a relevance to all, or all have relevance to Nazrul, without ever waiting to show us how these links are actually provable.