Introduction
Muslim nationalism, linked as it was to the demand for Pakistan, remained an unsettled question for various Muslim actors and groups in the political landscape of 1940s British India. David Gilmartin's pioneering workFootnote 1 on Punjab of this period shows how the Muslim League in the 1940s symbolically used the trope of din (faith, Islam) to further its own agenda of the Muslim cause, contrasting it to the concept of dunya (world) or the secular world of those linked to colonial rule.Footnote 2 Yet the League's insistence on faith was at times ambiguous as Jinnah, the Muslim League leader himself, was never entirely considered by the Muslim religious leaders, the Ulama, as a person who possessed the required credentials to lead a Muslim nation.Footnote 3 Within this context, Ayesha Jalal, by detailing Jinnah's negotiations for the creation of Pakistan with a range of political actors and constituencies, challenges official Pakistani historiography that represents the creation of Pakistan as the culmination of the historical aspirations of Indian Muslims.Footnote 4
To broaden the above discussion, for this specific paper I take my cue from David Gilmartin's important article in which he critically analyses the emplotment and transformation of the partition events into a ‘master narrative’ of nationalist historiography.Footnote 5 Writing about Punjab in the Partition era (rather than the heartland of ashraf politics in the United Provinces), Gilmartin argues that Pakistan's creation was also a partial resolution of the contradiction between the particularisms of Muslim identity linked to locality and place, and the larger construction of Muslim moral community connected to a territorially bounded nation-state. He states that although the Pakistan movement sought to transcend the divisions among Muslims through the symbol of the emergent state and the formation of the moral sovereign, the diversity of people's lives and particularistic cultural experiences remained in perpetual tension to this order.Footnote 6 The mistrust shown by the new Pakistani state, wrapped as it was in the ideology of Muslim Nationalism, toward the diverse aspirations of its own people led to an imposition of a meta-narrative of an undivided nation on the populace. A reaction to this political process was the gradual cracking of the constructed ideological edifice of a unified Muslim moral community. For example, by the mid-1950s the promise of the Muslim Nationalism that led to the creation of Pakistan in 1947 was severely put to the test by regional and nationalistic claims by Pakistan's diverse ethnic groups. Foremost among these was the voice of its Bengali citizens who, as the largest demographic part, claimed their economic and linguistic rights from the overtly centralizing state in Karachi, fourteen hundred miles away from Dhaka.
Such histories, as Shahid Amin in his rendition of a South Asian event of early twentieth century reminds us, are deleted from nationalist master narratives inducing selective national amnesia as these events fit awkwardly into neatly woven patterns.Footnote 7 In Pakistani historiography where the major pre-occupation remains the narrative surrounding the creation of Pakistan, many aspects of national life, like the emergence of Bengali nationalism, are given scant attention. A major arena of national amnesia that this paper seeks to address is the absence of any serious work on the nascent Communist Party of Pakistan's relationship with the populace and the state.Footnote 8 This paper is part of a larger research project that seeks to critically engage with cultural politics during Pakistan's early years of existence, paying special attention to the Communist Party of Pakistan during its brief period of legal existence after Pakistan gained independence.Footnote 9 In pursuing this task the paper will concentrate on literary exchanges between various intellectuals to offer a glimpse beyond the official retelling of Pakistan's history which periodically omits how the young country struggled to create an ideological consensus and to find a cultural basis for its creation and existence.Footnote 10
In order to elaborate on this argument, this paper will partially follow Ranajit Guha's discussion on the relationship of Indian national movement with the Indian masses.Footnote 11 Guha borrows the Gramscian concept of hegemony to show the processes through which consensus was built by the Indian nationalist elite leadership. He shows how these leaders needed to harness the intuition and enthusiasm of the people so that order could evolve out of chaos. Guha argues that the subalterns’ popular initiatives, autonomy of function, the immediacy in their politics and the spontaneity of their actions, needed to be disciplined by the bourgeois national elite for it to control and hegemonize the national movement. It is within this framework that I seek to provide a cultural and historical analysis of Pakistan's early years to argue that the debates among intellectuals were part of the ongoing attempts to ‘tame’ and ‘harness’ particularistic identities of various ethnic and linguistic groups by an emergent cultural leadership and the Pakistani state itself –the tension between the moral sovereign and the diversity of people's experiences.Footnote 12
It is clear that since its creation as the homeland for Indian Muslims the state of Pakistan has been an unstable configuration of shifting alliances and competing ideologies. The discussions, disagreements, apprehensions and conflicts over what should pass as ‘authentic’ Pakistani culture is a continuing story of various twists and turns. I argue that, as the country became independent under the banner of Muslim nationalism, the question for most intellectuals and State functionaries was what would constitute the cultural norms that would unify the diverse populace and what were the modalities through which this process would come about?
In Pakistan's first decade of existence there were clear camps of intellectuals who had competing claims linked to various ideological positions that impressed upon the state and the populace about the legitimacy of one set of ideas over others. One such set of intellectuals were linked with the Communist Party of Pakistan which claimed its lineage from the communist movement in India that besides having a secular (dunya) orientation in politics was very active in the anti-colonial struggle. As a continuation of the Communist Party of India the Party had some roots in the workers and peasant movement in the new country, but it is most remembered for its influence on the literary and intellectual debates of the era through its control of the All Pakistan Progressive Writers Association. There were, however, contesting literary voices to that of the progressives. These were not as organized as the Association and consisted of a range of free thinkers, modernist poets and independent-minded intellectuals, in addition to those who sought to link the question of Pakistan with Islamic morals and values. Eventually, many of them became associated with the literary group, Halqa-Arbab-e-Zauq.
In presenting debates on Pakistan's culture along with the uncertainty, confusion and messiness that these entailed, I will specifically concentrate on the works of Sajjad Zaheer, the Communist Party of Pakistan secretary general, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, a major Urdu literary figure and also the secretary general of the All Pakistan Progressive Writers Association (and hence aligned with the Communist Party of Pakistan during Pakistan's early years), and Mohammad Hasan Askari, a literary critic and one of the foremost critics of the progressive movement.Footnote 13 It should be kept in mind that people like Mohammad Hasan Askari or Sajjad Zaheer had both come from the same cultural tradition of North Indian Urdu-speaking respectable gentry, the ashraf. As migrants from the Urdu-speaking belt in India, their strong support for Urdu (either as the language of South Asian Muslims or as the language of communication) placed them in an evolving dialogue with the contested politics within the new country where other ethnic and linguistic groups had begun to challenge Urdu's cultural dominance.
