Thursday | 16 January 2025 | Reg No- 06
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Thursday | 16 January 2025 | Epaper

Remembrances

They speak . . . from the land of timeless silence

Published : Sunday, 29 January, 2017 at 12:00 AM  Count : 356
Syed Badrul Ahsan
In expectation of a dawning of freedom, they fell into the grip of a terrible night. As they waited, close to forty six years ago, for the song of liberty to reverberate across this land, their lives were claimed by elements of darkness come from caves and mountain fastnesses a thousand miles away.
Today, thousands of days and nights having passed since that fearful symmetry of fear and of dashed hopes coming to loom over this land of rivers and melodious moonshine, since that cherished moment when freedom came prancing into our courtyards, we remember with deep reverence the earliest of our fallen soldiers of freedom.
We speak of Professor Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta, of Professor Rashidul Hasan. In their sacrifice, as in the sacrifice of what would eventually be three million Bengalis, lay embedded the seeds of sovereignty and of that pursuit of happiness that remains the dream of every man and every woman in every spot of the planet we call home.
Today, on this afternoon of a January day slowly but surely passing into twilight, of moments redolent of the spring in our lives and in our steps as we traipsed down the corridors of our precious Department of English endless summers ago, we remember the scholars our martyred teachers were. We recall too the young men, students of this department and pupils of those teachers, whose lives were stilled in those nocturnal hours when the enemy upended civilized order and told us in no uncertain terms that barbarity was not dead, that some men were indeed nasty, brutish and short.
Our heads remain bowed before Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta and Rashidul Hasan. In the brilliance of our intellectual skies, they go on emitting light.
Our prayers for those young men, our student compatriots, who perished on that night of medieval barbarism, have never ceased, will never cease. They were ours, as we who live are theirs.
On this declining afternoon of a receding winter, there are too imperishable memories of the hearts and the souls of all the teachers we have lost to the inscrutable laws of mortality. They were the light of our lives as they sought to transmit that light, in all its beauty and in all its grandeur, into our bubbling youthful imaginations.
We offer up a prayer --- deep, purposeful and rising from the core of our collective heart --- today for all these men and women who led us by the hand into the land of literature, to have us know of the joys and pathos inherent in life. Literature, they said, was not life. And life, they averred, was not literature. And yet the two were inextricably linked, they told us day after day. Literature could be life --- and the other way round.
They were the teachers we revered. It was the spirit in them that was all. Observe them in their shadowy procession today, for they caused the creators of English literature to come alive in the classroom for us. Having done their duty, they passed on. They belong to the ages, to the timeless.
In our remembrances of these men and women of abundant brilliance ---- Ahsanul Haque, Khan Sarwar Murshid, Nadira Begum, KMA Munim, Shamsuddoha, Suraiya Khanam, Nizamuddin Ahmed, Kabir Chowdhury, Khondokar Ashraf Hossain, Khondokar Rezaur Rahman, Razia Khan Amin, Benazir Durdana, Syed Khwaja Moinul Hassan --- shines the light of God in us. In their laughter, in their conversations and discourse, in their reprimands, in their pensive silences, in the smiles which caused the stars to glow brighter in their eyes, we spotted a world.
We became part of that world. The world, let it not be left unsaid, will forever be underpinned by the hopes and dreams and ambitions they engendered in our beings.
We are what we are --- because they gave shape and form and substance to the seekers of knowledge we were --- and are --- in these uncertain and parlous times.
The stars will soon be out. In the song of the crickets, we will tonight travel down the road back to all our literary sensibilities. Tonight we will seek to reconnect with the men and women who taught us the meaning of rainbow skies.r
(This article is taken from EDAS Chronicle 2016, the annual journal of the English Department Alumni Society, Dhaka University. The alumni get-together took place at the Teacher-Student Centre (TSC) of DU on Friday, 27 January 2017.)
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Associate Editor, The Daily Observer






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