Sardar Fazlul Karim

Sardar Fazlul Karim (Bengali: সরদার ফজলুল করিম; 1 May 1925 – 15 June 2014) was a scholar, academic, philosopher and essayist in Bangladesh. Sardar Fazlul Karim was born on 1 May 1925, to a lower middle class Bengali Muslim family of Sardars in the village of Atipara in Wazirpur located in the Backergunge District of the Bengal Presidency (present-day Barisal District, Bangladesh). His father, Khabiruddin Sardar, was a farmer, and his mother, Safura Begum, was a housewife. He had one brother and three sisters, and they grew up in the village. When Sardar was a high school student, Saratchandra Chatterjee's novel Pather Dabi (Demand for a Pathway) inspired him to dream of a revolution for the first time; his friend Mozammel Haq had given him the book. Young Mozammel, a political activist and journalist, died in 1965 Cairo plane crash. The book greatly influenced the teenaged Sardar. Years later he learnt that the same book had inspired Jyoti Basu to be a revolutionary. Sardar was always an obedient child and even helped his father in agricultural work.