Badruddin Umar, who died in Dhaka on September 7, 2025, at the age of 93, was often introduced as a Marxist theorist and a figure of the Bangladeshi left. That label never captured the real centre of gravity of his life’s work. His lasting contribution was scholarly.

Umar left behind a meticulous body of English-language writing and translated work that gave international readers an empirically grounded view of East Bengal’s history, culture and class formation. The best of his English books and essays are neither slogans nor memoirs; they are archives in prose — dense with references, patient with evidence and consciously written to carry Bangladesh’s history beyond the limits of a single language community.

For students of South Asia who read him first in English, Umar appears primarily as a historian of structures, a cartographer of class conflict and a translator who understood translation as an intellectual act.

In the notice of his passing, Bangladeshi outlets described him as a public intellectual, researcher and teacher. These are apt terms but, to readers abroad, he is inseparable from the project of explaining East Pakistan and Bangladesh to the outside world, in the language that academic debates now most often use.

Bangladesh intellectual Badruddin Umar, who passed away in September, was often dubbed a leftist theorist. But his real legacy is scholarly: one that gives international readers an empirically grounded view of the country’s contested past

BEYOND NATIONALIST NARRATIVES

The clearest portal into Umar’s English-language corpus is his two-volume study, published by Oxford University Press. The Emergence of Bangladesh, subtitled Class Struggles in East Pakistan 1947–1958, reconstructs the first post-Partition decade through newspapers, election records, union minutes, memoirs and government papers. It is a historian’s........

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