Marxist Thought in South Asia 1837971838, 9781837971831

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MARXIST THOUGHT IN SOUTH ASIA

POLITICAL POWER AND SOCIAL THEORY Series Editor: Julian Go Political Power and Social Theory is a peer-reviewed journal committed to advancing the interdisciplinary understanding of the linkages between political power, social relations, and historical development. The journal welcomes both empirical and theoretical work and is willing to consider papers of substantial length. Publication decisions are made by the editor in consultation with members of the editorial board and anonymous reviewers. For information on submissions, and a full list of volumes, please see the journal website at www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/tk/ppst.

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Rethinking Obama, 2011 Political Power and Social Theory, 2012 Postcolonial Sociology, 2013 Decentering Social Theory, 2013 The United States in Decline, 2014 Fields of Knowledge: Science, Politics and Publics in the Neoliberal Age, 2014 Patrimonial Capitalism and Empire, 2015 Chartering Capitalism: Organizing Markets, States, and Publics, 2015 Perverse Politics? Feminism, Anti-Imperialism, Multiplicity, 2016 Postcolonial Sociologies: A Reader, 2016 International Origins of Social and Political Theory, 2017 Rethinking the Colonial State, 2017 Critical Realism, History and Philosophy in the Social Sciences, 2018 Gendering Struggles Against Informal and Precarious Work, 2018 Religion, Humility, and Democracy in a Divided America, 2019 Rethinking Class and Social Difference, 2020 Global Historical Sociology of Race and Racism, 2021 Trump and the Deeper Crisis, 2022

SENIOR EDITORIAL BOARD Ronald Aminzade University of Minnesota, USA Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Duke University, USA Michael Burawoy University of California-Berkeley, USA Nitsan Chorev Brown University, USA Diane E. Davis Harvard University, USA Peter Evans University of California-Berkeley, USA Julian Go The University of Chicago, USA

Eiko Ikegami New School University Graduate Faculty, USA Howard Kimeldorf University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, USA George Lawson London School of Economics, UK Daniel Slater University of Michigan, USA George Steinmetz University of Michigan, USA Maurice Zeitlin University of California-Los Angeles, USA

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POLITICAL POWER AND SOCIAL THEORY VOLUME 40

MARXIST THOUGHT IN SOUTH ASIA EDITED BY

KRISTIN PLYS University of Toronto, Canada

PRIYANSH University of Toronto, Canada AND

KANISHKA GOONEWARDENA University of Toronto, Canada

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

Emerald Publishing Limited Emerald Publishing, Floor 5, Northspring, 21-23 Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 4DL First edition 2024 Editorial matter and selection © 2024 Kristin Plys, Priyansh and Kanishka Goonewardena. Individual chapters © 2024 The authors. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited. Reprints and permissions service Contact: www.copyright.com No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-83797-183-1 (Print) ISBN: 978-1-83797-182-4 (Online) ISBN: 978-1-83797-184-8 (Epub) ISSN: 0198-8719 (Series)

CONTENTS About the Editors

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About the Contributors

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Chapter 1 Marxist Theory Unbound: Global Perspectives From South Asia Kristin Plys, Priyansh and Kanishka Goonewardena

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Chapter 2 The Anti-Imperialist Marxisms of SBD de Silva and GVS de Silva Kanishka Goonewardena

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Chapter 3 Alavi Contra Alavi: Towards a Conjunctural Awareness Ayyaz Mallick

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Chapter 4 Mapping the Politics of Postcolonial Critique in Pakistan Through the Writings of Aziz-ul-Haq (1958–1972) Muhammad Azeem

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Chapter 5 Murder as Praxis? Theorizing Marxist Feminism in Pakistan Through Akhtar Baloch’s Prison Narratives Umaima Miraj

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Chapter 6 Mohammad Azharuddin as a Theorist of Shock: The Life of an Indian Muslim Cricket Captain in the Time of Hindu Nationalism Priyansh

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Chapter 7 Crisis and Revolt in Sri Lanka: Theorizing a Horizon of Possibilities Amid the Unravelling of the Global Order 121 Devaka Gunawardena and Ahilan Kadirgamar

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Chapter 8 Anti-colonial Marxism in French and Portuguese India Compared: Varadarajulu Subbiah and Aquino de Bragança’s Theories of Colonial Independence Kristin Plys

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Chapter 9 Interview With Professor Himani Bannerji Himani Bannerji, Kanishka Goonewardena, Kristin Plys and Priyansh

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Chapter 10 Poems of Resistance Salman Haider

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Index

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ABOUT THE EDITORS Kristin Plys is an Associate Professor in the History and Sociology Departments at the University of Toronto. For 2023–2024, she is the J. Clawson Mills Scholar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is the author of Brewing Resistance (2020), winner of the global sociology book award from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and co-author, with Charles Lemert, of Capitalism and Its Uncertain Future (2022). Priyansh is a PhD Student in Physical Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. His research broadly focuses on the relationship between sport and politics today, with particular attention devoted to the neoliberal Indian state’s interventions in sport policy. Kanishka Goonewardena is a Professor of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto and co-editor of Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebre. His recent writings on critical theory, urban studies, and imperialism have appeared in various academic and popular journals such as Historical Materialism, Antipode, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Progressive Planning, Jacobin, and Spectre.

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Muhammad Azeem is an Associate Professor at LUMS University Lahore and teaches Labour Law, Critical Legal Theory, and International law from the perspective of the South. He published his book titled Law, State and Inequality in Pakistan with Springer in 2017. Some of his notable publications are in Third World Quarterly, Law and Development Review, and Comparative Labour Law and Policy Journal. Himani Bannerji is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her research and writing life extends between Canada and India, with interests encompassing anti-racist feminism, Marxism, critical cultural theories, and historical sociology. Her publications include The Ideological Condition: Selected Essays on History, Race and Gender (2020), Demography and Democracy: Essays on Nationalism, Gender and Ideology (2011), Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism (2001), The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Racism (2000), and Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism (1995). Her most recent research on Marx has appeared in Marcello Musto (ed), Rethinking Alternatives with Marx: Economy, Ecology and Migration (2021), Marcello Musto (ed), Marx’s Capital after 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism (2019), A. K. Bagchi and A. Chatterjee (eds), Marxism: With and Beyond Marx (2014), E. Dua and A. B. Bakan, Theorizing Anti-Racism (2014), and S. Mojab (ed), Marxism and Feminism (2015). Her forthcoming book, Decolonization and Humanism: The Postcolonial Vision of Rabindranath Tagore (Tulika) examines the modernity and radical humanism of Rabindranath Tagore. Devaka Gunawardena is a political economist and independent researcher. He holds a PhD and MA in Anthropology from the University of California – Los Angeles and a BA in Postcolonial Studies from Wesleyan University. He is a frequent contributor to the Sri Lankan publications the DailyFT and Polity. His research interests include Marxism and agrarian studies, and he regularly writes and co-writes on the political economy of Sri Lanka in forums such as The Wire and the Economic and Political Weekly in India. Salman Haider is a poet, theatre artist, and playwright from Pakistan currently living in exile in Canada. Ahilan Kadirgamar is a Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, an MA in Economics from the New School for

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Social Research and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a fortnightly columnist in the Daily Mirror, an Editorial Board Member of the Sri Lanka Journal of Social Sciences, and a Board Member of Himal Southasian Magazine. His research interests include agrarian change, co-operatives, and economic alternatives, and he regularly writes on the political economy of Sri Lanka in forums such as The Hindu and the Economic and Political Weekly in India. He is currently the Honorary Chair of the Northern Co-operative Development Bank and served on the Central Bank of Sri Lanka appointed committee to draft the Economic Development Framework for a Northern Province Master Plan (August 2018). Ayyaz Mallick is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the Department of Geography and Planning, University of Liverpool (UK). His research interests include Marxist and postcolonial theory, with a focus on labour, social movements, and urban politics in Pakistan. His publications in English and Urdu have explored issues of state theory, urban development and restructuring, and the relationship between “particular” and “universal” in social theory and political practice. His academic work has appeared in Antipode, Studies in Political Economy, Urban Geography, and Tarikh [History]. He has also written for newspapers and other popular outlets such as Jacobin, The News, Novara Media, and Socialist Project. Umaima Miraj is a PhD Student of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on understanding women’s revolutions in anti-colonial movements through a revolutionary feminist world-systems perspective.

CHAPTER 1

MARXIST THEORY UNBOUND: GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES FROM SOUTH ASIA Kristin Plys, Priyansh and Kanishka Goonewardena University of Toronto, Canada

ABSTRACT In this introduction to the special issue, ‘Marxist Thought in South Asia’, we detail the long history of Marxist politics and theorizing in South Asia and highlight the unique contributions and perspectives of South Asian Marxists to global Marxism. Three contributions we find particularly significant are (1) South Asian Marxists’ approach to thinking about questions of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, (2) the treatment of agrarian and feudal continuities in Marxist theories from South Asia and (3) unique South Asian contributions to theorizing caste from a Marxist perspective. Keywords: Marxism; South Asia; capitalism; imperialism; agrarian relations; caste Marxism is not just a European preoccupation. It has, perhaps, had even more vibrant articulations in Latin America, Africa and among the Black diaspora. But South Asia has been relatively neglected in efforts to highlight Global South revolutionary theoretical traditions. Our goal in this issue is to demonstrate the historical and continued relevance of Marxist thought in South Asia by both highlighting lesser known thinkers as well as promoting anti-imperialist Marxist approaches to revolutionary thought more broadly. Our efforts are not solely to make Marxism relevant to South Asia again, but to demonstrate how South Asian Marxisms can contribute to global Marxist theory. In other words, our effort is to recover the South Asian revolutionary tradition for the rest of the world. In so doing, this special issue interrogates the nexus of anti-colonialism Marxist Thought in South Asia Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 40, 1–17 Copyright © 2024 Kristin Plys, Priyansh and Kanishka Goonewardena Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-871920230000040002

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and Marxism. Together, these essays are forging an anti-imperialist Marxism based on empirical work in South Asia and beyond by unsettling the propensity within various discourses (including certain strands of Marxism) to disproportionately fixate on white male theorists. Our essays contribute to anti-imperialist Marxism through dialectical and historical approaches to theorizing. While we are doing anti-imperialist Marxism in the South Asian context, we see this as being in the service of a global Marxism that is both anti-imperialist and nonEurocentric. Across the social sciences and humanities of late, both capitalism and the post-colonial have been central objectives of inquiry. But these parallel trends are often at loggerheads. The extremes of the post-colonial position assert the centrality of race and colonialism in shaping modernity while disavowing the role of class and capitalism, while the return to capitalism that has been central in history but other disciplines as well has brought about a vibrant revival of work in labour history and histories of capitalism. However, unlike the Eurocentric work of some influential Marxists, these new histories of labour and capitalism are more global in scope and focused on the political economy of the Global South. In bringing these two positions together, many in the humanities and social sciences have turned to concepts of racial capitalism and post-colonial political economy which has meant recovering the theories and voices of racialized Marxists living and working in the Global South. This is a development we welcome and celebrate. While African, Black diaspora, Latin American Marxists have been central to this endeavour, and while to a lesser extent East Asian Marxists such as Ho Chi Minh and Sukarno have also been a part of this conversation, South Asian Marxist voices who theorize race, coloniality and the historical development of global capitalism have been relatively neglected in this effort to revisit the work of Global South and diaspora Marxists of the 20th century.

MARXISM DURING BRITISH RULE While Marxist academics of the Global North have disproportionately focused on the work of African and Latin American Marxists in recovering anti-colonial and anti-racist Marxist perspectives, Marxism has long flourished in Asia. The South Asian Marxist tradition has a long history dating back to the early 19th century. With the formal end of the global slave trade in the 1830s, labour from South Asia was mobilized by the British and French Empires to replace enslaved workers in British and French territories in Africa and in the British West Indies (Mohapatra, 2007, p. 178; Sharma, 1982, p. 17; File no. 7237/91, PSA). As a colonial working class in formation, one of the unique features of the development of the South Asian working class was that from the start, it was created by European Empires to be a global working class. Because of British and French strategies for class formation in South Asia, Left responses against these conditions eventually assumed an internationalist orientation. The plantation was the primary enterprise for most of the colonial period. Labour conditions on colonial plantations were a merger of slavery with a modern rational corporate labour

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regime (Behal, 2007, p. 158; 2010, p. 32; Behal & Mohapatra, 2008, p. 143; Mehta, 1991, p. 5). Desertion was a common recourse for workers to ‘escape physical coercion and torture’, but they would often be caught and returned to the plantation by chowkidars (security guards) (Behal, 2007, p. 159; Behal & Mohapatra, 2008, p. 161). In some cases, labour uprisings occurred, including the Bengal Indigo Disturbances of 1859, the Blue Mutiny of Champaran in 1917 in Bihar (Mehta, 1991, p. 5) and Rowmari Garden Uprising in 1903 (Behal & Mohapatra, 2008, p. 165), typically in reaction against violent assaults by European plantation staff (Behal, 2007, p. 166). In the latter half of the 19th century, peasant uprisings and labour revolts were the most common form of dissent against colonial capital. These uprisings were mostly ‘scattered and unorganised’ (Sen, 1997, p. 65), generally consisting of informal actions directed at gaining control over the work process or of spontaneous outbursts and rioting (Veeraraghavan, 2013, p. 65). The first known strike in British India was a weavers’ strike in Empress Mills, Nagpur in 1877 (Meyers, 1958, p. 56; Sharma, 1982, p. 65). By the first decade of the 20th century, strikes became more organized. In 1903, a strike over unpaid overtime in the Government Press in Madras lasted six months (Veeraraghavan, 2013, pp. 69–72). In 1905, mill workers in Bombay organized strikes against the introduction of electric light in factories, refusing to work past dusk and before dawn. In 1907, an India-wide railway worker’s strike lasted one week and garnered key concessions. In 1908, workers in various sectors in Bombay organized a political strike against British rule (Saxena, 1990, p. 61). During the 1910s, industry, especially heavy industry such as steel and iron, intensified. Likewise, strikes proliferated from 1917 on. The year 1920 saw at least 51 major strikes in South Asia, each strike involving as many as 70 to 135,000 workers (Saxena, 1990, p. 78; Sen, 1997, pp. 120–4). The first two formal trade union organizations were the Madras Labour Union founded in 1918 by BP Wadia and Majoor Mahajan (Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association) founded in 1918 by Mohandas Gandhi. The Madras Labour Union was created by a group of textile workers in the B and C Mills in Madras, and with the help of BP Wadia, it became a citywide organization consisting of workers from various industries – including textile workers, rickshaw-pullers, railway workers, printing press workers, kerosene oil distributors, aluminium vessel workers, barbers, scavengers, policemen, postmen and domestic workers (Mathur & Mathur, 1957, pp. 16–17; Veeraraghavan, 2013, p. 88). MLU’s first tasks were to ameliorate the economic condition of workers by raising wages and ensuring timely and accurate payment of wages (Karnik, 1978, pp. 24–25; Mehta, 1991, pp. 44–46; Ramanujam, 1986, p. 14; Veeraraghavan, 2013, p. 91). But of far greater concern to the union was the violence inflicted upon workers by British managers in workplaces across the city (Jha, 1970, p. 89; Mathur, 1964, p. 19; Rao, 1938, p. 14). Majoor Mahajan, on the other hand, was ‘abnormal’ for a trade union, in that the goal of the union was to create class-cooperation between owners and workers. If a worker was ‘victimized’ by management, the union would pay the aggrieved worker a token sum to prevent labour unrest (Rao, 1938, p. 159). MM

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was staunchly opposed to strikes, and from 1918–1939, workers in Ahmedabad struck only once, during a general strike in 1924, and that too without the support of trade union leadership (Chandavarkar, 1998, p. 86; Jha, 1970, p. 100; Meyers, 1958, pp. 57–60; Rao, 1938, p. 160). Majoor Mahajan was also an exclusively Hindu trade union. As a result of this communal discrimination, Muslim textile workers in Ahmedabad were non-unionized until the 1930s when they created Mill Mazdoor Sangh affiliated with the Communist Party of India (CPI) (Chandavarkar, 1998, p. 77). By 1920, 125 formal trade unions were founded across South Asia – in Bengal (mostly in Calcutta), Punjab, Madras, Jamshedpur, Ahmedabad, Burma, Oriya and Bombay (Mathur, 1964, p. 21; Mehta, 1991, pp. 40–42; Saxena, 1990, pp. 83–88; Sen, 1997, pp. 138–139; Sharma, 1982, p. 77). The period of 1919–1922 saw the greatest growth of political consciousness of the working class, which coincided with a growing nationalist movement and worsening economic conditions (Roy, 1990, p. 6). As a result, the 1920s were characterized by unprecedented workers’ unrest. The colonial state responded by spying on unionized workers, imprisoning them and subjecting them to police search and harassment, but also developed special Labour Advisory Boards in Madras, Bengal, Bombay and Punjab (File no. 5629/69, PSA) as a legal forum through which to settle labour disputes. While most of the rulings of these boards were in favour of employers, the Labour Advisory Boards did recommend establishing a minimum wage along with the legal recognition of trade unions in order to prevent disputes (Sen, 1997, p. 140). In 1920, the All Indian Trade Union Congress (AITUC) was formed. This was the first working class organization in South Asia that encompassed all of British India. Its platform was generally anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist but was also cautious not to stoke the ire of the British Empire or of the Gandhian Congress Party (Adhikari, 1972, p. 206; Karnik, 1978, p. 33; Sharma, 1982, p. 151). In its founding address to its members, it took a stand against the Gandhian independence movement, ‘Your nation’s leaders ask for SWARAJ, you may not let them leave you out of the reckoning. Political freedom to you is of no worth without economic freedom’. (As quoted in Amjad, 2001, p. 34; As quoted in Sen, 1997, p. 158). In their founding year, the AITUC had 107 member unions, representing a total of 20,994 workers. Most of these unions were based in Calcutta, Bombay, Lahore and Jamshedpur. Notably, Majoor Mahajan, consisting of 6 unions and 16,450 workers, refused to join the AITUC because of the AITUC’s anti-Gandhian line (Mehta, 1991, pp. 54–55; Ramanujam, 1986, p. 15; Saxena, 1990, p. 91). The CPI was formed later that same year, on 17 October 1920 in Tashkent (Adhikari, 1972, p. 215; Ahmad, 1962, p. 57; Singh, 1994, p. 37; Sen, 1997, p. 170) headed by MN Roy, Mohammed Shafiq and MPBT Acharya. In 1921, the CPI founded four regional groups in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Lahore. The Bombay group, led by SA Dange, focused on the student movement and trade union activities (Sen & Ghosh, 1991, pp. 52–53). In Calcutta, Muzaffar Ahmad and poet Nazrul Islam started the Communist literary journal Navyug in 1922, and began organizing workers in and around Calcutta (Sen & Ghosh, 1991, p. 53). The Madras

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group was adopted by the existing labour movement and led by labour organiser, Singaravelu M Chettiar. In Lahore, the party was led by Ghulam Hussain, who left his job as an economics professor at Peshawar College to found the Inquilab Group (Josh, 1979, p. 46), which produced the Urdu-language newspaper, Inquilab (Josh, 1979, p. 47), and to work in concert with the Railway Workers Union. The aims of this burgeoning party were, as stated by Singaravelu Chettiar, ‘to win Swaraj for the masses in India, to prevent exploitation of the workers and peasant by suitable land and industrial legislation, to secure to the bread winner, a minimum wage by which he and his children shall have the necessaries of a decent life and to end all distinctions of caste, creed or sect in all political and economic relationships’ (First Communist Conference Papers, Subfile No. 4, NMML). Their method to reach these aims was to strengthen the working class through unionization, strategic strikes and striking with ‘full force and effect’. From its origins, Marxism in South Asia was anti-colonial, and primarily dedicated to opposing an international labour regime in which racialized workers from the Global South were placed at the bottom of racial and economic hierarchies.

MARXISM AFTER INDEPENDENCE While political and trade union movements inspired by Marxism played a decisive role in South Asia’s movements for independence in the 1940s, after Independence was won, Marxism thrived in some regions within South Asia, while in others, political and social conditions threatened Marxist intellectual development and politics. In Punjab, where Marxism was well established before partition, the labour movement, along with the radical Left, was decimated. Istiaq Ahmed contends that the demobilization of soldiers contributed to creating a more violent partition in Punjab, as unemployed soldiers stoked by communal tension (and many suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from their participation in the World Wars) took it upon themselves to rid their towns and villages of the religious ‘other’ (Ahmed, 2011). The violence was not only communal in nature but also inflicted against the Left. The genocide that took place in Punjab debilitated Punjab’s labour movement, trade union movement and the Communist Party. Though dealt a difficult hand, which was exacerbated by the mass departure of Sikhs who comprised a majority of the Communist Party in Punjab (Ali, 2015, p. 64), Sajjad Zaheer and other communists consolidated the Communist Party of Pakistan in the aftermath of partition. While the most well-known Communists of Pakistan’s early years remain better known for their literary works, they were also committed to resurrecting and building the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP). Faiz Ahmed Faiz contended that without addressing the more radical aims of the Communists in their support for national independence, national liberation in Pakistan remained incomplete. In response to this stalled revolution, Sajjad Zaheer pushed for an even harder Communist line, purging all Islamists, nationalists, liberals and even Freudians who ‘disrespected love as a pure desire’ (Ali, 2011, p. 517; See also Jalil, 2014, p. 356). The

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CPP organized labour unions under the Pakistan Trade Union Federation (PTUF) even though only 0.8% of the population were industrial workers and only 0.25% were unionized (Ali, 2015, p. 74). Most of these unionized workers worked in government, railways and tea plantations. Though small in number, the PTUF organized key events in Karachi and Lahore which put forth an anti-imperialist agenda and united communist workers, peasants and intellectuals to work together to fight back against the rollback of labour standards and rights after independence along with Pakistan’s cooperation with US hegemony (Ali, 2015, p. 75). The CPP encompassed many broadly Left movements, including the Democratic Women’s Association, a women’s labour association, Democratic Students’ Federation, the CPP student wing and the Progressive Writers’ Association, for writers and other artists (Malik, 2016, pp. 107–108). But social dislocation in the aftermath of partition made political organizing particularly challenging for the Pakistani Left, and relentless state persecution and repression eventually led to the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case of 1951. Faiz and Zaheer were accused by Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan of meeting with disaffected army officers in Rawalpindi to plan a coup (Jalil, 2014, p. 372). The actual events remain unclear; some contend that there was actually a discussion about a possible coup, while others present evidence that the arrests were made to suppress opposition in the upcoming elections (Malik, 2016, p. 119). As a result of the Conspiracy Case, many prominent Communist leaders, and leaders of the Progressive Writers’ Association, including Faiz and Zaheer themselves, were imprisoned. In 1954, the PCC and other leftist parties were, then, officially banned (Ali, 2013, p. 484; Mir & Mir, 2006, p. 16; Raza, 2013, p. 513). During his imprisonment, during which he spent most of his time in solitary confinement, Faiz wrote some of his most critically acclaimed poetry (Dryland, 1992, p. 180). The development of Marxism in Sri Lanka, while echoing the Indian experience in several ways, divides into three phases. The first one begins with the formative engagement of the pioneering generation of radical Sri Lankan students with communist internationalism in the late 1920s and culminates with their achievement of some post-colonial parliamentary political power in 1956. It was during this period that the major Marxist parties in Sri Lanka were formed – the Trotskyite Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1935, and its breakaway group that became the Communist Party of Ceylon (now CPSL) in 1943. In these years, they transformed themselves into mass organizations of national scale, with remarkable influence and success in parliamentary politics as well. The second period goes from 1956 to 1977, the heyday of Sri Lanka’s pursuit of post-colonial national development, during which time leaders of Marxist parties occupied a few key ministerial positions in several leftist coalition governments. It was in these years that Marxist literature became available for the masses, in English, Sinhala and Tamil, although Marx’s own writings in this impressive Left literary production and circulation remained a small fraction. The ongoing third phase can be dated from 1977, the beginning of neoliberalism in Sri Lanka and the decline of Marxist parties as effective political forces within or without parliament. It is mostly in this post-1977 period, after the virtual elimination of Marxist parties from parliamentary political power, that substantive readings of Marx

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and Marxism were undertaken in Sri Lanka – in various attempts to make sense of the country’s history and politics – whereas in earlier phases, Marxism was mostly a matter of political strategy (Jayawardena, 1974). Back in post-independent India, the Left ran into a number of strategic tensions even as it functioned as the main opposition to the Congress Party that had assumed power following the Partition (Namboodiripad, 1986). Towards the end of colonial rule, the CPI developed different approaches for political action in urban and rural areas. Within a year of independence, major urban centres like Bombay, Madras and Calcutta saw a rise in insurrectionist activities guided by the ‘Ranadive line’ that took its name from the then general secretary B.K. Ranadive. As it were, the Ranadive Line quickly pivoted from targeting the British Empire to the Congress government following independence by arguing that the independence earned did not amount to actual freedom (Bidwai, 2015). The objective of such action was to delegitimize the bourgeois regime, and to create separate platforms for a popular assertion. For rural India, a different strategy was devised. As opposed to spontaneous strike actions in the cities, the Communists in rural areas emphasized an extended agrarian struggle, with Telangana serving as the prime example. The Telangana region was part of the princely state of Hyderabad where a network of landlords served the Nizam through a systematic exploitation of debt-ridden and unpaid labourers (Bidwai, 2015). Even as India gained freedom from colonial rule, the peasants waged their own armed struggle and managed to liberate around 4,000 villages. This was done by violent actions carried out on the landlords with the intention of weakening the semi-feudal structure. But catastrophe beckoned here for Left politics. With the Nizam’s hold on Hyderabad loosening, the Congress-led government at the Centre exploited the situation to get him to accede to the Indian state. In 1964, the strategic confusion manifested into a split of CPI. A new force emerged in the form of CPI (Marxist), a trend that was to be repeated multiple times in the future as internal factions became more confident of a separate existence while still staking their claim under the broad umbrella of Left politics. Three years later, a strident faction of the CPI (M) took charge of a peasants uprising in Naxalbari, West Bengal. Taking its inspiration from Mao Zedong’s ideas of a protracted people’s war (Shah, 2010), this group was led by the ideologue Charu Mazumdar. Subsequently, the Mazumdar faction engineered another split by forming the CPI (Marxist-Leninist), and they came to be popularly known as Naxalites. The split was as much a result of internal conflicts among the Indian Communists as it was representative of tensions within the Communist movement internationally that were epitomized by the ‘Sino-Soviet split’ (Vanaik, 1986). The movement soon spread beyond West Bengal into nearby states, and it was characterized by a model of guerrilla warfare. It has since undergone multiple shifts in strategy and organization, but it remains a thorn in the side of the Indian state to this day. The Naxalites’ objective of creating a crisis of legitimacy for the Indian state received greater fuel following the embrace of neoliberal shock therapy in 1991. As the state leveraged its position to facilitate capitalist accumulation, the broad

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Left was presented with an opportunity to present a new politics in the face of economic stagnation. However, a combination of hedged bets in face of the embrace of neoliberalism by other bourgeois parties, a withering organizational structure and calculated assaults on Left groups by the rising force of Hindu nationalism meant that this historic opportunity has not yet been grasped in the Indian context.

