On a dusty track that winds through the coal-flecked countryside of Paschim Bardhaman, past paddy fields that shimmer emerald in the monsoon and amber in October, lies a village most outsiders have never heard of and that is precisely the point. Churulia is not a polished tourist town. There are no tour buses idling outside designer cafes, no ticket counters with glossy brochures, no hawkers in matching uniforms. What there is, instead, is the shadowed doorway of a modest two-storey house where, on 24 May 1899, a boy called Dukhu Mian, “the sad one,” was born to the muezzin of the local mosque. That boy would grow up to be Kazi Nazrul Islam: poet of rebellion, composer of some 4,000 songs, scourge of the British Raj, bridge-builder between Hindu and Muslim Bengal and eventually the National Poet of Bangladesh.
Churulia is, in a phrase, a literary pilgrimage country. You come here not for monuments in the grand sense but for the feeling of standing on the soil that shaped a towering imagination. You come to hear Nazrul Geeti drift out of a schoolroom window, to see the simple mound where his wife Pramila Devi lies buried, to walk past the remnants of a 16th-century mosque and the grass-covered hump said to hide the ruins of an Afghan-era fort. Come for the Nazrul Jayanti festival in late May and the village swells with scholars, singers and cultural heavyweights from both West Bengal and Bangladesh. Come on an ordinary Tuesday in February and you may well have the Academy to yourself.
History
Churulia's story is older than its famous son suggests. The area sits on the northern edge of the Raniganj Coalfield, a belt of rolling country long contested and long inhabited. Local tradition holds that a fort once stood here in medieval times, reduced during the 16th century when the Afghan chieftain Sher Khan swept across Bengal; a mound on the village's edge is still pointed out as the likely burial place of those ruins. A mosque built during the period of Muslim rule survives in modified form and is often cited locally as a modest but worthy example of provincial Islamic architecture.
By the late Mughal period Churulia had settled into the rhythm of a quiet Bengali village: paddy, pond, mosque, temple, the seasonal cycle of harvests and festivals. It was into this world that Kazi Faqeer Ahmed, imam and caretaker of the Pirpukur mosque and of the mausoleum of a local saint named Haji Pahlawan, welcomed his second son in 1899. The family was poor. When the father died in 1908, the ten-year-old Nazrul took his place as the mosque's caretaker and, for a time, as its muezzin, calling the faithful to prayer before he was old enough to shave.
What happened next was the opposite of what anyone in Churulia might have predicted. The boy fell in with his uncle's leto troupe, itinerant folk theatre performers, and began writing verses for their songs. He ran away to school, joined the British Indian Army in 1917, found his way to Karachi, read Persian poetry in the barracks, and returned to Calcutta as a soldier-turned-poet. In 1922 he published “Bidrohi” (“The Rebel”), a thunderous incantation of defiance that made him instantly famous and thoroughly unwelcome to the colonial authorities. Prison, journalism, marriage to a young Bengali Hindu woman named Pramila Devi, more poetry, more prison, the long dusk of illness that robbed him of voice and memory from 1942 onwards, the invitation from newly independent Bangladesh in 1972, his death in Dhaka in 1976: all of it traces back, somehow, to this unassuming village.
Pramila died in 1962 and was buried in Churulia, where Nazrul had wished to join her. That wish was never fulfilled; he lies instead beside a mosque on the campus of Dhaka University. In 2011 two admirers cycled from Churulia to Dhaka carrying a small bag of soil from Pramila's grave, which was mixed with the earth of Nazrul's resting place, a gesture of symbolic reunion that tells you most of what you need to know about the hold this poet still has two countries on.
Before You Go: A Reading List
A few hours with any of the following will transform what is otherwise a visit to a dusty village into a pilgrimage you feel in your bones.
- Nazrul's poem “Bidrohi” (“The Rebel”) - widely available in English translation. Read it once for the blast of it, a second time more slowly.
- A selection of Nazrul Geeti - search for recordings by Manabendra Mukhopadhyay, Firoza Begum (in Bangladesh) or Anup Ghoshal. Let the songs become a soundtrack for your drive.
- Introducing Nazrul Islam by Serajul Islam Choudhury - a concise scholarly introduction to the poet's life and work, useful for context.
- Kazi Nazrul Islam: A New Anthology, edited by Rafiqul Islam - a generous selection with accompanying essays.
- For the atmosphere of the wider landscape, Mahasweta Devi's short stories set in the Rarh Bengal countryside are unrivalled.
