Syed Manzoorul Islam: Writer of fiction and popular educationist

Junaidul Haque

Syed Manzoorul Islam was one of our most popular educationists. He was an internationally known intellectual and one of the foremost of Bangladeshi storytellers or essayists or critics. I wrote this piece when he approached his 75th birthday on January 20, 2025:

Syed Manzoorul Islam looks young for his age. He is now a highly respected Professor Emeritus, Department of English, Dhaka University.

They say that Syeds and Haqs rule the world of Bangla fiction or Bangla literature. They are not wrong. Just think of Syed Waliullah, Syed Shamsul Haq and Syed Manzoorul Islam. You may remember Hasan Azizul Huq and Mahmudul Haq. Younger Syeds and Haqs are also ready to take over.

So even Manzoor Sir (my direct teacher) reaches 75! Slim, always smiling, he was almost boyishly young even at 45. And now we hear that he will be seventy five! Wasn’t he fifty only the other day? God knows time does fly truly quickly. What do His angels gain by making such   brilliant men getting on in years? He became a lecturer only months before I entered the Department of English, Dhaka University, as a first year Honours student. He always read the writings of younger people and recognised me as a popular contributor to Young Observer, the teenagers’ page of The Bangladesh Observer, during my admission viva!

Syed Manzoorul Islam began writing as a student. And what a student he was! One of the very best to study in the English Department of Dhaka University. He graduated in the mid-seventies and joined the department as a lecturer. Today he is one of Dhaka University’s most popular senior teachers. He has written stories and essays, art criticism and columns during the last fifty years or more. He has earned his popularity as a writer and a teacher. He has written his brilliant, postmodern short stories during the last three and a half decades. I sincerely believe that these stories will give him a permanent place in the domain of Bangla literature. He has written a few brilliant novels. He is a powerful writer widely respected in both sides of Bengal.

Syed Manzoorul Islam’s short stories are not at all traditional. They differ a lot from the stories that we have been reading. He is a post-modernist with a very racy prose. His characters are varied: an old, aristocratic housewife of Sylhet, a lady owner of a ferry ghat hotel, Ferguson Dinnerwallah, a tea garden ‘combined hand’ with an interesting past, a police detective, a struggling garments worker and a garage apprentice, commonly known as a ‘grease monkey’. He treats them with great affection and turns ordinary people quite known to us into memorable characters. He delineates them with his effortless postmodern craftsmanship. He practices magic realism and often shifts time sequences to blend the past and the present. He is a very sensitive and careful observer of human nature.

He dips like a poet into the conscious and subconscious areas of the human mind. He portrays the complexities of city life with enviable ease. He describes our loneliness, our nostalgia and our sorrow. A craftsman like him is rare on either side of Bengal. His deep insight turns him into a truly brilliant writer. He is smart, fresh, witty and completely original. He begins his stories in an easy conversational style and slowly takes the reader to the bottomless pit that is the human mind. He is brilliantly satirical. He is a master of narrative and that makes his characters very lively.

Syed Manzoorul Islam paints contemporary Bangladesh quite skillfully in his stories. A student struggling to survive, a wayward terrorist, an honest worker of meager means, a sad and affectionate housewife, a robber-turned-billionaire, a poor farmer, a nice middle-aged lawyer, a working adolescent sacrificing his boyhood, a poor youth with shattered dreams and a dignified ‘fallen’ woman are some of his memorable characters. He is an effortless turner of the ordinary into the sublime. We find it difficult to forget his Dolai Khal garage mechanic, the terrorists of Bangshal and Shankar, the poor but noble tea garden worker, ordinary police detectives and the old lady aristocrat. The grandma of his story counts time with the help of an earthquake or an epidemic. The poor, middle-class boy who loved to go to school one day finds himself in Nantu Miah’s ‘Car King’ garage after the death of his father. He must support his mother and sister. Before reporting for work, the boy grabs his books and cries bitterly. The reader weeps with him. Observe Mr. Alam, an established doctor and formerly a farmer’s son. He loves to call Jafrabad ‘West Dhanmandi’ and sometimes only Dhanmandi. He can’t be a Jafrabadi and equate himself with a police sepoy or a bank clerk! The only distance he walks is up to the mosque and he likes the big salute of the darwan. The writer brilliantly satirizes the nouveau riche. He doesn’t spare the old aristocrats either. The zamindars of Prithvim Pasha bring blankets from abroad for their horses. ‘The horses slept well but the grooms shivered’.

As a critic and essayist, Syed Manzoorul Islam has written extensively on world literature, art and culture. He has discovered and promoted many a brilliant young writer. He has also written on politics and society. But I admire him most as a novelist and a writer of short stories. His fiction speaks against social hypocrisy and thuggery, the heart-rending repression of women and the dishonesty of the fake men of religion. He depicts the great sorrows of small people. At the same time, he gives us hope and helps us to dream of the noble and the beautiful.

We wish the brilliant writer and teacher many more years of creative life.

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N.B. I mention with deep sorrow that he left us on October 25, 2025 after suffering from a massive heart attack on way to the ULAB to take classes. After a few days of fight with death at the Lab Aid hospital, he left us for his heavenly abode, leaving behind thousands of relatives, friends, students and admirers.