MARXIST THEORIZING FROM SOUTH ASIA This rich history of Marxist political parties and social movements has produced a vibrant critical intellectual culture in South Asia that goes well beyond its influence in local politics. Perhaps the most significant product of Marxism in South Asia has been its unique contributions to Marxist theory. The many ways in which South Asian Marxists have applied and refashioned global Marxism to fit the local context has led to important innovations and interestingly unique themes and debates. Three contributions we find particularly significant are (1) South Asian Marxists’ approach to thinking about questions of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, (2) the treatment of agrarian and feudal continuities in Marxist theories of South Asia and (3) unique South Asian contributions to theorizing caste from a Marxist perspective. South Asian Marxisms, which grew out of late colonial labour struggles before organizing themselves into various mass political parties, cannot be understood in isolation from the subcontinent’s history of colonialism and anti-colonial struggles followed by projects of national development and neoliberal globalization in the post-colonial era. In both colonial and post-colonial times, the persistence of imperialism in the world economy too remained a constant and immediate reference point for South Asian Marxists, which cannot be said for all varieties of post-colonial theory emerging from that part of the world or elsewhere. South Asian Marxists’ contribution to a global revolutionary political tradition, therefore, bears the marks of their confrontation with imperialism and colonialism in addition to capitalism, which also sets them apart from their Europeans comrades as well as kindred spirits in settler colonial societies. Negotiating the relationship between national liberation and socialist revolution, in other words, was a formative theoretical and practical task for Marxists of South Asia, and the experience of undertaking it was constitutive of their political being. It was one which inserted them, moreover, into the heart of political debates among leading international Marxists and the revolutionary movements they represented, as exemplified in M. N. Roy’s famous Comintern exchanges with Lenin on ‘national liberation movements in the East’. Of course, not all Marxists – South Asian or not – agreed on the key issues debated in the Comintern and beyond, especially on revolutionary strategy in the colonies. The long-standing divisions between the various Marxist political parties of the subcontinent emerged precisely on the basis of such strategic disagreements on revolutionary politics as much as their theoretical implications.

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On the theoretical front, South Asians Marxists are distinguished by their original assessments of the nature of class struggles and alliances in the projected transition of the subcontinent from feudalism to socialism, mediated as it was by forms of capitalist development and underdevelopment installed by European colonialism and imperialism, not without support from indigenous ruling classes profoundly invested in preserving caste privileges. The gravity of such political inquiry into real and possible transitions from one mode of production to another is reflected in the depth of subcontinental Marxist theorizations on modes of production and social formations. These involved vigorous debate on peripheral and semi-peripheral spaces in world economies, their mutations under colonial and imperialist rule and the prospects of their transition to socialism. Indeed, few ‘transition debates’ in the world can match the nuance and insight of the South Asian Marxist deliberation on class relations and modes of production (Thorner, 1982). As we briefly detailed in our capsule history above, colonial political economy in South Asia first centred on the plantation as the primary means of capital accumulation and extraction. As in other colonial contexts, this strategy necessitated the centrality of agrarian production for the modern economy, which in practice meant continuities of feudal class relations were reconfigured to serve the profit motive of the capitalist world-system along with its colonial imperatives. These feudal continuities repurposed to serve a capitalist logic have led to new insights in agrarian Marxism based on a careful consideration of the particularities of agrarian political economy in South Asia. Several of the articles in this volume continue in the legacy of preeminent South Asian Marxist scholars including Irfan Habib (2002), EMS Namboodiripad (1984), Hamza Alavi (1973), Utsa Patnaik (1986), Jairus Banaji (1972), G.V.S. de Silva (1988), S.B.D. de Silva (1982), Gail Omvedt (1981) and recent scholars like Michael Levien (2018), Alpa Shah (2013) and Prasannan Parthasarthi (2001) who through their innovative work have enriched our understanding of the feudal and the agrarian. Kanishka Goonewardena’s contribution to this volume critically assesses Sri Lanka’s ‘two de Silvas’ and their focus on the plantation economy and relations between town and country as a means to theorize development in mid-20th century Sri Lanka. Muhammad Azeem’s article assess the distinct trajectories of Pakistan’s post-colonial political economy showing how it diverged from the most popular critical theories of the 20th century and how local Marxist thinker, Aziz-ul-Haq, grappled with these inconsistences. Ayyaz Mallick’s article assesses Hamza Alavi’s contributions to Marxist understandings of class and rural society in Pakistan, while Umaima Miraj’s contribution focuses on feudal legacies and their role in structuring capitalist patriarchy in Pakistan. Certainly, a discussion of feudal and agrarian political economy is incomplete without also theorizing caste. In terms of a theoretical standpoint, taking cue from Teltumbde (2016), we seek to push against the delinking of caste and class. This is not a position of mere scholarly import, but it has huge political ramifications as well. As Teltumbde argues, the overlooking of anti-caste struggles by early Indian communists caused fissures in Left politics that continue to simmer

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to this day. Yet, the questions of caste-class remain germane to any foundational understanding of South Asian society. While the early communists who predominantly belonged to the upper castes failed to pay adequate attention to the caste-class question, B.R. Ambedkar deftly addressed the problem through his leadership of organized protests against landlords who ran an oppressive system called Khoti which targeted Dalit peasants and other farmer castes in the Konkan region. This was one among the many attempts made by Ambedkar to resolve the caste-class question. Eventually, as we find in his landmark essay ‘Buddha or Karl Marx’, Ambedkar’s disenchantment with communist politics pushed him away from providing a political answer to the caste-class problem. Interestingly, it was not until the Naxals began to organize in rural areas that communists in India began to refine their position on caste (Teltumbde, 2016). The historical costs of this belated attempt can be seen in politics today where the Left movement and anti-caste struggles do not always overlap, even though people’s struggles become intelligible only when we think with class and caste. As a question of politics, it is not about placing caste alongside class. Rather, for Marxists, the challenge is to think with caste when they speak of class. While the papers in this collection do not directly tackle this problem, the questions of caste and class breathe fervently as we think, for instance, of cricket in India. To date, there have been only four cricketers who identify as Dalit who have represented the national team in the Test format (Bhawnani & Jain, 2018). As the question of race and caste itself has attracted public attention lately (Wilkerson, 2020), it is worth thinking with C.L.R. James’ pronouncement on race and class with regards to cricket. Certainly, the discussion on racial discrimination in cricket in Priyansh’s essay becomes richer when we pay attention to Indian cricket and caste oppression. One can bring a similar frame of mind to Umaima Miraj’s paper as well, where the false splintering of class, gender and caste comes undone in a searing analysis of the living feudal structures and patriarchy in Pakistan. In Kristin Plys’ article, the caste-class question comes together through V. Subbiah’s theories of caste which he developed in order to be a more effective labour organizer in the context of early 20th century Pondicherry. We recognize that this is just scratching the surface of South Asian Marxists’ contribution to global Marxism. And in addition to more work that highlights unique contributions from South Asia, there is also more theoretical work to be done within Marxist theorizing from and about South Asia. We see this special issue as merely a launching point, and we encourage theorists to continue to push the boundaries of Marxist theorizing in the South Asian context and beyond. While reinforcing the importance of thinking with Marxist thought in the context of South Asia, this special issue emerged with another concern. The set of papers here broadly offer new ways of thinking with theory. It remains its explicit objective to make theoretical contributions that challenge the notion of a canon per se. The papers do not only engage with the canon, however broadly defined it may be. Devaka Gunawardena and Ahilan Kadirgamar, for example, provide us with an excellent template of how we can build a theory of the present, drawing the global Marxist tradition while centring South Asia.

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Other articles similarly show how one can do Marxist theory rooted in South Asia, and in so doing, explore what we understand by theory and who can be considered a theorist. Umaima Miraj’s paper in this issue is an exemplary contribution to this effect as the reading of a Marxist-feminist politician Akhtar Baloch’s diary leads to broader questions about the commodification of women’s bodies, lovelessness and alienation in marriages of force, and the subversive working out of this predicament through murder. The diary is read by Miraj as a rich source of archival information, and it helps construct a feminist investigation into love and revolution. The theoretical approach here is novel and immensely productive, as it explicitly states that thinking about women’s liberation is an inevitable necessity for a revolutionary politics. For Marxist-feminist theory, in general, this study of incarcerated women in Sindh raises major theoretical concerns as it locates resistance and its limits in unanticipated spaces. Another paper in this issue that deals with the question of theory is Priyansh’s work on cricket, aesthetic appreciation and Marxism and the theoretical value of treating sporting praxis as political. Through an engagement with C.L.R. James’ (1963) early forays into thinking about cricket as an art, Priyansh looks to extend James’ theoretical formulation by examining the sport aesthetically. After outlining a code of aesthetic appreciation of cricket on Jamesian terms, Priyansh goes on to push it further by encouraging us to consider the political implications of such a theoretical intervention. By looking at the life of a former Indian cricket captain Mohammad Azharuddin, the author is keen to argue that thinking with an individual could be more productive if we were not to just see them as a sportsperson who symbolized the social energies of their time. Instead, we can go beyond an athlete’s political proclamations to think with the playing of sport, and whether it can be construed as political praxis. Both papers, as noted above, are keen to devise new ways of thinking about theory. Whether it is the question of love and revolution, or the politics of playing sport, these papers are overtly concerned with redrawing the boundaries of theory. They go about this task by narrating their arguments in a fashion that cannot be contained within the otherwise strict parameters of academic writing. Furthermore, by looking at the lives of numerous women who find themselves jailed for murder, and that of a male cricketer whose name is popularly stained with the charge of match-fixing, Miraj and Priyansh unsettle bourgeois notions of morality by unravelling the conditions in which the people studied here made history.

OVERVIEW OF THE ISSUE This collection of articles begins with Kanishka Goonewardena’s ‘Development and Socialism in Sri Lanka: The Anti-Imperialist Marxisms of G.V.S. de Silva and S.B.D. de Silva’. It offers a critical reflection on two leading Sri Lankan Marxist economists firmly committed to socialist development. Goonewardena’s encounter with the works of the two de Silvas, barely known outside of Sri Lanka and mostly forgotten at home as well, focuses on their accounts of how

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colonialism and imperialism fatefully undermined the prospects of socialist post-colonial development in Sri Lanka, mostly because of the plantation economy set up by British colonialism. While S.B.D. de Silva’s magnum opus The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (1982) presents an incriminating survey of the plantations and their debilitating effect on national economic development, Goonewardena’s chapter highlights his theorization of the ‘colonial mode of production’, so that he may be read in dialogue with other critics of imperialism and advocates of socialism such as Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank. In his reading of G.V.S. de Silva, Goonewardena underlines the novelty of his prescriptions for socialist development in iconoclastic essays such as ‘Heretical Thoughts on Economic Development’ and ‘Social Change’. Goonewardena’s article concludes with an assessment of the actuality of the writings of both de Silvas, especially in the light of the unprecedented economic and political crisis confronting Sri Lanka today. Ayyaz Mallick’s ‘Alavi Contra Alavi: Towards a Conjunctural Awareness’ explores the writings of Pakistani sociologist Hamza Alavi, especially on the post-colonial state, ethnicity, peasantry and kinship relations. Mallick demonstrates both the strengths and pitfalls of his theorization of the post-colonial state and ethnicity and suggests how Alavi’s other work (on the peasantry and kinship relations) may serve to complement the weaknesses of the former. Thus, by reading Alavi contra Alavi, he develops an ‘integral’ perspective on the relations between civil and political society, arguing for a conjunctural awareness of mediations between the same and their imbrications with differentiated relations of class, gender, ethnicity and kinship. In Muhammed Azeem’s ‘Mapping the Politics of Postcolonial Critique in Pakistan through the Writings of Aziz-ul-Haq (1968–1972)’, he shows us that Pakistan had never been a place of serious and nuanced debate and contestation of politics of post-colonial critique. Pakistan lacked a continuity of economic, political and cultural dependency that many newly independent countries (NICs) exhibited and as theorized by many of the critical paradigms for understanding post-colonial political economy such as neocolonialism, dependency theory and post-colonial theory. Instead, Pakistan is presented by extant liberal academic literature as a ‘failed nation’ and a state dominated by the military and plagued by religious extremism. In opposition to these liberal views on Pakistan’s post-colonial development, this chapter examines how cultural contestation of Pakistan’s nation-building project post-independence from British rule was far more complex and unique. Azeem contends that because the nation-building project of Pakistan was, on the one hand, an amalgamation of Indo-Persian, Arab, Indian and Western colonial and civilizational influences and, on the other hand, entailed suppression of resilient local and national cultures of its constituent nationalities developed over centuries. This was later expressed in ethno-nationalist politics. However, when it came to the politics of the marginalized in the late 1960s, there were important political, theoretical and literary insights which caused a change in the direction of political practice in Pakistan, which parallelled the politics expressed by writers like Fanon and early subaltern studies influenced by the Naxal Movement in India. The contestation and

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confusion arising from this dialectic also entered Pakistan’s literary and cultural sphere. Through the writings of Aziz-ul-Haq, Azeem’s article reads the nuances of these contestations and juxtapose them with the extant literature to complicate the latter’s conclusions and, in doing so, to indicate the possibility of a different post-colonial critique of the failure of nation-building project in Pakistan. Umaima Miraj’s ‘Murder as Praxis? Theorising Marxist Feminism in Pakistan Through Akhtar Baloch’s Prison Narratives’ grapples with how women in revolutionary history are often relegated to the sidelines or subsumed under the larger goals of the movements. In order to negate the liberal notions of the oppressed women of the Global South, and also to historicize women’s participation in anti-systemic revolutionary movements, Miraj shows why it is important to recover the silenced or forgotten voices of revolutionary women whose stories and politics highlight that women’s presence in the sphere of dissent is neither a new nor a bygone phenomenon. In this chapter, Miraj highlights one such woman: Akhtar Baloch, daughter of the activist and folk singer Jiji Zarina Baloch, one of the founders of Sindhiani Tehreek, and the stepdaughter of the founder of the progressive and leftist party, Awami Tehreek, Rasul Bux Palijo. In 1970, 18-year-old Akhtar Baloch began a hunger strike against Yahya Khan’s military regime, protesting the One Unit Scheme and for the electoral lists of the upcoming elections to be published in Sindhi. She was arrested thrice over these protests in the next few years. Based on her jail diaries, translated into English in 2017 as Prison Narratives, and an in-depth interview, Miraj explores how Akhtar situated her struggles and protests against the state-sponsored One Unit Scheme, electoral lists and the feudal economy of Sindh, in the larger sphere of struggle against global capitalism and domination. By also analyzing the importance of revolutionary poetry and friendships formed in her jail time, Miraj argues that uncovering her important contribution adds to our understanding of Marxist- feminist theories of the Global South. Priyansh’s ‘Mohammad Azharuddin as a Figure of Shock: The life of an Indian Muslim cricket captain in the time of Hindu nationalism’ begins with an analysis of how Mohammad Azharuddin’s arrival in professional cricket served, to quote Karl Marx, as a reform of consciousness that awakened the sport ‘from its dream about itself’. His expertise with the bat invoked the wide expanse of human sensorium, provoking reactions of shock and admiration among observers. In this paper, Priyansh examines Azharuddin’s life in cricket and public through a dialectical probing of the relationship between shock and aesthetics. Azhar and cricket appear as a productive terrain to carry out the analysis, as it pushes the possibility of what or who can be considered as a valid subject for theoretical scrutiny. Taking cues from Walter Benjamin and C.L.R. James, Priyansh theorizes the shock effects created by a cricketer most unusual. From his wristy wizardry with the bat to his appointment as captain of the Indian men’s cricket team during the rise of Hindu nationalism in the country, Azharuddin’s presence and popularity extended beyond the boundaries that are often imposed on a sportsperson. Through his involvement in the match-fixing scandal that was exposed at the turn of the 21st century, not to mention the lurid attention that

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was devoted to his multiple marriages, Azhar (the name by which he was popularly known) challenged the mores of a game that had emphasized Victorian notions of purity on and off the field. For the purposes of this chapter, Priyansh discusses how Azhar constructed a bodily discourse that pushes us to reassess our very notions of art and aesthetics. Devaka Gunawardena and Ahilan Kadirgamar’s ‘Crisis and Revolt in Sri Lanka: Theorizing a Horizon of Alternatives amidst an Unravelling Global Order’ analyzes the popular uprising in Sri Lanka on 9 July 2022 that led to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fleeing the country. It represented a stunning culmination of a wave of protests during the recent past. The proximate cause of the uprising, they contend, was the worst economic crisis that Sri Lanka had experienced since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Yet the breakdown was long in the making as the island nation became the first country in South Asia to take a neoliberal turn in the late 1970s. The dramatic collapse was catalyzed by a sovereign debt crisis with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Nevertheless, like all great revolts, it has led to a counter revolution by the ruling class, including the reconfiguration of the old regime. Gunawardena and Kadirgamar take a Marxist approach to examine the tremendous consequences of recent events, both in terms of Sri Lanka’s long history of struggles involving working people and the global unravelling underway. They assess whether Sri Lanka is a harbinger of more global political economic changes to come. The process includes the possibility of systemic resistance to financialization in the scores of countries in the Global South experiencing tremendous debt distress. In this regard, they interrogate whether Sri Lanka’s revolt could yet become a revolution. This chapter provides a template for scholars to levy Marxist thought to better understand contemporary events in South Asia as they unfold. Kristin Plys’ ‘Anti-colonial Marxism in French and Portuguese India Compared: Varadarajulu Subbiah and Aquino de Bragança’s Theories of Colonial Independence’ examines how two Marxist anti-colonial intellectuals from Portuguese India and French India – Aquino de Bragança and V. Subbiah – differentially theorized movements for independence from colonial rule. Through the analysis of primary source documents in French, Portuguese, Italian and English, Plys compares V. Subbiah’s Dalit, anti-fascist anti-colonial Marxism to Aquino de Bragança’s internationalist anti-colonial Marxism. Both theorists’ approaches have similarities in (1) theorizing the relationship between fascism and colonialism, given that the Portuguese Empire was administered by Salazar’s Estado Novo and the French Empire was under Vichy rule, (2) rethinking Marxism to better fit the Global South context and (3) intellectual and political connections to Algeria were critically important for theory and praxis. Despite the distinct geographic and social spaces in which they lived and worked, both produced remarkably similar theories of anti-imperialism. The essays included in this volume do anti-imperialist Marxism in the South Asian context in the service of a global Marxism that is anti-imperialist and non-Eurocentric. They accomplish this objective through different perspectives and methodological approaches. Kanishka Goonewardena’s ‘Development and

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Socialism in Sri Lanka: The Anti-Imperialist Marxisms of G.V.S. de Silva and S.B.D. de Silva’, Ayyaz Mallick’s ‘Alavi Contra Alavi: Towards a Conjunctural Awareness’ and Muhammad Azeem’s ‘Mapping the Politics of Postcolonial Critique in Pakistan through the Writings of Aziz-ul-Haq (1968–1972)’ have a shared endeavour of recovering South Asian theorists of development and assessing the continued utility of their work, but also accounting for the limits to their theoretical paradigms and praxis. Umaima Miraj’s ‘Murder as Praxis? Theorising Marxist Feminism in Pakistan Through Akhtar Baloch’s Prison Narratives’ and Priyansh’s ‘Mohammad Azharuddin as a Figure of Shock: The life of an Indian Muslim cricket captain in the time of Hindu nationalism’ both question who can theorize and what is a valid object of theoretical analysis. In Umaima’s article, she looks to women involved in revolutionary anti-colonial movements, reading their praxis as Marxist-feminist theory, while Priyansh examines one Indian cricket captain’s athletic style and media performance through a cultural Marxist lens. As both articles demonstrate, theory is not limited to writings of white European men. Devaka Gunawardena and Ahilan Kadirgamar’s ‘Crisis and Revolt in Sri Lanka: Theorizing a Horizon of Alternatives amidst an Unravelling Global Order’ levies Marxist theories from South Asia and elsewhere to analyze the world-historical significance of contemporary events in Sri Lanka as they unfold. Kristin Plys’s ‘Anti-colonial Marxism in French and Portuguese India Compared: Varadarajulu Subbiah and Aquino de Bragança’s Theories of Colonial Independence’ uses comparative historical methods to show how Marxist thought in South Asia differed by region, but these two essays also situate these comparisons in the global context by drawing on Global South connections made by South Asian theorists to open up Marxist thought in South Asia as part of the broader Global South. The editors’ interview with Himani Banerjee similarly gestures to global connections through reflection on Banerjee’s life and work. This volume closes with several poems of resistance by Marxist poet, Salman Haider. Haider is one of Pakistan’s most celebrated and well-known contemporary poets. In 2017, he was disappeared by the Pakistani state for expressing solidarity with those exploited, oppressed and on the margins of Pakistani society. He now lives in exile in Canada. Haider’s poems, some in translation for the first time, bring together the themes of the intellectual work presented in this volume. Themes of development, who can theorize, Marxist aesthetics and the global and comparative imagination of the Left are present in his poems along with his central themes of state violence. While his poems expose state and structural violence in the context of Pakistan’s past and present, his poems of resistance also have global resonance. Haider’s poetry reminds us of the urgency to place Marxist concerns old and new, in forms familiar and novel. To unbind Marxist theory, as the title of this introduction suggests, we need to reopen the frayed packaging and see whether we can arrange the old contents in newer arrangements. The two de Silvas, Hamza Alavi, V. Subbiah, Aquino de Bragança and others may exist as figments of a history foreclosed, but we rang the alarm bells here so that we could hear them speak again. They remind us of the continued relevance of anti-imperialist

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thought, and their uplifting contributions to questions that still animate the minds of Marxists. The mode of expression that was adopted by Akhtar Baloch, Mohammad Azharuddin and Salman Haider perhaps makes them unlikely guests in this gathering. But the contributions to the special issue stimulate this very incongruity. Through diary writing and treatises on political economy, searing critique and sport-making, we think, write and sketch out a poetic Marxism.

ARCHIVAL SOURCES Punjab State Archives, Chandigarh. Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.

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Jha, S. C. (1970). The Indian trade union movement: An account and interpretation. KL Mukhopadhyay. Josh, B. (1979). Communist movement in Punjab, 1926–47. Anupama Publications. Karnik, V. B. (1978). Indian trade unions: A survey. Popular Prakashan. Jayawardena, V. K. (1974, January–February). Origins of the left movement in Sri Lanka. Social Scientist, 2(6/7), 3–28. Published by: Social Scientist Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/ 3516475 Levien, M. (2018). Dispossession without development: Land grabs in neoliberal India. Oxford University Press. Malik, A. (2016). Alternative politics and dominant Narratives: Communists and the Pakistani state in the early 1950s. In V. Kalra & S. Sharma (Eds.), State of subversion: Radical politics in Punjab in the 20th century. Routledge. Mathur, J. S. (1964). Indian working-class movement. Indian Universities Press. Mathur, A. S., & Mathur, J. S. (1957). Trade union movement in India. Chaitanya Publishing House. Mehta, B. L. (1991). Trade union movement in India. Kanishka Publishing House. Meyers, C. A. (1958). Labor problems in the industrialization of India. Harvard University Press. Mir, A. H., & Mir, R. (2006). Anthems of resistance: A celebration of progressive Urdu poetry. India Ink. Mohapatra, P. (2007). Eurocentrism, forced labour, and global migration: A critical assessment. International Review of Social History, 52, 110–115. Namboodiripad, E. M. S. (1984). The marxist theory of ground rent: Relevance to the study of agrarian question in India. Social Scientist, 12(2), 3–15. Namboodiripad, E. M. S. (1986). The left in India’s freedom movement and in free India. Social Scientist (New Delhi), 14(8/9), 3–17. Omvedt, G. (1981). Capitalist agriculture and rural classes in India. Economic and Political Weekly (pp. A140–A159). Parthasarthi, P. (2001). The transition to a colonial economy: Weavers, merchants, and kings in South India. Cambridge University Press. Patnaik, U. (1986). The agrarian question and development of capitalism in India. Economic and Political Weekly (pp. 781–793). Ramanujam, G. (1986). Indian labor movement. Sterling Publishers. Rao, B. S. (1938). The industrial worker in India. George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Raza, A. (2013). An unfulfilled dream: The left in Pakistan ca. 1947–50. South Asian History and Culture, 4(4), 503–519. Roy, D. K. (1990). Trade union movement in India. Minerva. Saxena, K. (1990). Trade union movement and the national movement. South Asian Publishers. Sen, S. (1997). Working class of India: History of emergence and movement 1830–1990 (with an overview up to 1995). KP Bagchi & Co. Sen, A., & Ghosh, P. (Eds.). (1991). Communist movement in India: Historical perspective and important documents (Vol. 1, pp. 1917–39). Samkalin Prakashan. Shah, A. (2010). In the shadows of the state: Indigenous politics, environmentalism, and insurgency in Jharkhand. Duke University Press. Shah, A. (2013). The Agrarian question in a Maoist Guerrilla Zone: Land, labour and capital in the forests and hills of Jharkhand, India. Journal of Agrarian Change, 13(3), 424–450. Sharma, G. K. (1982). Labour movement in India: Its past and present. Sterling Publications. Singh, G. (1994). Communism in Punjab. Ajanta Publications. Teltumbde, A. (2016). Dichotomisation of caste and class. Economic and Political Weekly, 51(47), 34–38. Thorner, A. (1982). Semi-feudalism or capitalism? Contemporary debate on classes and modes of production in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 17(49, 50 & 51), 1961–1968, 1993–1999 & 2061–2066. Vanaik, A. (1986). The Indian left. New Left Review, 159(159), 49–70. Veeraraghavan, D. (2013). The making of the Madras working class. Leftword. Wilkerson, I. (2020). Caste: The origins of our discontents. Random House.

