Bengal mourns death of poet Daud Haider

Hindustan Times

28-04-2025

Kolkata, The literary circle in Kolkata on Monday mourned the death of Daud Haider, an exiled Bangladeshi poet, in Berlin and said his poems reflected anger and rebellion.
He lived in India for 13 years before leaving for Germany where he died at the age of 73.
Sahitya Akademy Award-winning Bengali poet Subodh Sarkar told PTI that Haider's poems reflected anger and rebellion and the one for which he was expelled had a controversial line.
He was exiled by the Sheikh Mujibur Rehman government in 1974 after the poem criticising radicalism and bigotry in the country was published in a Bengali daily.
Haider's settling in Berlin was facilitated by Nobel laureate writer Gunter Grass at a time he was not sure about his future moves, Sarkar said adding that lately, his works resonated with a yearning to come back to his roots, his motherland Bangladesh.
Sarkar said he and Haider were in touch and used to make long-distance phone calls from Germany and talk to him for 30-40 minutes.
Recalling Haider's visit to Kolkata during the late '80s, Sarkar said, "We met at the residence of poet Sunil Gangopadhyay several times."
He recalled after living in India for several years, Haider's life took another turn as he headed to Germany and spent 35 years of his life there.
Haider died in Berlin on Saturday and his family and friends confirmed it the next day.
Condoling the death, another Sahitya Akademi-winning poet Joy Goswami said, "Haider was among the foremost poets in Bengali literature belonging to the league of Annada Sankar Roy, Aloke Ranjan Das Gupta and Shakti Chattopadhyay. His demise will certainly create a void."
Goswami recalled as a young poet associated with 'Desh', a prominent Bengali literary magazine, in his earlier years, he used to see Haider chatting with litterateurs like Sunil Gangopadhyay and Shakti Chattopadhyay but did not have much interaction with him on personal front then.
His poems left an indelible mark in the minds of readers, Goswami said.
Born on February 21, 1952, in Pabna district in erstwhile East Pakistan, currently Bangladesh, Haider served as the literary editor of the daily newspaper Sangbad in the early 1970s.