Of course South Asian Muslims as a group were never a monolith and there was much diversity in terms of culture, language and politics. Even among those Muslim intellectuals from North India who did make the journey to Pakistan the issue of the Muslim presence in India is much more nuanced than is often portrayed. As Pakistan was formed on an ideological platform of Muslim nationalism in South Asia the division of British India itself created deep ambivalence about the continuity of what till then was a shared heritage for many North Indian intellectuals of all religious persuasion. Intellectuals who, in many cases, had known each other due to their writings in Urdu/Hindi and who were developing a shared South Asian literary idiom all of a sudden found themselves on different sides of a political, social and cultural border that was becoming more difficult to cross. Commenting on this dilemma, Sadat Hasan Manto, one of the greatest short-story writers of the period, reflected on his own sense of displacement in these terms:
There is a desire in me to write. But when I sit down to write my thoughts become chaotic. Even after trying, I cannot separate Hindustan from Pakistan and Pakistan from Hindustan. Continuously this question arises in my mind. Will Pakistan's literature be different? If yes, then how? All that was written in undivided Hindustan who will claim that literature, will it now also be divided? Are the basic problems of our people on both sides not the same?Footnote 14
Like Manto, there was much apprehension within various intellectual circles regarding what exactly constituted Pakistani culture and what claims it could make on common pasts. Hence, the endeavour here is to show that whereas during the initial months of Pakistan's independence issues related to infrastructure development, settlement of refugee populations and national security concerning the new state, debates on questions related to the trauma of partition, of Urdu as national language, the history of Muslim nationalism and the pivotal issue of Islam's role in political life also remained at the forefront of intellectual discussions.
In what follows, I will initially provide a brief survey of the Communist Party of India's position on the Muslim question in British India. Subsequently the focus will be on a specific public discussion that Sajjad Zaheer, while he was secretary general of the Communist Party of Pakistan, had with Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi. I will then introduce Askari's work and present debates on culture and history between progressive and liberal intellectuals on Islam, national culture and the interpretation of Muslim history (a discussion that is perhaps still incomplete). In conclusion, an added argument about how a specific ashraf elite, despite being on either side of the political spectrum, shared a consensus among them on Urdu language and its related cultural norms.
Indian Communism and the Muslim question
In a book of essays published in 1944, Sajjad Zaheer, a major leader of the Communist Party of India and, as mentioned above, later the first secretary general of the Communist Party of Pakistan,Footnote 15 argues that the Muslim League's demand for Pakistan was the ‘logical expression of the development of political consciousness among the Muslim peoples of India’.Footnote 16 Following the Communist Party of India's emerging formulation on the nationalities question,Footnote 17 Zaheer asserts that the League's call for Pakistan needed to be understood by the Indian National Congress as the affirmation of the right of each community to determine its own future. In putting this argument forward, Zaheer and the Communist Party of India accepted the demand for Pakistan and saw it as an acceptable resolution of the Muslim question in Indian politics. However, by late 1946 the Communist Party of India (and Zaheer) had started to change its position on the partition of British India. This said, the Party did eventually accept the division in its Calcutta Congress held in March of 1948. In the following sections, the history of this transformation is discussed, eventually focussing on how the communist movement under Zaheer's leadership during Pakistan's early years put forward its own argument on the country's future political and cultural trajectory.
Since the mid-1930s, after an earlier period of supporting radicalized violent politics that brought about severe repression by the British colonial government, the Communist Party of India entered into a phase of united front politics that sought to bring together all anti-imperialist sections of society. The Communist Party, like the Indian National Congress, treated India as a single nation which was engaged collectively in the struggle for independence. The Muslim League, and its demand for dividing India into two nations (Hindu and Muslim), was condemned as a reactionary communal organization of elite Muslims.Footnote 18
However, by the early 1940s, the Communist Party started to rethink the issue of Muslim separate identity being put forward by the newly invigorated Muslim League under the leadership of Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Its most forceful support of the ‘Muslim Question’ came in the aftermath of its policy of opposing the Quit India Movement. In a plenary meeting of the Central Committee in September 1942, the Communist Party of India passed a resolution based on a report by G. AdhikariFootnote 19 and outlined its positionFootnote 20 on the thesis on self-determination of different nationalities and the acceptance, in principle at least, of their right to secede from the Indian Union. This was a bold departure from the arguments that the Party itself had adhered to in the past.Footnote 21 This position was again echoed in an important document written by P. C. Joshi, General Secretary of the Party. Joshi's paper,Footnote 22 published by the party press in 1944, affirmed that Congress was the greatest national organization of the country that had united the various patriotic elements. Yet he also spelled out the Communist Party of India's position on Muslim self-determination and urged the Congress leadership to follow suit. In a polemical vein Joshi chided Congressmen for denying that the Muslim League's leadership was patriotic by arguing:
A belief continues to be held that the League is a communal organization and that Mr. Jinnah is pro-British. But what is the reality? Mr. Jinnah is to the freedom-loving masses what Gandhiji is to the Congress masses. They revere Quaid-Azam as much as Congressmen do the Mahatama. They regard the League as their patriotic organization as we regard the Congress. This is so because Mr. Jinnah has done to the League what Gandhiji did to the Congress in 1919–20—made it into a mass organisation . . . Mr. Jinnah through the slogan of Pakistan has given expression to the freedom urge of Muslims for absolute independence in their own homelands.
We do not expect a Congressman to readily admit all this, but we do not expect him to deny the patriotism of others but try to understand how it expresses itself for them; we do not expect a Congressman to claim the monopoly of patriotism for himself.Footnote 23
The same paper mentioned the Communist proposed amendments to the All India Congress Committee's resolution in its Bombay meetings in 1944. The Communist Party, according to the amendments, stood for the right of self-determination and secession as a democratic right of different nationalities and ethnic groups, including Muslims. Indeed, in following this argument, the Communist Party's manifesto for the 1946 elections demanded immediate independence and transfer of power to not only two governments (India and Pakistan), but to 17 interim ‘sovereign’ national assemblies that corresponded to different nationalities that had been defined by the party in 1942 and now also included Baluchis as an additional national group.Footnote 24 Hence in a matter of less than five years, the Communist Party of India had moved from a position of considering India as a single nation, to a policy of national self-determination in a multi-national India culminating in the right of all nationalities to secede from the union and create their own sovereign states.
