Badruddin Umar (1931), a towering persona, is no more. Umar is not merely a Marxist historian of postcolonial Bangladesh but a revolutionary theorist whose work fundamentally challenged dominant narratives of class struggle, nationalism, and state formation. His scholarship, empirical historical research, and radical political praxis critically examined class struggle, peasant movements, and the contradictions of postcolonial Bangladesh.
His six decades of intellectual endeavour constituted a radical counter-narrative to both liberal and revisionist leftist interpretations of postcolonial Bangladesh. What makes Umar's work indispensable for contemporary critical theory is its unflinching commitment to three revolutionary principles: that true historical change emerges from peasant and workers' movement rather than elite nationalism; that the postcolonial bourgeoisie constitutes not a progressive force but a comprador class; and that Marxism must be continually reinvented through the specific material struggles of the Global South.
Umar's most ground-breaking intervention is his critique of Bangladesh's ruling class as a "lumpen bourgeoisie", a parasitic elite that emerged not through classical capitalist development but through state patronage and imperialist collusion. This theoretical breakthrough is underwritten by Umar's devastating critique of Bangladesh's post-liberation trajectory in works like The Emergence of Bangladesh: Class Struggles in East Pakistan (2004). Here he developed his signature concept of the "lumpen bourgeoisie", a ruling class that emerged not through capitalist production but through patronage and imperialist alliance. This formulation, born from concrete analysis of Bangladesh's political economy, provides a more precise tool for understanding contemporary Global South elites than dependency theory's more abstract formulations.
While mainstream Marxism often centres industrial proletariats, Umar insisted that Bengal's peasantry, from the Tebhaga movement (1946–47) to the 1969 and subsequent mass uprisings, is the true revolutionary force. His Peasant Revolts in Bengal, 1850–1950 (1978) dismisses romantic nationalist narratives, showing how agrarian rebellions are class wars against zamindars, usurers, and the colonial state.
He dismantles two dominant historiographical myths simultaneously: the colonialist portrayal of Bengali peasants as passive subjects, and the nationalist glorification of middle-class leadership. Through painstaking documentation of the Tebhaga movement and other uprisings, Umar demonstrated how sharecroppers and landless labourers develop their own revolutionary consciousness independent of urban intellectual vanguards, an insight that anticipates later debates about subaltern agency while maintaining rigorous class analysis.
Badruddin Umar's seminal work Purbo Banglar Bhasha Andolon O Totkalin Rajniti (1970) fundamentally reconceptualised the 1952 Bengali Language Movement by excavating its submerged class dimensions. Where mainstream narratives, both nationalist and liberal, frame the movement as a cultural renaissance unifying Bengalis against Pakistani domination,
Umar revealed how competing class interests collided. His archival work demonstrated how the urban bhadralok (middle-class intelligentsia) strategically mobilised linguistic nationalism to advance their own interests, securing government jobs and cultural capital, while systematically excluding the economic demands of peasants and industrial workers. This is not merely an academic critique but a political intervention, exposing how the movement's legacy was weaponised to legitimise post-1971 regimes that perpetuated agrarian exploitation.
Umar's analysis anticipated later debates about the "cultural turn" in left politics, offering a materialist counterpoint to Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities by showing how linguistic nationalism in Bengal served concrete class objectives rather than abstract identity formation. His research on the marginalisation of proletarian dialects (such as the East Bengali Musalmani Bangla) within the standardised vernacular promoted by the middle class remains a crucial reference point for contemporary studies of linguistic imperialism in postcolonial states.
In Bangladesher Communist Party: Ottihya O Bortoman (1989) and subsequent essays, Umar developed a critique of leftist failures that transcended local particularities. His central thesis identified three fatal contradictions: first, the left's elitist detachment, where party cadres reduced Marxism to theoretical dogma while remaining alienated from the lived struggles of workers and farmers. Second, the strategic capitulation to bourgeois nationalism during the 1971 liberation war, where communist groups subordinated class demands to the illusion of a "national unity" government. Third, he documented how the oligarchic state systematically co-opted or exterminated leftist organisers through a combination of targeted repression and patronage networks, a process he termed "authoritarian demobilisation".
These insights find eerie resonance today, from the decline of the Indian Left Front to the crisis of socialist movements in Africa, revealing a recurring pattern where postcolonial left parties fail to build durable counter-hegemonic institutions. Umar's unpublished field notes on the 1980s peasant uprisings in Tangail and Sirajganj, where communist organisers ignored indigenous sharecropper leadership, provided concrete case studies of this disconnect.
Umar's scholarly practice constituted a radical break from both positivist historiography and Western Marxist abstraction. His methodology can be best described as embedded revolutionary praxis, combining three interdependent approaches: rigorous archival excavation of colonial land records and court documents; oral histories gathered through years of living among peasant communities in Noakhali and Rangpur; and direct participation in labour strikes and student movements as a "militant observer."
This produced works like The 1969 Mass Upsurge in East Pakistan (1989), where factory occupation committees and rural communities are analysed not as abstract sociological phenomena but through verbatim worker speeches and hand-written leaflets.
Umar's notebooks revealed an obsessive attention to material minutiae, from the price fluctuations of betel leaves during harvest seasons to the spatial organisation of railway worker dormitories, that grounded his class analysis in tangible lived experience. This method anticipates later developments in "history from below" but with a crucial distinction: where E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class reconstructs subaltern agency retrospectively, Umar documented it synchronically as both scholar and organiser.
His 1975 fieldwork on debt bondage in Comilla, for instance, simultaneously informs his theoretical critique of usurer capital in Agrarian Bengal (1986) and becomes evidence in land rights lawsuits filed by the Bangladesh Krishok Federation. This praxis-oriented epistemology challenges the neoliberal university's separation of research from activism, offering an alternative model for engaged scholarship in the Global South.
Umar's Marxism, equally critical of Soviet dogmatism and postmodern identity politics, offers pathways for reinvigorated revolutionary praxis. His recent interventions on the climate crisis's disproportionate impact on Bengali peasants suggest an evolving ecological Marxism grounded in material realities rather than academic fashion.
What emerges is not just a theory, but a toolkit for understanding twenty-first-century contradictions. Umar's insistence that Marxism must speak in the language of peasant uprisings and factory strikes, rather than academic jargon, makes his work profoundly significant for scholars and activists fighting authoritarian capitalism across the Global South.
The author is a professor at the Department of Development Studies at the University of Dhaka.
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