Azad started his career in 1969 by joining the Chittagong College.[5] He joined the University of Chittagong as a lecturer on 11 February 1970 and Jahangirnagar University in 1972.[citation needed] He was appointed as an associate professor of Bengali at the University of Dhaka on 1 November 1978 and got promoted to the post of professor in 1986.[5]
Literary works
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Azad's first collection of poems, written between 1968 and 1972, was published as Alaukik Istimar (lit.'Unearthly steamer') in 1973,[8] in which year he went to Scotland for studying Ph.D in linguistics from University of Edinburgh. He wrote a short-story in 1979 called Onoboroto Tusharpat (lit.'Heavy snowing') which was inspired from his newly-wed life with his Dhaka University class-mate Latifa Kohinoor. In Britain one day Azad was driving a car with his wife during heavy snowfall which became the main plot of the short story;[citation needed] so many years later Azad included this short-story in his 1996 book Jadukorer Mrityu (lit.'Death of the magician') which book is the collection of his own-written five short-stories.
Towards the end of the 1980s, he started to write newspaper column focusing on contemporary sociopolitical issues. His commentaries continued throughout the 1990s and were later published as books as they grew in numbers. Through his writings of the 1990s and early 2000s he established himself as a novelist.
In 1992 Azad published the first comprehensive feminist book in Bengali titled Naree (English: Woman). Naree received both positive and negative reviews as a treatise, it was considered the first full-fledged feminist book after the independence of Bangladesh.[9][10] In this work Azad mentioned the pro-women contributions of the British Raj's two famous Bengali socio-political reformers: Raja Rammohan Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, he criticized Rabindranath Tagore, a famous Bengali poet and Nobel laureate, and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, a famous Bengali novelist of the 19th century. The work, critical of the patriarchal and male-chauvinistic attitude of society towards women, attracted negative reactions from many Bangladeshi readers. The government of Bangladesh banned the book in 1995. The ban was eventually lifted in 2000, following a legal battle that Azad won in the High Court of the country.[10]
In the year of 1994 he published his first novel which was titled as Chhappanno Hajar Borgomail (lit.'Fifty-six thousand square-miles, the area of Bangladesh'); the novel was about military rule in Bangladesh in 1980s decade. He got special recognition for his second novel Sab Kichu Bhene Pare (1995) which was based on interpersonal relationship of Bangladeshi society. He wrote Ekti Khuner Svapna (lit.'Dreaming of a murder'), an unrequited love-based novel where the main male protagonist lives in Salimullah Muslim Hall of Dhaka University where Azad lived during his student life, it was Azad's last novel published in 2004 in which year he died. Other important novels are Kobi Othoba Dondito Aupurush (lit.'The poet or the condemned eunuch') and Nijer Shonge Nijer Jiboner Modhu (lit.'The honey of one's life with himself'), the first was based on a fictitious late 20th century Bangladeshi male poet's life who is castrated after involving in live-in relationship with a much younger woman and the latter was inspired by Humayun Azad's own rural life when he was a teen-aged boy. Another noted novel written by Azad was Fali Fali Kore Kata Chand (lit.'The split moon'), where the main female protagonist character Shirin is an educated young woman with self-boastfulness, she engages in adultery, leaves her husband and becomes misandrist.[citation needed]
Azad also wrote teen-age literature, among them, the discourse-book Laal Neel Deepabali is noted, this book was written for teen-aged boys and girls as Azad's aim was to teach Bangladeshi adolescent boys and girls about the history of Bengali literature in short.[citation needed]
Azad had been fearing for his life ever since excerpts of his novel, Pak Sar Jamin Sad Bad (lit.'Pakistan's national anthem; Be Blessed the Sacred Land') were first published in The Daily Ittefaq Newspaper's Eid supplement in 2003.[6] In that novel, he indecorously criticised the political ideologies of the Islamic extremists of Bangladesh. After that book had been published, he started receiving various threats from the Islamist fundamentalists.[12]
Grave of Azad at Humayun Azad Complex in Rarhikhal village
On 12 August 2004, Azad was found dead in his apartment in Munich, Germany, where he had arrived a week earlier to conduct research on the nineteenth century German romantic poet Heinrich Heine,[14] several months after the Islamists' machete attack on him at a book fair, which had left him grievously injured.[15] His family demanded an investigation, alleging that the extremists who had attempted the earlier assassination had a role in this death.[16][17] While alive, Azad had expressed his wish to donate his body to medical college after his death.[18] But he was buried in Rarhikhal, his village home in Bangladesh, as doctors denied to take his body for medical research, as several days had passed to reach his body to Bangladesh from Germany.[19] The first death anniversary of Azad was observed with respect in Rarhikhal village on Friday, the 12 August 2005.[20]
Personal life
Azad married Latifa Kohinoor on 12 October 1975 whom he first met 1968 when studying M.A. in Dhaka University.[21][6] Together they had two daughters, Smita and Mouli, and one son, Anannya.[22]
^Kabir, H. (1976). Pronominalization in Bengali (PhD). University of Edinburgh. hdl:1842/17313.
^Husna, Asmaul (July 2022). "Humayun Azad and the Contemporary Relevance of His Writings for the Bangladeshi Youth". Society and Culture in South Asia. 8 (2): 275. doi:10.1177/23938617221099532.
^Nooha Sabanta Maula (18 September 2014). "What is Feminism". The Daily Star.