Given this change of position the Communist Party of India encouraged its members to work closely with the Muslim League to organize the 1946 elections. This cooperation was most evident in Punjab where the League sought to distance itself from the ruling Unionists and worked hard to gain the rural Muslim vote.Footnote 25 Muslim communists such as Danial Latifi, Ataullah Jehanian, and Chaudary Rehmatullah joined the Muslim League and assisted in its contact with the peasantry and working class and helped to organize and publicize the League's election programme.Footnote 26 The manifesto itself, as Gilmartin suggests, was an attempt to radically transform the relationship between a future state and the masses. It primarily concentrated on rural reform and in a communist-influenced, progressive language the manifesto guaranteed state protection for the peasants against the excesses of feudal power.Footnote 27 In Sind, as in Punjab there were some peasant-based organizations that, during the 1940s, had close links with the Communist Party of India. One of them, the Sind Hari Committee under Haidar Bux Jatoi's leadership, was active in certain rural districts, and G. M. Syed, a progressive Muslim League leader, supported its demands for tenancy rights among the Haris (peasants). This close partnership made it possible for the Muslim League to move towards becoming a mass organization in Sind, helping it tremendously in the 1946 elections.Footnote 28
Hence through their alliance with the League, the communists sought to raise consciousness among the Muslim peasantry, an area that they had not had much earlier success in, while the Muslim League itself in the mid-1940s benefited from communist work among the peasantry and strengthened its own secular appeal among a large section of the Muslim masses.
Notwithstanding the progressive manifesto in Punjab or the hard work performed by the communists for the League, the long-term effects of this collaboration did not produce the structural transformation that the communists were pushing for. The weakness of the communist movement in the area itself and the ways in which the Muslim League manipulated the situation in its favour by using the communist connections to create a mass base, but eventually not allowing communist sympathizers any formal position in the party, inevitably created misgivings towards the League among Communist Party of India members.Footnote 29
However, despite the desire to work for the League, by the mid-1940s, there were other competing and vocal tendencies that shaped the Communist Party of India's outlook on partition of British India and the Muslim League. Where earlier the Party had pushed for the right of secession for all nationalities, by late spring of 1946 it reverted to its earlier position and stressed that the best interests of the Indian people would be served by remaining together in a common union.Footnote 30 Still later, in August 1946, the Communist Party of India issued a resolution which, while asserting that the Muslim League represents the bulk of the Muslim Masses, declared that the demand reflected the feudal and Muslim elite interests that sought to compromise with imperialism for a share in administering divided India. Following the position of Rajani Palme Dutt, British communist leader and influential journalist who also served as principal advisor to Indian communist politics,Footnote 31 the resolution argued that the masses that support the Indian National Congress are correctly against the division of the country on a religious and undemocratic basis and want a single union.Footnote 32
A move towards a pro-Nehru and pro-Congress stance on national independence may have been the Communist Party of India's tactic to seek a position in the mainstream of Indian Nationalist politics.Footnote 33 Although Soviet analysts, as evidenced by articles in the New Times and other Soviet publications,Footnote 34 were ambivalent about the Partition plan as unveiled by Mountbatten on 3 June 1947,Footnote 35 the Party, with reservations, accepted it as a step forwards and pledged its support to the Nehru government. It was clear that the Party, under the leadership of P. C. Joshi and the intellectual influence of Rajani Palme Dutt, had, by the time of independence, judged the figure of Jawaharlal Nehru as worthy of left-wing support and as the nationalist and progressive leader of the Congress.Footnote 36
The Communist Party of India was critical of both the Congress and the Muslim League for accepting the partition plan.Footnote 37 Yet, it was at least clear in the Party's analysis that Congress’ ‘compromise’ on partition was more to retain control of the pre-independence popular upsurge by bargaining with the British, while the Muslim League had been a lackey of the British by forcefully demanding the division of the country on a religious basis and hence weakening the progressive forces of united India. I would emphasize that although the Party finally accepted the creation of Pakistan by arguing for the division of the Party itself, the deep suspicion of the Muslim League's politics and the agony over British India's division was the overwhelming sentiment that was shared by a majority of Party workers of all religions and ethnicities. Pakistan's creation was, according to the Communist Party of India, non-progressive and hence reactionary.Footnote 38
The Party divided
The pro-Nehru tilt and the pro-Congress line of soft-opposition by the Communist Party of India came under increasing attack just a few months after independence by the left wing of the Party. In December 1947, the Central Committee met in Bombay to prepare for the forthcoming Party Congress to be held in February 1948. The Committee passed a resolution that accused the government of India of pandering to Anglo-America imperialism and of being reactionary. Subsequently, from 28th February to 6th of March 1948, 632 delegates assembled in Calcutta for the second congress of the Communist Party of India. The most important task performed during the meeting was the shift towards a more radical political line and a severe critique of the ‘reformist’ politics of the Party's leadership during most of the 1940s. The Communist Party of India Congress’ declarations asserted that the basic aim of the Party in the forthcoming years would be to organize the toiling masses to struggle for anti-imperialist and agrarian revolution so as to establish a people's democratic state led by the working class.Footnote 39 In contrast to its earlier decisions, in the final analysis the Party had declared war on the Nehru government. As much as these discussions were the main focus of the Congress, the delegates also took some time to divide the Party into two constitutive parts, the Communist Party of India would confine its working to the boundaries of the Indian Union and the post-August 1947 separated territories of Pakistan would be free to form a different Communist Party.
