| Sumario: | This article examines how Kazi Nazrul Islam, litterateur and musical polymath, references the First World War in his Bengali prose fiction as a means of constructing and asserting both a personal and a communal identity. Nazrul was part of the newly formed 49 Bengalees or the Bengali Double company, which never saw combat and was unceremoniously dissolved after the War. Several of his fictional works written during his posting in Karachi cantonment or immediately after it draw on the War as a matrix for staging a multiply inflected persona with autobiographical overtones. These texts often equate military service for the colonial master with patriotism and evoke an ideal of heroic masculinity for the heroism-starved Bengali. Besides, most of these texts try to inscribe Bengali Muslims into an urbane, middle-class literary space and forge an identity for them within the broader rubric of Bengali or Indian nationalism. But more conspicuously, these texts focus on personal emotions revolving around unrequited love. Even in texts depicting gruesome battle scenes and the rigours of military training, the Great War does not enjoy thematic centrality but serves only to metaphorise or catalyse the protagonist's amatory tribulations. This article argues that Nazrul's prose fiction deserves attention because of the way it appropriates and personalises the Great War for emotional self-projection, in dialogue with the more public sentiments of heroic masculinity and patriotism.
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