Today 23 October is the birth day of Poet Shamsur Rahman (1929 – 2006)
Shamsur Rahman was born in his grandfather’s house 46 no. Mahut-Tuli, Dhaka. His paternal home is situated on the bank of the river Meghna, a village named Paratoli, near the Raipura thana of Narshingdi district. He was the fourth of thirteen children. He studied at Pogos High School from where he passed matriculation in 1945. Later he took his I.A. as a student of the Dhaka College. Shamsur Rahman started writing poetry at the age of eighteen, just after graduating from the Dhaka College. He studied English literature at the Dhaka University for three years but did not take the examination. After a break of three years he got admitted to the B.A. pass course and received his B.A. in 1953. He also received his M.A. in the same subject where he stood second in second division.
In his leisure after the matriculation, he read the Golpo Guccho of Rabindranath Tagore. He told that this book took him into the extra ordinary world and transformed him into an altogether different personality. In 1949, his poem “Unissho Unoponchash” was published in “Sonar Bangla” which was then edited by Nalinikishor Guho.
He had a long career as a journalist and served as the editor of a national daily, Dainik Bangla and the weekly Bichitra in the 1980s. A shy person by nature, be became an outspoken liberal intellectual in the 1990s against religious fundamentalism and reactionary nationalism in Bangladesh. As a consequence, he becamea frequent target of the politically conservative as well as Islamists of the country. This culminated in the January 1999 attack on his life by the militant Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami. He survived the attempt.[1]
His health broke down towards the end of 1990s and on two occasions he received major cardiac surgery. He died in 2006 of heart and kidney failure after having been in a coma for 12 days.[1]
