HAILAKANDI, Sept 20 � Author, academician, scholar and linguist Syed Mujtaba Ali was remembered at a reminiscential meeting held here recently.
A meeting on the occasion was held at the Banga Bhawan under the auspices of the Hailakandi branch of Barak Upatyaka Banga Sahitya and Sanskriti Sanmilan under the chairmanship of its district president, Dr Paritosh Chandra Dutta.
Speaking on the occasion, the central president of the Sanmilan, Nitish Bhattacharjee informed that a district-level literary conference will be organised in memory of Syed Mujtaba Ali. The meeting was also addressed by Hilal Uddin Laskar and Santosh Kumar Mazumdar, among others. All the speakers highlighted the life and literary activities of Mujtaba Ali and stressed the need of popularising them.
It may be mentioned here that Syed Mujtaba Ali was born at Karimganj in Sylhet district of Bengal Presidency (now in Assam). He passed the matriculation examination from Sylhet Government Pilot High School and intermediate examination from Sylhet MC College. He went to the Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan and graduated in 1926. He was among the first graduates of the university. He studied for a brief period in Aligarh Muslim University. Later, he moved to Kabul to work in the Education Department (1927�1929) as a professor. From 1929 to 1932 he went to Germany with Wilhelm Humboldt scholarship and studied at the universities in Berlin and later in Bonn. He did his PhD from the University of Bonn with a dissertation on comparative religious studies on Khojas in 1932.
In 1934-1935 he studied at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Subsequently, he taught at colleges in Baroda (1936�1944) and Bogura (1949). After a brief stint at the Calcutta University (1950), Mujtaba Ali became the secretary of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and editor of its Arabic journal Thaqafatul Hind. From 1952 to 1956 he worked for the All India Radio at New Delhi, Cuttack and Patna. He then joined the faculty of the Viswa-Bharati University (1956�1964) as professor of German language and later of Islamic culture.
Mujtaba Ali was at ease in 15 languages. He was a trailblazer of a unique category of Bengali writing. Ramya Rachana in the Bengali language, an anecdotal storytelling often based on real-life experiences became immensely popular, mostly because of his attractive writing style. Deshe Bideshe, the story of his journey to and experiences in Kabul during his brief stint as professor in a college there is one of Ali�s best works. Panchatantra is a collection of thoughts and short stories (some already published in Desh magazine) of his days in Europe, Cairo and Baroda and Chaha Kahini are two more from among his best.
After the partition of India in 1947, Syed Mujtaba Ali went from India to the then East Pakistan, his motherland. He was one of the first to call for Bangla as East Pakistan�s State language on November 30, 1947, at the Sylhet Kendriya Muslim Sahitya Samsad. He was a prominent activist and supporter of Bengali as the national language of East Pakistan. In 1948, when he was the principal of Azizul Huq College, Bogura he wrote an essay, The State Language of East Pakistan, which was printed in Chaturanga of Kolkata. During that time, the West Pakistan rulers tried to impose Urdu as the only State language of East Pakistan while Bengali was spoken by most of the people. The Government of Pakistan wanted an explanation. Mujtaba Ali resigned and moved to India.