Political prisoners first performed the drama “Kabar”

On December 14th The Daily Star published a requiem for Munir Chowdhury which for the first time mentioned that he wrote his famous drama “Kabar” for performance by prisoners to mark February 21 in 1953. From the sentence it would appear that prisoners in Dhaka Central Jail were free to stage dramatic performances or they had any such facility or freedom. But this was not the case. I was a prisoner in Dhaka Central Jail at that time and was directly connected with the whole process. Munier Chowdhury was a political prisoner and was residing in a cell of the New Twenty. There is another place in the Dhaka Central Jail named the Old Twenty. In the cellular prison quarters prisoners during the night remained secluded and alone in a cell. They could not stage a drama.

In the whole of the Dhaka Central Jail only Khata No Old Two was an exception. Here 80 odd prisoners were locked up together in one double storied building, the other half being used as a mosque. On Fridays political prisoners from all the separate cells and yards were brought here who were willing. It was a sort of weakly meeting opportunity for us Muslim prisoners. We used to exchange information on Fridays. There I met Prof. Chowdhury for the first time. And it was on one such Friday meetings that I conveyed the request of my ward's inmates to Prof. Chowdhury to write us a drama on the 21st February which he promptly did and named it “Kabar” and which we produced for the first time in ward no. 2 in Dhaka Central Jail. It was not the prisoners but political prisoners who requested and first performed the drama “Kabar”.

Hasanuzzaman Khan
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