During the Calcutta Conference, the report on Pakistan was presented by Bhowani Sen.Footnote 40 In his speech, Sen asserted that the programme and task for a democratic front for Pakistan was exactly similar to those for India. His Report, however, detailed some differences between the two states that needed to be taken into account to develop a revolutionary strategy. Sen acknowledged that the Communist Party was weak in the areas that were part of Pakistan due to the presence of feudalism and the weakness of the trade union and peasant movements. He also asserted that the Muslim League had an authoritarian hold on the country and along with the strong hold of religion among the Muslim masses the terrain of work for the Communist Party would be more difficult. To overcome these obstacles, therefore, there was an added urgency. Sen argued in his Report to build mass fronts that would bring proletariats, peasants and the urban middle classes on a democratic platform to expose the anti-people policies of the government and its feudal and bourgeois allies.Footnote 41
After the Report on Pakistan was passed by the Party Congress, delegates from Pakistan met separately and convened the first Congress of the Communist Party of Pakistan. It accepted the Report on Pakistan with amendments and elected its first office bearers. Syed Sajjad Zaheer, who was a member of the central committee of the Communist Party of India, was elected general secretary, as he had opted to go to Pakistan. It was also decided that the East Bengal party would continue to be guided by the West Bengal Communist Party and would retain its link to the Communist Party of India. Hence, it was only the West Pakistan Party that would constitute an entirely separate entity.
Sajjad Zaheer belonged to a very prominent, educated and respected Muslim family from the United Provinces of the Owadh area. His father, Sir Syed Wazir Hasan, was once the Chief Justice in Owadh and his brother, Ali Zaheer, was the first Indian Ambassador to Indonesia after independence.Footnote 42 The family was close to the Nehrus and young Sajjad Zaheer, after completing his law degree at Oxford, had joined Jawaharlal Nehru's inner circle in Allahabad in 1936 while Nehru served as the President of the All India Congress Committee. After the Calcutta conference Sajjad Zaheer came to Pakistan as the leader of the nascent party. Zaheer had previously travelled to Pakistan in December 1947 as the Communist Party of India's central committee member to organize the remaining cadres in the newly-formed state, as less than 50 party members had been left in the whole of West Pakistan.Footnote 43
Reports also indicate that during the years 1948–1951, when he managed the Communist Party in Pakistan, Zaheer was extremely critical of even the slightest deviation from Party policy (this of course is also the period of the radical turn within the Communist Party of India under B. T. Ranadive's, newly elected general secretary of the Party leadership). Zaheer's attitude towards Pakistan and the Muslim League reflected the radical line of the Communist Party of India which saw the need for the Muslim masses to be made conscious of their nationalistic and historic duty and to be wrenched away from their communally-minded feudal Muslim League leadership. Hence the militancy in his letters to Party comrades was represented often with dictatorial language, giving much importance to the dissemination of Party literature, opposition to the Muslim League leaders (he calls them ‘downright scoundrels’) and the building of an open political front linked to other progressive forces in the country.Footnote 44
One of these fronts was to re-establish and re-organize the Progressive Writers Association. The Progressive Writers Association was one of the most influential literary movements in the decade that preceded the partition of British India. It was initially formed by a group of Indian students like Mulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zaheer who were living in England during the 1930s. With annual gatherings, regional meetings and affiliated literary journals the movement attracted writers and intellectuals from almost all Indian languages. Its strength, however, lay among the Urdu-Hindi writers of that era. The first All India conference was held in Lucknow in 1936 and Munshi Prem Chand, one the greatest short story writers and a novelist of Hindi and Urdu, presided over the meeting. From its inception, the Progressive Writers Association was influenced by socialist and Marxist tendencies and soon after his return from Britain in 1935–1936, Sajjad Zaheer himself joined the Communist Party of India. Hence, although the Progressive Writers Association was open to all who broadly agreed with its manifesto—which called for a new literature that addressed progressive ideals and focused on the issues of poverty, deprivation and servitude of the Indian masses—it soon became closely aligned with the Communist Party of India.Footnote 45
The All Pakistan Progressive Writers Association was a continuation of the All India Progressive Writers Association and closely affiliated with the newly formed Communist Party of Pakistan and hence influenced by the Communist Party of India's radical line. Zaheer, himself a founding member and past president, was keen to push the role of intelligentsia in society. In his communiqués he asserted the need for writers to have a thorough mastery of Marxist ideology and insisted on study circles so that intellectuals and creative people, especially those linked to the Communist Party of Pakistan, could study the works of Marx, Lenin and Stalin as well as literature coming from the Soviet Union and progressive literature and journals from Europe and Britain. The writers were also encouraged to pen essays, articles and literary criticism for popular consumption to counter bourgeois and ‘reactionary’ ideologies that were being propagated then by, according to him, state and class enemies.Footnote 46
By the late 1940s, the All Pakistan Progressive Writers Association had started to purge from its ranks those that did not completely tow the new party line. This became more evident after the introduction of the new manifesto which targeted ‘non progressive’ writers during the first Association conference held in Lahore in November 1949. During this conference the ‘non progressive’ intellectuals were severely criticized for their perceived political failings, alliance with the state machinery, sexual perversions and lack of social consciousness.Footnote 47 The manifesto clearly divided the Pakistani cultural scene into many factions and spoke positively of those intellectuals who raised their voices against the ruling class and struggled against oppression and for independence, peace and socialism. As well as being read at the conference, the manifesto was also published in the foremost literary journal affiliated with the progressives, Sawera (Dawn) and proclaimed that the writing of progressive intellectuals was embedded in the spirit of life and in their willingness to move the working class towards action.Footnote 48 In opposition to these intellectuals were the undemocratic groups who supported the status quo. The manifesto lumped the various writers: Islamists, nationalists and liberals (supporting ‘art for art's sake’) into the same basket and painted them as reactionaries. The published manifesto then turned towards those writers who used bourgeois psychology and Freudian parameters to understand society. These authors were rendered perverse, pornographic and decadent for their depiction of life through the lens of sexuality. They not only distorted people's experience, the manifesto asserted, but also disrespected love as a pure desire.Footnote 49
The Party line
In researching the body of work on the social history of the left and Communist movement of Pakistan's early years, it became evident that the arena of culture and intellectual creativity was of immense importance to the nascent party, the Communist Party of Pakistan and to Zaheer himself. Zaheer, an accomplished short-story writer and literary critic, did not produce much literary work during these early years in Pakistan, yet he was constantly writing for the Party newspapers and sending long letters to all Party committees. He also found time to read what was being written in the various literary journals and newspapers and would send individual comments and criticism to friends and foes alike. A person of immense energy, seriousness and dedication to his cause, Zaheer had an exchange of letters with the poet and short story writer Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi on an essay by Qasmi published in a local newspaper. The essay, entitled Ihtijaj aur Ihtiat (Protest and Prudence), was published in early 1948 in the Urdu daily, Imroze.Footnote 50
After brief formal and courteous sentences of introduction (they had not yet met although were very familiar with each other's work and political stance) as would be expected from a man of his lineage from United Provinces ashraf, Zaheer then, in his characteristic polemical and forceful style as a communist leader plunged into a radical critique of Qasmi's essay. He acknowledged Qasmi's attack on the monied class, but then attacked him for saying that Islam had brought about a social and economic revolution. He claimed: ‘History, however, belies that Islam brought about social or economic justice. Even [in] the so called economic justice established by Islam, a group of human beings continued to be exploited and oppressed’.Footnote 51 He then proceeded to detail the history of the ancient world from ‘primitive’ communism to the Greeks and Romans and then to the advent of Islam, arguing that once society was divided into classes its productivity was due to the institution of slavery. Zaheer pointed out that, as Muslim conquests of other lands continued in the early years of Islam's expansion, monarchy was established and questioning of the social order was not tolerated. Islam, according to him, was not able to eradicate the class system and hence it cannot be a complete system as society is always changing. Zaheer, in his exposition against early Islam uses the example of the third Caliph Usman, who he accused of banishing a companion of the prophet, Abuzar Ghaffari, who had egalitarian ideals, and his campaign against the Kharijees, a group that Zaheer linked with class struggle.
