Syed Mujtaba Ali

Syed Mujtaba Ali was born on September 13, 1904 in Karimganj in the Sylhet region of British India, into an educated Muslim family that traced descent from religious scholars ^[1]. His father, Khan Bahadur Syed Sikandar Ali, served as a sub-registrar, a post that required frequent transfers and gave the boy an early acquaintance with different towns of Sylhet and Assam. The household valued books, and the brothers grew up reading widely in Bengali; his elder brother Syed Murtaza Ali later became a respected historian of Sylhet ^[2].

Schooling in Sylhet town coincided with the political awakening that followed the First World War. As a teenager Mujtaba Ali heard Mahatma Gandhi speak during the Non-Cooperation Movement, and the encounter left him unwilling to continue in a government-controlled school ^[1]. The decisive turn came in 1919, when Rabindranath Tagore visited Sylhet. The young student wrote to the poet asking whether he might study at Santiniketan, and Tagore replied encouragingly. After matriculation he left home in 1921 for Visva-Bharati, the institution Tagore was then building in rural Bengal ^[3].

He belonged to the first cohort of students to take a degree from Visva-Bharati, graduating in 1926 ^[2]. The years at Santiniketan shaped nearly everything he wrote afterward. He studied Sanskrit, English, and several modern languages, absorbed Tagore's ideal of an education open to the whole world, and formed a devotion to his teacher that he expressed decades later in essays and reminiscences. Fellow students remembered his gift for languages: by early adulthood he could work in Bengali, English, Urdu, Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and German, and he kept adding to the list throughout his life ^[3].

In 1927 Mujtaba Ali accepted a post teaching at a college in Kabul, arriving in Afghanistan at the age of twenty-two ^[1]. He spent about a year and a half there, learning Persian and Pashto, befriending Afghans of every rank from palace officials to his devoted servant Abdur Rahman, and witnessing the reform program of King Amanullah. When the Saqqawist uprising of 1929 toppled Amanullah, the young teacher lived through the siege of Kabul before escaping the country. Those months supplied the material for his most famous book, though he would not write it for nearly two decades ^[4].

A scholarship from the Wilhelm Humboldt Foundation took him to Germany in 1929 ^[2]. He studied at Berlin and then at the University of Bonn, where in 1932 he completed a doctoral dissertation on the Khojas, a religious community of the Indian subcontinent, examining their beliefs and practices on the basis of sectarian literature ^[3]. He was among the earliest Bengali Muslims to earn a doctorate from a German university. In 1934 and 1935 he continued studies at Al-Azhar in Cairo, adding classical Arabic scholarship to his training in comparative religion ^[1].

The European years widened a sensibility already unusually cosmopolitan. He read French and Italian, followed German literature closely, and developed the habit of comparing civilizations that runs through all his essays. Anecdotes from Berlin cafes, Bonn lecture halls, and Cairo streets later filled his sketches, always filtered through the persona of an amused Bengali observer abroad ^[4].

Returning to India in the mid 1930s, Mujtaba Ali taught for roughly a decade at colleges in the princely state of Baroda, where the reforming ruler Sayajirao Gaekwad III had built a strong educational system ^[2]. He lectured in comparative religion, a subject that suited both his Bonn training and his temperament. Colleagues knew him as a brilliant conversationalist whose classroom digressions ranged across a dozen literatures.

The Partition of 1947 unsettled his career as it unsettled the subcontinent. His home district of Sylhet joined East Pakistan by referendum, and he moved there, serving as principal of Azizul Huq College in Bogra from 1949 ^[1]. The appointment ended badly. In 1948 he had published a forthright essay defending Bengali as a state language of Pakistan, at a moment when the central government insisted on Urdu alone. The stance made him unwelcome to official circles, and he resigned and left for India ^[5].

The rest of his working life alternated between institutions and cities. He worked for All India Radio in Delhi, Cuttack, and Patna, spent time with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and its Arabic journal Thaqafatul Hind, and later returned to Visva-Bharati as a professor of Islamic culture in the early 1960s ^[2]. He never stayed anywhere long. Friends joked that the author of Deshe Bideshe (In Lands Home and Abroad) was constitutionally incapable of remaining in one land, home or abroad.

Deshe Bideshe, published in 1948, made his reputation almost overnight ^[4]. The book recounts his Kabul years: the overland journey through the Khyber Pass, the expatriate teachers' colony, the collapse of Amanullah's monarchy, and above all Abdur Rahman, the towering Pathan servant whose loyalty gives the narrative its emotional core. Bengali readers had seen travel writing before, but nothing with this blend of scholarship, comedy, and affection for ordinary people. It is generally regarded as the first major Bengali travel book about Afghanistan and remains continuously in print; an English translation by Nazes Afroz appeared in 2015 as In a Land Far from Home: A Bengali in Afghanistan ^[6].

