From guerrilla to rock hero

Azam Khan

by Maqsoodul Haque

IT WAS a rain-drenched night in June 1971. A three-man squad of Mukti Bahini guerrillas had been crawling head down for well over an hour. A well-fortified Pakistan army forward bunker at Saldah in Comilla was the target. Earlier, the three had walked non-stop from their secret camp within the liberated Bangladesh for four hours. The only homing element to target the enemy was beacons coming off several Petromax lamps visible only as a blur in the distance. The orders from the sector commander were precise. Crawl till the enemy was sighted and in line of fire before executing the ambush. Optical illusions had made figuring distances exacting. The element of surprise could not be betrayed. This was to be the young warrior’s baptism by fire.

Yet it was the guerrillas who were in for a bigger surprise. Before they could figure out and gather their bearings, they realised that they were less than half a metre away from target. From their vantage point, on the top of the bunker and about three metres below, they saw the enemy. Six Pakistani soldiers huddled together for dinner under a tarpaulin cover.

The rain was beating down hard—and no, there wasn’t any sentry on duty. The guerrillas, heart thudding with excitement, waited. They had to be doubly sure. Those were the early days of the war, and weapons were few. The leader, a section commander of this special ops squad, clutched a vintage World War II 9mm sten gun with an extra magazine of bullets. The others had a pistol and four grenades between them. In awe they eyed the enemy’s assortment of weapons.

They soon realised this was no ordinary bunker. It was a heavy machine gun nest. They had to go for a precision kill, so the leader signalled his comrades to lie perfectly still until he opened fire. Rising stealthily from the crawl to a crouch and then standing upright he readied his weapon.

The leader steeled himself for the kill and with his great sense of wry humour, thought quickly; ‘How about singing them a song, in a language the enemy understands before they die, a befitting goodbye’? He chose a 1960s Hindi film song popular in East Pakistan and India.

And so it was with his shrill voice and the song—eisa mouka phir kaha milega (when will I ever get a chance like this again)—a staccato of Sten gun fire pierced the silence of the night. The first magazine was emptied. The enemy had no chance and as they lay moaning, the second magazine of 28 bullets was swiftly brush-fired in a final coup de grace.

The operation was over in less then five minutes. Before they retreated to base, the final count was six Pakistani soldiers shot dead, several weapons captured and the bunker blown up.

The 21-year-old guerrilla leader and section commander of Sector 2 on the secret mission was none other than Azam Khan, a.k.a. Mahbubul Haque Khan who passed away in Dhaka on June 5, aged 61.

Successive governments since 1971 have made a mess of our history. Each new version had to be coloured to accommodate requisite post-independence political expediencies. Although Azam Khan participated in no less than 30 frontal fights and innumerable hit-and-run operations during the war, not much is known or documented about his valour and heroism during the war of liberation.

It is thought that his pre-war leftist orientation was the reason why he never received a gallantry award. After the war, barring a handful, he maintained a discrete distance from the rest of his former comrades. Whenever he spoke of the liberation war his words were limited only to details of how he left home and his return. At most he would describe his training in Melaghar, Agartala. That was all.

It, therefore, took me years of persuasion for him to come up with the first-person account above. Sadly, it’s the only one he ever divulged to me and that too because of my insatiable curiosity. There were other reasons why he chose to maintain silence.

He explained to me in 1992: while Mukti Bahini was a guerrilla force it nonetheless fought under a formal and structured military chain of command divided into sectors, sub-sectors and sections. True, they were a rag-tag group of irregulars and volunteers; however, the call of war meant the participants had to undertake an oath of secrecy. They were soldiers for the nation. It was an oath he chose not to renege upon for as long as he could.

During my intense probing on the subject, there were times he would give me an anguished look and much to my frustration, slip back into deafening silence.

In 1992 in sheer despair he told me: When your mother and sisters are raped in front of your eyes, your father and brothers mercilessly tortured and killed; you do what you have to do. Fighting for the motherland is no obligation—it’s a duty. In fighting the war, I did no ‘favour’ to my nation—neither do I expect any favours for what I did in return.

Emergence of the rock hero

TO UNDERSTAND Azam Khan and his music one has got to look at the way the world was shaped in 1971 and the tumultuous events that followed in the years thereafter. It was nearing times for the Vietnam War of 21 bloody years to come to an eventual conclusion (1975). In the US, a new movement evolved to address the consciousness of the young. Disparagingly they were termed ‘hippies’—in other words, social outcasts, riff-raff, good for nothing.