Following the classical Marxist argument on the stages of history, Zaheer marked the contemporary period as that of industrialization, capitalism and imperialism. Logically in this teleological schema the next stage would be communism (via socialism). He admonished Qasmi for pushing Islam into the argument as being some middle ground between communism and capitalism. He argued, by bringing in Islam we play into the hands of those who want to divert people's attention from the ‘real struggle, the class struggle’. He then rhetorically raised the issue of loyalty towards Pakistan and dismissed the question by asserting that his and the Communist Party of Pakistan's loyalty cannot be to the Pakistan of Muslim League landlords and the vested interests who had sold the country to the British and the enemies of freedom and democracy. Rather, he insisted, his loyalty and the loyalty of every progressive intellectual, should be with the Pakistani masses who are the true inheritors of Indian Muslim culture. He cautioned against the conspiracy of the capitalist and the elite who use religion (Islam), nationality and language to disrupt the unity of the workers and peasants.
Finally, he strongly urged that, for intellectuals, it is not enough to show preference for social change or be sympathetic to the working class cause. Rather, he insisted that people need to join the struggle for a socialist transformation under the leadership of the Communist Party as it is the Party of the vanguard and only by attaching itself to this struggle that intellectuals can realize the development of literature, art and culture. Clearly, at least at this particular juncture of his political and literary career, Zaheer's teleological emphasis on a progressive history was in Benjaminian terms also linked to a history of redemption; a history that sought to conquer social processes through the inevitability of historical determinism and glorified certain working class struggles whilst never probing the creative multiplicity of the other social and cultural experiences.Footnote 52
The debate continues
Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, the person who unfortunately was the focus of Zaheer's ire, came from a respectable, but not as influential, household in Punjab. Orphaned at a young age, he managed to get an education and worked for some years in low-paid jobs in Bahalwalpur before abandoning everything to lead the unpredictable and economically burdensome life of a professional writer.Footnote 53 Qasmi became the first general secretary of the All Pakistan Progressive Writers Association and also editor of Nuqush, the foremost Progressive literary journal. He later edited Imroz and The Pakistan Times.
During the late 1940s, Qasmi, although not a member of the Party, was a dedicated worker on the cultural front and was in agreement with the new All Pakistan Progressive Writers Association manifesto in terms of its criticism of ‘non-progressive’ writers and intellectuals. Qasmi was, therefore, a fellow traveller, sympathizer and prominent member of the progressive writer's movement at this stage of his long and illustrious career as a man of letters. However, he had somewhat different views than Zaheer on the issue of Islam in political life. In his reply to Zaheer's admonishments, Qasmi graciously acknowledged the receipt of his first communication from Zaheer and assured him that the differences of opinion between them, which there surely were, might be removed if they got to meet one another. However, Qasmi maintained that Islam and communism complement each other and, if they were intelligently interpreted, social justice would be established in the country. He agreed that slavery existed in early Islam, but this was not the true essence of Islam. Qasmi argued that the notion of a just society was abandoned as Islamic polity became wealthy due to the conquests of foreign lands and as monarchy became established. In this process those who opposed anti-democratic regimes were forcefully eliminated. Now the way forward was to reinstitute the practice of ‘ijtihad’ which should reflect the needs of the majority. In this sense Islam and communism were much closer than had previously been thought. If, Qasmi contended, Islam can help in the eradication of the class system and communism absorbs the spiritual and moral values of Islam then both can serve the same purpose: the betterment of human life. If communism stood for economic welfare, then such a system could only become better if a moral code was also attached to it. Islam, according to Qasmi, provided such a code. He agreed that communism would sound the death knell of official Islam in Pakistan, the Islam of the Central Government of Pakistan, but not of the true Islam that he was talking about. He warned, however, that the communist workers should not criticize the true principles of Islam as this would hinder them from coming closer to the masses. They should rather propagate the similarities and make people see that the moral arguments of Islam and communism are the same. Qasmi agreed with Zaheer in reasserting his loyalty to the Pakistan of the masses, rather than those of the capitalists and the landlords. He affirmed his commitment to collective action and asked Zaheer, despite their differences, to instruct him in matters of future political action.
Qasmi, as mentioned above, had a very different political history and trajectory from Zaheer. His training had not been within the milieu of the Party cadres who had come from India and who had served with the Party leadership during the 1940s. In this regard he was also less influenced by the radical shift in the policies of the Communist Party of India that were directly influencing the more combative and insurrectionary mode of communist politics on both sides of the border. Qasmi was a product of small town Punjab and sought a more organic link with the culture, tradition and beliefs of the people themselves. Within the parameters of such concerns, the issue of Islam was hence understood more as a cultural question that had to be respected if political work was to be accomplished within the masses.
