Syed Mujtaba Ali

Syed Mujtaba Ali ( bn, সৈয়দ মুজতবা আলী; 13 September 1904 – 11 February 1974) was a Bengali writer, journalist, travel enthusiast, academic, scholar and linguist. He lived in Bangladesh, India, Germany, Afghanistan and Egypt.

Early life and education

Ali was born on 13 September 1904 to a Bengali Muslim family in Karimganj, Sylhet district, British Raj. His father, Khan Bahadur Syed Sikander Ali, was a sub-registrar. He traced his paternal descent to Shah Ahmed Mutawakkil, a local holy man and a Syed of Taraf, though apparently unrelated to Taraf's ruling Syed dynasty. Ali's mother, Amtul Mannan Khatun, was a Chowdhury of Bahadurpur, an Islamised branch of the Pal family of Panchakhanda. Mujtaba was the youngest of three brothers, one of whom being the writer Syed Murtaza Ali.

Mujtaba Ali passed the matriculation exam from Sylhet Government Pilot High School though was said to have not passed his intermediate exam from MC College. In 1919 when Rabindranath Tagore was visiting Sylhet, Mujtaba Ali met Tagore who had great influence on Mujtaba Ali's writings. Later, in 1921 Mujtaba joined the Indian freedom struggle and left his school in Sylhet. In the same year 1921, he went to Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan and graduated in 1926 with B.A. degree. He was among the first graduates of the Visva-Bharati. 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 earned his PhD from the University of Bonn with a dissertation on comparative religious studies on Khojas in 1932.

Career

Ali then studied at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo during 1934–1935. He taught at colleges in Baroda (1936–1944) and Bogra (1949). He briefly lived in East Pakistan before moving back to India in 1949. After a brief stint at Calcutta University in 1950, he became Secretary of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and editor of its Arabic journal ''Thaqafatul Hind''. From 1952 to 1956 he worked for All India Radio at New Delhi, Cuttack and Patna. He then joined the faculty of Visva-Bharati University (1956–1964) as professor of German language and later of Islamic Culture. He lived in Calcutta till early 1972. Following the Liberation of Bangladesh, he moved with his family to Dhaka and lived there till his death in 1974.

Language activism

After the Partition of India into India and Pakistan in 1947, Ali went from India to the then East Pakistan. He was one of the first to call for Bangla as East Pakistan's state language on 30 November 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, being the principal of Azizul Huq College, Bogra, 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