Writing Resistance: Kazi Nazrul Islam’s Prose and the Ethics of Anti-Colonial Politics

Abstract

This article examines selected prose writings and journalistic essays by Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976) as a sustained form of anti-colonial political thought in colonial Bengal. Moving beyond the dominant image of Nazrul as a revolutionary poet, it repositions him as a vernacular political theorist whose prose articulates a counter-hegemonic ethics of resistance. Using discourse analysis and ideological criticism, the article shows how Nazrul’s writing challenges colonial legality, exposes the epistemic foundations of imperial power, and constructs an alternative political subjectivity grounded in collective agency and moral responsibility. Through close readings of texts associated with Jugobani, Dhumketu and Rajbandir Jabanbandi, it argues that Nazrul turns journalism into political praxis and literature into ethical intervention. It further argues that his engagement with revolutionary violence yields a tragic ethics of resistance that refuses both pacifist idealism and romantic militancy. The article contributes to postcolonial scholarship by recovering Nazrul’s prose as a site of indigenous political theory and decolonial critique.