Professional and Literary Life
Azad was born in the village of Rarhikhal, Munshiganj district. He earned BA degree in Bengali language and literature from University of Dhaka. He obtained his PhD in linguistics from the University of Edinburgh in 1976. He later served as a faculty member of the department of Bengali language and literature at the University of Dhaka. His early career produced works on Bengali linguistics, notably syntax. He was regarded as a leading linguist of the Bengali language.
Towards the end of 1980s, he started to write newspaper column focusing on contemporary socio-political issues. His commentaries continued throughout the 1990s and were later published as books as they grew in numbers. Through his writings of 1990s, he established himself as a freethinker and appeared to be an agnostic. In his works, he openly criticized religious extremism, as well as Islam, the major religion in Bangladesh.
In 1992 Professor Azad published the first comprehensive feminist book in Bengali titled Naari (Woman). Largely akin to The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir in contents and ideas, Naari became a best-seller and earned Humayun Azad popularity as an author. In this work Azad painstakingly compiled the feminist ideas of the West that underlie the feminist contributions of the subcontinent's socio-political reformers and drew attention to the anti-women attitude of some acclaimed Bengali writers including Rabindranath Tagore. The work, critical of the patriarchal and male-chauvinistic attitude of religion towards women, attracted negative reaction from the conservatives. The Government of Bangladesh banned the book in 1995. The ban was eventually lifted in 2000, following a legal battle that Azad won in the High Court of the country.
Read more about this topic: Humayun Azad
Famous quotes containing the words professional, literary and/or life:
“Never be intimidated when you deal with men. Curse, don’t cry.”
—Anonymous, U.S. professional woman. As quoted in Aspirations and Mentoring in an Academic Environment, ch. 4, by Mary Niles Maack and Joanne Passet (1994)
“Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month’s labor in the farmer’s almanac, to restore our tone and spirits.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I don’t like your miserable lonely single “front name.” It is so limited, so meagre; it has no versatility; it is weighted down with the sense of responsibility; it is worn threadbare with much use; it is as bad as having only one jacket and one hat; it is like having only one relation, one blood relation, in the world. Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)