Bangla Press Desk: Language Movement veteran, poet, essayist, and Rabindra scholar Ahmad Rafique died at a hospital in Dhaka on Thursday night. He was 96.
Ahmad Rafique, who was on life support, breathed his last at 10:12pm at the intensive care unit of BIRDEM Hospital.
His special assistant, Md Russel, and his driver, Md Kalam, confirmed the death news to the media.
Physicians said Ahmad Rafique suffered cardiac arrest just seven minutes before being declared dead.
He was placed on life support at the hospital as his condition deteriorated on Wednesday afternoon.
Rafique had long been suffering from kidney complications and, in recent weeks, endured several mild strokes.
On 11 September, he was 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.
Ahmad Rafique was born on 12 September 1929 in Brahmanbaria. He lived alone in a rented flat in New Eskaton’s Gaushnagar. He lost his wife in 2006 and had no children.
It has been learned that before his death, he donated his body to Ibrahim Cardiac Hospital and Medical College.
As one of the foremost chroniclers of the Language Movement, Rafique authored and edited more than a hundred books.
His contributions 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). This article was originally published on Daily Sun.
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