While recommending to the readers the must-read work of Badruddin Umar titled ‘Language Movement and the then Politics in East Pakistan’, I will narrate the calendar of events in capsule form, and leave the controversies for Umar’s historiography to dispel. February 21 of 1952 was a sequel to the embryonic identity-consciousness of 1948 when Curzon Hall in the science faculty had erupted into a loud protest over Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s assertion that Urdu would be the state language of Pakistan. Shamsur Rahman Selim, a young fresher, had shouted ‘no’ to Jinnah, turning the entire assembly astir in pandemonium. That was when the seed was sown and the students of the University had since gone on underscoring the demand by relentless organisational work. When Khwaza Nazimuddin, the then Prime Minister of Pakistan and a scion of the Dhaka Nawab family, once again iterated Urdu as the sole state language of Pakistan, at a public meeting on January 26, 1952 in Dhaka, the campus community of st...
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