Ahona Panda

The adoption of the ghazal by Nazrul, with renewed fervour in the late ’20s and ’30s, signaled an understanding that his earlier literary and linguistic world was an impermanent one, as was a politics in which the unity of Hindus and Muslims was achieved through an appeal to a shared culture and language.

I arrived in Dhaka, some years ago, as an outsider twice removed. First, I had grown up in Kolkata; second, I was a graduate student in Chicago.