CHAPTER 2

THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST MARXISMS OF SBD DE SILVA AND GVS DE SILVA Kanishka Goonewardena University of Toronto, Canada

ABSTRACT This chapter offers an introduction to two leading Sri Lankan Marxist political economists, S. B. D. de Silva and G. V. S. de Silva. By surveying their most influential writings – the 645-page book The Political Economy of Underdevelopment by S. B. D. de Silva and the pungent essays ‘Heretical Thoughts’ and ‘Social Change’ by G. V. S. de Silva – -it traces the distinctive and provocative qualities of these two thinkers, especially concerning problems of development and underdevelopment. In doing so, it is argued that S. B. D. de Silva is best understood as a leading anti-imperialist political economist alongside Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi, distinguished by a classical Marxist focus on class struggle and relations of production in his narration of the ‘colonial mode of production’ in Sri Lanka. As for G. V. S. de Silva’s erudite reflections on the trajectories of transition to capitalism and socialism as well as the prospects of social and economic development in countries emerging from pre-capitalist social formations in the wake of colonization, his remarkable attention to spatial questions at multiple scales – between country and city, colony and metropole – receives special attention. The conclusion underlines the sustained relevance of both de Silvas to making sense of the origins of the present crisis in Sri Lanka. Keywords: Marxism; imperialism; plantations; city; country; development In the Marxist political tradition of Sri Lanka, two de Silvas – SBD and GVS – occupy special places. Both distinguished themselves in the field of economics, by Marxist Thought in South Asia Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 40, 19–28 Copyright © 2024 Kanishka Goonewardena Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-871920230000040003

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prevailing against the neoclassical orthodoxies of the dismal science, with devout attention to the prospects of development in so-called post-colonial countries aspiring to socialism. In so doing, they drew creatively from Marx’s conception of capitalism and revolutionary Marxisms after Marx to formulate searching critiques of Sri Lanka’s unfinished struggle with colonialism and imperialism, which has lasted for over 500 years. These de Silvas sought not merely to write about colonialism and imperialism, and the steady complicity of diverse local elites in these lucrative enterprises, but above all to transcend all that in a socialist project of development, as engaged intellectuals with exemplary careers in public and political offices. SBD, who was born in 1926 and studied economists as much as economics until his death at the age of 92, is fondly remembered by Sri Lankan leftists as a dedicated lecturer at the University of Peradeniya and a spirited participant in political–economic debates. He launched his oeuvre, however, not as an academic but as Deputy Director of the Research Department of the Central Bank, in the immediate aftermath of Sri Lanka’s independence from the British in 1948, before being removed from that position by his red-baiting seniors. He persisted, nonetheless, in a series of other government appointments to become Secretary to the Ministry of Industries in the 1970–1977 government led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike and was Assistant Director of the Agrarian Research and Training Institute when his magnum opus finally appeared in 1982. The Political Economy of Underdevelopment is a 645-page treatise on Sri Lanka’s ‘colonial mode of production’ dominated by the plantation economy of tea, rubber and coconut.1 It offers a striking contribution to the world literature on capitalist development and underdevelopment (Personal conversation with SBD de Silva). SBD’s Underdevelopment grew out of his doctoral dissertation entitled ‘Investment and Economic Growth in Ceylon’, submitted to the University of London in 1962. Unconcerned with ‘considerations of professional survival or advancement’, he declined an invitation from Oxford University Press to publish the manuscript immediately as a monograph and set about ‘revising’ it – for the better part of two decades (viii). In that process, he became the first Sri Lankan academic to reject his own PhD thesis, according to the avid reader of SBD, Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta (2020, 2018). Whereas the dissertation had sought ‘to analyse the backwardness of Sri Lanka’s peasant sector in terms of its failure to absorb growth impulses that were thought to emanate from the plantation sector’, further research revealed to SBD that ‘the plantations themselves were merely another backward sector with no impulses to spread’ or initiatives to uplift the peasantry, contrary to commonplace contemporaneous economic opinion on development in the former colonies (1). The book, therefore, refutes the dissertation as well as the regnant orthodoxy on development: Underdevelopment is SBD’s ‘attempt to place in the world context what was essentially a

1

Parenthetical page references to this book will be given in the main text without repeatedly indicating the author’s name and date of publication (De Silva, SBD, 1982). Similar page references will be given to the main texts of GVS de Silva (1988) as well.

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country-based study . . . and to examine the problems of underdevelopment in terms of more generalised analytical categories’ obtained from Marxian rather than neoclassical economics (1). SBD’s claim to have sketched a worldwide perspective on Sri Lanka’s travails of underdevelopment is both true and false. True, because the scope of Underdevelopment is indeed global, studded as it is with poignant examinations of various other countries facing their own problems underdevelopment, on account of comparable experiences of colonialism and imperialism; false, because this book, though focused on Sri Lanka, cannot but aspire to be a general theory of capitalism and colonialism, in the most internationalist and anti-imperialist accents of Marxism. In terms of scope, depth and intellectual force, Underdevelopment ranks alongside better known works on the subject of capitalism and development by more renowned writers such as Andre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin, who (among other kindred spirits) are in fact generously and critically appraised by SBD. It is to be regretted, therefore, that this magisterial work by SBD is rarely registered in contemporary discussions on colonialism and imperialism, either in Sri Lanka or the rest of the world – except in the irreverent weekly blog on ‘economists and economics’ (e-Con e-News) curated by the said Sri Bhaggiyadatta.2 What does the reader find in Underdevelopment? Following a settling of accounts with the inadequacy of neoclassical economics to the problem of underdevelopment at hand, and a contrasting appreciation of it in SBD’s Marxist perspective, the first of the three parts of this 17-chapter book delves into a richly detailed consideration of two types of colonialism in relation to metropolitan capital: settler colonialism and non-settler colonialism. This typological distinction firmly underlines SBD’s theorization of the divergent fortunes of settler and non-settler societies with respect to the prospects of capitalist development, especially their quite different capacities to industrialize in the mould of the metropole, revered for its rapid and qualitative growth of productive forces, especially in high value-added and capital-intensive sectors of the economy. The exhaustively documented second part then deals with the discontents of the plantation system that lay at the heart of both types of colonial economies, with special attention to their forces of production, class relations and labour regimes ranging from chattel slavery to forms of indenture characteristic in European colonies of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. It is in this middle part that we find the most thoroughgoing study of the Sri Lankan economy under British rule, generously sprinkled with comparative references to plantation economies throughout the colonial world; it is here too that we see SBD’s central argument concerning the fateful plantations most amply spelt out. To wit: in spite their veritable profitability for the metropolitan ruling classes and a relatively smaller band of local elites in both colonial and post-colonial times, plantations did not develop forces of production or

2 Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta, E-Con, E-News, 1 June 2019-15 May 2022: https:// eesrilanka.wordpress.com.

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opportunities for indigenous industrialization in the non-settler colonial parts of the world; on the contrary, they retarded development. SBD’s account of the pioneering role played by plantations in the ‘development of underdevelopment’ (Frank, 1966) of countries such as Sri Lanka rests on classical Marxist class analysis, highlighting the preponderance in these economies of metropolitan rentiers, merchants and bankers, alongside their obsequious local agents, who accumulated vast surpluses in the sphere of exchange rather than production, without developing productive forces as did the classical industrial bourgeoisie praised by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. In the third and final part of Underdevelopment, the long arc of SBD’s argument bends towards a general theory of peripheral underdevelopment, as he stretches Marx’s critique of the capitalist mode of production into colonized spaces. This includes a close analysis of the ‘mechanisms of metropolitan control’ in non-settler colonies, with a clear emphasis on their domination by merchant rather than productive capital. SBD is unequivocal here about the role played by merchant capital in the relationship between capitalism and underdevelopment, that is, ‘mediating between precapitalist forms of production in the periphery and capitalism in the metropolis’ (426). Merchant capital in the metropolis is, therefore, different from merchant capital in the periphery, where it functions as a reactionary rather than progressive force with respect to the development of productive forces and production relations. Accordingly, SBD is insistent that plantations – the lynchpin of the ‘colonial mode of production’ – are not capitalist but pre-capitalist. In his own words (447): Imperialism, as the agency by which capitalism expanded its sphere of influence, has had little or no transformative effect on the periphery; rather than developing capitalist social relations and productive forces, imperialism stifled them and intensified unevenness of development on a world scale. In countries that came under the hegemony of the established capitalist centres there was for the most part merely a reorganization of their precapitalist structures, retarding a real transformation of these structures. . . . [T]hese countries were transfixed in a twilight world which is neither feudalism nor capitalism.

How, then, is Underdevelopment to be assessed? SBD’s pioneering work is best read as an answer to the question: why does underdevelopment, fundamentally marked by shackled forces of production, persist in the periphery? It is his remarkably erudite enquiry into it that yields an original theoretical concept: the ‘colonial mode of production’. This productive concept demands to be studied alongside those proposed for related purposes by Frank, Amin, Giovanni Arrighi and Immanuel Wallerstein (dependency, unequal exchange, hegemony, world system), with close reference to the array of theories of imperialism in the Marxist tradition, from Lenin and Luxemburg to Walter Rodney, Amilcar Cabral, Amiya Bagchi and Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik. For it is in the company of these thinkers that SBD’s own contribution becomes clearest in its insistence on theorizing underdevelopment in terms of production and class relations, rather demarcations of centre from periphery with primary reference to the sphere of exchange. Theoretically, two related features of his critique of underdevelopment are particularly striking: first, the degree of agency attributed to merchant capital

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in the ‘development of underdevelopment’; second, the Manichean line he draws between capitalist and pre-capitalist production relations. At stake in Underdevelopment, therefore, is nothing less than the meaning of capitalism; the nature of the interaction between capitalist and non- or pre-capitalist social relations under the influence of European colonialism and imperialism and our understanding of historical transitions, from feudalism to capitalism as well as from feudalism and capitalism to socialism. Readers of SBD are of course also obliged to ask: what is to be done with underdevelopment? Given the analytical rather than prescriptive nature of Underdevelopment, SBD lies open to misinterpretation by critics and acolytes alike.3 The worst possible travesty would be to regard him as an advocate of peripheral capitalist development or industrialization by any means necessary, along the lines of Deng Xiaoping’s notorious parable of the cat and the mouse. Merely because Underdevelopment is on occasion liable to be misread as a lament of the lack of capitalist development in the colonized periphery, no one should be misled to imagine that the kind of industrialization achieved by the metropolitan bourgeoisie could simply be replicated in the periphery under the auspices of a so-called ‘national bourgeoisie’. Frantz Fanon (1963/1961) questioned that temptation in the famous ‘Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, by demonstrating the futility of nationalism without socialism, locally and globally. Moreover, as Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik (2021) have shown in their latest book Capital and Imperialism, ‘capitalism, in order to exist, must metastasise itself in the practice of imperialism and the immiseration of countless people’, precisely because it is not by its nature a ‘self-contained and self-generating system’.4 For the Patnaiks – and for SBD too – capitalism as a self-sustaining system exists neither in theory nor in history; it feeds on its other like Deng’s proverbial cat needs its mouse. So deserves SBD’s case a hearing devoid of the familiar fetishisms of technological fixes, fantasies of modernization theorists, utopias of national bourgeoisies and theoretical misconceptions of capitalism in hothouses. Those seeking a way out of underdevelopment bequeathed by the ‘colonial mode of production’ are rather forced to ask: socialism and barbarism? ‘Socialism or Barbarism?’ is unsurprisingly the title chosen for a book of his by GVS de Silva – the Sri Lankan Marxist who grappled with Lenin’s ‘what is to be done?’ question in the post-colonial condition with unparalleled insight. Two years junior to SBD, GVS is widely regarded as more political than economic, partly on account of the practical and prescriptive orientation of his work. But this political reputation grows mostly out of his role in drafting Sri Lanka’s landmark Paddy Lands Act of 1957 – as Secretary to Philip Gunawardena, the legendary Minister of Food and Agriculture in the 1956 Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP) government, and a founder of the Marxist movement in Sri Lanka. This Act, it should be recalled, was the first great socialist political act in

For a fine critical review of Underdevelopment by a leading Sri Lankan Marxist theoretician, see Abhayavardhana (2001). 4 The quoted words in this sentence are from the publisher’s description of the book. 3

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independent Sri Lanka, with the immediate objective of establishing tenancy rights of share-cropping peasants and uprooting the entrenched imbalance of power between landlords and tenant farmers. Its popular slogan and political– economic demand – ‘Land to the Tiller’ – remained a lifelong influence on GVS, whose socialist credentials came to rest also on his lasting commitment to rural technological and social development as well as his abiding concern for the self-emancipation of the peasantry from the depredations of actually existing village life, in Sri Lanka as well as neighbouring countries. After graduating with honours from the University of Ceylon and a stint at the London School of Economics, GVS left academia for politics, joining the Ceylon Communist Party in the early 1950s, before breaking with it over ideological differences. Henceforth, he laboured as an independent Marxist until his untimely death in 1980. Even after Philip Gunawardena’s resignation from the MEP government, in protest of the damage inflicted on the Paddy Lands Act by vindictive landlords in Parliament, GVS continued his public service with distinction, holding leading positions in such state institutions as the Industrial Development Board and the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, while also contributing his expertise to international institutes such as United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), Asian Institute of Development (AID) and Participative Institute for Development Alternatives (PIDA). As a Marxist political economist in search of national strategies for socialist development, with the impoverished masses of peasants at the forefront of his original mind, GVS was keenly interested in two social and geographical relationships: one between the forces of production and the social relations of production, the other between the country and the city (De Silva, 1988, p. 1). GVS’s acute reading of Marx and radical thoughts on socialist development are now accessible mostly through an edited collection of his work, aptly entitled Socialism or Barbarism, which includes two of his most iconoclastic essays: ‘Social Change’ and ‘Some Heretical Thoughts on Economic Development’.5 Penned in 1973, the latter still reads like a Sri Lankan ‘communist manifesto’, scintillating critique and call to action rolled into one. The real-utopian project GVS lays out here intends to transcend not only the socio-spatial inequalities of the country but also its location and vocation within the global imperialist division of labour. How is this to be achieved? ‘The central economic question in our country’, GVS writes in the first line of ‘Heretical Thoughts’, ‘is the development of the rural productive forces’ (83) – a task hindered rather than aided by the plantation-driven ‘colonial mode of production’, as SBD also demonstrates. But: ‘Why rural? Why not urban, or both urban and rural?’ (83). In his penetrating socio-spatial analysis reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s celebrated critique of the comprador bourgeoisie, GVS shows why the city is the problem rather than the solution. For ‘the urban’ is constitutionally incapable of autonomous development of productive forces and social relations in a socialist direction because of

5 All references to GVS de Silva (1988) are taken from Socialism or Barbarism, indicated parenthetically by page numbers in the main text.

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the persistently parasitic relationship of the city to the countryside on the hand and of its subservient relationship to the metropole on the other hand. All efforts of national development on the way to socialism must, therefore, be concentrated where they are most needed and likely to succeed – in the countryside rather than in the city. What does this socialist agenda look like? It involves ‘the deployment, on an immense scale, of resources, technology, skills and expertise from the urban to the rural sector’ (83). But that is not all: ‘equally necessary is a transformation of the economic relations within . . . which these productive forces operate’ (85). The economic relations to be so revolutionized are twofold: those ‘between the rural economy and the urban economy’ and those ‘within the rural economy itself’ (85). Concerning the country–city relation to be deconstructed, GVS notes that ‘the exploitation of the rural economy by the urban takes practically the same forms as the exploitation of the urban economy, in turn, by the imperialist economies of the developed countries’ (86). It is this anti-imperialist perspective that clarifies for him how ‘our rural economy . . . is a doubly exploited one’ (86) and why its emancipation must be a priority for any realistic socialist-revolutionary project. For GVS, the rural is essentially ‘a simple commodity production economy’ trapped between ‘a senile feudalism and a castrated capitalism’ (96). The Sri Lankan village – so romanticized by cultural nationalists and multicultural tourists alike – appears to him for what it is: a ‘fertile breeding ground of . . . backwardness, low productivity, inefficiency, ignorance, apathy, lethargy, resistance to new ideas, excessive familism and isolation from the community’ (97). Yet by virtue of the distance between what the rural is and what it could be, it is precisely here that we must act in accordance with the ninth of the ten-point programme Marx and Engels (1998/1848, p. 61) proposed in the Communist Manifesto: i.e. the ‘combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries’ in conjunction with the ‘gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country’. How, then, is the rural economy to be revolutionized? Echoing the New Economic Policy of the Soviet Union, GVS calls on the state to ‘give a very high priority to rural electrification, which is the power base for the development of rural productive forces’ (89). Beyond this electrified base, his enumeration of related tasks for the state is exhaustive – including investments in agriculture, irrigation infrastructure, livestock, fisheries, rural industries and research and technological innovations. The state, in short, is summoned for a ‘technological revolution in the countryside’ (91). Research scientists, engineers, technicians and other skilled workers must be made to leave their laboratories, office desks, conference tables and relatively comfortable urban life, and live and work among the rural people, educating them and at the same time learning from them. Agricultural experimentation must be done in the cultivator’s field and technical innovation in the village smithy, with the full and intelligent participation of the rural people. The village must be shaken out of its torpor, and turned into a hive of lively discussion, creative thinking, technical innovation and productive activity, by a well-planned and organized invasion of skilled and knowledgeable town folk who are anxious to teach and learn in a spirit of humility, seeking, as it were, atonement for their primordial sin of parasitic existence . . . (91–92).

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While the state is accorded a key role in this revolution, an equal if not greater emphasis in GVS’s thinking falls on democratizing its form, in a well-arranged marriage of ‘Land to the Tiller’ to ‘Power to the People’. The domicile of this radical couple is to be the village ‘Community Organization’ (103), proposed by GVS as the basic political unit of the revolution. In ‘Heretical Thoughts’, GVS insists on the necessity of ‘a far-reaching decentralization of administration and decision making’ (103) to effectively revolutionize the forces and relations of production in the countryside. While the democratic role of ‘producer cooperatives’ and ‘consumer cooperatives’ in this process is duly registered by GVS, for him it requires not a partial but a ‘total organization of the rural economy’ (102). It is within this holistic horizon that he proposes the political form of the village ‘Community Organization’. Nothing that concerns the revolution is to be alien to it, which GVS imagines as a hub of ‘public discussion and debate’ leading to political decisions on all matters of common interest (105). Indeed, ‘the Community Organization must be the driving force in a mass movement to develop the productive forces, increase the technological consciousness, widen the intellectual horizon, and unleash the suppressed creative energy of the entire rural community’ (104). GVS is clear that ‘it should be a thoroughly democratic organization and not a bureaucratic one imposed from above’ because ‘the essence of the matter is that the mass of the people must responsibly and consciously participate in development’ (105). Politically, GVS’s ‘Heretical Thoughts’ align perfectly with Lenin’s potent but often-misunderstood slogan: Communism 5 Electrification 1 Soviet Power. For in this formulaic definition, ‘electrification’ stands for the rapid development of productive forces in the backward conditions inherited by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and ‘soviet power’ refers to the ‘power to the people’ in anticipation of the ‘withering away of the state’ as theorized in Lenin’s (1917) State and Revolution. GVS’s diagnosis of Sri Lanka’s predicament of underdevelopment in rural–urban–global terms also reminds us of another pioneering Marxist work on the profound spatial aspects of capitalist development, published in the same year as ‘Heretical Thoughts’: The Country and the City by Raymond Williams (1973). It is in this book that the Welsh literary critic expounded on the fundamental significance of the relation between the country and the city to the historical geography of capitalism, from the intensely debated origins of this mode of production to its present forms: ‘What happened in England has since been happening ever more widely, in new and dependent relationships between all the industrialized nations and all the other ‘underdeveloped’ but economically important lands’. As to what this story of unequal relations means to the colonized countries of the world, Williams (1973, p. 279) is also clear: ‘one of the last models of “city and country” is the system we now know as imperialism.’ If the Marxist synergies between GVS and Williams are apparent enough to their seasoned readers, here it remains to be pointed out that neither is anti-urbanist in spite of their due attention to the rural and that both have also much in common with the great Marxist theoretician of space (Henri Lefebvre, 2003/1970, 1991/ 1974). Here’s GVS sounding very much like the French philosopher on ‘the urban’:

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What, then, is the future of our cities? Are they doomed . . . ? No. . . . As the rural economy takes off, it will lift the urban economy up with it, as a junior partner. Cities will once again grow, not as parasites living on the countryside and exploited in turn by foreign economies, but as useful satellites of the rural economy. This, however, will not be the end of the story. With the further development of the rural productive forces, economies of scale will become both necessary and possible. This will again require the concentration of industry, services and decision making in urban centres. The decentralization inherent in the development of the rural economy may then come to into conflict with the increasing need for centralization. Decentralism and centralism are not absolutes, the decentralization which today is necessary to liberate the incarcerated rural productive forces, may eventually become a drag on the growth of the urban productive forces. “Urban centralization” could well be the heretical cry of a future economist (94–96).

The dialectical and historical materialist qualities of GVS’s thinking are also palpable in the most theoretically innovative essay written by a Sri Lankan Marxist: ‘Social Change’ (241–286). It offers a fine measure of the depth of GVS’s engagement with Marx’s political–economic writings – from the famous ‘Preface’ to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy to Grundrisse to Capital – in search of possibilities for socialist development and transition to communism, in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. In this brilliant essay, GVS sketched a historical materialist theory of transitions between modes of production by rereading Marx in the light of revolutionary and evolutionary transformations of social and political relations from the bourgeois revolutions in Europe to the last decade of the Cold War, with special attention to the socialist and indeed communist aspirations of post-colonial societies. A multilinear historical trajectory from ‘pre-capitalism’ to ‘barbarism’ or ‘communism’ emerged in his non-teleological analysis. In a nutshell, ‘pre-capitalist’ societies harbour the potential to evolve into either ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism’, and both could in turn proceed, under specified historical and political conditions, towards either ‘barbarism’ or ‘communism’. Fleshed out with concepts of the nature of the state in such social formations and theorizations of crises of capitalist accumulation, GVS’s matrix of historical pathways through modes of production yields provocative reflections on the ‘what-is-to-be-done’ question in the context of unfinished struggles, in South Asia and beyond, for an exit from actually existing capitalism. If this brief account of the key writings of SBD and GVS succeeds grasping the nature of their distinctly Sri Lankan and South Asian contributions to Marxism, an inevitable question still suggests itself: how well have Underdevelopment and Socialism or Barbarism aged since their initial publications? GVS and SBD were both exemplary artisans and partisans of the post-colonial political project of socialist development, which was essentially conceived and executed with mixed results, to say the least, in the Cold War era and under the aegis of the Non-Aligned Movement (Prashad, 2007). Their radical political–economic aspirations, however, were defeated by Sri Lanka’s neoliberal turn as early as 1977 and the concomitant marginalization of the Marxist political parties in parliamentary as well as mass politics. In the most commonplace political sense, then, SBD and GVS seem to belong to a disappointed if not lost generation of revolutionaries. Yet the worst economic crisis in Sri Lanka since independence in 1948, which brought protestors of various backgrounds in unprecedented

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numbers to the streets in the summer of 2022 and deposed a popularly elected president, has vindicated in no uncertain terms the descriptions and prescriptions of Underdevelopment and Socialism or Barbarism. As the most astute observers of this dire economic and political crisis situation including Prabhat Patnaik (2022), Shiran Illanperuma (2022), Matt Withers (2022) and Devaka Gunawardena and Ahilan Kadirgamar (2022) have noted, what is called the aragalaya (the struggle) in Sri Lanka today can only be understood with an historical perspective linking the ‘colonial mode of production’ to the ‘development of underdevelopment’ in the neoliberal era, such as we find in Underdevelopment; and the solution to the present crisis in Sri Lanka lies not in yet more neoliberalism as advisers from the World Bank or IMF would like to have it but in the kind of ‘Heretical Thoughts’ propounded by GVS. So remain SBD and GVS our contemporaries and comrades in Sri Lanka, South Asia and beyond.

REFERENCES Abhayavardhana, H. (2001). The political economy of underdevelopment. In S. B. D. de Silva (Ed.), Selected writings (pp. 368–375). Social Scientists Association. de Silva, S. B. D. (1982). The political economy of underdevelopment. Routledge & Kegan Paul. de Silva, G. V. S. (1988). The alternatives: Socialism or barbarism. In C. Abeysekera (Ed.), Social Scientists Association. Fanon, F. (1963/1961). The wretched of the Earth [trans. C. Farrington]. Grove Press. Frank, A. G. (1966). The development of underdevelopment. New England Free Press. Gunawardena, D., & Kadirgamar, A. (2022, April 30). The political economy of the crisis in Sri Lanka. Economic and Political Weekly, 57(18). www.epw.in. Accessed on May 10, 2022. Illanperuma, S. (2022, April 8). Is Sri Lanka heading towards further turmoil? Roots of the 2022 economic crisis. Jamhoor. www.jamhoor.org. Accessed on April 8, 2022. Lefebvre, H. (1991/1974). The production of space [trans. D. Nicholson-Smith, afterword D. Harvey]. Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. (2003/1970). The urban revolution [trans. R. Bonomno, foreword N. Smith]. University of Minnesota Press. Lenin, V. I. (1917). State and revolution. www.marxists.org. Accessed on May 05, 2022. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1998/1848). The Communist Manifesto: A modern edition [intro. Eric Hobsbawm]. Verso. Patnaik, P. (2022, May 18). Neoliberalism and the Sri Lanka economic crisis. The Bullet. www. socialistproject.ca. Accessed on May 18, 2022. Patnaik, U., & Patnaik, P. (2021). Capital and imperialism: History, theory and the present. Monthly Review Press. Prashad, V. (2007). The darker nations. Boston: A people’s history of the Third World. The New Press. Sri Bhaggiyadatta, K. (2018, June 19). One of Sri Lanka’s greatest economists: S. B. D. de Silva. Colombo Telegraph. https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/one-of-sri-lankas-greatesteconomists-sbd-de-silva/). Sri Bhaggiyadatta, K. (2020, September 2–12). S. B. D. de Silva, Parts 1–7. Gammiris: The Pepper Spray Club. https://gammiris.lk/author/krisanthasri/ Sri Bhaggiyadatta, K. (2019, present). E-Con, E-News. https://eesrilanka.wordpress.com Williams, R. (1973). The country and the city. Oxford University Press. Withers, M. (2022, May 12). The making and masking of Sri Lanka’s debt crisis. East Asia Forum. www.eastasiaforum.org. Accessed on May 12, 2022.

