Bridging the Divide: Kazi Nazrul Islam and Nationalism

Abstract

In my essay I have tried to show how Kazi Nazrul Islam wielded the all-important weapon of language to give impetus to the cause of Nationalism. The argument is based on the premise that the dynamics of creativity, the quality of imagination and the question of memory that are associated with creative writing cannot be ignored. Literature deconstructs memory if only to construct new memory to be further renewed and transformed by the receiver’s mind. Today, seven decades later after the independence of India, as we try to recover a sense of what the experience of nationalism actually meant to the people, we need to turn to the many layers of histories that lie submerged beneath the official history.