Staff Reporter:
Eminent Language Movement veteran, poet, essayist and Rabindra scholar Ahmad Rafique has been placed on life support at BIRDEM Hospital in Dhaka after his condition deteriorated on Wednesday afternoon.
He is currently unconscious in the hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU).
Family sources confirmed the development on Wednesday night. According to hospital authorities, his treatment is being supervised by Dr Kaniz Fatema, head of the ICU at BIRDEM. Rafique has long been suffering from kidney complications and, in recent weeks, has endured several mild strokes.
Earlier, on 11 September, he had been discharged from Labaid Hospital and admitted to Health & Hope Hospital in Panthapath. However, due to a lack of adequate treatment facilities there, he was transferred to BIRDEM last Sunday. While at Health & Hope, between 13 and 14 September, officials from the Ministry of Cultural Affairs visited him and assured that the government would take responsibility for his treatment. His well-wishers say they are still waiting for such assistance.
Ahmad Rafique, who lived alone in a rented flat in New Eskaton’s Gaushnagar, was born on 12 September 1929 in Brahmanbaria. He lost his wife in 2006 and has no children. Beyond an extensive personal collection of books, he possesses no significant assets.
As one of the foremost chroniclers of the Language Movement, Rafique has authored and edited more than a hundred books. His contributions have earned him the Ekushey Padak, the Bangla Academy Literary Award and numerous other honours. His scholarship on Rabindranath Tagore is widely celebrated across both Bangladesh and India, with Kolkata’s Tagore Research Institute conferring on him the title of Rabindratattwacharya (Scholar of Rabindra Philosophy).