CHAPTER 3

ALAVI CONTRA ALAVI: TOWARDS A CONJUNCTURAL AWARENESS Ayyaz Mallick University of Liverpool, UK

ABSTRACT This chapter explores the writings of Pakistani sociologist Hamza Alavi, especially on the post-colonial state, ethnicity, peasantry and kinship relations. In contradistinction to most (partial) uptakes of Alavi, I evaluate his work as a whole in order to shed light on its continuities and discontinuities. I demonstrate both the strengths and pitfalls of Alavi’s theorisation of the post-colonial state, mode of production and ethnicity by placing him in context of wider Marxist debates at the time. I then suggest that Alavi’s other work (e.g. on the peasantry and kinship relations) may serve to complement the weaknesses of the former. Thus, by reading Alavi contra Alavi, I advocate for an ‘integral’ perspective on the relations between civil and political society, arguing for a conjunctural awareness of mediations between the same, and their imbrications with differentiated relations of class, ethnicity and kinship. Keywords: Marxism; state; class; ethnicity; Pakistan; Hamza Alavi

INTRODUCTION At one point in his letters to the late Stuart Hall, his friend and philosopher David Scott reflects on the form of Hall’s extensive corpus and how this has influenced the latter’s reception. For Scott, the often selective uptake of Hall’s output in different strands of activist and intellectual work is integrally related to the fact that Hall is, above all, a ‘theorist of the contingency of the present’ who therefore – and almost exclusively – deployed the essay as ‘the most conducive’ generic form for his scholarship-as-intervention modus operandi. As such then, the fact that there is no ‘Big Book’ to turn to for ‘Stuart Hall’s Theory of Marxist Thought in South Asia Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 40, 29–45 Copyright © 2024 Ayyaz Mallick Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-871920230000040004

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Everything’ is congruent with Hall’s ethos of ‘see[ing] virtue – not failing – in the fragment’, an intellectual (and political) practice animated by ‘an implicit worry about the false unity of the monograph – the book’s illusion of closure’ (Scott, 2017, pp. 61–62, emphasis in original). It is thus the very form of such scholarship as intervention that lends itself to partial and one-sided uptakes of an author’s oeuvre. Much the same may be said about the fate of another New Left contemporary of Stuart Hall: the Pakistani sociologist Hamza Alavi (1921–2003). For Alavi too, while not being as wedded as Hall to the fragment or – as Hegel would put it – to ‘the labour of the negative’,1 it is the essay (in the form of journal articles, book chapters, etc.) which was the paramount form of intervention over a wide-ranging and restless intellectual journey. That Alavi’s writings have given rise to a selective uptake, often (over-)emphasising one aspect over the other, is not surprising given the targeted form and the astonishing range of his interventions.2 Thus, for example, where in global and subcontinental Marxist debates, Alavi has figured mostly by virtue of his interventions in debates about the modes of production and on the peasantry (Thorner, 1982), in Pakistan, it is Alavi’s ruminations on the character of the post-colonial state and (to a lesser extent) on ethnicity that have generated the most intense debate (cf. McCartney & Zaidi, 2019). What has rarely been done is to consider Alavi’s oeuvre as a whole, the uptake of Alavi’s work – especially that on state theory – being stuck in a kind of one-sidedness and (dare I say) even a provincialism, which has ignored his continuities and discontinuities with the wider Marxist milieu within which he was embedded. Consequently, as I will show later, there has been a lack of critical interrogation of the problematic – i.e. the assumptions and pre-suppositions (both conceptual and historical) – of Alavi’s scholarly output. In turn, this has led to engagements and critiques of Alavi that are limited by virtue of being confined at the (narrowly) empirical and, indeed, at an empiricist level (cf. Zaidi, 2014). This essay therefore has two interrelated aims. First, it aims to shed light on Hamza Alavi’s oeuvre as a whole, not to chase or even conjure the mirage of a ‘false unity’ where none might be present, but precisely in order to understand the strengths and pitfalls and the continuities and discontinuities of these different aspects of Alavi. Second, this chapter will embed Alavi within the context of the wider critical/Marxist debates of the day to shed light on the implicit and explicit problematic that animates his theorisation(s). From his wide-ranging essays, I will specifically consider the writings on colonialism and imperialism, mode of production, the post-colonial state, ethnicity, peasantry and agrarian relations to think through the links (or lack thereof) between these, and their relation to congruent Marxist scholarship. As such, my aim is to both force the Alavian reception out of the curious – Pakistani or, at best, South Asian – provincialism 1

This works to Alavi’s detriment as we will see. To pinpoint just a few broad areas Alavi wrote on: peasantry and kinship relations, ethnicity and communalism, neo-imperialism, women in the Third World, post-colonial state theory, mode of production debate, anti-colonial movements and the Labour Party in United Kingdom.

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that has been its fate, and to consider its productivity and limitations both in his own day and especially today.

THE PITFALLS OF A PROBLEMATIC: ON THE POST-COLONIAL STATE AND RELATED CONCERNS As mentioned above, engagement with Alavi’s corpus has rarely attempted to embed his work in the wider Marxist and post-colonial milieu within which he carried out his theorising. This has especially been the case in Pakistan where Alavi’s theorisation of the post-colonial state has been ‘omnipotent and omnipresent’ (Azeem, 2020, p. 1679). Exceptions to this trend may be seen in the work of Aasim Sajjad Akhtar (2008, 2018), Tariq Amin-Khan (2012) and Muhammad Azeem (2020). Amin-Khan brings Alavi in conversation with wider debates on the mode of production, dependency and ‘Political Marxism’ trends regarding the emergence of capitalism. Azeem, albeit briefly, contrasts Alavi’s approach to theorising multiple dominant classes in a social formation with those of Poulantzas and Gramsci (although his engagement with Gramsci is rather limited). Akhtar carries out a concerted critique/correction of Alavi on the question of the power structure’s legitimation ‘from below’ through Gramsci and cognate post-colonial/critical scholarship (such as by the Subaltern Studies school, Sudipta Kaviraj and Nazih Ayubi). However, in these engagements with Alavi and beyond, there has been a limited elaboration of the tenets of his fundamental problematic when it comes to the state and the mode of production, nor a linking of the latter to other aspects of his work. To recap briefly the main coordinates of Alavi’s theory, he sees the post-colonial state or the ‘superstructure’ as ‘overdeveloped’ vis a vis the ‘structure’ in the colony. This is because in societies with a highly stratified ‘feudal’ structure pre-colonisation (such as mediaeval India), the metropolitan bourgeoisie had to create a ‘state apparatus through which it can exercise dominion over all the indigenous social classes in the colony’ (Alavi, 1972a, pp. 61; 1982a, p. 183). As such, the colonial and post-colonial social formation comes to be characterised by three dominant classes – the indigenous bourgeoisie, metropolitan bourgeoisie and the landowning class – which are ‘not in antagonistic contradiction’ as they coexist in the same structure of ‘peripheral capitalism’ (1982b, pp. 297–298). In stark contrast to Western capitalist states which are the product of and hegemonised by a single ruling class, the post-colonial state takes on a ‘relatively autonomy’ of ‘a different order’, i.e. it mediates between the competing (but not antagonistic) interests of ‘a plurality of fundamental classes’ (1972a, pp. 71–2; 1982b, pp. 298–303). While the different classes may be in a relation of ‘unequal collaboration’ (e.g. between the metropolitan bourgeoisie and indigenous bourgeoisie), it is the state and specifically the military-bureaucratic oligarchy which comes to play a mediatory role between these different interests (1972a, p. 75). In the process, the military-bureaucratic oligarchy also develops ‘independent material bases of autonomy’ through networks of (sociopolitical) control and ‘direct appropriation and disposition of a substantial proportion of the economic

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surplus’ (1972a, p. 72, emphasis added; 1982b, pp. 302–303). It is also in this outsized significance of the state apparatus that Alavi locates the importance of the salariat: an ‘auxiliary class’ of educated, professionalised and/or white-collar employees, located mostly (or at least aspiring to be so) in the (post-)colonial bureaucratic apparatus (Alavi, 1988, p. 69; 1989, p. 225; 1991, pp. 157–158). For Alavi, the salariat – due to regionally uneven patterns of development – has a tendency to fracture and align along ethnic and communal lines in order to draw wider support in its ‘struggle for access to the limited opportunities for state employment’ (1991, p. 158). It is important to note that Alavi’s theorisations of the ‘overdeveloped’ post-colonial state, the political role of the salariat, and ethnic politics in India–Pakistan, is integrally related to his theorisation of ‘peripheral capitalism’. Here, Alavi made an intervention in the ongoing debates of his day on the mode of production in (post-)colonial social formations. Alavi characterises ‘peripheral capitalism’ as different from the capitalist mode of production proper by dint of the former’s ‘disarticulation’, i.e. while peripheral societies are characterised by a generalisation of ‘free’ wage labour and surplus appropriation through economic coercion alone, the circuit of generalised commodity production and extended reproduction of capital is satisfied only through the link to the metropolis (1982a, pp. 179–182). Thus, while localised mechanisms of (pre-colonial) governance are dissolved along with the generalisation of capitalist private property and wage labour, the disarticulation of extended reproduction of capital leads to labour-intensive forms of exploitation (absence of real subsumption), underdevelopment of productive forces and a lack of internal linkages between different sectors of the peripheral capitalist economy. It is this disarticulated structure which leads to a plurality of dominant classes in the social formation and acts as ‘a structural imperative’ (1982b, p. 295; 1983, pp. 62–63) on the state which takes on a relatively autonomous, ‘overdeveloped’ role to preserve the peripheral capitalist mode as a whole with its dependent linkages to the metropolis. Alavi’s provocative theses have drawn engagements and critiques from within South Asia and beyond. In Pakistan’s case, while we have briefly mentioned some key interlocutors above, most engagements have not moved beyond critiquing or affirming the Alavian model at a simply empirical level. Recently, for example, Zaidi (2014) threw the gauntlet by calling for a re-evaluation of Alavi’s state theory by bringing focus onto a ‘fracturisation of power’ due to the rise of assertive institutions outside the bureaucratic-military oligarchy (such as the private media) and the increasingly informalised nature of power and accumulation in contemporary Pakistan. The essays in response to Zaidi’s call of (intellectual) arms have evaluated Pakistan’s changing power structure and modes of accumulation by both affirming the prevailing elite character of the power bloc (see chapters by Armytage, Javid, and Shah in McCartney & Zaidi, 2019), while also shedding light on new social groups – such as ‘intermediate classes’ and specific peasant castes transitioning to capitalist accumulation – that are having determinate effects on the rhythms of power and accumulation in the country (see chapters by Akhtar, Jan, and Javed in McCartney & Zaidi, 2019). Moreover, McCartney’s ‘looking backward’ to an evaluation of Alavi’s model in

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its day casts doubt on both the (relatively) autonomous power of the Pakistani state and its insulation from different social classes (McCartney, 2019). However, these empirical (re-)evaluations have not led to a sustained consideration of Alavi’s fundamental problematic. It is in fact by placing Alavi’s theorisation in its historical context that one gets a clearer idea of his fundamental problematic and its strengths-pitfalls. From within African contexts, the responses to Alavi by John Saul (1974) and Colin Leys (1976) disputed the former’s characterisation of the ‘independent’ or ‘autonomous’ character of the bureaucracy. Crucially, both Leys and Saul drew upon (in addition to Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire) recent interventions by Nicos Poulantzas in ongoing debates on the capitalist state in the pages of the New Left Review and beyond. On a related note, Eqbal Ahmad drew upon Gramscian concepts of ‘hegemony’, ‘balance of forces’ and ‘analysis of situations’ to dispute characterisation of the colonial state as ‘overdeveloped’ (1980, pp. 129, 139). Ahmad critiqued Alavi and other formulations with regards to post-colonial social formations as having an undue ‘emphasis on uniformities in the patterns of development while short-circuiting empirical evidence of significant differences between seemingly comparable state and socioeconomic formations’ (Ahmad, 1980, p. 128). Instead, Ahmad brought focus on the distinct historical antecedents, economical and ideological preferences, formal-legal status and metropolitan linkages that are (contingently) concretised in the form of varied ‘systems of power’ in the Third World, ranging from elective-parliamentary, dynastic-oligarchical, radical-nationalist and neofascist states. Others focused attention on the ambiguity of Alavi’s characterisation of ‘peripheral capitalism’ and its associated class formations. Among Latin American engagements with Alavi, Sherry Girling asked the question whether ‘there [are] really three distinct propertied classes competing within the pcs [postcolonial state]?’ and whether Alavi’s three dominant classes may not be more usefully understood as fractions of a single bourgeoisie class (Girling, 1973, p. 50). Relatedly, Shirling also raised the question of how and if the relative autonomy and mediatory role of the post-colonial state is different from the mediatory role of the metropolitan state with regards to different fractions of a single dominant propertied class (i.e. the bourgeoisie) (Girling, 1973, p. 51). Making a cognate point to Girling, Wolfgang Hein and Konrad Stenzel, see Alavi’s characterisation of the ‘overdeveloped’ state as ‘a bit too schematic’ and point to factors such as the ‘structural heterogeneity’ of underdeveloped societies, the ‘unstable balance between different dominating classes and fractions’ and the role of the metropolitan bourgeoisie for understanding the ‘particular autonomy’ of the bureaucratic-military oligarchy and the frequent change of political regimes in dependent countries (Hein & Stenzel, 1973, p. 35). In India, Hira Singh and in Sri Lanka, S.B.D. de Silva also critiqued Alavi for his focus on the geographical destination of surplus while ignoring more situated relations of/in production, along with the variegated dialectic of resistance and accommodation to colonialism, which reinforced and even constituted various ‘feudal’ and pre-capitalist forms of exploitation in colonised social formations (Singh, 1998, p. 48; de Silva, 1982, pp. 469, 473). On a related note, while Hartmut Elsenhans agreed with

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Alavi on the outsized role of the ‘state class’ in (post-)colonial societies, he disagreed in Alavi’s designation of the ‘hypertrophy of the Third World state’ as a legacy of the colonial period (Elsenhans, 1996, p. 131). Elsenhans critiqued Alavi, along with dependency and world system theorists, for mischaracterising Third World states as ‘capitalist’ when in fact, the disarticulated nature of various sectors within post-colonial economies and the rentier – not capitalist – tendencies of an expanding ‘state class’ may be better explained by recourse to the (controversial and nebulous) Marxian conception of Asiatic mode of production (Elsenhans, 1996, p. 172). From these varying engagements, we can distill three (related) fundamental pre-suppositions of Alavi’s problematic with regards to the theorisation of the (post-)colonial state and peripheral capitalism. First, there is the undue haste with which Alavi asserts the generalisation of (capitalist) wage labour and purely economic forms of surplus appropriation in his characterisation of peripheral capitalism (this is also a point made by Amin-Khan, 2012, pp. 95–103). It is this generalisation of capitalist relations in colonial formations, and its attendant separation of the political and economic moments of domination, that lends a certain schematic/mechanical quality to Alavi’s characterisation of the ‘overdeveloped’ state, which (for all intents and purposes) acquires an autonomy/ separation from society itself. Second, his characterisation of the peripheral capitalist mode, its generalisation of wage labour and its three dominant classes (along with the state-centred salariat) lead Alavi to a discounting of the concrete regimes of labour control, surplus appropriation and sociopolitical hegemony (entailing varied combinations of consent, coercion, resistance and accommodation) in peripheral social formations. As such, Alavi’s account of struggle and competition among different social groups (such as in his essays on Pakistan) remains almost exclusively confined to the struggles within the civil-military bureaucracy and the shifting – but ultimately (homeo-)static – mediations of the Pakistani state with regards to the three dominant classes. In short, Alavi’s theory of the ‘over-developed’ state suffers from an undue emphasis on horizontal class struggle (i.e. among the dominant classes) at the expense of vertical class struggle (i.e. between the dominant and subordinated classes). A third important issue is the fundamental (almost ontological) distinction that Alavi draws between metropolitan societies characterised by a ‘single’ dominant class versus peripheral social formations characterised by a ‘plurality’ of dominant classes. This strict demarcation allows Alavi to, firstly, locate the relative autonomy and ‘overdeveloped’ nature of the post-colonial in its mediatory role among the dominant classes only (i.e. in the horizontal class struggle), while ignoring the rhythms of struggle and contestation ‘from below’ (i.e. vertical class struggle) which might affect the form and modalities of rule in determinate ways. Second, and even more importantly, this bracketing of the (post-)colonial experience allows Alavi to jettison the intense, creative thinking going on in wider Marxist theory at the time with regards to the capitalist state, its relation to varied classes and class fractions and the form of Bonapartism (more on this below). As such, flowing organically from his ruminations on peripheral capitalism, there is more than a hint of Weberianism in Alavi’s state theory with its

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stark demarcations between Western/non-Western and state/society domains. Here, the superstructure/state has an almost apriori autonomy from an ‘underdeveloped’ structure/society, and tends to reproduce the disarticulated, peripheral capitalist structure without the different modalities and forms of political domination being affected by (class and other) struggles in the wider social formation. The pitfalls of this quasi-Weberian flirtation can be most clearly discerned in Alavi’s later essays on the Pakistani state and ethnicity. For example, in a 1990 essay titled ‘Authoritarianism and Legitimation of State Power in Pakistan’, the account moves almost exclusively on the plane of machinations among different sections and individuals of the civil and military bureaucracy (Alavi, 1990). In fact, the momentous subaltern struggles in Pakistan of the late-1960s and 1970s around class and national iniquities, which heralded an organic crisis of the ruling bloc and fundamentally altered modalities of domination, incorporation and accumulation in the country (Akhtar, 2018; Toor, 2011), barely get a paragraph-long mention in the whole essay (cf. Alavi, 1990, p. 51). Relatedly, the problem of legitimation too is reduced to the military junta’s mobilisation of various iterations of ‘Islam’ and praetorianism, without an elucidation of how such an ideological complex may articulate with (regionally differentiated) subaltern social groups. The oscillation between (formal) democracy and military dictatorship in Pakistan itself is (correctly) put down to civilian political leaders’ inability to mobilise mass resistance to the military-bureaucratic oligarchy. However, the political elite’s inability in mobilising the masses for a sustainable hegemonic project based on representative democracy is itself reduced to their ‘narrowly legalistic’ approach (Alavi, 1990, p. 36) rather than located in the former’s social – i.e. historical and material – inadequacies (cf. Mallick, 2021). The truncation of the rhythms of class struggle thus leads ultimately to a fully liberal-institutionalist problematic predicated on an apriori separation of state-society and a fundamental dichotomy between (liberal) democracy versus military dictatorship. It is this narrow framing – flowing organically from his theorisation of the state and mode of production – that leads Alavi to his particular understanding of the politics of ethnicity in India and Pakistan. Thus, where the machinations of/ within the state slowly come to be of exclusive focus, the various iterations of ‘ethnicity’ as a node of sociopolitical mobilisation is also reduced to the struggles of regionally differentiated salariat or salariat-aspiring social groups for white-collar employment, especially within the state itself (Alavi, 1988, p. 70; 1989, p. 225; 1991, pp. 157–158). While the salience of the issue of state quotas/ employment with regards to the politics of ethnicity in (for example) Pakistan cannot be denied, such a narrow focus fails to explain the specific ideological-material mechanisms, spaces and organisational forms through which an ‘ethnicity’ is defined, mobilised and indeed forged both within and outside the spheres of the state. For example, Alavi’s account of the emergence of the ‘Muhajir’ ethnicity as a salient (and violent) node of political mobilisation in Pakistan moves almost exclusively on the plane of the Muhajir/Urdu-speakers’ shifting travails with regards to state employment. Again, the investment,

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incorporation and role of subaltern social groups other than the salariat-aspiring middle classes in defining and forging ‘ethnicity’ are given short shrift (cf. Alavi, 1991, pp. 173–174). However, as has been shown elsewhere, while demands around the state quota system were key to the Muhajir political party Muhajir Qaumi Movement’s (MQM’s) emergence, the formation of ‘Muhajir ethnicity’ was also integrally related to (among other processes) the shifting rhythms of the urban question in Sindh and the regional impact of the US imperium (through the first Afghan jihad) (cf. Mallick, 2020; Verkaaik, 1994). As such, an understanding of ‘ethnicity’ in Pakistan (and beyond) centring around the salariat’s access to state employment, while not entirely untrue, does serve to obscure more than it reveals, especially with regards to the rhythms of material-ideological hegemony and concomitant spatial practices and imaginaries implicated in determining both the form and content of ‘ethnic’ mobilisation. Again, the limited elucidation of ethnicity in Alavi flows from a problematic which short-circuits the integral (and dynamic) character of state-society relations, i.e. in Gramscian terms: the boundary-traversing social and spatial spheres of the ‘integral state’. In fact, while Alavi demarcated his theorising of the (post-)colonial state and social formation due to the issue of ‘plurality’ of dominant/fundamental classes, we can see cognate debates about multi-class ruling blocs and state relative autonomy taking place in Western contexts too. Thus, for example, the New Left Review, where Alavi first proposed his theory of the ‘overdeveloped’ post-colonial state, had already been host to a debate on British history where Perry Anderson (1964) and Tom Nairn (1964) located the antecedents of the present crisis of the British state in the 19th century age of revolutions. Here, the pressure of subaltern insurgency and revolution had given rise to a composite ruling bloc: ‘a unique paradox [whereby] in the supremely capitalist society of Victorian England, the [landed] aristocracy became – and remained – the vanguard of the bourgeoisie’ (Anderson, 1964, p. 33). Such uneven rhythms of class and state formation within the very heart of Western Europe had, of course, also been noted by Marx in his comments on the differentiated development of political economy, philosophy and political theory in England, Germany and France, respectively, in his reflections on the Prussian Junker caste, and on the ‘anachronism’ of the ‘German political present’ (cf. Marx, 1843, pp. 5–6). In the interwar years, it would be Antonio Gramsci whose extension of the concept of ‘passive revolution’ as the general, pacificatory form of bourgeois hegemony in the epoch of imperialism would be integrally informed by his reflections on the unevenness in state formation and, crucially, the multi-class character of ruling blocs in Western Europe (cf. Gramsci, 1971, pp. 18–19, 280–287, 317; Harootunian, 2020; Thomas, 2006). Contemporaneous to Alavi was the famous Miliband-Poulantzas debate on the capitalist state which the former took as his point of departure and demarcation (cf. Alavi, 1972a, pp. 60–72). However, unremarked and unregistered by Alavi, it is the later iterations of this debate – especially the interventions by Nicos Poulantzas – which provided fruitful openings for understanding the multi-class character of ruling blocs and the relative autonomy of the state without reducing the latter one-sidedly to subject or object (as in earlier

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exchanges in the state debate). Thus, the later Poulantzas located the relative autonomy of the capitalist state in its twofold character. Firstly, the state embodies the formal separation of the ‘economic’ and ‘political’ in capitalism, i.e. the said ‘separation’ should be conceived not as ontologically discrete spheres but as the specific ‘capitalist form of the presence of the political in the constitution and reproduction of the relations of the production’ (Poulantzas, 1978, p. 19, emphasis in original). Secondly, the struggle between fractions of the dominant class and those of the dominant class versus dominated classes also serve to give the capitalist state its specific form of relative autonomy and institutional materiality vis-`a-vis wider society. The state is seen as shot through with class struggle, with its relationship to society not being external but that of ‘a strategic field’ and as a ‘specific material condensation of a relationship of forces among classes and class fractions’ (Poulantzas, 1978, p. 129, emphasis in original). Such a conception which locates the (relative) autonomy of the state in the institutional materiality and simultaneously relational character of the state could have, presumably, lent itself to creative theorising for post-colonial contexts too. Thus, for example, instead of taking the state-society boundary as given apriori, the focus would be on the specific social forces and their attendant hegemonic projects through which adequate institutional forms are concretised (‘condensed’) both in the sphere of the formal state (political society) and in civil society. Attention is hereby focused on how a (proto-)hegemonic social class (or class fraction) does not simply lay hold of a pre-given state apparatus, but how such apparatuses themselves are constituted, redefined and their boundaries continually renegotiated, in the process of the constitution of a hegemonic class itself. In this regard, the state apparatus does not exclude, pace Alavi, a plurality of fundamental classes, but – as a material condensation of social struggles both within and outside the state – the state itself would be a relational condensation of a ruling bloc which may include multiple classes (or class fractions), albeit under the hegemony of a single fraction or class. Thus, different apparatuses, institutions and branches of the state can come under the hegemony of different fractions of the historical bloc, with the dominant group’s interests often ‘crystallised’ in the apparatus wielding real (as opposed to merely formal) power over other branches of the state. As such, ‘an unstable equilibrium of compromises [vis a vis different fractions of the historical bloc and subordinate classes]’ and ‘a conflictual unity [of the historic bloc/dominant classes]’ is arranged within and through the state, whereby the dominance of the historical bloc is reproduced even while ensuring some level of incorporation of dominated classes (Poulantzas, 1978, pp. 31, 127). Poulantzas’ conception of the state as a relational condensation, therefore, moves us towards a Gramscian understanding of the ‘integral state’ (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 243, 262), i.e. the dialectical unity of civil and political society, understood not as ontologically distinct terrains or topologies external to society or social classes but as forms of practice and institutional condensates internal to a class, class fraction or class alliance’s constitution of itself as a hegemonic bloc (Thomas, 2011, p. 289). In such a conception, the extent of the relative autonomy of the state and the specific institutional forms this takes (e.g. parliamentary

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democracy, praetorianism, fascism, etc.) cannot be simply read off apriori from ‘the structure’ or the mode of production (defined narrowly) but would be a product of the class struggles traversing the whole social formation and their historically informed but conjunctural condensation in specific forms of political rule. The phenomenon of Bonapartism or dictatorship is thus not to be reduced to its antecedents in an ‘overdeveloped’ superstructure. But this specific form of the relative autonomy and materiality of the state is to be related to the concrete and conjunctural rhythms of class struggle, the constitution of a class or ruling bloc’s hegemonic apparatuses traversing the boundaries of civil and political society (‘the integral state’) and the institutional mechanisms of consent, incorporation and accommodation (or lack thereof); the latter are able to generate vis a vis subordinate social groups. Such a conjunctural but historically informed conception lends itself to understanding how, to draw upon Fanon, a post-colonial ruling bloc’s social and material inadequacies, an inability ‘to bring about coherent social relations’, conditions its resort to a state that ‘does not. . . reassure the ordinary citizen, but rather one that rouses his anxiety’ (Fanon, 1967, p. 132; Mallick, forthcoming). Relatedly, a focus on the differentiated social and spatial spheres of the integral state also lends itself to a complex understanding of how hegemonic projects themselves work through difference, i.e. by drawing upon historically and structurally developing social and spatial unevenness, and concretising-fetishising these in the form of relations of gender, ethnicity, caste, etc. (Hall, 1980; Hart, 2008; Short, 2013). Such a mode of theorising lends itself usefully to both theorising multiple dominant classes within a ruling bloc (Alavi’s concern), while also providing useful openings to avoiding the binary of state-society and, relatedly, a narrow focus on the state as the field par excellence of (ethnic) difference (Alavi’s pitfalls). The state itself becomes a strategic field traversed by contradictions and struggles emanating in the wider social formation, while its institutional materiality, the distinction between the (political) state and (civil) society, is no static rendering of pre-given institutions but is itself determined by and reacts to these wider struggles in the social formation. Happily though, in contradistinction to some of the more static renderings of state and society discussed above, there may be seen within Alavi’s oeuvre itself an indication of such a dynamic, relational and conjunctural conception of social forces and struggle. It is here that Alavi’s conceptualisation of the peasantry and revolution may offer useful openings to us.

