Syed Mujtaba Ali
Source: Web (anandabazar.com)
Literature & Poetry • Historical Archive • 🇧🇩 Historical India • 2 views

Syed Mujtaba Ali 🇧🇩

সৈয়দ মুজতবা আলী (Known as "Mujtaba Ali")
Master Humorist, Travel Writer, Polyglot Linguist, Author of Deshe Bideshe
Born 1904-09-13 🇧🇩 Karimganj, Sylhet, Historical India
Passed Away 1974-02-11 Dhaka, Bangladesh
Lifespan 69 years old
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Notice / Correction
"A traveler without humor is like a book with no words; laughter is the universal translation of humanity."

Archival Overview

Celebrated Bengali travel writer, polyglot linguist, and master humorist whose delightful travel classic 'Deshe Bideshe' ('In a Land Far from Home') captured Afghanistan on the eve of the 1929 civil war.

Biographical Record

Syed Mujtaba Ali was born on September 13, 1904, in Karimganj, Sylhet. One of the earliest students at Rabindranath Tagore's Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan, Ali was an astonishing polyglot fluent in fifteen languages, including Bengali, English, French, German, Arabic, Persian, and Pashto. He earned his doctorate in comparative philology from the University of Bonn in Germany.

In 1927, he accepted a professorship at the Habibiya College in Kabul, witnessing the fall of King Amanullah Khan; his 1948 travelogue Deshe Bideshe remains the undisputed classic of Bengali travel literature. In 1948, his visionary essay The Language of Pakistan became the first intellectual defense of Bengali as a state language of East Pakistan.

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Final Resting Place

Perpetual Memorial
Azimpur Graveyard
Dhaka, Bangladesh
GPS: 23.7282, 90.3852
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