Islam, Kazi Nazrul

(1899–1976), Bengali poet and playwright. Kazi Nazrul Islam, known as the bidrohi kobi (rebel poet), was both a poet and a playwright who was deeply influenced by leftist ideology and who championed the working class. Many Bengalis consider Nazrul Islam a "nonconformist" who despite not having a formal education and not having traveled outside India acquired a worldly outlook. He took the Bengali literary world by storm with his poem Bidrohi (The Rebel). That poem, along with his many other patriotic poems and songs, inspired Bengalis during their struggle against the British and during the Bangladeshi war of liberation in 1971.

Nazrul Islam was born to an impoverished family in West Bengal, India. He lost his father at an early age and to support his family started working as a domestic servant and later as a baker's assistant. In 1917, at the age of eighteen, Nazrul quit high school and joined the Forty-Ninth Bengali Regiment. After the regiment was disbanded in 1919, Nazrul went to Calcutta to pursue his writing career.

Nazrul Islam is regarded as the greatest Bengali poetic force after the Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore. His chief works include Agnibeena, Shonchita, Dolon Champa, and Chayanot. Although Nazrul's life as a poet lasted a little over twenty years, he wrote three thousand songs, twenty-one books of verses, fourteen books of songs, six novels and collections of stories, four books of essays, three plays, four books of poems and plays for children, and three books of translations of Persian poetry and Qurʾanic verses. Many of his works remain uncollected in out-of-print journals and periodicals.

Tragically, Nazrul's literary career was cut short in July 1942 when he suffered a stroke and lost his speech. Within weeks his condition deteriorated further, and he lost contact with reality. He lived for another thirty-five years and died in Dhaka, Bangladesh.