A STRATEGIC CORRECTIVE: ON THE PEASANTRY AND REVOLUTION As discussed above, while Alavi’s work provided important signposts for understanding colonial modes of accumulation/class formation and how this translates into particular forms of state formation and politics, it was also marred by a lack of specificity and conjunctural concreteness. However, there is another strand of Alavi’s extensive corpus which may be mobilised as a complement/

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corrective. I refer here to Alavi’s pioneering reflections on neo-imperialism and especially his work on the peasantry and agrarian relations in the Global South. It is here that Alavi’s strategic awareness comes to the fore and it is to a brief consideration of these that we now turn. In the 1950s and 1960s, as the high-era of decolonisation and subsequently post-colonial developmentalism was coming to the fore, Alavi was one of the first to pinpoint the new patterns of neo-imperial exploitation then emerging. Sensitised by his experiences as a pioneer of the newly instituted State Bank of Pakistan and as a close observer of that country’s descent into the willing embrace of US imperialism, Alavi wrote on the distorting effects of US aid in Pakistan (Alavi & Khusro, 1961). A few years later, he was to make a more concerted intervention into emerging debates around neo-imperialism. In an essay for The Socialist Register’s inaugural issue, Alavi (1964) mobilised data from the United Kingdom and India to pinpoint how even seemingly anti-imperialist projects of Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) were being distorted by monopoly capitalism. Thus, the new imperialism did not simply repeat the old colonial patterns combining a fostering of extractive sectors, captive markets and the prevention of a sustainable industrial base in colonised countries. Instead, monopoly capital from the core now partnered with sections of the national bourgeoisie not so much to block peripheral countries’ attempts at development and industrialisation but to make these dependent in key ways on metropolitan countries through payments on royalties, technical expertise, brand names, etc. (Alavi, 1964, pp. 120–121). Thus, even while local capitalists may continue to own majority shares in national industry, the partnership model ensured that control of key sectors (such as of capital goods) remained with the metropole. Plus, as indicated earlier, Alavi was perceptive in grasping the distortive/extractive effects of seemingly benevolent development ‘aid’, by pinpointing how much aid not only end up back in the pockets of Western ‘experts’ and monopolies but also became a means for using the Third World as a dumping ground for the core’s ‘unwanted’ and surplus commodities. In many ways then, Alavi pioneered and prefigured later analyses elucidating how neo-imperialism worked through monopolies over technical, financial and scientific instruments, patents and expertise (Albo, 2004), while also bringing attention to the distortive effects of international ‘aid’, even in the seemingly benevolent form of grain, food, etc. (Araghi, 1995; McMichael, 2012, pp. 67–79). It is however in his work on the peasantry and agrarian relations that the strength of Alavi’s strategic analysis would come fully to the fore. A now classic 1965 essay ‘Peasants and Revolution’ in the second issue of The Socialist Register would undertake a comparative analysis of revolutionary peasant movements of varying degrees of success (from Russia, China and India) to investigate the conditions under which peasants become revolutionary and the role of different sectors of the peasantry in such a process (Alavi, 1965). Eschewing prevailing orthodoxies focusing on the role of the poor peasantry (including landless labourers), Alavi showed how it is the middle peasantry – by virtue of their essentially different class situation as small landholding but independent producers – who provided the initial thrust of revolutionary upsurge in rural areas.

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Through a careful elucidation of the changing class alliances and fractions in the process of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, Alavi showed how there was a processual difference in the ‘necessary preconditions’ for the mobilisation of the middle and poor sections of the peasantry (Alavi, 1965, p. 251–252). Thus, while the poor peasantry was hampered by its direct relations of subordination to big landlords, it is the initial militancy of middle peasant-led formations which weakened the hold of feudal overlords and the state, and setting the stage for a more sustainable coming to the fore of landless labourers and sharecroppers. Alavi was particularly attuned to how patterns of absentee landlordism, world war-induced changes and initial forays of militancy (for example, by the Kuomintang) against landlords and/or the landlord-colonial state changed state formations themselves, and thus created the conditions for a more advanced stage of (class) struggle (Alavi, 1965, pp. 261–262, 266–267). Here was Alavi at his strategic best: a concrete elucidation of shifting class formations and alliances, combined with a conjunctural analysis of situations where the state is not simply a set of institutions external to society but a strategic field whose machinations and contradictions integrally inform the form and content of revolutionary struggle. Alavi’s pioneering analysis on the role of different sections of the peasantry would later find resonance in Eric Wolf’s celebrated work Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (1969). In many ways, Wolf’s comparative analysis of six peasant rebellions (Mexico, Russia, Cuba, Algeria, China and Vietnam) would confirm Alavi’s theses on the importance of independent, small landholders, combining this with a focus on the ‘free peasant’ of ‘frontier’ colonised regions. Alavi’s diachronic analyses of revolutionary consciousness and organisation among the peasantry also echoed in key ways the long and painful ‘dialectic of experience’ elucidated by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon, 1967; Sekyi-Otu, 1996). While Fanon’s focus was more on the poor peasantry, its migratory and political ‘travels’ and its transformations in the form of the ‘lumpenproletariat’ of the urban periphery, like Alavi, Fanon was also attuned to the transformations of organisational form, content and (crucially) space that an anti-colonial movement would have to go through to avoid a debilitating isolation at the hands of colonial forces. For Fanon too, while emphasising the importance and indeed the ineluctability of the moment of spontaneity (Hudis, 2017), it is the ‘knowledge of the practice of action’ that was the key mediator in bringing organisational and sociological depth to the movement and for avoiding the (seemingly unavoidable) disappointments of the ‘completely useless phase’ of bourgeois nationalism (Fanon, 1967, pp. 118, 142). Thus, while his analyses of the revolutionary, but differentiated, role of the peasantry had illustrious lineages, Alavi did not stop there. His later work would specify these analyses by a deep study of caste and kinship relations in rural Western Punjab (in Pakistan), and how these lend themselves to a complex terrain of class formation and mobilisation (Alavi, 1972b, 1973). These studies would point to the role of patrilineal kinship structures (biraderis), with their norms of endogamy and control over women, in regulating the social lives of the peasantry (Alavi, 1972b, p. 23). In the inaugural issue of The Journal of Peasant

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Studies, and cognate to his earlier essay on peasants and revolution, Alavi pointed to ‘two ‘sectors’ of the agrarian economy’, which combine ‘feudal’ and ‘capitalist’ forms of expropriation to form a ‘“multiplex” mode of production’ (Alavi, 1973, pp. 53–54). Crucially, Alavi demonstrated that the strength of biraderi ties is manifested unevenly according to class/production relations (such as landownership and relations in production). Thus, biraderi ties are weakest among big landlord and poor peasants (sharecroppers and landless labourers), among whom patron-client relations dominate. On the other hand, biraderi ties were strongest among independent, small-holding proprietors (‘middle peasants’), where these often served as horizontal solidarity for maintaining security of tenure, forming voting blocs and, in some cases, even as an incipient (revolutionary) class consciousness (Alavi, 1973, p. 58). Again, prefiguring later debates on the intersectional/integral relation of class and relations of difference, Alavi warned against conceptual schema whereby ‘primordial loyalties and structures. . . exist by themselves in ‘functional’ isolation’ (Alavi, 1973, p. 59). He insisted therefore on a processual and relational understanding whereby ‘primordial loyalties, such as those of kinship, which precede manifestations of class solidarity, do not rule out the latter’. The task of an engaged theoretical (and political) practice is therefore one of elucidating ‘the complex mediations of the processes by which class solidarity is established and manifested, [which] escapes the attention of those Marxists who focus exclusively on dramatic demonstrations of class solidarity of peasants in revolutionary action’ (Alavi, 1973). In effect, Alavi’s elucidation of kinship relations in their integral, but differentiated, articulation with class relations of production and exploitation offers a vital corrective to his above-discussed reflections on ethnicity. Thus, where ethnic politics was seen a function mainly of the salariat class’s aspirations towards state and white-collar employment, the work on agrarian structures showed how social relations of difference are produced over multiple arenas of social practice (ranging from relations in production, the valences of everyday life, to a culmination in the sphere of the ‘political’ as such, for example, via voting blocs). Alavi’s work on the peasantry and rural society thus brings attention to the historical structuring of class in complex and differentiated ways (such as via kinship/biraderi), and also how these identities may be transformed in everyday life and, indeed, within the vortex of political struggle itself. This then is the conjunctural and strategic register of Alavi: informed by history, cognisant of structure, but with a keen awareness of the conjunctural specificity (and malleability) of these via the practice of struggle and the dialectic of experience itself.

TOWARDS A CONJUNCTURAL AWARENESS What then remains of Alavi today? How may he ‘travel’ and ‘translate’ to our times – not through a mechanical, simply empirical ‘testing’ of his arguments vis a vis contemporary realities (a failing endeavour if there ever was one, and indeed

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unfair on the author being put to ‘test’ in a different historical situation from their own), but in a way where their abiding concerns, method and problematic may inform our struggles today and the practical and conceptual struggles they may throw up? We have already discussed how Alavi’s agrarian analyses (and of neo-imperialism) made provocative and pioneering interventions, many of which have been taken up in contemporary Marxist and critical theory. In addition, his elucidation of how ties of kinship articulated with relations of production, and how these then influence the form, content and intensity of political mobilisation (or lack thereof), find resonance in current thinking on a reformulated ‘agrarian question’ under the pressures of neoliberal globalisation (Akram-Lodhi & Kay, 2010; Bernstein, 2006). Influenced by the shifting-expanding foci of social theory in general, a renewed effort is also being made among agrarian scholars for understanding ‘interlocking oppressions’, such as the articulation of class relations with gender, race, caste, etc. (cf. Chari, 2004; also see Levien et al., 2018 and articles in the cognate JPS issue). That Alavi’s analyses of the peasantry are animated integrally by strategic (revolutionary) concerns lends an extra suppleness to the theorising, one which may be usefully carried over to his somewhat static analyses of the post-colonial state. In addition, we have also seen how Alavi’s – very valid – concerns with the Bonapartist and authoritarian forms taken up by post-colonial states were inflected through much too schematic a problematic. Crucially, however, by placing Alavi in conversation with his contemporaries tackling similar concerns in both metropolitan and peripheral contexts, we can see how a relational conception of the state lends useful openings to understanding how complex and multi-class historical blocs can produce particular forms of the state’s relative autonomy. As such, in combination with Alavi’s more strategic-conjunctural analyses and in contradistinction to more apriori notions of state/‘superstructure’ autonomy, the task becomes of concretely elucidating the class formations, hegemonic apparatuses, the organisational content and forms of the latter and their incorporation (or lack thereof) of subaltern social groups, which culminate in the various and proliferating forms of authoritarianism and populism today. In fact, Alavi’s attention to complex forms of social differentiation and shifting agrarian formations, along with his attention to the state and forms of politics, can usefully inform contemporary analyses and struggles. A spate of recent agrarian thinking has grappled with issues around ‘classes of labour’, relative surplus populations, the increasingly porous – and, indeed, analytically unsustainable – urban/rural and proletarian/peasant divides, their conjugation with differentiated forms of oppression and their relation to the ‘reformulated’ agrarian question in the 21st century (Lerche & Shah, 2018; Lerche, 2013). Related to this has been a parallel concern for elucidating how processes of domination, surplus appropriation and lumpenisation might feed into different iterations of populism (agrarian and otherwise) (cf. Borras, 2020). Crucially, in wider social theory, there has been creative thinking with regards to how social relations of difference (such as race and gender) are inflected when state and politics takes on populist and/or Bonapartist forms (cf. Hall, 1988; Hart, 2020). It

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is here that Alavi’s wide-ranging concerns – bringing together shifting and differentiated (agrarian) class formations, along with the culmination of these in the sphere of the state and in revolutionary struggle – offer openings and avenues of extension for our political and conceptual explorations today. Authoritarianism and dictatorship not as the cultural-ontological disposition of the Black and brown peoples of the world, but as a product of the valences of colonial history, patterns of accumulation and, often indeed, a reaction to contemporary struggles; class as a central axis of exploitation but produced in a differentiated manner through historically situated forms of difference; the conjuncture as a product of multiple structural and historical rhythms, but always open to the intervention of (organised) practice and struggle itself: here Hamza Alavi takes his rightful place as a guiding light and one of our most distinguished comrade-in-arms.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Waqas Butt, Hashim bin Rashid and colleagues from the Marxism in South Asia Reading Group in Toronto whose feedback and encouragement was crucial for the preparation of this chapter.

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Alavi, H. (1991). Nationhood and communal violence in Pakistan. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 21(2), 152–178. Alavi, H., & Khusro, A. (1961). The burden of U.S. Aid. Pakistan Today (Autumn 1961). Albo, G. (2004). The old and new economics of imperialism. Socialist Register, 40, 88–113. Amin-Khan, T. (2012). The post-colonial state in the era of capitalist globalization: Historical, political and theoretical Approaches to state formation. Routledge. Anderson, P. (1964). Origins of the present crisis. New Left Review, I/23, 26–53. Araghi, F. A. (1995). Global Depeasantization, 1945–1990. The Sociological Quarterly, 36(2), 337–368. Armytage, R. (2019). An evolving class structure? Pakistan’s ruling classes and the implications for Pakistan’s political economy. In M. McCartney & A. S. Zaidi (Eds.), New perspectives on Pakistan’s political economy (pp. 153–175). Cambridge University Press. Azeem, M. (2020). The state as a political practice: Pakistan’s postcolonial state beyond dictatorship and Islam. Third World Quarterly, 41(10), 1670–1686. Bernstein, H. (2006). Is there an agrarian question in the 21st century? Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d’´etudes du d´eveloppement, 27(4), 449–460. Borras, S. M. (2020). Agrarian social movements: The absurdly difficult but not impossible agenda of defeating right-wing populism and exploring a socialist future? Journal of Agrarian Change, 20(1), 3–36. Chari, S. (2004). Fraternal capital: Peasant-workers, self-made men, and globalization in provincial India. Stanford University Press. de Silva, S. B. D. (1982). The political economy of underdevelopment. Routledge, 2011. Elsenhans, H. (1996). State, class, and development. Radiant Publishers. Fanon, F. (1967). The wretched of the Earth [Trans. by Constance Farrington]. Penguin Books, 2001. Girling, S. (1973). “The state in post-colonial societies – Pakistan and Bangladesh” comments on Hamza Alavi. Kapitalistate, 2/1973, 49–51. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci [Trans and edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith]. International Publishers. Hall, S. (1980). Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance. In UNESCO (Ed.), Sociological theories: Race and colonialism (pp. 305–345). UNESCO. Hall, S. (1988). The hard road to renewal: Thatcherism and the crisis of the Left. Verso. Harootunian, H. (2020). Some reflections on Gramsci: The Southern question in the deprovincializing of Marx. In R. M. Dainotto & F. Jameson (Eds.), Gramsci in the world (pp. 140–157). Duke University Press. Hart, G. (2008). The provocations of neoliberalism: Contesting the nation and liberation after apartheid. Antipode, 40(4), 678–705. Hart, G. (2020). Why did it take so long? Trump-Bannonism in a global conjunctural frame. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 102(3), 239–266. Hein, W., & Stenzel, K. (1973). The capitalist state and underdevelopment in Latin America – The case of Venezuela. Kapitalistate, 2/1973, 31–48. Hudis, P. (2017). Frantz Fanon’s contribution to Hegelian Marxism. Critical Sociology, 43(6), 865–873. Jan, M. A. (2019). The segmented ‘rural elite’: Agrarian transformation and rural politics in Pakistani Punjab. In M. McCartney & A. S. Zaidi (Eds.), New perspectives on Pakistan’s political economy (pp. 176–198). Cambridge University Press. Javed, U. (2019). Ascending the power structure: Bazaar traders in urban Punjab. In M. McCartney & A. S. Zaidi (Eds.), New perspectives on Pakistan’s political economy (pp. 199–215). Cambridge University Press. Javid, H. (2019). Democracy and patronage in Pakistan. In M. McCartney & A. S. Zaidi (Eds.), New perspectives on Pakistan’s political economy (pp. 216–240). Cambridge University Press. Lerche, J. (2013). The agrarian question in neoliberal India: Agrarian transition bypassed? Journal of Agrarian Change, 13(3), 382–404. Lerche, J., & Shah, A. (2018). Conjugated oppression within contemporary capitalism: Class, caste, tribe and agrarian change in India. Journal of Peasant Studies, 45(5–6), 927–949. Levien, M., Watts, M., & Hairong, Y. (2018). Agrarian Marxism. Journal of Peasant Studies, 45(5–6), 853–883.

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Leys, C. (1976). The ‘overdeveloped’ post colonial state: A re-evaluation. Review of African Political Economy, 3(5), 39–48. Mallick, A. (2020). The (un)making of the working class in Karachi, 1980s–2010s. Ph.D. thesis, York University. Mallick, A. (2021). Pakistan: The immediacy of Frantz Fanon. In N. Gibson (Ed.), Fanon today: The revolt and reason of the wretched of the Earth (pp. 193–215). Daraja Press. Marx, K. (1843). Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right. www.marxists.org. Accessed on December 16, 2022. McCartney, M. (2019). In a desperate state: The social sciences and the overdeveloped state in Pakistan, 1950 to 1983. In M. McCartney & A. S. Zaidi (Eds.), New perspectives on Pakistan’s political economy (pp. 25–55). Cambridge University Press. McCartney, M., & Zaidi, A. S. (Eds.). (2019). New perspectives on Pakistan’s political economy: State, class and social change. Cambridge University Press. McMichael, P. (2012). Development and social change: A global perspective (5th ed.). SAGE Publications. Nairn, T. (1964). The English working class. New Left Review, I/24, 43–57. Poulantzas, N. (1978). State, power, socialism [Trans by Patrick Camiller]. NLB. Saul, J. (1974). The state in post-colonial societies: Tanzania. Socialist Register, 11, 349–372. Scott, D. (2017). Stuart Hall’s voice: Intimations of an ethics of receptive generosity. Duke University Press. Sekyi-Otu, A. (1996). Fanon’s dialectic of experience. Harvard University Press. Shah, A. (2019). Institutions matter: The state, the military and social class. In M. McCartney & A. S. Zaidi (Eds.), New perspectives on Pakistan’s political economy (pp. 75–92). Cambridge University Press. Short, N. (2013). Difference and Inequality in world affairs: A Gramscian analysis. In M. Ekers, G. Hart, S. Kipfer, & A. Loftus (Eds.), Gramsci: Space, nature, politics (pp. 197–216). WileyBlackwell. Singh, H. (1998). Colonial hegemony and popular resistance: Princes, peasants, and paramount power. Canadian Scholars’ Press. Thomas, P. D. (2006). Modernity as “passive revolution”: Gramsci and the fundamental concepts of historical materialism. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association/Revue de la Soci´et´e historique du Canada, 17(2), 61–78. Thomas, P. (2011). Conjuncture of the integral state? Poulantzas’s reading of Gramsci. In A. Gallas, L. ¨ Bretthauer, J. Kannankulam, & A. Stutzle (Eds.), Reading Poulantzas (pp. 277–291). Merlin Press. Thorner, A. (1982). Semi-feudalism or capitalism? Contemporary debate on classes and modes of production in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 17(5), 1993–1999. Toor, S. (2011). The state of Islam: Culture and cold war politics in Pakistan. Pluto Press. Verkaaik, O. (1994). A people of migrants: Ethnicity, state, and religion in Karachi. VU University Press. Wolf, E. R. (1969). Peasant wars of the twentieth century. Harper & Row. Zaidi, A. (2014). Rethinking Pakistan’s political economy: Class, state, power, and transition. Economic and Political Weekly, 49(5), 47–54.

CHAPTER 4

MAPPING THE POLITICS OF POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUE IN PAKISTAN THROUGH THE WRITINGS OF AZIZ-UL-HAQ (1958–1972) Muhammad Azeem LUMS University, Pakistan

ABSTRACT Pakistan had never been a place of serious and nuanced debate and contestation of politics of postcolonial critique, that is, the continuity of economic, political, and cultural dependency of newly independent countries (NICs) on ex-colonizers as pointed out by neocolonialism, dependency theory, and postcolonial theory, respectively. Instead, Pakistan is presented by extant liberal academic literature as a “failed nation” and a state dominated by the military and plagued by religious extremism. As opposed to this, through the literary and activists writings of Aziz-ul-Haq, this chapter will try to illustrate how cultural contestation of the nation-building project postindependence from British rule was a lot more complex and interesting in Pakistan. This was so because the nation-building project of Pakistan was, on the one hand, an amalgamation of Indo-Persian, Arab, Indian, and Western colonial and civilizational influences and, on the other hand, entailed suppression of resilient local and national cultures of its constituent nationalities developed over centuries. This was later expressed in ethno-nationalist politics. However, when it came to the politics of the marginalized in the late 1960s, there were important political, theoretical, and literary insights which caused a change in the direction of political practice in Pakistan, which paralleled the politics expressed by writers like Fanon and early Subaltern Studies influenced by the Marxist Thought in South Asia Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 40, 47–74 Copyright © 2024 Muhammad Azeem Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-871920230000040005

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Naxal Movement in India. The contestation and confusion arising from this dialectic also entered Pakistan’s literary and cultural sphere. This chapter not only tries to give a different postcolonial critique of the failure of nation-building project in Pakistan but, though at a preliminary level, is an attempt to separate the original postcolonial theory in its radical tradition from contemporary postmodern/poststructuralist postcolonial theory marked with pessimism and resignation. Keywords: Pakistan; postcolonial confusion; failed nation-building project; postcolonial theory; left politics; liberal discourse

INTRODUCTION Pakistan had never been a place of serious and nuanced debate and contestation of politics of postcolonial critique, that is, continuity of economic, political, and cultural dependency of newly independent countries (NICs) on ex-colonizers as pointed out by neocolonialism (Nkrumah, 1965), dependency theory (Frank, 1969), and postcolonial theory (Young, 2016).1 The extant literature on Pakistan locates the causes of the failure of its nation building in the dichotomous struggle of democracy versus dictatorship and liberalism versus Islam, military by its own choice supporting hegemonic agendas of cold war jihad and later “war on terror,” and linguistic, economic, and political suppression of East Pakistan and other nationalities in Pakistan (Abbas, 2005; Ahmad, 1974; Cohen, 1984; Haqqani, 2005; Lieven, 2011). The blame is solely pinned on the political and military elite of West Pakistan for denying the legitimate rights of East Pakistan, machinations of global powers, and habitual deviation of Pakistan from the ideal type of liberal democracy. In this telling, Pakistan is discarded as an “unnatural” country, nation, and a failed state. It is to be noted at the outset that both the liberal and Left activist, academic and literary writings in Pakistan hold this position of considering Pakistan as an “unnatural nation” and a “failed state,” and creation of Pakistan as a communal divide in united India, while considering India as a natural nation and a successful nation-building project. Details of the roots of this confusion are in the position of Communist Party of India (CPI) before partition (detail to follow). While there is reasonable truth to this understanding of considering Pakistan as an “unnatural nation” and a “failed state,” I contend that the scholars focusing exclusively on such causes perforce excavate only half truths. They fail to account for the role that continuity of economic, political, and cultural dependency of

1

Dependency theorist pointed out unfair terms of trade between NICs and ex-colonizers as the cause of backwardness of the later. There are many writers in this collective like Andre Gunder Frank (1969), Cardoso and Faletto (1979), Furtado (1984), Amin (1974) but for a good summary and place of their work around attempts of New International Economic Order (NIEO) of 1970s, see Cox, R. W., & Cox, R. W. (1979). Ideologies and the New International Economic Order: Reflections on some recent literature. International Organization, 33(2), 257–302.