A stream of books followed: the novel Abishwasya (Unbelievable), the Egypt-flavored fiction Shabnam, story collections such as Chacha Kahini (Tales of an Uncle), and volume after volume of essays including Panchatantra and Mayurkanthi ^[2]. The Chacha Kahini stories, set largely among Indian students in a Berlin boardinghouse, created a gallery of comic characters that generations of Bengali readers can quote from memory. His signature form was the ramya rachana, the light essay, which he elevated into a vehicle for serious ideas delivered with a raconteur's timing ^[5].

Recognition came from both sides of the Bengali-speaking world. He received the Narasingh Das Prize from Delhi University for Deshe Bideshe, and the government of Bangladesh honored him posthumously with the Ekushey Padak in 2005, one of the country's highest civilian awards ^[1]. Anthologists routinely place him beside Rabindranath Tagore and Pramatha Chaudhuri among the finest essayists in the language, and his collected works, published in eleven volumes, remain steady sellers in Kolkata and Dhaka alike ^[5].

In 1951 Mujtaba Ali married Rabeya Khatun, and the couple had two sons, Kabir and Firoze ^[1]. Family life, however, rarely anchored him for long; his postings and restless habits kept him moving between Calcutta, Delhi, Santiniketan, and the towns of East Bengal, and contemporaries described a man happiest at a tea table surrounded by listeners.

His linguistic range became the stuff of legend. Accounts credit him with command of some fifteen languages, including Bengali, English, German, French, Italian, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Sanskrit, Pashto, and Gujarati ^[3]. He wore the learning lightly. In his essays a verse of Hafiz sits beside a Sylheti proverb and a joke about German landladies, and the transitions feel like conversation rather than display.

Those who knew him recalled strong appetites and stronger opinions: a love of good food and adda (the Bengali art of extended conversation), impatience with pomposity, and generosity toward students and younger writers ^[5]. He wrote under pencil-names as well, including Satyapir, in newspaper columns that mixed satire with commentary on the politics of the day ^[2].

Mujtaba Ali spent most of the 1950s and 1960s in India, retiring from Visva-Bharati in the mid 1960s and settling into a writer's life in Calcutta ^[2]. Ill health began to press on him; diabetes and related complications limited his travel, though not his output of columns and essays.

The Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 stirred him deeply. He had been punished two decades earlier for defending the Bengali language in Pakistan, and he supported the independence movement openly from India ^[5]. After victory in December 1971, he chose to move permanently to the new country, arriving in Dhaka in 1972 and taking Bangladeshi citizenship. Relatives and admirers welcomed the return of a writer whose loyalty to the Bengali language had cost him a career in the old Pakistan ^[1].

His health declined quickly in Dhaka. Syed Mujtaba Ali died on February 11, 1974, at the age of sixty-nine, and was buried in the capital of the state he had lived to see born ^[1]. Newspapers on both sides of the border marked the death of a man who belonged, in an unusual way, to two countries and one language.

Anyone asking who was Syed Mujtaba Ali usually receives the same answer first: the author of Deshe Bideshe. Yet the Syed Mujtaba Ali biography is broader than a single book. He built a bridge between Bengali letters and the wider world, bringing Kabul, Cairo, Berlin, and Bonn into the language with a familiarity no earlier writer had managed ^[4]. His essays taught readers that scholarship and laughter could share a page, and his prose style, digressive, allusive, and intimate, still influences Bengali columnists and humorists.

Among Syed Mujtaba Ali achievements, admirers count his early stand for the Bengali language in 1948, years before the Language Movement of 1952 turned the question into mass politics ^[5]. His essay on the state language issue is cited in histories of that movement, and the Ekushey Padak awarded in 2005 recognized precisely this contribution alongside his literature ^[1].

The basic Syed Mujtaba Ali facts, a Sylhet boyhood, Tagore's Santiniketan, a Bonn doctorate, fifteen languages, and some three dozen books, only partly explain his hold on readers. What endures is a voice: skeptical, humane, endlessly curious, and funny in a way that survives translation poorly and rereading wonderfully. In 2015 the English edition of his Kabul memoir introduced that voice to international readers, and universities in Bangladesh and India continue to keep his work on their syllabi ^[6].