Kazi Nazrul University was established under the West Bengal Act XIX of 2012. The Assent of the Governor was first published in the Kolkata Gazette Extraordinary 16^th August 2012. Named after the rebel poet, Kazi Nazrul Islam(1899-1976) of India – who is also the national poet of Bangladesh – this university aims at achieving an ideal of creative freedom that marks the life of the mind and the intellectual traffic of ideas. The revolutionary poet, Kazi Nazrul, has been immortalised in Bengali cultural memory because of his acute thirst for a spirit of independence and his attentiveness to the syncretism that characterises knowledge traditions as well as transactions. This university has been established with the explicit aim of achieving this same syncretism of purpose and its allied commitment to the dream of a transformed future. Thefoundingvision of Kazi Nazrul University is to function effectively as an institutional space encouraging and providing instruction, teaching, training and research in various branches of learning and courses of study – with a view to promoting advancement and dissemination of knowledge, and extending higher education to meet the immediate needs ofsociety. While teaching activities are the mainstay of any higher educational institution, KNU has been modelled after the Humboldtian fashion of a research university – with specific emphasis on the need for knowledge production alongside processes of dissemination. There have been notable endeavours within the university to set up centres for advanced interdisciplinary exchange and intensive research collaboration, apart from rigorous daily routines of classroom instruction.

For a long time there has been a demand for a university in this area. The setting up of Kazi Nazrul University was primarily intended at responding to these local-material needs of democratizing higher education, outside of urban-metropolitan centres of cultural dominance. Professor Anuradha Mukhopadhyay, the first Vice Chancellor, assumed office on 3^rd December, 2012 at the Asansol Durgapur Development Authority (ADDA) building. On 10^th January 2013, the Hon'ble Chief Minister of West Bengal Smt. Mamata Bandopadhyay laid the foundation stone of Kazi Nazrul University on its own campus –close to the birthplace of Kazi Nazrul Islam at Churulia, 31 kilometres away from the city of Asansol. Aligned with its original goal of spreading the reach of higher education along hitherto-neglected vectors of geographical development, the Universityhas been established to promote teaching and advanced research in Asansol and its adjoining areas in the district of PaschimBardhaman.