Kazi Nazrul Islam and Decolonisation: Poetry as a Praxis of Political Intervention and Cultural Ecology

Abstract

This paper explores how Kazi Nazrul Islam’s poetry aligns with the leitmotifs of decolonisation. Nazrul Islam grapples with the race-gender-based regimens of his society. His activism and creative oeuvre harp on a subversive praxis, which interrogates the British colonial regime and racist norms ingrained in colonial India. As the paper examines, decolonisation not only foregrounds anti-colonial interventions and emancipation of the colonised, but envisages a continuing cultural revolution against colonialism. Analysing Nazrul Islam’s emblematic political poems and his intellectual struggle, the paper ascertains how his poetry and authorial-political life mirror the philosophy of decolonisation, and thus radically contends colonialism. His poetry pits a cultural wholeness – composed by nature, human, men, women, and global religions and myths – against the western ideology of culture, race, anthropocentrism, and androcentrism that remains agentive in shaping, consolidating, and validating global colonialism.