Kabir Chowdhury

Kabir Chowdhury was a wellknown academic, essayist, materialist, translator, cultural worker, civil society activist and a pioneer in the movement against fundamentalism in Bangladesh.

Kabir Chowdhury was born in Brahmanbaria of the then Tipperah district of United Bengal where his father was working as a civil servant. He grew up in an atmosphere of liberal ideas and secular thinking. His family hailed from Chatkhile of Noakhali district of Bangladesh and his father was a devout Muslim free from any trace of religious fanaticism. Kabirs many close friends in school belonged to the Hindu community. When he studied English literature at the Dhaka University in the early 1940s he was greatly impressed by the writings of H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, among others. During the second World War he was deeply troubled by the Nazi atrocities carried out in their concentration camps, the mass killing of Jews as a plan of ethnic cleansing and the destruction of all democratic norms. Kabirs faith in democracy, secularism and liberal thoughts grew stronger by the day and he found himself drawn to socialist ideology.

Source: Wikipedia