TAQWACORE WEBZINE

I was just reading Blue-Eyed Devil while my Genius Itunes played music that I never knew I had. This song just jumped on, the 2008 song Rebel Warriors by Asian Dub Foundation.

My ears perked as the open khobitah had recognizable words. It was in Bangla. I immediately went to the parents to ask them what it said.

“Oh! This is Bidrohi Kobi!” my dad said, as he looked over my shoulder at my laptop. Bidrohi Kobi is defined in English as ‘the rebel warrior poet’. “His name is Kazi Nazrul Islam. This poem is famous. They recite it all the time. He’s singing about being oppressed against the British back when it was colonized. He saying that we need to fight.”

I had been a little surprised. I knew poetry and language was a big part of Bengali culture, but the poet that I heard about repeatedly was the famous Rabindranath Tagore, known for his Nobel Peace Prize that he won for writing his epic poem Gitanjali. But I hadn’t heard of Kazi Nazrul Islam, who was the official national poet of Bangladesh.

“They both are well known,” my dad continued. “Almost all Bengali functions start with a poem by Kazi Nazrul Islam and a song and dance by Rabindranath Tagore.”

This poem that was sampled in the song above is Islam’s most famous one of all – written in 1922 (after he left the British army in 1920) and is called Bidrohi. A punk blogger said with regards to the words, “I can’t get over how Rock & Roll his words are. It’s Like Sabbath meets T Rex meets The Clash.”

An excerpt of the lyrics are below, though you can find the full lyrics here. I believe the song sampled the closing para.

I am the hurricane, I am the whirlwind
I smash everything on my path and leave behind.
I am the dance-insane rhythm
I dance on, with my own beat
I am the heart liberated wit.
I am the different musical modes
I rock, I roll, on move I startleI whistle and swing on sharp notes.

I do whatever this mind wants whenever
I embrace the enemy and fight the death as a warrior.
I am pestilence, the global terror
I am the death of the dictator
I am warm and restless forever.

…

I am a Rebel ‘Vrigu’-
I mark my footprint on the chest of the creator God
I shall cut open the heart of the grief inflicting whimsical lord.
I am the Hero, Rebel – eternal -
Rose above the universe alone
My head is ever Monumental

I just find it phenomanal that rebellious poetry got such recognition in Bangladesh. It’s as if they were punks and activists intertwined into the history of what it means to be us here as muzzpunks in the US. The poets were punk before there was punk. And yeah, yeah, yeah, taqwacore is how we define it and punk is how we define it but I think being a rebel against the colonizer is punk, and Kazi Nazrul Islam was an original Taqwacore.

Though the wiki stated that Islam died in 1976 in Dhaka from a degenerative disease, my parents refuted. “He was poisoned,” my mom said. “By the British.”

That’s not what wiki said,” I told my mom. “It said he died a slow death.”

“He did,” she stated, “because he was poisoned. What is this wiki thing, anyways? What do they know?”

True rebel rocker, fighting the colonizer, poisoned by the oppressor… Keep your Gandhi, we have Nuzral Islam and Tagore to inspire fight in us.

And to close – Bangladeshi metal band, Dew Drop, doing a 2003 cover of Nuzral Islam’s Chol, Chol, Chol.

Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed is an activist and writer living in Los Angeles. She is the Founder of South Asian American Voting Youth (SAAVY), an aspiring novelist and a long-time blogger for the popular South Asian blog Sepia Mutiny.