Nadera Begum
A life lived in quiet courage
There was nothing of pretence in Nadera Begum. And pretension was an idea abhorrent to her as she coursed through life in all its varied dimensions. Her reading sustained her; and her teaching was something more than a vocation for her. She was unlike any other teacher in the department of English at Dhaka University in that she brought into her pedagogy, if one might use that term, a good deal of the informal. That essentially meant developing a remarkable degree of rapport with her students. She was forever breezing through the corridors of the department, an incessant sign of the activism that once defined her life. Her classroom lectures were brisk, noted for the constant flow of ideas which appeared from somewhere deep within her. Yes, you could say Nadera Begum was unconventional in the way she handled life in academia.
It was the unconventional which, back in what we now regard as the defining moment that was 1948, Nadera Begum called forth in her. She was young, came of a large family of siblings attuned to matters literary as well as political and cultural. There was Kabir Chowdhury. There was Munier Chowdhury, whom Pakistan and its quislings would murder in the War of Liberation. And, of course, there was the sister who would someday be known in the Bengali world of aesthetics as Ferdousi Majumdar. There were the others as well. But where Nadera Begum diverged from her siblings was not in the way she observed politics and culture, not in the way the family shared beliefs and values, but in the idea that politics sometimes needed a radical touch. Given that the state of Pakistan was increasingly exposing itself to charges of communalism and left-over feudalism, given too that the state was determined to ride roughshod over Bengali aspirations, protest was in order. Nadera Begum was part of that protest.
Nadera Begum was a young Bengali student, which is why it was only natural that hers would be a voice of resistance linking up with every other voice of resistance in Pakistan's eastern province. There was logic in that protest, for it was the Bengali language that was coming under assault. If men of the stature of Dhirendranath Dutta boldly raised the question of the status of the Bangla language in a country founded on communal politics, it was the young, like Nadera Begum, who showed promise of carrying the torch into the future. And it was a job Nadera Begum, young and vivacious and fired by conviction, did very well. In 1948, it was heresy to challenge the government. It was apostasy to question the workings of the state. But there were the young --- and many of them were rising political stars, like Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Tajuddin Ahmed, Shamsul Haq, Syed Nazrul Islam, Oli Ahad --- who did throw down the gauntlet. Other young men, the future Justice Abdur Rahman Chowdhury for instance, were courageous enough to let the all-powerful Mohammad Ali Jinnah know of the ignorance of the non-Bengali leadership about the cultural heritage of the Bengalis. It was to this group that Nadera Begum belonged.
Nothing strange about it, sure. And yet there was something unusual, for Nadera was a young firebrand and a woman at that. In her were combined the revolutionary fervour of Pritilata Waddedar and the intellectualism of Sarojini Naidu. For Nadera Begum, even at that young age, life came in a combination of social realism and intellectual yearning. And then there was the influence of Munier Chowdhury. The result of it all was a socialistic streak in her, a process of thought that swiftly led her into a defence of the rights of the class four employees of Dhaka University. That was, of course, in 1948. Nadera Begum's belief in the dignity of the individual was absolute: men on lower career rungs could not be divested of their dignity. She protested in writing, on public platforms. And she marched in processions where women were not supposed to be seen at all. Nadera Begum did not see things from such a perspective. Hers was a struggle for basic human dignity. She was not waging her battle as a woman. She was only bringing her education into utilization, in the service of the have-nots.
Therein she was a pioneer. Long before so many others in Bangladesh, such as Motia Chowdhury and Amena Begum; before women like Asma Jehangir in Pakistan and Medha Patkar and Brinda Karat in India, Nadera Begum was demonstrating the power of truth that women, despite being women, could wield against the autocracy of the state. She paid a price, of course. She went to prison and stayed there from 1949 to 1951, a very symbol of necessary resistance to a state fast losing touch with citizens. Not for Nadera Begum the easy way out through issuing statements. Not for her a life removed from the din and noise of politics. She was every inch a political being and yet politics was not what she wished to adopt as a way of life. After gaining freedom from incarceration, she went on with life as it ought to be lived. No braggadocio she, nothing in her of the arrogance which often comes to people who have once made a niche for themselves in the making of history. It was literature she went back to, as a teacher. She shunned the limelight, which is why no one sought her out every time the tumult of her youthful era rounded a year.
Nadera Begum did what history had ordained for her, in the early 1950s. And then she stepped away, into the other role history had sketched for her. She enlightened the young, made them walk the intricate, often tortuous pathways of literature. And she did it in her own fashion, giving her pupils topics to write on without any clues to the research the subjects needed to be underpinned by. There was that twinkle, almost motherly, in her eyes as she looked at a confused, often helpless you. Not to worry, said she. Do it this week and two more over the fortnight after that. Your knees were near collapsing.
Thre weeks later, you were beaming. Nadera Begum had read your essays, found them to be somewhat of substance, and given you a straight A for each.
raindrops collide against the window as evening prepares to pass into night. Across the skies, the clouds pass you by. No more than a couple of months ago, Nadera Begum --- political activist, scholar, academic --- passed through the constricting passages of life into eternal silence. Music comes in muted form.
Syed Badrul Ahsan was a student of Prof. Nadera Begum at Dhaka University.
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