National Struggle from a Postcolonial Literary Perspective: Nuruldiner Sarajiban

National Struggle from a Postcolonial Literary Perspective: Nuruldiner Sarajiban

Leela Gandhi refers to Ranajit Guha's opinion that Indian nationalism “achieves its entitlement through the systematic mobilization, regulation, disciplining and harnessing of subaltern energy, that nationalism integrates the randomly distributed energies of miscellaneous popular movements” (Dominance 144, qtd. in Gandhi 111). Syed Shamsul Haq (1935-2016), a literary stalwart of Bangladesh, has always been conscious of the contribution of the common rural people of Bangladesh to the nationalist cause. The mobilization of the peasants against British rule, as dramatized in Haq's verse play Nuruldiner Sarajiban (1992), is one such movement, the systematic accumulation of which Guha terms as “subaltern” energy that culminates in anticolonial nationalism in Bangladesh. Haq recreates the history of the Mughalhaat peasant insurgency of 1783 in Rangpur in his play in the 1990s, a specific juncture in the history of independent Bangladesh that requires the play to act as a clarion call to countrymen to unite against the then dictatorial government headed by Hussain Muhammad Ershad. The play simultaneously operates on two time frames: First, it establishes the position of the subaltern protagonist against the British colonizers that marks the postcolonial stance of the playwright, and then it stands as an inspirational symbol amidst its contemporary political crisis. The paper examines how the verse play illustrates both the colonial propaganda, the two-nation theory of the British colonial rule, and the anti-colonial agenda of the mass peasant movement-- ascertaining Nuruldin's position as a public hero, and also as an emissary of freedom and solidarity for all people in Bangladesh against neo-colonialism in a time of post-colony.