Editorial
Celebrating Sufia Kamal
She remains our point of light
Remembering Sufia Kamal is in large measure a celebration of the Bengali cultural heritage. The centenary of her birth, which was observed throughout the country on Monday, was indeed occasion for us to recall the significant role the poet played in our cultural ambience once she opted for a literary vocation in the early years of her life. She was an individual who, it can be said with pride, was our link with the past. Her interaction in youth with Begum Rokeya, Mohammad Nasiruddin, indeed with Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam were all pointers to the path that lay ahead for her, one which would define her own presence in the Bengali world of creative thought.
Surely the greatest tribute one can pay Begum Sufia Kamal is to recall the courage she demonstrated --- and in this she was amply encouraged by her family --- in emerging from a constricting conservative social atmosphere and going out into a wider world within the expanses of which she meant to give expression to her aspirations. And she did it with credit. Even as she engaged herself in literary pursuits, she remained fully aware of the poet's larger responsibility to society. And this responsibility she fulfilled marvellously well through taking part in all the progressive political movements which increasingly defined the Bengali persona after the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. She would not stay silent when the Ayub Khan regime sought to proscribe Rabindranath Tagore in Bangladesh. Likewise, in the mass upsurge of 1969, she spotted the beginnings of a political-cultural renaissance, which renaissance was to achieve round itself out through the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971. But the arrival of freedom did not lead Sufia Kamal into complacency. In the years that remained of her life, she waged a relentless, brilliant struggle against the forces of bigotry and darkness.
Sufia Kamal was, and remains, a point of light for the nation. That is why it becomes easier for us to look with optimism to the future.
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