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Pakistan has played in cultivating the frustrations around failure of Pakistan’s nation-building project. Similarly, the struggle of the marginalized and their dream for an egalitarian society does not deserve any mention in the abovementioned liberal writings confined only to inter-elite struggles. In other words, a robust postcolonial critique and its politics vis-`a-vis this failure is conspicuous by its absence from the extant literature. My reading of Urdu writings of a literary critic and activist writer, Aziz-ulHaq, shows that postcolonial critique and its politics in 1950s and 1970s was a multifaceted, critical, and creative project which tried to understand the frustration of newly independent Pakistan in its nation-building projects from a unique postcolonial perspective, which is lacking in the extant literature. This was so because the nation-building project of Pakistan was, on the one hand, an amalgamation of Indo-Persian, Arab, Indian, and Western colonial and civilizational influences and, on the other hand, entailed suppression of resilient local national cultures of its constituent nations developed over centuries. The contestations and confusions arising out of this dialectic also found their way in the cultural and literary sphere in Pakistan. Through the writings of Aziz-ul-Haq, I try to read the nuances of these contestations and juxtapose them with the extant literature, to complicate the latter’s conclusions and, in doing so, to indicate the possibility of a different postcolonial critique of the failure of nation-building project in Pakistan. By transcending the liberal discourses about Pakistan, main argument of this chapter is how the activist writings and literary debates reflecting postcolonial confusion and frustration of failing nation-building project in Pakistan are parallel to the nuances of politics expressed by writers like Fanon and later early Subaltern Studies, as an example of postcolonial theory, under the influence of Naxal Movement in India in 1970s. By doing this, though at a preliminary level, this chapter tries to capture the origins of postcolonial theory as a radical tradition, that is, disappointed from bourgeois nation-building, a desire of the marginalized for a radical change by their own as a next step. By doing this, this chapter wants to separate radical tradition of postcolonial theory from the contemporary postmodern/poststructuralist postcolonial theory devoid of political practice and marked with resignation and pessimism. Recalling the original radical themes of politics of postcolonial critique is important to reclaiming lost aspirations of “independence” in the era of neoliberal globalism. In this context, it is important to ask as to why the writings of Aziz-ul-Haq are better placed to capture the nuances of postcolonial critique and its politics in Pakistan? Aziz-ul-Haq’s writings are mostly written in early 1960s to early 1970s. This is a period of the rise of the Left resulting in semi revolution of 1968 (Ali, 1970; Khan, 2008) and immediate breakup of Pakistan with the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. As mentioned already, this indicates the failure of nation-building project and a betrayal of the dream of revolution by people of Pakistan. Aziz was very strongly embedded in the Left political and particularly literary scene of Pakistan in those days. His writings and position on independence of Bangladesh are unprecedented in Pakistan. Secondly, his critical engagement with almost all literary trends at that time and his critique and

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psychoanalysis of these writings pointing out postcolonial confusion makes him one of the best reference points of literary and cultural contestations going on at that point of time.2 Above all, his imagination of peoples’ revolution in South Asia and his critique of the nation-building projects of both India and Pakistan, make him stand out among those Third World writers who pointed out the frustrations of bourgeois and traditional Left nation-building project as its ally as an extension of foreign policy of Soviet Union. These writers advocated for more egalitarian societies and peoples’ revolution in the Third World. It may, however, be noted that while Aziz’s writings are visionary, creative, and insightful, he sometimes does not give references for his controversial historical claims. His writings are mostly for literary and intellectual crowd and he feels no academic burden to prove everything. Therefore, one can only pick insights from his writings as reference points for building a different future trajectory of academic research on postcolonial Pakistan. Early period of Aziz’s writings is from 1958 to 1962, before leaving for Canada for education, is dominated by his literary and philosophical interventions as the basis of formation of his literary theory. Meeting Hardial Bains in Canada exposed him to a crucial international Marxist debate in North America going in early 1960s against revisionism and liberalism. Both Aziz and Hardial were on the forefront of fighting against revisionism of Husseri and Heidegger pushed among the youth to keep them away from dialectical and historical materialism. Aziz was confident that Hardial will fight back revisionism and build a new Party in North America (Bains, 1997). But Aziz came back to Pakistan because situation in South Asia for a revolution was ripe as is reflected in his writings from 1967 to 1972 about Naxal movement and independence of Bangladesh. It is to be noted here that in his interaction with Bains, he challenged his internationalist views and firmly kept his nationalist aspiration for the revolution of peoples of his country (Haq, 1967, pp. 52–53). Aziz-ul-haq started Left politics in Pakistan during late 1960s by forming a new group Naey Loug (New People) in Punjab University. This was mostly a Left literary group which later turned into a commonly known collective of Professors’ Group (Ijaz, 2012). Soon, the group got caught up in anti-Ayub politics of 1968 and started a proper student organization named as National Students Organization (NSO).3 This group played an important role, both verbally and through militant means, in the fight against Jamiat-Talba-Islam, a student wing of Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) in Punjab University, Lahore, and across Punjab. When Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) emerged on political scene as a proponent of politics of socialism in Pakistan, Professors’ Group had divergent opinions: Aziz-ul-Haq was in favor of joining PPP, whereas another important leader, Professor Aziz-ud-Din, was against it. While the group survived this division, another division emerged among its members around the military operation in 2

It seems necessary to extend this theoretical framework to the writings of Major Ishaque and Rasul Paleeju to properly comprehend a holistic approach of postcolonial theory in Pakistan at that point of history. 3 Military dictator of Pakistan in 1960s.

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East Pakistan, which resulted in the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. Professor Aziz-ud-Din and his group were of the opinion that the struggle of independence of Bangladesh is led by progressive bourgeois elements and should be opposed. As opposed to this, Aziz-ul-Haq was in favor of full and unconditional support of Bengalis and their right to secede from Pakistan (Ijaz, 2012, p. 18). After separating from the group on this difference, Aziz-ul-Haq made another vibrant intellectual group called Young People’s Front (YPF). At that time, he was known as the “Socrates of Lahore” due to his intellect and vibrant presence on the literary scene of Lahore (Sohail & Aziz, 2022). It is a sad coincidence that this Socrates also met an unnatural death when he was murdered in 1972 at the age of 32 and only lives on in his copious writing. As far as Aziz-ul-Haq’s ideology is concerned, his colleagues and comrades label him as an Existentialist-Marxist (Ijaz, 2012, p. 9). He was vocal about Peoples’ Democratic Revolution all across South Asia. He did not think that trade union should be the starting point of revolution. Rather, he wanted to form a group of revolutionary intellectuals as a prerequisite for a revolution. This revolutionary group, he thought, could form an alliance with labor, etc., and can win them. For him, labor knew better about their bad work conditions and we do not need to give them lectures but should explain to them how the system works (Ijaz, 2012, p. 10). Before we start our journey through the most interesting times for change and fascinating complexities of postcolonial thought in Pakistan (1960–1972), it is important to deconstruct the contemporary postmodern/poststructuralist postcolonial theory and separate it from the lost and original radical strand of postcolonial theory in the tradition of Fanon, which can only explain the way Aziz is capturing the political and literary scene of Pakistan and imagining a future with radical change in South Asia. Postcolonial theory in its current dominant and popular form emerged when academics of Third World/Global South, raised and educated in the West, like Stuart Hall and Edward Said, among many, started challenging centuries old Western domination in intellectual and academic field. Before this, roots of postcolonial theory were in radical trend of anti-colonial liberation movements with revolutionary ideology as originally reflected in the writings of Fanon and Ngugi (Young, 2016, p. 65). Fanon’s writings were for self-determination and structural social change in colonized world (Fanon, 1963). Unlike Fanon, Edward Said was moderate and was influenced by Chomsky and Foucault. His works are related to postmodern and poststructuralist skepticism and representation (Edwards, 2008, p. 12). Later versions of postcolonial theory influenced not only by Foucault but also by Derrida, made important intellectual contributions and challenged binaries and essentialism around identity of postcolonial countries, brought their complexities to the fore and exposed colonialism (Bhabha, 1990, 1994; Spivak, 1988). But gradually this strand of deconstructive postcolonial theory confined itself to the literary departments of universities. Therefore, it is necessary to state at the outset that the writings of Fanon should be historically contextualized and be kept separate from the later postmodern

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critics (Edwards, 2008, p. 11). This point is very important for our current inquiry of politics of postcolonial critique in this chapter. Related and relevant also for us is the collective of Subaltern Studies in India globally acclaimed as an example of postcolonial theory (Chibber, 2013). This collective started its critique of bourgeois nationalism and modernity quite in line and inspired by Naxal movement in India in 1960s–1970s (Seth, 1997, 2002, 2006). But going through the changes by Spivak and others in 1988, it went into deconstructive textual practices at the expense of revolutionary perspectives. This gave rise to pessimistic postmodern/poststructuralist tendencies claiming “retrogressive indigenism and softer versions of Hindutva” (Sarkar, 1997, pp. 106–107). This was quite in line with the decline of revolutionary movement in India and influence of pessimistic resignation from politics already present in postmodernism and poststructuralism in the West. Therefore, to imagine radical change in South Asia, it is important to reengage with the complexity of politics of postcolonial critique and bring back its originality and richness. How to reimagine the abandoned dream of independence and freedom, if not nation-building, for the large swath of masses in Third World/Global South still living in semicolonial (Shahid-u-Rahman, 2005), rather a new form of colonial subordination (Chimni, 2006) under neoliberal globalization? For this, we need to go back and engage with the richest moment of this politics of postcolonial critique in 1960s–1970s, with all of its complexities and contestations, and affect a theoretical continuity and rupture from that moment. To this end, a cursory view of the history of Marxism as it developed in Europe and Third World during anti-colonial and postcolonial times is relevant. In the West, Marxism, as claimed by Perry Anderson, was structurally separated from political practice in 1920s–1930s and later defeated by fascism and Nazism. This defeat and lack of organic contacts with working classes resulted in pessimism and resignation in Western Marxism (Anderson, 1979). From Gramsci to Cultural Marxism and going through different strands of postmodernism/ poststructuralism, main question for Western Marxism had been why the revolution did not happen in Europe? As opposed to this, from Chinese revolution to Algerian struggle of independence, Marxism in the Third World developed as a result of anti-colonial struggle. Later, it tried to answer the crucial questions of construction of socialism and delinking of NICs from the clutches of metropolitan centers as described by neocolonialism and dependency theory. Adding to this, Fanon, and later Ngugi brought the continuity of cultural domination of the West in NICs along with economic and political domination. For this, and based on our above narrative, we can easily claim that the most influential and original theoretical strand of politics of postcolonial critique was Marxism. But what was its nature? Was it Eurocentric? One opinion is that Third World Marxism behind postcolonial critique was anti-Western. Therefore, it was different from post-Marxism, “Universal Western Marxism,” and “European Marxism.” It was flexible, creative, and postcolonial. It was a syncretic tradition of Marxism. It uses Marxism as popular politics rather than coercive force (Young, 2016, pp. 6–7). Third World was also against the influence of Soviet Union, so this was also different from Orthodox or “official Marxism.”

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This chapter is an attempt to capture original spirit and theme of postcolonial theory through the writings of Azzi-ul-Haq. This needs a brief understanding of state and society of Pakistan and the nature of Left politics and Marxism in 1960s and early 1970s.

PART I: PAKISTAN AS A “FAILED NATION” OR PROBLEMS OF FAILED NATION-BUILDING PROJECT To properly appreciate the true nature of postcolonial confusion in Pakistan and Aziz’s contribution in this regard, it is important to have a cursory but overarching overview of the recent historiography emerging in Pakistan to reflect its current crisis of religious extremism and hold of military establishment on politics. As already pointed out, there is abundant common sense literature on Pakistan stuck in fashionable trend of condemning military and its role in promoting Islam and jihad and derailing democracy. An easy and fashionable trend of liberal historiography tries to locate the roots of current Islamic extremism in independence movement of Muslims of India and trying to blame Jinnah even (Ahmed, 2020). Even the established historians could not escape the discursive trap of the West in its “war on terror” and these writers often feel advising the West to engage with Pakistan on the issues of Taliban, Al-Qaeda, nuclear weapons, etc. (Jalal, 2008, 2014). Some more nuanced and serious academics tried to bring the trends of modern Islam in independence movement and later in postcolonial contestation (Qasmi, 2011; Qasmi & Robb, 2017). As a whole, this historiography stuck in liberal discursive trap of Western hegemonic agenda of “War on Terror” is unable to sympathetically originally engage with postcolonial confusion and the dream of postcolonial Pakistan. As opposed to this, there is an emerging trend of academic work on Left and peoples’ history of Pakistan (Ali, 2015) along with autobiographies of Left leaders of Pakistan (Abbas, 2010; Minto, 2016). But unfortunately, traditional Left writings on Pakistan’s history and society in Urdu, including giant writers like Sibt-e-Hasan and Ali Abbas Jalapuri, suffer from two problems as whole. One is economic and technological reductionism in these writings as a legacy from “official Marxism” of Soviet Union. Left scholarship in Pakistan also drifted into liberal enlightenment and modernity due to inherent lack of epistemological break of Marxism from liberalism (Azeem, 2017). Secondly, there is heavy influence of historiography under Indian nationalism in the understanding of traditional Left in Pakistan. They idealize India as a natural nation and its successful bourgeois nation-building project while dreaming about liberal democracy and secularism in Pakistani context of military control and religious extremism. As far as new writings of academic Left in Pakistan are concerned, it seems that despite relying on new research methods and recent availability of archival research material, these writers have not yet transcended the intellectual impasse left by traditional Left writings as mentioned above. (Some details of these writings to follow) Before we proceed, it seems important to explain at the outset that the term “traditional Left” in India and Pakistan in this chapter means

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Left under the influence of Soviet Union from which Naxalbari movement and similar currents separate themselves in late 1960s. Two themes in Aziz’s writings separate him from abovementioned established and known liberal Left historiography on Pakistan. His writings are not only a critique of military state-led nation-building in Pakistan but, at the same time, is a ruthless critique of modernity and liberal democracy of bourgeois nation-building and the internal colonization of India. Unlike the thinking of traditional Left in Pakistan considering the creation of Pakistan as communal and its nation-building as a deviation from natural nation-building of India, Aziz tries to reach the material roots for the politics of Muslims of united India and consequent complexity of postcolonial confusion in its nation-building on its own account. For this, he provides creative insights by deconstructing and separating the politics of Muslim of majority and minority provinces of united India. He finds the desire of Pakistan in the genuine need of majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab against the British colonial control and the dominance of Hindu commerce class. Secondly, Aziz does not get lost in liberal account of independence of Bangladesh as the only cruelty imposed by Pakistan. Aziz’s clear but bold stance on the question of independence of Bangladesh strongly condemns not only Pakistan but exposes the coordination of India to actually stop radical change in Bangladesh. In this way, Aziz not only transcends the Left liberal historiography of both India and Pakistan but also keeps alive the dream of the emancipation of peoples of South Asia beyond liberal democracy and modernity. Aziz’s also captures the abovementioned postcolonial confusions and frustrations of failing of nation-building project in Pakistan in all literary trends of that time. He engages with them and guides the literary scene of Pakistan. This critical engagement of Aziz is once again different than the famous and commonly known Progressive Writers Association (PWA) as a front of traditional Left in Pakistan (Ansari, 2015; Toor, 2011). Aziz while exposing the right-wing postcolonial writers, do not spare the PWA writers and influence of Indian bourgeois nationalism on them. This will be covered in second part of this chapter. Let us unfold these aspects in Aziz’s writings one by one. At the end of this chapter, we will try to bring to light the confusion of Aziz-ul-Haq in understanding postcolonial situation also. Colonial Roots of Postcolonial Confusion: Deconstructing Muslim Identity Politics in South Asia Aziz thinks that the politics and interests of majority Muslim provinces of Punjab and Bengal should be considered different than the interests of minority Muslim provinces of UP/CP with cities like Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Bijapur, and Delhi. He finds these differences not only at political and economic level but at cultural and psychological level also. For him, Muslims of UP/CP consider themselves as belonging to Mughal dynasty originally from Arab and Iran and not natives, whereas Muslims of Punjab and Bengal were converted for them (Haq, 1970a, p. 92).

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For Aziz, Muslims of minority provinces were well off. Whereas, those of Punjab and Bengal came under feudal and imperial exploitation due to imposition of permanent settlement laws and were poor.4 Hindu commerce class also added to their miseries. That is why Muslims of Punjab consider themselves not only Muslims but suppressed also and, therefore, wanted to get rid of both British rulers and dominant Hindus (Haq, 1970a, pp. 96–97). It is pertinent to mention here that Aziz does not want to reduce this politics of Muslims of Punjab and Bengal to “communalism” as depicted in the writings of Left intellectuals like Sajjad Zaheer, Sibt-e-Hasan, Syed Muhammad Taqi, Qurat-ul-ain-Haider which trend, to be noted, is still prevalent in contemporary trend of liberal and Left historiography on Pakistan. He went to the extent of pointing out that all these writers basically consider themselves as Indians based on deep historical and psychological analysis of their writings (Haq, 1970a, p. 96). It is to be noted that all these writers belong to the minority Muslim provinces of British India. Aziz does not stop here and also exposes the other trends of Muslim politics from the minority Muslim provinces as belonging to feudalism and racial superiority. For Aziz, Ulma-e-Deoband in their politics consider themselves as rulers of India though their politics was anti-imperialist. He finds the ideological origins of their politics in feudal nationalism. He places the ambitions of Ali Garh Movement belonging to the same dream of ruling classes of Muslims in India asking for compromise and share from new British rulers. In that sense, all strands of politics of Muslim minority provinces of India were elitist, claiming themselves as custodian and true rulers of India in the beginning and later compromising with British to seek share in the Empire. In order to demonstrate his position, Aziz divides the history of Muslim League (ML) in three periods. He called the first period as “Agha Khani” period (1905–1912). Main contention of this period was the division of Bengal in 1905 which could benefit the Muslims of Bengal. This division was a relief for the peasants of Bengal but feudal leadership of ML separated itself from them, and that is why it was so easily undone in 1911 due to the pressure of Congress and it disappointed ordinary Muslims. For Aziz, second period of the politics of ML was from 1912 onward where its leadership came in the hands of young people who wanted Hindu–Muslim unity. Aziz calls it the period of “Lucknow Pact” representing the interests of minority Muslim provinces. At that point, both ML and Congress wanted a “responsible government.” It is important to know that Iqbal separated himself from ML due to Lucknow Pact. Similarly, Jinnah and ML stayed away from Khilafat Movement, whereas people of Punjab supported it. To illustrate this, Aziz also gives reference of Iqbal from his speech of 21st of June 1937 where Iqbal in annual session of ML said that Muslims of Punjab and Bengal should consider their interests separate from the Muslim of minority provinces (Haq, 1970a, pp. 103–106). Aziz concludes from this that during this period of independence

Law introduced by Lord Cornwallis in 1793 in Bihar and Bengal which first time made land hereditary and transferrable India giving birth to landlordism.

4

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movement, Muslims of majority provinces remained busy with their provincial issues and considered ML as representatives of minority Muslim provinces. To further highlight the difference of approach in politics of minority and majority Muslim provinces of united India, Aziz claims that Muslims of Punjab considered Unionist Party better than ML and their differences were with the approach of ML on Nehru Report and Simon Commission. He further adds these differences create two groups in ML named as “Shafi League” and “Jinnah League.” Similarly in Bengal, for Aziz, Fazal-e-Haq and his friends considered Krishak Praja Party as closer to them than ML (Haq, 1970a, p. 116). This difference of politics in united India formed the basis for imagining Pakistan as a nation in national-building in 1950s–1960s. It is pertinent to mention here that renowned Marxist thinker Hamza Alavi also pointed the roots of politics of Muslim in middle class for jobs though he considers it the politics of the Muslims of whole India and could not deconstruct it like Aziz as different interests of minority and majority provinces (Alvi, 1989). Noe let us see how these historical differences later reflected as the postcolonial confusion in the nation-building project of Pakistan. Postcolonial Nation-Building in Pakistan In order to properly grasp the frustration and confusions of nation-building project in postcolonial Pakistan, we need to understand the global, regional, and local Pakistani politics within which Left and ethno-nationalist politics of Pakistan had been unfolding. Left in united India first supported the idea of partition of India and told Muslim comrades to join ML. But soon after independence, it started considering Pakistan as unnatural state which would be impossible to survive in future. A historical trajectory of this understanding can explain better the problematic position of traditional Left in Pakistan. Following the line of communist international in 1920s, CPI opted for the policy of united front with progressive bourgeoisie and made close relations with Congress and its leadership. Quite in line with the position of Congress, CPI also considered India as one nation and ML as reactionary communal organization of elite Muslims trying to divide India (Ali, 2015, p. 36). This analysis lasted till 1942 when Soviet Union asked CPI to support British in its war against fascism. At that time, Congress, responding to national aspirations, started its nonviolent civil disobedience movement against British and CPI reacting to it started supporting ML and its demand for Pakistan. Using Stalin’s work of 1913 on national question, Adhikari report first time gave the idea of considering India as constituting of various cultures and languages and not a cultural whole (Adhikari, 1943; Gilmartin, 1998, pp. 1088–1095). This understanding about the support for the demand for Pakistan continued till 1944 in the writings of known communists like Sajjad Zaheer (1944), N. K. Krishnan (Ali, 2015, p. 45), and P. C. Joshi (1944), the then General Secretary of CPI, and finally 1944 Congress of CPI accepted this position (Ali, 2015, p. 46). The culmination of this position of considering India constituting different nations appeared in election manifesto of CPI in 1945–1946,

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where a demand to give independence was not only for India and Pakistan but for 17 “sovereign” national assemblies. Therefore, top Muslim communists leaders of CPI joined ML, wrote pro-people manifestos for it, and gave a mass base for the success of ML in elections (Ali, 2015, p. 49). The position of CPI started changing after WWII, and it again started declaring demand of Pakistan as representing the interests of Muslim feudal elite and Congress as keeping India united. It is to be noted that the position of the Soviet Union about the creation of Pakistan was the same, that is, British Empire wanted to divide and rule India (Dyakov, 1945, pp. 11–14). To sum up, the position of CPI and Soviet Union by 1947 was against the partition plan. CPI considered that Congress is accepting the partition under compulsion whereas ML is forcefully dividing India as lackey of British rulers. To be noted, CPI also condemned its abovementioned previous position of supporting ML in mid 1940s and declared the creation of Pakistan as nonprogressive and hence reactionary (Dyakov, 1947, pp. 13–15). For Ali, both the CPI and the Congress criticized Muslim elite politicians as the real culprits behind the partition of India (Ali, 2015, p. 63). After partition in the next congress of in 1948 in Calcutta, Bhowani Sen presented a report tilted “Report on Pakistan” where the dominant opinion was that Indian union was progressive and creation of Pakistan was a regressive step (Basu, 1997, pp. 757–761). With this thinking, communists started their politics in Pakistan. Obsessed with this understanding and reacting to internal colonization and forcible nation-building of Pakistani state, politics of Pakistani Left immediately after independence, in 1947 to early 1960s, was in close alliance with centrifugal nationalist forces from Bengal, North Western Frontier Province, and later with Sindhi nationalists. As opposed to this, Indian Left coordinated with national bourgeois forces and became part of their Indian nation-building project plagued with internal colonization of many states including Kashmir, Hyderabad, etc. To sum up, political ideology of Pakistani Left became anti-Pakistan considering it unnatural nation and correctly pointing out failing nation-building project. However, it remained uncritical of internal colonization by India and its expansionism and considering it a natural nation-building project. Under the influence of above political position, analysis of Pakistani Left about Pakistan got lost in a few myths about the creation of Pakistan, which Aziz forcefully rebutted. First common myth of Pakistani Left was that Pakistan was created for cold war as a buffer state and the United States wanted to divide Pakistan and India. This way Pakistani Left, quite in line with Indian Left being allied with Soviet Union, was able to oppose the United States and its allied Pakistani state. As opposed to this, Aziz pointed out that imperialism did not always played the game of “divide and rule.” It can unite and rule also (Haq, 1967, p. 48). It can be both divide and rule or unite and rule (Haq, 1971c, p. 153). For Aziz, regional integration also does not matter for imperialism. Aziz’s position was that the United Kingdom wanted to keep India and Pakistan united but by late 1940s, the events came under the influence of cold war and the United States started dealing with Pakistan in 1950s. Its main aim was to stop socialism in South Asia (Haq, 1971c, p. 154). Therefore, Aziz did not think Pakistan was

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created for cold war reasons and rejected this reason as propaganda by Soviet historians as well as intellectuals like Tariq Ali (Ali, 1970).5 Aziz’s opinion was that Muslims–Hindu divide in India has its own existence independent of imperialist design. Hindu commerce class (mahajin) was dominant in India. It bought all the land in Bengal and became feudal under Permanent Settlement and hence Muslim majority was subordinated. That is why all the peasant movements of Titu Mir and Haji Sharia Ullah were led by Muslims (Haq, 1972, pp. 186–219). To be noted, British supported mahajins as opposed to Muslims. A cursory historical overview of this phenomenon can be illustrative for our proposed analysis in this article. Cornwallis introduced Permanent Settlement law in Bengal in 1973 to create a landlord class by giving them full proprietary rights over the estates. Its aim was to ensure security of government revenue and to assure sustainable supply of agricultural raw material. It was also to produce a money owning class to purchase British industrial goods. Above all, British rulers considered this zamindar class “as a bulwark against revolution” as stated by William Bentinck, Governor General of India (De, 1977, pp. 18–19). This increase and concentration in wealth created a prosperous class which can invest and purchase zamindari estates. Instead of improving land and agriculture, these moneylenders just bought landed rights leaving peasant deserted. As compared to Muslims, there was a dominant commerce and money lender class in Bengali Hindus (Dasgupta, 2015, p. 513). Responding to this situation, Shariat Ullah (1781–1840), Titu Mir (1786–1831), and Doodo Meeah (1781–1862) led many peasant revolts in religo-political terms against zamindars. Their movements were a “reaction” and did not provide remedies to the then existing situation (De, p. 21). After the defeat of these movements, anti-British struggle of Muslim peasantry was abandoned by Muslim zamindar elite and middle classes and they started complaining about Hindu Zamindars, moneylenders, and Hindu amlas (clerks) who could dispose them of their zamindaris. This gave communal color to land question in Bengal (Dasgupta, 2015, pp. 22–23). As opposed to the common perception of the Left in Pakistan that Pakistani state is against India but not people of Pakistan, Aziz thinks that the people of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) are historically against India, whereas Pakistani elite always wanted friendship with India (Haq, 2012, p. 197). It is to be noted that now the recent scholarship based on declassified documents from the United States are confirming the facts in entirely a different way than the above established narrative of Pakistani Left under the influence of Indian nationalism of Congress and Indian Left. For example, Dennis Kux’s factual analysis based on declassified documents is a simple story of how the United States wanted India not to completely go under the influence of Soviet Union and, therefore, always tried to please India and force Pakistan to submit to India (Dennis, 2001).

5

Gangudick, Brief History of Pakistan (Pakistani Ki Mukhtasar Tarikh) cited by Aziz-ulHaq.

