Shahalam Tariq
Sitting in a café in Beirut were three men; the literary critic Edward Said, the intellectual and activist Eqbal Ahmed and the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Edward Said recalled the event that when Eqbal Ahmed had stopped translating Faiz’s verses for Said, but for Said “as the night wore on it did not matter. What I watched required no translation: it was an enactment of a homecoming expressed through defiance and loss”. This was not an isolated scene captured through the window of a dimly lit past, but just one event of many. It is one moment of a history; a history when Pakistan was not the literary wasteland it is now, when artists and poets from Pakistan were connected to global circles not just artistically but in political solidarity. This has been covered in much depth by Sumayya Kassamali [1].
Today, I do not wish to talk about history, so I can, in the reflection of nostalgia discuss our present day turmoil to condemn ourselves as a ‘failed nation’. Rather, I aim to analyze in the light of history the ruins of present day cultural decay and to attach to that – instead of an idealistic longing for a glorious past – actual material and political reasons which led to said ruin. I aim to locate within the flux of history one of the principle reasons of the silencing of a mainstream progressive culture; the severing of the bond between the people and the artists. This article will not be exhaustive in any sense, I only aim to examine within a limited scope the reasons of culture turmoil.
A progressive culture – or any culture for that matter – is not an alien entity existing independently on its own. What a culture needs – to be erected upon – is the social formation of people, and the variety between cultures is reflective of the difference in those social formations. What I mean by this is that, the way people interact with each other, with different segments of the society they acquire ideas in light of those experiences and the art they produce is also related to those experiences and ideas. For example, if someone wants to write a critique of patriarchy their place in society must be such that as subjects they belong to that strata of society who have faced oppression at the hands of patriarchy – not men, specially ruling class men; though exceptional cases can exist.
To observe the disappearance of a progressive culture then, we must turn our heads and peak into the social and material conditions of those that produced it. Perhaps it would do us good to start our conversation with the beginning of the Progressive Writers Association; the publication of Angaaray, a short story collection written by the Left-wing writers Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan and Mahmud-uz-Zafar. The stories in the collection criticized religious extremism and patriarchy. One of the reasons why they could criticize religious extremism from the point of view of Muslims was because “they were born into that particular society…They were more sure of their ground” [2]. But Angaaray wasn’t confined to that as Ahmed Ali wrote about the so-called ashraf or the national bourgeoisie and criticized their behavior as in their minds “modern ideas do not new enable circuits of sympathy” [3].
This contempt for the national bourgeoisie highlights something significant, it shows a sense of class consciousness and class solidarity; the collective was in one way or the other connected to the Communist Party of India. In fact, after partition Sajjad Zaheer became they General Secretary of the Communist Party of Pakistan. The popularity of the CPI was evident as the Muslim League reached out to them for gaining popularity within the working masses as documented by Kamran Asdar Ali in Surkh Salam: Communist Politics and Class Activism in Pakistan 1947-1972. This is what I meant by social formations, the artist, whatever social class they may belong to, found the true expression of a progressive art only when they formed social bonds with the people.
The manifesto of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association speaks of bringing “the arts into the closest touch with the people” and to highlight all that would help “us to act, to organize ourselves to transform, we accept as progressive”. This shows that the very reason that almost the entire strand of popular literature of the past century in the sub-continent (and specially Pakistan) was based on the artist’s connection to his people and his ability to organize: an act which is always collective. The movement that gave birth to great names such as Faiz, Faraz, Jalib among others was this movement.
Thus, the more we probe into history the more it becomes obvious that attacks on progressive publications, abducting and killing of politically active students, the creation of pocket unions are all attempts to sever the bond between people. This bond creates culture and sustains it. Faiz Ahmed Faiz was a trade unionist, thus what he learned, he learned from being among the people; where real history is created and not in some imaginary poetic wonderland. Habib Jalib is known as the awami shayar or the ‘poet of the people’ and that is true of who he was, and what made him great.
It is rightfully recognized that religious extremism, a history of martial-law and censorship and backwards education are some of the many reasons which have caused the decline of culture. Yet, it must be recognized that every aspect of State-led repression has in some form directly attacked the sense of community between the people, whether it is the banning of student unions, or the imprisonment of popular leaders of the people such as Hassan Nasir. If we were to think of a lost past only in terms of things like music, literature, fashion and so on, on its own we would fall into the trap of nostalgic dreaming about a glorious past. We would have utopian dreams where decapitating religious ideas would free our sense of expression again, but a truly progressive art can only be born out of a real, material and social connection of the artist with the people. We need not bring back the past. What we need is to reignite progressive politics and a sense of organizing with the people. Once that is done at a popular level, great art and culture – amongst other benefits – would find its place in the Pakistani society. To dream of a lost past is to reminisce about ghosts, our task should not be to honor the dead but to imagine and create better horizons for the generations yet to come. So let us stop being Romantics, for now is the time to be Revolutionaries!
References
[1] Kassamali, Sumayya. “Faiz Ahmed Faiz in Beirut.” The Caravan, caravanmagazine.in/reviews-essays/you-had-no-address-faiz-beirut.
[2] Zaheer, Sajjad. “Shall We Submit To Gagging?” The Leader 1933.
[3] Shingavi, Snehal. “Introduction.” Zaheer, Sajjad, et al. Angaaray. 2014.