This in particular differentiated the social understanding of people like Qasmi and those who were at the helm of the Communist Party of Pakistan. Many of those who formed the top leadership in the newly constituted party had come from India. Indeed the Party's Political Bureau in late 1948 consisted of Sajjad Zaheer, Sibte Hasan and Ashfaq Baig, all highly educated men from North Indian ashraf background. They were sent by the Communist Party of India leadership to take charge of the communist movement in Pakistan, where they had minimum cultural or social understanding of or political experience among the working masses.Footnote 54 In a way Qasmi's critique was a broader one that eventually led to many, including Qasmi himself, becoming dissatisfied with the Communist Party of Pakistan's hard line politics (under the direction of the Communist Party of India's militant position). For example, some Punjab-based communists like Fazal Elahi Qurban, and also the Sikh communist Teja Sing Swatantar who had worked for the Muslim League during the 1946 elections, took a strong stand against the central leadership of the Communist Party of India about their change of position on the Pakistan question. The contradictions in the Party position which, although on the one hand sent Zaheer to Pakistan yet on the other considered the Muslim League and its demand for Pakistan as reactionary, were resisted by Qurban and his colleagues in their discussions with Ajoy Ghosh, who was the central Communist Party of India leader in charge for Punjab. When the central party leadership did not pay heed to their arguments, Qurban and Swatantar along with their colleagues decided to form an independent Pakistan Communist Party in June 1947, based on the old thesis of national self determination of the Muslim populace.Footnote 55 The Communist Party of Pakistan thus was perceived as insensitive to the historical moment that the partition of British India had provided the Muslims of South Asia with the creation of Pakistan. In its analysis, the Party could only explain this phenomena as a historical mistake and reconcile to it as an interim phase, albeit a way-station, that needed to be passed to arrive at real ‘emancipation’. This tendency within the Communist Party of Pakistan eventually led to severe critique from other writers and also became the form in which the state itself labelled the Party as ‘anti-state’.
The Muslim question, another view
The above discussion gives a glimpse of how the question of Muslim culture and civilization was being debated even among Leftist circles in the Pakistan of the late 1940s. Qasmi was not alone in his desire to reconcile Islamic history with egalitarian or democratic politics. Many others who were not as closely linked to the progressives also sought to think about the place of Islam in a future polity while distancing themselves from the Muslim League's propaganda machine.
Many ‘non-progressive’ intellectuals concentrated around the literary group, the Halqa Arbab-e-Zauq. Some had previously been close to the progressivesFootnote 56 and others, while remaining close to the Halqa, had divergent views, eclectic literary taste and many times severe differences of opinion amongst themselves.Footnote 57 My bracketing them here together is not due to the fact that these individuals shared some intellectual or ideological agenda, rather, this group of intellectuals, who were periodically targeted by the progressives, coalesced together due to their appreciation of literature which did not have a ‘specific’ social and political agenda as that which the progressives pushed forward in alignment with the Communist Party of Pakistan.Footnote 58
Among the non-progressives a major voice that seriously engaged with the question of Muslim culture was Mohammad Hasan Askari, whom Aamir MuftiFootnote 59 rightly proclaims as a magisterial intellect, a polyglot of staggering erudition. Askari's is an important voice in the history of Urdu criticism. In his youth he had been close to the progressives as they were the dominant literary movement of the time. However, later, Askari along with others like the poet N. M. Rashid and even Miraji, became associated with the modernist movement, or that of the jadidiyat. This of course was not a movement in the conventional sense of the term, but a trend in literature that experimented with form through which experience could be channelled.Footnote 60
In the immediate post-independence moment, Askari became one of the major critics of the progressives and derided them for being shallow and derivative. In a series of articles published in October and November 1948, Askari discussed how, after Pakistan's independence, Muslim intellectuals should think about culture and literature in this new land and look ahead towards an unprecedented and uncharted future.Footnote 61 A major thrust of his argument in these essays concerned the ways in which the writer/intellectual should understand and represent the material and non-material needs of the populace. This impulse to connect with the masses echoes the argument made by the progressives. However, in a subtle intervention Askari suggested that the mere advocacy of the economic needs of the people was not enough and people also had non-material and spiritual needs. He asserted that, unless the intellectual understands these demands, the masses will not come any closer. This, according to Askari, was the major and primary intellectual task. This spiritual need was linked in Askari's early writings to the creation of the Muslim homeland as a culmination of the Muslim nation's desire for freedom. He forcefully recognized the cumulative aspiration for a space where Muslims could think, live and create freely, devoid of censorship and surveillance and influenced by their own history and cultural heritage. Of course, his attempt to push this agenda, he complained, was being marred by the negative attitude of the Pakistani state against intellectual and creative production through various forms of censorship, propaganda and coercion. Askari argued that only in a society that was based on social justice, economic progress and the defense of individual freedoms could arts and culture flourish.Footnote 62
A major question that he raised was whether Muslims are a separate nation or a part of the larger Indian nation. He is somewhat ambivalent and his partial answer to this question is that Muslims have to create a sense of self-respect and confidence by generating creative work within the parameters of Muslim civilization. Askari's view of Muslim civilization and history, at least at this stage of his career, was based primarily on his reading of the Muslim presence in South Asia. Within this context, he was opposed to how the state was using Islam to subdue politicians and create consent. In contrast to government attempts to ban publications and curtail free speech, he advocated for a creative impulse and a sense of inquiry that would produce a new and creative culture in harmony with Muslim history and spiritual needs. While disagreeing with the government's censorship policies, he also openly attacked the Muslim communists (such as Sajjad Zaheer) who, according to him, negated or distorted the history of Muslim culture and society. In a nuanced paragraph full of irony and dripping with sarcasmFootnote 63 he argued that Muslim communists should not forget their own notion of selfhood, their own cultural history and democratic traditions. But, Askari stated, the communists could conceive of the people of Russia (meaning Soviet Union) as having continuous historical claims on their socialist principles, yet Muslim masses, according to the same Muslim communists, could not claim such traditions.Footnote 64 He challenged the communists and allied progressives to rethink the Muslim past in South Asia not only through the lens of Historical Materialism, but also through a critical and innovative attempt to see democratic and egalitarian practices even in ostensibly hierarchical moments in Muslim history. No culture, or for that matter, literature, he argued, could develop without a connection to its own roots, history and tradition. His main contention was that Muslim communists had lost faith in the ability to think independently and creatively for themselves. In a sharp phrase addressed to Muslim communists he asserted that, in pursuing progressivism, ‘we as a people will vanish and only progress will remain’.Footnote 65
However, even a person like Askari, coming from North Indian elite Muslim tradition, and an important voice in the history of Urdu criticism, maintained a very strong link with his pre-partition Indian cultural milieu. At least in the early period after Pakistan's independence, he clearly affirmed that all that he had learned was due to his Hindu teachers and that Urdu was not an exclusively Muslim language. But due to the newly formed Indian state's appropriation of Hindi as its national language (which was, of course, also contested within the Indian Union), Askari asserted that Muslims in Pakistan had to keep Urdu alive. In the late 1940s he remained against the overt Persian and Arabic influence on Urdu and took much pride in the Indianness of the language. His pluralistic and inclusive gestures, toward various South Asian influences on Urdu and related Muslim culture clearly separates him from the more avid proponents of Islamic cultural traditions and their drawing of cultural connections with the Middle East. His assertions, much like the Muslim supporters of the Indian National Congress (Azad and Madani) locate him within the larger South Asian cultural milieu, primarily within the North Indian ashraf tradition.