War and senseless brutalities were no longer fashionable. When millions thronged the Woodstock Concert—three Days of Peace and Music in 1969—all our rock heroes from Santana, Rolling Stones, Sly & The Family Stones, The Who, Crosby Still Nash & Young, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimi Hendrix, even Ravi Shankar participated. With screams of FREEDOM, the mass assembly was a peace missive fired by citizens of America, aimed at the soul and conscience of all mankind. The White House turned a deaf ear to it all. Music meant nothing—or so it thought.

Never officially acknowledged by the Bangladesh government were efforts by likes of Ravi Shankar, Bob Dylan and George Harrison in 1971 to garner support for our liberation war and the plight of millions of refugees then in India. On August 1, 1971 over 40,000 people thronged Madison Square Garden in New York and George Harrison’s epic rock rallying anthem ‘Bangladesh’ would instantly propel him to the centre stage of world history. The triple album on the concert went gold in days after its release.

The Concert for Bangladesh changed music globally. World music became what it is really meant to be—bullets hitting the soul of conscious people and thereby forcing changes in lifestyle and attitude among the masses, as also policies of governments.

A generation fights for freedom of expression

AZAM Khan had an earlier fascination for The Beatles and George Harrison in particular. It was only natural for him as a freedom fighter to acknowledge wholeheartedly his (Harrison’s) huge contribution to our cause as also his pure spirituality.

Rock until the late sixties was unheard of in our part of the world in its native language. 1971 is significant. We had entered a truly happening global cross-cultural exchange phase in the history of the world. The fallout in Bangladesh was marked in the persona of Azam Khan. Guitar, drums and keyboards made its bold entry into our cultural domain.

Accusations of cultural revisionism were in the air. Our elders and the teeming middle class in general, not familiar with the emerging new soundscape gave it a sinister label Oposhongskriti or counter-culture. This was going to be a no win-win situation for rockers, therefore politicised and abusive culture vultures were deployed by the establishment to confront the disquiet.

However the shape, definition and course of culture would change for the better in the years to come, and something our puritanical patronising cultural cognisanti could never imagine—not even in their wildest dreams.

It is, therefore, absurd to even suggest that anybody other than Azam Khan could have risen up to the occasion and taken on rock’s mantle on his lean shoulders for yet another fight. He bore all insults and ignominy heaped on him with fortitude, resilience and humour. He was the penultimate hero. Neither his credibility as a frontline freedom fighter nor his patriotism could ever be questioned. The simplistic yet powerful messages emerging from his songs could not be rubbished.

Nothing in the world stood between him and his mission. This was to be no guerrilla theatre; it was far more arduous and hazardous than bargained for. The government of the day as much as our parents was uneasy with this errant yet mercurial former freedom fighter.

The Jhanki philosophy

PEOPLE without a basic education in Western Music or culture term Azam Khan’s music as pop. Some have gone further than that, and have branded him either a ‘Pop Guru’ or ‘Pop Samrat’ (emperor). Nothing could be more ridiculous and for records, he despised both terms.

Pop as a word may mean ‘popular’ yet as a genre it has an altogether different and negative connotation; ‘crass’ as in ‘unrefined as to be lacking in discrimination and sensibility’. To explain it further, pop music is wallpaper music. It is neither painting nor sculpture, i.e. it has no permanence. Azam Khan’s music is all about what pop is NOT. It has lasted for over 38 years and will last for centuries.

Rock is just not a Western musical genre. It is a comprehensive philosophy and lifestyle statement, which at its finest rejects status quo, establishment, i.e. any form of exploitation or subjugation of fellow man. It is a derivative of the words ‘Rock and Roll’ or to shake and rattle listeners to act, free their spirit, wake up and rise up in revolt against all scum’s of the earth.

On the flipside, it is also a self-destruct philosophy and it isn’t as if Azam Khan was unaware of it. He had volunteered for several hazardous near-death encounters during the liberation war and survived. Our liberation, as far as he was concerned, meant just the culmination of many skirmishes—the final battles were never fought, the war as such never ended. Independence means freeing the nation ensnared in mental slavery and as in War and so in peace; he chose to take sides with the toiling masses. His weapon would be music.

It is only appropriate that Azam Khan gave the philosophy an amusing Bengali coinage—‘Jhanki o Dola’—later settling for just ‘Jhanki’ or Rock. His favourite quip whenever he saw me was – ‘jhanki ditey hoibo’ (we gotta rock it)! How more ‘Western’ can you get to describe rock in Bengali than just that one punch word – ‘Jhanki’?

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Maqsoodul Haque was the lead vocalist for FeedBack from 1976 to 1987 and is currently the front man and band leader of the jazz-rock fusion ensemble Maqsood O’ dHAKA.