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Aziz remains dynamic in his analysis in writings and examines the cold war controversy of global hegemony between the United States and Soviet Union. He keeps a close eye on the changing position of the United States towards Soviet Union, China, and India. But, at the same time, he never loses sight of actual contradiction of the people of South Asia against the nexus of global and regional powers. One also needs to look at regional expansionist and colonizing ambitions of both India and China to understand the frustrations of Pakistan. From Non-Aligned Movement to Bandung Conference, Nehru was champion of Pan Asian leadership. Only in Bandung Conference, Nehru realized his ambitions are eclipsed by Chuen Lie. Aziz cited lots of evidence from the coverage of Bandung Conference to support this point (Haq, 1972, p. 190). Soviet Union supported India in these ambitions and even sided with India in its 1962 war against China. To be noted, what is ignored by Aziz is how regional small countries of East Asia were also scared of China’s expansionism (Eslava et al., 2018). This point is important to understand the challenges posed by current rise of China as a global power and its influence on small regional countries like Pakistan, which is missing in Aziz’s analysis in the 1970s. Based on our above analysis, it is important to trash another myth of liberal and Left historiography on Pakistan that foreign policy of Pakistan was India-centric due to its powerful military which wanted to keep its dominance and survival. Azeem has also pointed out how vulnerability of postcolonial Pakistani state was vis-`a-vis unruly masses led by Left and ethnonationalist forces. Hegemonic imperialist agenda in these Third World countries with weak national bourgeoisie is carried by military bureaucracy during cold war. Therefore, strong military in Pakistan is not because of being anti-India but because of being the seat of power of imperialism. India’s expansionism and historical roots of anti-Indian feelings of Muslims in Punjab and KPK, as mentioned earlier, only feed the reliance on military and resulted in its strength which Left in Pakistan failed to see. Sadia Toor has correctly pointed out the ideological nature of state of newly independent Pakistani as liberal and anti-communist (Toor, 2011). Later development of Pakistani state as dominant by military with its Islamic face is the outcome of imperialist cold war jihad and later war on terror. Within this complex global and regional politics, Aziz points out the nature of contradictions in Pakistan. For him, there are four contradictions: one is the contradiction of Pakistani people against India. He calls it “national contradiction.” For him, this is how Pakistani people feel. To be noted, traditional Left always undermine how Pakistani people feel and ignore India’s regional expansionist designs in their analyses. Second for him is “nationalities contradiction,” which is against the ruling elite of Pakistan. Third for him is “neocolonial contradiction” of the people of Pakistan against imperialism and dependent local elite. Finally, Aziz thinks there is a contradiction of people of Pakistan against its feudal and comprador capitalist class, which he calls “class contradiction” (Haq, 1971d, p. 166). In this chapter, we are concerned with nationalities contradiction as one controversy in nation-building project and postcolonial confusion in Pakistan. On this point, Aziz points out four positions by political forces in Pakistan. First

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position was of right-wing parties like Jamaat-i-Islami. These parties neither accept class politics nor nationalities contradiction. They use Islam to negate the culture of nationalities and consider them as traitors when they ask for their cultural rights and go to the extent of bracketing them as supporters of India and Hindus (Haq, 1971e, p. 226). Second position for Aziz is that of Socialist Party (Haq, 2012, p. 226) and PPP. They accept national question but when it comes to class struggle, they ignore national question. They consider class as a natural connection between marginalized of all nationalities in Pakistan and the basis of their unity. For Aziz, these people do not analyze the situation concretely and fail to place it in a dynamic historical context. They sided with Punjabi chauvinism during the war of independence by Bengalis (Haq, 1971e, p. 227). Third tendency for Aziz is that of nationalists like NAP, Awami League, and revisionist revolutionaries, that is, traditional Pakistani Left which was pro-Moscow. They believe both in class and nationalities contradiction but want to first solve national contradiction by democratic and constitutional means. They think class question will automatically be solved as a next step. It is pertinent to mention here that Aziz also points out their hypocrisy and shows how they were always on the wrong side of the people. For example, in 1966, after 1965 war with India, people were against India and Tashkent Declaration because for them, Pakistan won the war but lost on negotiations table. But traditional Left supported Tashkent Declaration because it was brokered by the Soviet Union. Similarly, in 1968 movement, NAP also stayed aloof from labor strikes in railway and student strikes in Garden College Rawalpindi and called these strikes as the conspiracy of CIA, though later they joined the 1968 movement. This traditional Left, for Aziz, had already sidelined Bhashani for being vocal about the independence of Bangladesh and being against India (Haq, 1971d, p. 176). Fourth political position on nationalism question for Aziz was that of Mazdoor Kisan Party (Workers and Peasants Party – MKP) and National Students Federation (NSF). These people accept class and national question and try to solve them coherently. For them, without solving class question, national question cannot be solved. It is to be noted that in their understanding, these groups were clear that for class question to succeed, the oppressed people of dominant nations should support the national question of oppressed nations openly. At the same time, these groups expect the oppressed nations to fight against their feudal and tribal leaders. For Aziz, this is the correct position. Based on the analysis of these contradictions and holistic vision of South Asia, Aziz was able to tell an entirely different story of independence of Bangladesh, that is, different than the often told narrative by the liberal and Left historians. “Rewriting” Postcolonial History: Independence of Bangladesh It seems that Aziz tells us the people’s history of independence of Bangladesh quite in line with the theoretical framework suggested by this article. It is a story of internal colonization by ruling elite of NICs and their adjustment within hegemonic struggle of cold war. Keeping this in mind, vulnerability of Pakistani

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state and its frustrations of nation-building project are described and analyzed below from the writings of Aziz. Independence of Bangladesh, for Aziz, was not the slogan of Mujib but that of Bhashani who was a highly regarded Maoist peasant leader. He wanted to snatch this movement of Bengalis from Mujib and capitalists who were pro-India (Haq, 1971e, p. 238). For Aziz, Awami League won elections in 1970s but was ideologically aligned with Soviet Union and India, and Maoists were thinking whether to let them come to power or advance people’s democratic revolution and establish an independent socialist Bangladesh. Bhashani gave this idea of independent socialist Bangladesh on 8th of January 1971, which became popular. Mujib was not in power yet and was in prison in Pakistan. While the military operation of Pakistan army was failing in Bangladesh, Pakistani establishment and religious elements started supporting Mujib against Bhashani and announced Mujib as Prime Minister of Pakistan. Diverse political parties and politicians, Noor Khan, Moudoodi, Doltana, Nusrullah all raised one voice that only Mujib can save Pakistan (Haq, 1971e, p. 241). This could not slow down the revolution. In order to stop Bhashani, the United States restored supply of arms to Pakistan (Haq, 1971c, p. 159). Not only Bhashani, but Dr Taha, a Maoist leader, was also on the front of revolution, occupying five districts and having influence in 16 districts with armed struggle going on. Their fierce fights were against Indian supported Mukti Bahni on one side and Awami League on the other side. It was bigger fight going on for Aziz than between Awami League and West Pakistan forces. Therefore, to stop this upsurge, Mujib was released by Pakistan (Haq, 1971c, p. 160). Aziz further adds that after the defeat of Pakistani army, Indian army entered Bangladesh to deal with the upsurge, and surrender of Pakistan army was a joint design for him. Aziz finds this struggle of Bhashani and Dr Taha as the “historical continuity” of struggles of Bengali peasantry under the leadership of Titu Mir, Haji Shriat Ullah, and Dodu Mian. Most interesting aspect of Aziz’s analysis is how he connects this movement of independence of Bangladesh with regionally connected Naxal movement in India as well as with other struggles going on in India and Pakistan like that of Kashmir. Left in Pakistan first opposed independence of Bangladesh being led by Bengali elite. For Aziz, we can be against Bengali elite but not against the independence of Bangladesh. Due to his strong support for the independence of Bangladesh, Socialist Party leaders in Pakistan accused Aziz of talking about oppressed and oppressor nations, whereas for them Marxism only talks about oppressed and oppressor classes. Aziz goes in length citing Marx, Lenin, and even Mao against this “class only” position of Socialist Party. Similarly, for Aziz, India and Pakistan both stopped the independence movement of Kashmir in 1948. It was popular upsurge by Kashmiri people, and to stop it, first India invaded and then tribal fighters from Pakistan entered to help Kashmiris. Pakistani military stopped these tribes and coordinated with India. Aziz’s accounts are based on General Akbar’s narrative who was leading Pakistan army in Kashmir in 1948. Similarly, he found colonization of Hyderabad by India to curb Telangana peasant movement against feudalism (Haq, 1972, p. 191).

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Aziz is neither sympathetic to Indian position nor is supportive of Pakistani state, then one wonders what is the map of South Asia and the imagination of revolution in the mind of Aziz? At one level, his imagination was a peoples’ democratic revolution in South Asia which on one hand was a critique and a departure from bourgeois national democratic revolution of Congress and that of traditional Left as its ally. On the other hand, the very nature of this peoples’ revolution was struggle of all the oppressed classes and nationalities of South Asia against internal colonization by both India and Pakistan and at the same time, for complete independence from imperialism. Starting from his admiration of Naxal movement, to his position on the independence of Bangladesh and Kashmir, his analysis encompasses all the struggles of independence across India. It is a South Asian revolution with Indian bourgeois being a big oppressor as its enemy along with Pakistani military establishment and political elite. He, being a Pakistani, wants to arm the people of Pakistan against Indian expansionism, and at the same time he wants to get rid of Pakistani ruling elite (Haq, 1967, p. 41). Aziz is pro-Pakistan and anti-India only to that extent and not more. But even this slight pro-Pakistan and anti-Indian position was difficult for traditional Pakistani Left to digest which was theoretically and conceptually subordinated to the Indian Left. Dr Manzoor Ijaz, a close friend of Aziz, finds it “incomprehensible” to understand why Aziz had anti-Indian inclination. He identifies two important reasons. One was Aziz’s close association with Hardyal Bains, who later became one of the prominent leader of Canadian Left. Second, and more important reason, seems the influence of known Pakistani historians Zahid Chaudhry on Aziz, who was an intellectual force behind Young Peoples’ Front run by Aziz (Haq, 1970b, p. 120). But this association and influence was more tactical for Aziz. Being disillusioned with PPP, he was on a serious radical path to form a United Front of Left forces in Pakistan.6

PART II: CONTOURS OF EMERGENCE OF POSTCOLONIAL THEORY IN PAKISTAN Postcolonial writings and literature from Pakistan in the 1960s and early 1970s were trying to capture the frustrations arising out of the failure of the nation-building project. It was also an attempt to define Pakistani nation. Most of the anti-colonial struggles at that time were inspired by socialist ideas expecting it to come through national bourgeoisie. That dream was shattering and a dream of revolution by working class was gaining popularity through critique of national bourgeoisie in the writings of great revolutionaries like Fanon. At the same time, the dream of freedom and independence was cracking under ongoing dependent capitalist economic development creating inequalities across regions and across classes (Alavi, 1973).

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This is the context which postcolonial writers in Pakistan were internalizing in their literature and Aziz, as a critical scholar, was trying to resolve these contradictions through his literary critique. Under this postcolonial confusion, Aziz points out how the personality of the postcolonial Pakistani writer is split, dual, and even schizophrenic. Urdu literature describes this problem as a theme of Shakhsiat ka shikasta pan (brittleness of the personality). For old generation of writers, the reason of this brittle personality of the writers in postcolonial societies was their breaking from the past. Whereas new generation of writers thought that not breaking from past and the reluctance to fully embrace the present was the actual reason of their pain. For Aziz, both these positions were two sides of the same coin causing torsion or split in the personality of the writers. Aziz thought that increasing ideological individualism was splitting people like slices of bread and was the real cause of the split personality. This for him was caused through secularism and liberal democracy separating public and private as well as keeping business ethics separate from religion (Haq, 1962c, pp. 432–434). It looks like Aziz was attacking artificial separation of public and private, state and civil society, as well as political from the economic in typical Lockean and Hobbesian liberal understanding. It is an evident attack on liberal modernity. But why modernity keeps us divided? For Aziz, our collective personality is a rebel for modern civilization (Haq, 1962c, p. 432). In order to get rid of this split personality, Aziz suggests writers to first know and realize which ideology and system is splitting them and then try to achieve their coherent and collective personality (Haq, 1962c, p. 437). In another important article, Qool-o-Qarar (Giving Consent), Aziz further gave a comprehensive mapping of this postcolonial confusion in the literary scene of Pakistan. Aziz starts with writers who wanted to defend Adab-a-Aalia (Great Literature) with the aim of converting absolute truth into beauty. This way, these writers wanted to create immortal literature and wanted to become classical writers like Saadi, Rumi, Mir, or Momin. The writers out of this stream of quest, for Aziz, were Abid Ali Abid, Sufi Tabassum, and Nasir Kazmi. Later by giving up this quest, some writers got influenced by Freud and started searching their own self or discovery of self. Being absorbed in debates of consciousness and subconsciousness and finding themselves in Baudelaire, Malarmay, Ezra Puond, and T. S. Elliot, Aziz thinks that these writers have even lost their self and became Western. Aziz gives examples of Mira Ji, Qayum Nazar, and Anees Nagi following this tradition in Urdu literature. Some of these writers rejected the West in reaction and, by giving up their “self-consciousness,” decided to find a “collective consciousness” in the tradition of Karl Jung and tried to carve a “nation” for postcolonial Pakistan. As a result, they first became “pure Pakistani,” then “Muslim,” and finally staunch supporter of “Muslim World.” Hasan Askari, Jilani Kamran, and Intizar Hussain are main writers of this stream. For Aziz, these writers are buried in the past and their aim is jobs and siding with the ruling elite (Haq, 1960b, pp. 291–292). Aziz also engages with the writers from the Left or those who had progressive thought. For Aziz, these writers rejected Pakistan and Islam and, to be noted, they became Indians in Aziz’s opinion. They took refuge in civilization of

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Mohenjo-daro, Taxila and embraced Devdasian, Budhmat, etc. Aziz boldly placed Faiz and Qurat-ul-Ain Haider in this category of writers. Detail of Aziz’s critical literary engagement with these progressive writers will follow. But who is Aziz or to which category of writers he belongs to? He finds himself tired and speechless. He begs the people that “you tell us, please tell us, otherwise death is anyhow our destiny” (Haq, 1971e, p. 239). This point leads us to the literary theory of Iblagh (communication) preached by Aziz and his comrades against the trend of anti-culturalism (detail to follow). All the above trends or tendencies in postcolonial literature mostly were broader theoretical debates between Adab Braye Adab (literature for the sake of literature) and Adab Braye Zindagi (literature for life). Starting with proponents of Adab Braye Adab, these writers claimed that literature had its own standards of beauty and moral, so it should not necessarily have some objective or purpose or political message. For them, a writer only expresses his feelings of pain to get rid of it (Haq, 1959, pp. 299–300). Aziz agreed with this but, for him, a writer while writing this literature, can also teach and change the society. To support his agreement, Aziz intentionally gives examples of Iqbal, Hali, and Nasim Hajazi who were good writers, had a political message, and were also popular among proponents of literature for the sake of literature. As far as Adab Braye Zindagi was concerned, Aziz called it “revolutionary literature” or a literature with a purpose, and it is written to expose suppression and exploitation of labor. Aziz strongly set aside the common impression about this literature by classical traditional literary circles as propaganda. It is to be noted that while advocating “literature for life,” which was the slogan of PWA, Aziz distanced himself from them. Aziz and his comrades called PWA as Manshoori Marxist (Manifesto Marxist) who believes in top down manifesto of understanding people and literature. As opposed to this, comrades of Aziz believe in literary theory of communication where literature is talking to the people at a personal level (Humnava ki talash) to find similar minded people to unite. This approach was different than the approach of both traditional right-wing writers as well as progressive writers. Traditional writers like Wazir Agha and Sajjad Baqir Rizvi used to derive literary theories from European books and consider ordinary people as ignorant. Similarly, PWA Left leaning writers also avoided going to people and to deeply organize them.7 Azeem has also pointed how technological and economic reductionism of Official Marxism of Soviet Union and evolutionism of liberal modernity in the writings of PWA in Pakistan became excuses for these writers to declare people as outdated and not ready for change and to wait for evolution of productive forces (Azeem, 2017). This trend of self-indulgence as a free and open literary expression in Urdu literature came also under the theory of anti-culturalism. Following Marnetti, among many others, these writers argued about creativity as an individualistic and isolated experience of poet itself free from any distinct form and content. In

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his article, Sher, Shaer, and Saamay (Verse, Poet and Audience), Aziz gave the critique of Colling Wood, E. E. Cummings, and Buffalo Bills Defunct and their free verse as their own self-indulgence (Haq, 1962b, p. 399). Based on this situation of literary scene and the on the face of rise of Left politics, Aziz and his comrades made Halqa-e-Arabab-e-Zooq as a battleground of literary ideas in 1970s. In these literary battles, comrades of Aziz used to go prepared after discussing relevant texts.8 PYF under the leadership of Aziz was like a volcano burning the old established literary tradition of Lahore (Professor Ashfaq Bukhari, 2002). A detail of these intense literary discussions about postcolonial confusion and frustration failing nation-building project in Pakistan are documented by Younas Javed in compilation of minutes of Halqa-e-Arabab-e-Zooq Lahore (Javed, 1984). In another article, Aziz psychoanalysis the dominant trend of Urdu literature seeking refuge in the past, i.e., in the history of Islam. Jung and his philosophy of “collective consciousness” were becoming popular among certain writers in Pakistan. These writers used the concept of “Archetypes” by Jung, which are primordial images, inherited ideas, and ideas integrated in the psyche of a society. These are emotional structures of human beings varying from society to society and context to context. These are inherited but are like frames, not specific ideas or pictures which come from our own experience. When our extralogical, scientifically prejudiced times do not accept the backwardness of these archetypes and do not let them come in consciousness, we suffer and feel pain. For Aziz, in postcolonial confusion, our writers used Jung and made him an excuse to go back to Islam and ideology of Pakistan. This contradicted the new realities of modern life along with deteriorating economic conditions and rising demand for an egalitarian society. As a result of this, feelings of pessimism and defeatism started penetrating in classical Urdu literature and worship of the past came with full force with a rejection of future and ignorance of the bitterness of the present (Haq, 1962a, p. 379). Aziz continues his story and tells how Jinnah showed us a clear future and we got independence. But when writers from UP/CP, that is, minority Muslim provinces of united India as pointed out earlier, reached Punjab, Sindh, and Bengal, it was a strange world for them, and their hope died after one or two decades. Questions came in their mind about their identity, culture, civilization, etc. Rising capitalism with changing values and feelings posed another challenge to past feudal mindset of these writers believing in classical literature. These questions started emerging in literature as well as in philosophical and political writings of these writers in Pakistan. Therefore, literature started changing while reflecting psychological and emotional confusions of these writers. This, coupled with their suffering, became an important theme of Aashob, that is, pain and crisis, in their writings. These writers started looking at Islam, Arab, or Iran as their civilization and culture in order to find a sense of belonging and historical grounding. Aziz gives the writings of Intizar Hussain, Jilani Kamran, Iftikhar

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Jalib, Muhammad Hasan Askari, Sajjad Baqir Rizvi, and Nasir Kazmi as an example of this type of writers (Haq, 1962a, p. 381). Going to a deeper level of analysis, Aziz delves into the psychoanalysis of the metaphors used as archetypes in the writings of these writers and points out how all these writers are from Shia sect and traditionally consider themselves superior to Sunni Muslims in the subcontinent (Jones et al., 2015). These writers point out tradition, religion, and family as important for social psychology, and through this, they exaggerated their racial superiority and misunderstood Jung. These writers brought tradition of Marsia and struggle of Hussain (the grandson of Holy Prophet Muhammad who was martyred in Karbala) as symbol of fight against oppression. While admiring this aspect, Aziz points out how these myths have a limited influence for Sunni writers. He specifically tells how Intizar Hussain’s story with these symbols can only stir a storm in Shuhrat Bukhari and Nasir Kazmi, who are also from Shia sect but not in Sher Muhammad Akhtar and Anjam Romani, who are Sunni writers (Haq, 1962a, pp. 383–384). Being suggestive, Aziz thus indicates the limited currency of Jung’s archetypal projections in Purbi, Hindi, Sinsikrat, and Prakarti languages. In Punjab, for Aziz, Heer Waris Shah, a classical folk love story, can be of more mythical and metaphorical value than those of religion (Haq, 1961b, p. 325). But this could betray the Muslim and Pakistani identity of these writers, which they had renounced in pursuance of the nation-building project. Aziz also has a unique analysis of Iqbal’s politics and poetry than Left leaning PWA writers. First of all, we should make it clear that Iqbal’s quest is the quest of writers during anti-colonial struggle of the people of India and he seems to embrace all possible trends of liberation and emancipation from Indian nationalism, socialism, and even fascism. But mainly, Iqbal stands for identity politics of the Muslims of South Asia and even those of the Muslims of the world. Proper place and appreciation of Iqbal’s writings in the period of postcolonial confusion became controversial because he was co-opted by official ideology of Islam and Pakistan. Progressive writers reacted to that and refused to engage with Iqbal as a philosopher or poet. Aziz finds him an embodiment of a writer and philosopher, who talks about his people and is in search of truth (Haq, 1970c, pp. 117–172). Though Aziz admires Iqbal, he does not agree with his religious bent and eulogization of the glory of the past of Islam. Aziz strongly disassociates himself from the past, patriarchy, and any control or authority in this regard. Dialectics of Individual Freedom and Submission to Collectivism Writers are usually individualistic and, as already pointed out, Aziz was critical of liberal individualism. Aziz while admires individual freedom, he continuously advises writers to submit to the collective cause of establishing an egalitarian society. There are strange dialectics of need of freedom of individual from patriarchy and religion and, at the same time, submission to collectivism for the cause of revolution in Aziz’s literary theory. In his article, Murda Muashray Ki Zindagi (Life of a Dead Society), Aziz gives his own account of individual freedom to submitting to the cause of revolution.

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How he was given a name and made scared of God in family and school. Therefore, he perceived God more like his father, a male patriarch. Aziz was fearful of Him because of His expectations like his father has from him to study and become a doctor. People around Aziz, instead of finding reasons of their miseries in the system, were conceiving them as their fate written by their God. After noticing all this, Aziz became atheist and started meeting laborers and, reluctantly drinking tea in their dirty cups. One day when an old laborer talked to him, he removed all inner fears of Aziz forever. This laborer appeared to Aziz closer to true God and he met his God in him. There was still some quest in Aziz for some objective of life. He met Hardial Bains in Canada and probably learned his true ideological Marxist leaning. Through the above dialectics of individual freedom and submission to the collective cause in his life, Aziz tells writers that in a class divided society, there are only two types of relations: one is blood and legal relation and the other is that of class and common suppression. Aziz warns that if you choose the former, you are going to be dead. Therefore, at the height of this class conflict in society, Aziz advises the writers to choose a class relation and this is the only distinction between being alive and dead in our society (Haq, 1960a, p. 58). It is to be noted that Aziz is against pretentious freedom promised by emerging capitalism in the face of decaying feudalism in postcolonial context. Middle class writers and intellectuals were the victims of this mirage. In his article Miar-eZindagi aur Aazadi (Standard/Quality of Life and Freedom), Aziz criticizes the developmentalists and socialist discourses of modernity at that time (Haq, 1960a, p. 58). For Aziz, “quality of life” discourse assumes more goods and commodities like car and refrigerator, which makes your life easy and gives you freedom. But for this, we mortgage our precious time to the employer and lose our freedom and become more submissive. Then he contrasts this position of submission with those of middle class writers who refused to submit but started living aimlessly and talking for hours on a cup of tea. That is a reaction of writers to job-oriented submission and mechanical life of business (Haq, 1960a, p. 69). Aziz warns these writers that they cannot destroy the capitalist system by their aimless talk and cannot make this exploitative system sink in their cup of tea (Haq, 1960a, p. 69). Therefore, we need to get rid of both these fraudulent freedoms to get freedom from the “gods” who create all these lives of ours (Haq, 1960a, p. 70). To sum up, Aziz is “operational realist” somewhere close to Marx and John Dewey, that is, free to change based on experience. He calls it Will-to-Doubt. He is free thinker in that sense but has nothing to do with liberalism, laissez faire, libertarianism, etc. (Haq, 1961a, pp. 345–351). The height of the philosophy of freedom in Aziz’s writings can be found in his engagement with Sartre and his influence in Pakistani postcolonial literature. In his article Wajoodiat aur Aazadi (existentialism and freedom), Aziz finds existentialism as an emotional reaction of postcolonial writers, rather than based on reasoning, against the social situation, philosophy, and even against philosophizing (Haq, 1961c, pp. 306–329). Freedom for Sartre is existence and determinism is submitting to God and making Him responsible. For Sartre, since there is no God, so individual is responsible. Aziz does not agree with this and objects

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that Sartre does not look into society and system which is responsible. Aziz further asks whether man is really free, and whether slavery is an illusion. For Aziz, human freedom has nothing to do with God but with human society. Freedom comes with a responsibility to Aziz. It comes with collectivism, collective consciousness for social change, and the dream of an egalitarian future through revolution. Then what is precisely the role of the writer for change in society in Aziz’s literary Marxist thinking? Class Struggle in Theory: Aziz’s Theory of Literature Aziz’s article Mojuda Soort-e-Hal aur Adab (Current Situation and Literature) reads like a manifesto for revolutionary literary organization where he not only defines the very nature of revolution in Pakistan but also gives an outline of the role of writers in organizing (Haq, 2012, p. 253). Based on Marx’s famous quote that actual job of philosophers or intellectuals is to change the world, Aziz divides writings of intellectuals into bourgeois writings and revolutionary writings. Former, for him, interpret the world, whereas later are active agents of change in society (Haq, 1971b, p. 253). Current situation for him in early 1970s is retreating imperialism in the world and Pakistan’s comprador capitalists, military bureaucracy, and feudals as “triangular alliance” are supporting it. As opposed to this, labor, peasantry, intellectuals, and small bourgeoisie are fighting against imperialism as a united front. Intellectuals, for Aziz, need to enter this united front. He goes on to point out that the main job of revolutionary literature is to organize people for this struggle. Furthermore, writers themselves are affected by this situation due to inflation but, instead of turning to revolution, they are trying to keep a white-collar culture in their thinking. In order to become a revolutionary writer, it is necessary for Aziz to have ideological clarity and participate practically in revolutionary work. By not connecting with revolutionary practical work, writers fall into opportunism and become the slave of their own ego. Aziz warns writers of their egoistic tendencies and disliking organizational work. The first step in this organizational work for the revolutionary writers in Aziz’s understanding is to create propaganda literature or write pamphlets (Haq, 1971b, p. 261). This type of literature of PWA, even the poetry of great poets like Jalib, was derided by the right-wing writers. Aziz’s stance in this regard is unique and bold validating the importance of this type of literature. Aziz also condemns anti-intellectual tendency in Left, which insists only on mobilizing working classes for change. For Aziz, not talking to intellectual and educated classes is extremism and sectarianism. After creating propaganda literature for the movement, the next job of the revolutionary intellectual is to fight the poisonous propaganda of imperialism against socialist countries and, to be noted, intellectuals are the first and main victim of this propaganda. On a practical note, Aziz wants the writers to organize study circles and discussion groups of these intellectuals while avoiding liberal attitude which lacks seriousness and discipline. Aziz is not only critical of liberal attitude of writers avoiding seriousness and discipline, but he is also critical of the vulgar and patriarchal morality of

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middle-class male writers, who feel themselves entitled to sleep with every woman in the name of “love” as a theme of their creative self. His essay Mardangi ki Nafsiat aur Inqalabi Amal (Psychology of Masculinity and Revolutionary Activism) is a brilliant account of exposing the petty bourgeois aspirations of middle-class writers. Masculinity, for Aziz, is courage, whereas knowledge is equally important for revolutionary activism. Keeping many women as partner is taking women as commodity as is the culture of feudal and capitalist system. Middle class writers while seducing many women actually try to imitate this ethic. In this habit, some writers by chance fall in love with rich women, and for Aziz, they become slave and lose their masculinity, become jealous, and live in fear. As opposed to this, revolutionary men see the contradictions in reality and make natural human relations with women and keep their courage (Haq, 1971a, p. 78) and bring women to revolution. For Aziz, “[r]evolution is while establishing a relation between a man and woman at individual level and using it for structural change in society.” For him, we cannot undertake revolutionary struggle until husband and wife connect their revolutionary inclinations and become a true couple of revolutionary relation. For this, a writer needs to transcend the animalistic understanding of relation between a man and woman, which needs a “long protracted guerilla war in emotion” (Haq, 1971a, p. 82). In the second stage, Aziz advises writers to eliminate public and private divide between the lives of men and women and to make them one in revolution. This seems quite a simple statement but is a complete departure from the narrated relation of men and women in revolutionary theory and reflected in literature in Pakistan even by poets like Faiz. Faiz in his famous poem “Mujh Se Pehli Si Muhabbat Meray Mehboob Na Mang” is basically abandoning the romantic love of the beloved for the love of revolution. Through such understanding of gender relations for revolution, traditional Left in postcolonial Pakistan conceived revolution as an exclusive domain of men. It failed to collapse the public private divide, which strengthened patriarchy and left women to take care of the family and relegated them to the confines of the home. It also justified aimless wandering and revolutionary gossip of the men in public domain.9 As opposed to this, Aziz is asking men to take women with them for revolution. This is more contemporary theory and practice of revolution than outdated vision of PWA and its poets like Faiz. Dialectics of Form and Content In the face of changes in economic and social life in society, human psychology, morals, and manners also undergo change. This later process is slow leading to pain, confusion, and dispersion which is reflected in literature as well. For Aziz, literary writings are to bridge this gap between the old and the new and different forms of literature have different capacity in this regard. He gives example of ghazal (lyrical poem), whose content and form, both are embedded in the past as far as symbols, metaphors, and images are concerned. Ghazal can only express 9

An insightful view and observation given by Sara Abraham about Pakistani comrades.