This said, he was interested in establishing Urdu as the major language for South Asian Muslims. As a migrant from the United Provinces, his strong support for Urdu placed him in contrast to the emergent politics within Pakistan where other ethnic and linguistic groups had begun to challenge Urdu's dominance and its links with the culture of the Gangetic Valley. Mohammad Hasan Askari's intellectual trajectory took many twists and turns until his death in 1978. He remained eclectic in his intellectual tastes and by the 1970s had moved politically to a more narrowly defined Islamic oriented political position, perhaps also rejecting his more democratic and inclusive understanding of Muslim culture from a South Asian perspective. There is weight in Aamir Mufti's argument when he proclaims that such a turn helped Askari to conflate language, literature and religious identity, intellectual moves by him and others that enabled Urdu to officially ‘prosper’ in Pakistan. The process made Urdu shed its ‘Indianness’ and emerge as the language unique to South Asian Muslims.Footnote 66
The Party under attack
Intellectuals like Askari continued to question the materialist stand of communists like Zaheer. Askari claimed that although the progressives spoke of the people, yet they did not understand popular aspirations. For Askari, the creation of Pakistan was the culmination of the struggle of ordinary South Asian Muslims. Although many lost their lives and homes in the process, people were content that they had finally reached their historical destination. In contrast, he argues that the progressives wrote about the incompleteness of the independence project and how this independence (and partition) was not the logical culmination of the struggle.Footnote 67 Although also critical of the Muslim League government, it is clear that Askari was committed to creating a Muslim national culture and sought to shape a future national imaginary that the State could eventually incorporate. This was in sharp contrast to the notion of a future promoted by Zaheer and the Communist Party of Pakistan, a position that, given Qasmi's response, was also not completely acceptable in progressive intellectual circles either.
Sensing communist ambivalence towards the creation of Pakistan, Askari and othersFootnote 68 in the ‘non-progressive camp’ openly questioned their patriotism. Hostility towards the Muslim League pervaded the Communist Party of Pakistan leadership's political position, entrenched as they were within the larger argument of pre-independence nationalist ideals and the radical Party line. In various articles Askari hence accused them of favouring India on the Kashmir question and also for fomenting ethnic division by supporting the demand of the Bengali population for Bangla to be given the place of national language on a par with Urdu.Footnote 69
Sajjad Zaheer was aware of these attacks and argued that the Communist Party of Pakistan's loyalty was not to the Pakistan of Muslim League landlords and their vested interests who, in his opinion, were British lackeys. The progressives constantly argued that their loyalties were with the masses, not with the state. Sardar JafriFootnote 70, a progressive poet, intellectual and party member, openly took up the challenge and, in turn, accused Askari of instigating a witch-hunt against the communists. According to Jafri people like Askari knew that the progressives would never proclaim their loyalty to the state or the government, therefore it was easy to attack them as traitors so that they could be sent to prison or into exile.Footnote 71
Indeed the Pakistani state may have found its own fodder in the pronouncements by people like Askari (and others) against the Communist Party of Pakistan. Within the first year of its existence the ruling elite of Pakistan became suspicious of any challenge to its authority. The Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, openly advocated the supremacy of one ruling party and derided those who opposed the Muslim League as traitors and enemy agents.Footnote 72 Very soon after its independence Pakistan also became a political stage for cold war politics. British and US intelligence agencies periodically worked closely with the higher echelons of the Pakistani state apparatus to help them in their efforts to curtail the real or imagined communist threat from within or across the border.Footnote 73 Public Safety Acts and other draconian measures from the colonial period were reinvigorated and used to arrest and harass party workers and sympathetic trade unionists. Important members of the Communist Party of Pakistan's central committee were periodically jailed and communist publications were routinely banned or confiscated. Even literary journals linked to the Progressive Writers Association, Sawera, Adab e Latif or Nuqush, were constantly asked to stop publication for disseminating anti-state literature. Furthermore, the state started to use Islam as a political weapon to counteract various democratic forces. Islamic doctrine was employed in the media to persuade people against the anti-religious (meaning anti-Islam) and, linked to it, anti-Pakistan political stance of the communists.Footnote 74 Public gatherings by communists were occasionally attacked and disrupted by mobs claiming Islamic tendencies or love for Pakistan.
