Mahbub bhai : The gentlest radical

MAHBUB bhai, the gentlest and most gentlemanly of radicals that many of us ever met has passed on. The photograph of his dead face awakens us to memories of the warmth and love he had for so many. Perhaps the last of the aristocrat revolutionaries is no more, leaving behind not so much his literary creations as the entire example of a life that he led with determination, style and flair that few could match. We hope that Jowshan apa, his cherished and fellow traveler in life and work, will find the strength to carry on without him.
Mahbub bhai was rooted in the earth of his native Chittagong and was one of the centers of the leading lights of that city, and it was common to see them at his home. But his mental rhythm also came from a youth spent in Kolkata and its revolutionary promises posed by Marxist politics. Like many of his generation, communism was not an ideological, but a moral, choice. It was the stamp of having a conscience, and that Mahbub bhai would give all -- his life and wealth -- to the party was, to him, not a matter of sacrifice but a privilege. It was possible for sons of the earth like him, on whom the leftist sun shone to do so. It was such silent heroism on which the anti-colonial struggle was constructed, then and later after 1947.
Yet, he was left asunder from the party one day, and this ache never left him. But he was not ripped away from the sense of history, culture and language that made the man he became, towering above his peers through his short stature and smiling demeanour never betraying the steel inside. Having forsaken his family wealth when he had it all, he returned much later to making a living, proving that commerce was natural to him; even as he aggressively ran publications, edited broadsheets, wrote, agitated and organised.

Sadness at the death of idealism
Jowshan (Ara Rahman) apa would sometimes talk about the hard days, those difficult years as he built his ventures over the years without yielding to his instincts for literature and patriotism. In the end, he became a person who, in many eyes, became greater than that ferocious raging poem describing the fervour of 1952 than any other poem written, then or now.
"I was actually confined to bed because of chicken pox and someone came and told me about the firing in Dhaka. I was so angry. That's how the poem was born." In a way, the overwhelming historicity of that literary success has dimmed the quality of his large and articulate oeuvre. He wrote in the time honoured tradition of the poet and essayist as an activist, treading a middle path between aesthetics and homage to the spirit of the multitude he believed in.
"Afsan, what's going on? Are they going to discard everything?" he had exclaimed once to me as the socialist worlds collapsed. It was an agonised cry of a man who saw almost all the pillars of socialism on which their dreams were made crumble in the face of what he thought was revisionism, whether of the Soviet Russian or Chinese variety. It was not an orthodox man's cry for the loss of command and control over destinies of others but an idealist's anguish. Anguish that the kind of politics which claimed that the rights of the poor, the primary obligation of the state, the centre of all understanding, were being whittled away. I wonder how he felt when he saw the number of millionaires rise at greater speed in the erstwhile socialist world than in the West.
In their Uttara home, there would be a constant gathering of social, cultural and artistic luminaries. Jowshan apa and Mahbub bhai had built a lovely home, which was decorated with a sense of style and artistry rarely matched in Dhaka. When they entertained, one always whiffed a redolence of "sharafat," that fading sense of aristocracy, generosity and style, always understated yet in the end musical and rich in texture. It was in many ways a ceremony of the passing of a world of which he was part of and in some sense presided over.
All things must pass and we will not grieve his departure, for it was a life full led. Instead, we shall mourn our own lessening for as long as someone like him had remained, a link to that magnificent world of "possibility and promise" was there. He represented a time when crafting a better history was possible. It wasn't to be, and all we now have is an old sepia photograph of his life and the songs of his memories.
Farewell Mahbub bhai. You lived well; you were the better one amongst us, young and old.

Afsan Chowdhury is a senior journalist.