Given these pressures and government surveillance, as secretary general of the Communist Party of Pakistan, Zaheer remained underground throughout his tenure until his arrest in February/March 1951 in connection with the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. In February/March 1951, the Pakistan Government brought charges of sedition and of plotting a military coup against certain leaders of its own militaryFootnote 75 and members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Pakistan, Sajjad Zaheer and Mohammad Ata.Footnote 76 The poet and progressive intellectual, Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Faiz was never a card-carrying member of the Communist Party) was also accused of being a co-conspirator and was jailed along with the others. Whether this was a real conspiracy, or the Party was holding a tentative dialogue with some army officers, is a question that still makes rounds in intellectual circles. It is clear, however, that some members of the Communist Party of Pakistan (under Zaheer's advice), perhaps under pressure of becoming ineffective by perpetual government surveillance and attack, had discussions with a group of senior army officers who had grievances with the government, particularly regarding the Kashmir issue. Following the announcement of the conspiracy, there were widespread arrests and blanket clampdown on communist party activities. The entire process crippled the movement and demoralized cadres. The communist movement in Pakistan, nascent as it was, took years to recover from this suppression.Footnote 77
Concluding thoughts
With the Communist Party of Pakistan's inception during the Calcutta Congress in 1948 its leadership positions were primarily held by Mohajirs (migrants from India). These were highly educated men who, in many cases, had university degrees from Europe and possessed previous experience of urban and cosmopolitan life. They arrived in a Pakistan where the majority of the population was rural, the level of industrialization was low and the labour was ethnically diverse and unorganized.Footnote 78 Given the Communist Party's (Communist Party of India and then Communist Party of Pakistan) narrative of cultural ‘backwardness’ among Muslims and the economic underdevelopment of Pakistan, it was obvious by its progressivist and somewhat developmentalist argument, as exemplified by Bhowani Sen's position on Pakistan, that there was much work to be done to educate and organize the citizens of the new land about their historical task towards ‘true’ liberation. To pursue this task the Communist Party of Pakistan's leadership primarily relied on the universalistic rhetoric of class solidarity and proletarian politics. Yet on the cultural front, rather than being sensitive to the linguistic and cultural diversity of the local population, in most cases the Party advocated the deployment of a ‘progressive’ culture that had its roots in the literary tradition and cultural sensibilities of a Northern Indian urban and ashrafi milieu.
It needs to be re-emphasized that in contrast to Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, people like Mohammad Hasan Askari or Sajjad Zaheer, despite their political differences, had both come from the same cultural tradition of North Indian Urdu-speaking, respectable gentry: the ashraf. Although accused of favouring the rights of the Bangla language, Zaheer and others in the progressive movement continued to also think of Urdu as a national language that could eventually serve the purpose of a language of communication. It is also important to point out that, unlike others who pushed for Urdu's exclusive right to be the only national language (including Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan), the progressives were against the imposition of one language over the cultural and linguistic diversity of the land. This was an old position that linked them back to the earlier assertion of national self-determination as proclaimed in the Adhikari report. Yet in putting forward the argument for Urdu as the language of communication the communists, during this period at least, thought that rather than impose Urdu on the population, conditions had to be created that different linguistic groups would by consensus agree to accept it as a common language of interaction among the various provinces. This was indeed a more democratic resolution of the language question, and a partial acknowledgement of cultural diversity within the populace that was taking shape in the Pakistan of the late 1940s.
Yet many progressives were, very much like Askari, also steeped in the cultural traditions of the North Indian Urdu-Hindi belt.Footnote 79 They were sympathetic to the idea that eventually people would gravitate towards accepting Urdu not only as the major national language of communication but also of national unity.Footnote 80 Their arguments were almost exclusively for Urdu to attain its eventual pivotal place in national culture, not for any other major language.Footnote 81 In addition, as much as the Communist Party of Pakistan showed its solidarity with the Bangla question and the linguistic rights of the various people's of Pakistan, it remained hostile, at least in this early phase of its existence, towards the emergent nationalist leadership of various linguistic groups, whether Pashtun, Baluch, Sindhi or Bengali. It deemed nationalist leaders as belonging to elite classes and hence did not recognize them as class allies in the struggle for ‘real’ emancipation.Footnote 82 These political tendencies eventually culminated in the 1950s and later in movements for provincial autonomy and language rights against the centralizing state.Footnote 83
Further, discussions with the disaffected military leaders which became the basis of the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, howsoever tentative, exposed the political stance of the Communist Party of India's leadership; a party position that may have thought of relying on the military to bring about social change from above. These discussions could themselves be interpreted as an elitist move by the Communist Party of Pakistan to shortcircuit a future popular revolution. This ‘change from above’ model was based on the Party's analysis of Pakistan's economic development—at its independence the country had inherited only nine per cent of the total industrial establishment of British India. It showed the Party leadership's understanding of ‘Muslim masses’, as mentioned above, of being socially backward due to religious influence and susceptible to manipulation by the Muslim League's politics. It may also be a sign of the non-rootedness of the Communist Party of Pakistan's immigrant (mohajir, Urdu-speaking) leadership that could not completely link itself with the cultural politics of the masses and commit itself to the task of building a popular movement from below.
To conclude, the arguments presented in this paper were between a group of intellectuals who were looking for answers in class solidarity (as the communists did) or in the moral community of South Asian Muslims (as Askari and others did). Perhaps one appreciates the nuances and hesitancies in Qasmi's position more when one realizes that in both instances, in Askari's advocacy of an emergent Muslim culture or Zaheer's push for class transformation (at times from above),Footnote 84 there were elements of universalizing discourses that were not always attentive to the multiplicity of social and cultural (linguistic diversity, rural majority) life in the new country. These arguments, although politically at odds with each other did, however, share a structural similarity of being in a relationship of hierarchy with the people of Pakistan themselves. They seem reminiscent of the discussion on jute millworkers in colonial Bengal by Dipesh Chakrabarty where he reads the relationship between the labour leadership and the workers within the then prevalent babu-coolie idiom. He shows how the Bengali left leadership remained entrenched in a paradox where they sought to radicalize the workers yet themselves were situated in a hierarchical relationship with the labouring poor.Footnote 85 This perspective is also similar to Ranajit Guha's analysis, as suggested in the introduction, of how an elite leadership sought to tame the particularities of a national populace in colonial India.Footnote 86
Despite similarities, when the communists tried to present their vision of a future (secular) polity in intellectual circles or to the people through their various mass fronts and through trade union work—the communists controlled, Pakistan Trade Union Federation, Kisan Committee, Sind Hari Committee, Democratic Women's Association, Peace Committee, Democratic Student Federation, and other groups—they were very soon contained through severe persecution and state violence. Ironically, arguments made by people like Askari, who was not a supporter of state-sponsored ideology, were appropriated by the newly emergent Pakistani state as it sought to intimidate and eventually silence the communists. It may also have relied on these arguments to oppose the demands for cultural autonomy of the various peoples of Pakistan by officially promoting the universalized cultural tropes of common language (Urdu) or common religion (Islam) and when both failed, through military interventionFootnote 87. In the final analysis, the historical certainty of the progressives and the cultural generative attempts of intellectuals like Askari notwithstanding, both sides were eager to create a ‘new world’ on the ashes of the old. How successful both attempts were in the face of the Pakistani state and its own agenda is a story that is still unfolding.