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disappointment and pain of the writer and its longing for past which makes it popular. Therefore, for Aziz, Ghazal can only express our depressed emotional personality rather than do anything to pour strength into it. Aziz gives very unique and interesting example of Faiz’s poetry in this regard. For him, Faiz is depressed and is in pain because his dream of social change is not realized yet. People liked him because of his ghazals which embodied pain, disappointment, and pessimism, and not because of his optimistic message of social change in his few poems. Aziz still wants the poets of ghazal to continue their struggle and do not give up and do not adopt the new forms of literature like free verse, etc.

CONCLUSION Through the activist writings of Aziz-ul-Haq (1958–1972), this article tries to map the politics of postcolonial critique in Pakistan in its nuance and originality. On one hand, Aziz challenges the current fragile official state narrative of Pakistan based on Islamic ideology presented as the monolithic demand of all the Muslims of South Asia. Separating from the politics of ML dominated by the interests of minority Muslim provinces of India (UP/CP), who consider themselves as genuine custodian of Muslim rule in India and seeking only share in British regime, Aziz places the demand of Pakistan as the genuine need of majority Muslim provinces of Punjab and Bengal against the domination of both British rulers and Hindu commerce class. On the other hand, Aziz also distances himself from the liberal and Left counter narrative of considering Pakistan as an “unnatural nation,” and a failed state and a “communal” divide of India. Related to this, more unique and forceful position of Aziz is rebuttal of the conception of liberals and Left in Pakistan considering India as a “natural nation” and a successful nation-building project encompassing liberal democracy and secularism as ideals of bourgeois enlightenment and modernity. Aziz goes beyond this bourgeois nation-building project of both Pakistan and India led by civil–military bureaucracy and erstwhile national bourgeois, respectively. He exposes the internal colonization of both the countries by their ruling elite and keeps the colonial contacts in neocolonial form. Based on this position, Aziz wishes for the complete independence and the rule of the marginalized in South Asia and boldly stood for the independence of Bangladesh and Kashmir and other nations and cultures as national aspirations of their people in both the countries. In that sense, Aziz was able to capture the true nature of postcolonial confusion of India and Pakistan and frustration of their failing bourgeois nation-building projects and accordingly built its critique. But this is not enough and can be found in any poststructuralist/postmodern postcolonial critique of colonialism and postcolonial moment rejecting both liberalism and Marxism in one breadth, preaching political resignation and pessimism as “death of subject” and “death of history.” What is unique about Aziz is his firm commitment to the revolution of workers and the marginalized as a logical next step on the face of failing nation-building project in NICs of Third World. This way his articulation

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of Left politics in India surpasses its traditional Left and embraces Naxalite movement and imagines a people’s democratic revolution in South Asia. In theoretical terms, this political and historical position of Aziz stood parallel to early radical tradition of postcolonial theory in the writings of Fanon and Ngugi as well as in early Subaltern Studies inspired by Naxalite movement in India. This radical tradition of postcolonial theory emanating from this radical moment was different than the current postmodern/poststructuralist postcolonial theory developed by later writers like Edward Said and Subaltern Studies of Spivak devoid of politics and change as pointed out above. This postcolonial moment in its radical tradition was marked with optimism of complete independence and structural change in NICs beyond bourgeois democratic revolution. Why is this important? After the weakening of Left movement across the world in 1990s, recolonization of the Third World resources under neoliberal market economy, and above all, insufficiency of mere discursive critiques and romanticizing of dispersed and fragmented social movements, it is important to imagine anew the dream of freedom and egalitarian society. This needed structural change in economy for redistribution of resources and depth in democracy, that is, genuine representation of marginalized in running the affaire of the country. Obviously, current dominant postcolonial theory devoid of politics and confined to solitary literary departments of universities cannot do this. To counter the abovementioned contemporary postcolonial theory obsessed with deconstructionist linguistic techniques, Aziz’s interventions in postcolonial literary scene in Pakistan are mind blowing and can provide a good contrast and a way forward. As pointed above, there was political and ideological divide and confusion in postcolonial Pakistan like elsewhere in Third World countries. This confusion is also reflected in literary scene through creative writings of postcolonial writers. Aziz, being a genuine postcolonial literary theorist and critic, exposes the right-wing official writers like Intizar Hussain, who aligned with Pakistani state and its ideology of Islam and considers themselves being racially superior and belonging to Arab and Islam. Reacting to these writings, Left-wing progressive writers from PWA progressive tradition like Faiz and Quratul Ain Haider went to the other extreme and tried to prove them as Indians. Aziz also trashes their biases and submission to Indian nationalism of Congress and, consequently, their distance from the aspirations of people of nations and cultures comprising both India and Pakistan. Other than this major divide of right and left in literary scene, as already pointed out, Aziz also ruthlessly critiqued individualistic liberal trends emerging in postcolonial Pakistani writers inspired by anti-culturalism, Sartre’s existentialism, and Freud’s individualistic search of the self, all of them as Western influences. At the same time, Aziz resisted the refuge of the right-wing writers from UP/CP in the past using Jung’s theory of archetypes and primordial images which started appearing as metaphors in their poetry and other creative writings. To conclude, this chapter tries to show the reader a complex and rich theoretical face of society of postcolonial Pakistan which is damaged by its official state ideology of Islam and equally blurred and distorted by liberals and traditional Left academic writings on Pakistan. At the same time, though at a

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preliminary level, this article tries to theoretically destabilize the problematic democratic, liberal, and secular face of Indian nationalism propagated by elite of Congress, followed by traditional Left in India, and believed and idealized by the Left in Pakistan. This is though coming obvious to the global audience recently yet is reduced to the problem of Modi government, which is a distraction from its historical political roots and original theoretical flaws. This way, this chapter tries to transcend the elite conceptions of nationalism of both India and Pakistan. This chapter also brings to light the dream of postcolonial writers like Aziz who thought about the complete independence of countries of South Asia from imperialism and emancipation of its masses from the yoke of the local elite which is lackey of imperialism in Pakistan and is the part of global capitalist elite in contemporary India. This is the original theme of postcolonial theory, quite different than the current postmodern/poststructuralist postcolonial theory across us dominant in academia.

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Dennis, K. (2001). The United States and Pakistan 1947–2000: Disenchanted Allies. Oxford University Press. Dyakov, A. (1945). After the failure of the Simla conference. New Times, Aug 5, 11–14. Dyakov, A. (1947). A new British plan for India. New Times, June 13, 13–15. Edwards, J. D. (2008). Postcolonial literature: A reader’s guide to essential criticism. Palgrave Macmillan. Eslava, L., Fakhri, M., & Nesiah, V. (Eds.). (2018). Bandung, global history and international law: Critical reflections and pending futures. Cambridge University Press. Fanon, F. (1963). Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press. Frank, A. G. (1969). The underdevelopment policy of the United Nations in Latin America. NACLA Newsletter, 3(8), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714839.1969.11724318 Furtado, C. (1984). Cultura e desenvolvimento em epoca de crise (Culture and development in a time of crisis). Paz e Terra. Gilmartin, D. (1998). Pakistan and South Asian history: In search of narrative. Journal of Asian Studies, 57/4, 1088–1095. Haq, A. U. (1959). Maqsadi Adab (Literature with objectives) (pp. 299–305). Haq, A. U. (1960a). Miaray Zindgi aur Aazadi (Quality of life and freedom) (pp. 57–70). Haq, A. U. (1960b). Qool-o-Qarar (Promises) (pp. 289–293). Haq, A. U. (1961a). Aazad Khiali Kia Hay (What is free thinking?) (pp. 345–351). Haq, A. U. (1961b) Mantiq aur Asbatiat Walay (Logical empiricist and positivists) (pp. 330–344). Haq, A. U. (1961c). Wajoodiat aur Aazadi (existentialism and freedom) (pp. 306–329). Haq, A. U. (1962a). Jung aur Pakistani Adab (Jung and Pakistani literature) (pp. 369–386). Haq, A. U. (1962b). Shar, Shaer, aur Saamay (poetry, poet, and audience) (pp. 399–425). Haq, A. U. (1962c). Sukhsiat, Zaat aur Adab (personality, oneself, and literature) (pp. 426–438). Haq, A. U. (1967). Murdah Muashray ki Zindgi (life of a dead society) (pp. 39–56). Haq, A. U. (1970a). Iqbal aur Muslim League ki Siasat (Iqbal and politcs of Muslim League) (pp. 85–116). Haq, A. U. (1970b). Iqbal wa Iqbal . . .Asia wa Asia (Iqbal and Iqbal. . .Asia and Asia) (pp. 117–139). Haq, A. U. (1971a). Mardangi ki Nafsiat aur Inqalabi Amal (Psychology of manhood and revolutionary practice) (pp. 71–84). Haq, A. U. (1971b). Maujodah Surat-e-Hall aur Adeeb (Current situation and writers) (pp. 253–262). Haq, A. U. (1971c). Nea Tashkand? (New Tashkent?) (pp. 151–165). Haq, A. U. (1971d). Peoples Party ka Arooj-o-Zawal (Rise and fall of peoples party) (pp. 166–176). Haq, A. U. (1971e). Qumiatoon ka Masalah aur Hamara Muakkaf (Issue of nationalities and our point of view) (pp. 220–252). Haq, A. U. (1972). Pak Bharat Tauluqat: Mazi-Hall-Mustaqbil (Pak India relations: Past-presentfuture) (pp. 186–219). Haq, A. (Ed.). (2012). Mazameen-e-Aziz-ul-Haq (“Aziz-ul-Haq, collected works”). Husan-e-Qalam Publications. Haqqani, H. (2005). Pakistan between Mosque and military. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Ijaz, M. (2012). Heady politics of the 1970s. In A. Haq (Ed.), Mazameen-e-Aziz-ul-Haq (“Aziz-ul-Haq, collected works”). Husan-e-Qalam Publications. Jalal, A. (2008). Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia. Harvard University Press. Jalal, A. (2014). The struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim homeland and global politics. Harvard University Press. Javed, Y. (1984). Halqa-e-Arabab-e-Zooq (Lahore, Majlis Taraq-e-Adab). Joshi, P. C. (1944). Congress and communists. Peoples’ Publishing House. Khan, L. (2008). Pakistan’s other story: The 1968–69 revolution. The Struggle Publications. Lieven, A. (2011). Pakistan: A hard country. Penguin Random. Minto, A. H. (2016). Apni Jang Rahay Gi (our war will continue). Sanih Publications. Nkrumah, K. (1965, May 1). Neo-colonialism, the last stage of imperialism (pp. 276–288). Thomas Nelson & Sons. Professor Ashfaq Bukhari. (2002). Halqa-e-Arabab-e-Zooq Lyallpur: A brief history. Lyallpur Kehani Book Foundation.

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Qasmi, A. U. (2011). The Ahl-al-Quran movement in Punjab. OUP. Qasmi, A. U., & Robb, M. E. (Eds.). (2017). Muslims against the muslim league: Critique of the idea of Pakistan. Cambridge University Press. Sarkar, S. (1997). Writing social history. Oxford University Press. Seth, S. (1997). Indian Maoism: The significance of Naxalbari. In A. Dirlik, P. Healy, & N. Knight (Eds.), Critical perspectives on Mao Zedong’s thought. Humanities Press. Seth, S. (2002). Interpreting revolutionary excess: The Naxalite movement in India, 1967–71. In T. Barlow (Ed.), New Asian Marxisms. Duke University Press. Seth, S. (2006). From Maoism to postcolonialism? The Indian ‘sixties’, and beyond. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 7(4), 589–605. Shahid-u-Rahman, S. (2005). Pakistan: Sovereignty lost. Mr Books. Sohail, K., & Aziz, U. (2022). Aziz-ul-Haq: Socrates of Lahore. Green Zone Publishing. Spivak, G. (1988). Can the Subaltern speak? Columbia University Press. Toor, S. (2011). The state of Islam: Culture and cold war politics in Pakistan. Pluto Press). Young, R. J. C. (2016). Postcolonialism: An historical introduction. Wiley Blackwell. Zaheer, S. (1944). A case of congress-league unity. Peoples’ Publishing House.

CHAPTER 5

MURDER AS PRAXIS? THEORIZING MARXIST FEMINISM IN PAKISTAN THROUGH AKHTAR BALOCH’S PRISON NARRATIVES Umaima Miraj University of Toronto, Canada

ABSTRACT In this chapter, I uncover the jail diaries of a revolutionary woman of the 20th century Pakistan, Akhtar Baloch. Although feminism in Pakistan has oscillated between liberal and postcolonial camps, through reading Akhtar’s diaries, compiled as Prison Narratives (2017), I center Akhtar’s own struggles for Sindh, along with the resistance of the women she met in the prison convicted for the murders of their husbands, to better theorize Marxist Feminism in Pakistan that overturns the structures that commodify women through love and revolution. My article will show the commodification of women’s bodies; the “sale” of women through marriage as the goal of this commodification; the lovelessness and alienation women experience in commodified marriages; the unexpected fall in love with someone whom it is subversive for the commodified wife to love; the subversion of this unexpected event that leads to the attempted resolution of this tension through murder; the separation of the lovers through the incarceration of the woman by the capitalist-patriarchal state; and finally, the unexpected outcome (albeit the most common one) that the male lover abandons his female lover once she’s jailed, but the defiantly brave female lover finds platonic love in jail through close female friendships with other women who are similarly brave in both love

Marxist Thought in South Asia Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 40, 75–97 Copyright © 2024 Umaima Miraj Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-871920230000040006

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and in revolution. Through this exposition, I show that Akhtar’s diaries provide a way for us to build on Marxist Feminist theory through a theory of love and revolution from a Sindhi feminist perspective. Keywords: Marxist feminism; love; revolution; murder; female friendships; Sindh; Pakistan A murderer is led to the place of execution. For the common populace he is nothing but a murderer. Ladies perhaps remark that he is a strong, handsome, interesting man. The populace finds this remark terrible: What? A murderer handsome? How can one think so wickedly and call a murderer handsome; no doubt, you yourselves are something not much better! This is the corruption of morals that is prevalent in the upper classes, a priest may add, knowing the bottom of things and human hearts. (Hegel, “Who Thinks Abstractly?”)

Hegel writes, in relation to the above cited example, that to reduce the murderer to his act “is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality” (Hegel, 1966). To begin an essay on Marxist Feminism with murder could also easily be abstractly misunderstood. Just as the murderer in Hegel’s allusion could be reduced to a murderer and not be a handsome man, the women I recover in this essay could be seen through the lens of their act if we were to read their crimes through an abstract lens which would see the murderer as worthy only of the strictest punishment. But in Akhtar Baloch’s jail diaries, Prison Narratives (2017), the incarcerated women who commit these “crimes” underscore the oppression on their bodies and their agency through love and revolution. As Nimmi Gowrinathan points out in her recent book on women fighters in Sri Lanka: “To the outside world, once she takes up arms the female fighter is simply a threat to be destroyed. To me, she takes up arms because she is the target. She is less extreme than she is mundane: every woman navigating layered circles of captivity” (2021, p. 2: emphasis mine). In this essay, I uncover Akhtar through reading her jail diaries. While Akhtar was imprisoned for her political protests against the Pakistani state, the women she met in the jail were most often convicted for murdering their husbands and/or family members to be united with their chosen lovers. By reading these two intertwined revolutions, I argue that we can foreground the love and revolution poignant in these diaries for a better theory and praxis of Marxist Feminism. The opening up of love through the violent act of murder to negate the commodification of the women’s bodies, along with the revolutionary fervor in the name of the nation, highlight that love and revolution are converged for women. While feminist scholarship in Pakistan has oscillated between liberal bourgeois feminism that tries to save the oppressed women, and postcolonial feminism that, in speaking to the West, sometimes glosses over the actual oppression imposed on women in Pakistan by trying to highlight agency in this two-way dialogue, Akhtar’s diaries provide us a lens that centers the exploitation on women’s bodies

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in the feudal economy of Sindh.1 Although a feudal context is at the receiving end of unequal development, this context of Sindh is not particularly precapitalist when it comes to women’s bodies. I contend that women’s roles as property, as fetishized commodities, remains the same within their households and where the abstract binaries of feudal/capitalists do not apply. My article will show the commodification of women’s bodies; the “sale” of women through marriage as the goal of this commodification; the lovelessness and alienation women experience in commodified marriages; the unexpected fall in love with someone whom it is subversive for the commodified wife to love; the subversion of this unexpected event that leads to the attempted resolution of this tension through murder; the separation of the lovers through the incarceration of the woman by the capitalist-patriarchal state; and finally, the unexpected outcome (albeit the most common one) that the male lover abandons his female lover once she’s jailed, but the defiantly brave female lover finds platonic love in jail through close female friendships with other women who are similarly brave in both love and in revolution. Through this exposition, I show that Akhtar’s diaries provide a way for us to build on Marxist Feminist theory through a theory of love and revolution from a Sindhi feminist perspective.2 To underscore the importance of Akhtar’s jail diaries, I first highlight the problems of liberal feminist and postcolonial feminism in Pakistan. Then, I give a brief background of Akhtar Baloch and her revolutionary activities. After that I will outline how murder becomes central in her diaries and how it can serve to better theorize Marxist Feminism in Pakistan.

THE POVERTY OF FEMINIST THEORY IN PAKISTAN3 No argument for Marxist Feminism can begin without an autocritique of Marxism itself. It is a challenge that has posed the important questions of first, why women have been sidelined in revolutionary moments of struggles in the global Left; and second, returning to the root of it in Marx’s definition of the waged worker as the focus of exploitation and eventual liberation. Thus, as Silvia Federici (2004), Maria Mies (1986), Maria Dalla Costa (2019), Selma James (2012/[1975]), and other Marxist Feminists have time and again pointed out, the definitions of capitalist exploitation need to be rethought to center the woman as “never before [the emergence of capitalism] had such a stunting of the physical integrity of woman taken place, affecting everything from the brain to the uterus” 1

I do not intend to trace how the sexual division of labor leads to capitalist development in Pakistan in this case. The particularities of that are beyond the scope of this paper. My argument is based on the exchange of women’s bodies as property and women’s resistance to it with an inherent understanding that “[p]atriarchy . . . constitutes the most invisible underground of the visible capitalist system”. (Mies, 1986, p. 38) 2 Thanks to my advisor, Kristin Plys, for outlining this structure so brilliantly. 3 This term is borrowed from EP Thompson’s seminal essay, “The Poverty of Theory or an Orrery of Errors” (1978).

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(Dalla Costa, 2019 [1972], p. 26). Thus, Marxist Feminists have pushed to highlight that capitalism thrives on the appropriation of women’s bodies and fundamentally divide the working class into the worker man and the unwaged woman through this sexual division of labor (Mies, 1986). It is important to remind the reader of these debates because of the implication of mainstream Marxism on Feminism which has led to the idea that the two are different realms of exploitation and oppression and thus should be dealt separately (see Wallerstein, 2011, for an argument of how socialist movements historically deemed feminist movements a “nuisance”). So has been the case in Pakistan. No matter how much collective amnesia the state tries to inculcate with its dominant narratives around economic growth and corruption to eradicate any revolutionary history, Marxism in Pakistan has been rampant. Lal Khan, in the aptly named book, Pakistan’s Other Story: The 1968–1970 Revolution, has highlighted the revolutionary fervor in Pakistan in the world revolution of the time (Khan, 2008). Others have also highlighted that, contrary to the static history propagandized in official and state narratives, revolution has always been integral in Pakistan (Ali, 2015; Malik, 2020; Plys, 2020a). But while important work has been done on this history, it is primarily male centered, which has been the story of most Leftist movements in the Global South. The problem, for the purposes of this chapter, of this male-centered scholarship is that it draws on the similar flawed Marxist definitions that have been critiqued by Marxist Feminists, whereby women’s exploitation or revolution at home is left out from this larger literature. In Pakistan’s public memory, the military dictatorship of Zia Ul Haq during the 1980s marks the turning point of feminist politics (Saeed, 2020, p. 283). One author goes as far as to say that “Until 1979 women’s rights were never a critical issue” (Khan, 2011, p. 1076). Organizations such as the All-Pakistan’s Women’s Association had been working on women’s “social welfare issues” within the family and outside since 1949, but the real clash with patriarchal policies on the state level is attributed to the Zia regime and Islamization, before which “women’s rights activists were able to use Islam as a means of securing their rights, both within the family as well as in the economic sphere” (Kirmani, 2013, p. 201). In September 1981, the Women Action Forum (WAF) or Khawateen Mahaz-e-Amal was founded by 30 women after the Fehmida and Allah Bux versus the State case whereby the “judge sentenced Fehmida to 100 lashes and Allah Bux to death by stoning for committing adultery” (Mumtaz, 1991, p. 104). The case became representative of the other policies the Zia regime imposed on women under the tutelage of “Islamization” that demanded women to cover their heads, made it so women’s testimonies for maximum punishment (Hadd) became invalid, and failed to distinguish between “adultery (zina) and rape (zina-biljabr)” (Mumtaz, 1991). WAF, an urban-based movement that primarily centered on elite, educated women became the harbinger of women’s protest against these policies. In 1983, Sindhiani Tehrik, the Sindhi Women’s Peasant Movement, a branch of the Marxist Party, Awami Tehrik, was formed and broadened the scope

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of women’s politics to the region of Sindh.4 The movement expanded the focus from primarily women’s issues to include the Sindhi identity and language issues as well, especially prompted by the One Unit Scheme, which came into being in 1955 under Ayub Khan and sought to unify all of Pakistan into a unit, defying provincial differences. So, “[w]hile the Sindhiani Tehrik recognize[d] men’s oppression of women, it view[ed] this as part of the larger unjust and oppressive system where women’s rights cannot be isolated from men and society at large” (Mumtaz, 1991, p. 107).5 To argue that women’s issues only became important after Zia, however, rests on the assumption that doesn’t acknowledge any resistance or revolutionary activity that was perhaps not formally organized in the public sphere. Despite the abundance of feminist organizations and movements, feminist politics in Pakistan has dealt with the poverty of theory. On the one hand, mainstream narratives of equality and empowerment are abundant. This scholarship idealizes women’s liberation based on their inclusion into the economy, in education, state, etc., and saving the oppressed woman (Mumtaz, 1991). For example, Fauzia Saeed defines agency as “[t]he capacity of a woman to act, which she undertakes by choice with the intention of pursuing a valued objective” (Saeed, 2020, p. 2). This definition is representative of how women’s agency is conceived: it’s based on action, there is choice, and there is a valued goal or objective. This definition is primarily based on her reading of economists Fredrich Hayek and Amartya Sen, with the former informing her through his idea of how “freedom of thought and action is critical for the growth of both individuals and society,” and the latter’s provocation that “women’s education, their employment outside the home, and ownership of property [are] key factors that help them augment their voice in decision-making within the family” (Saeed, 2020, pp. 253, 255). With the proliferation of World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) agencies, women’s issues become dominated by nongovernmental organization (NGO) clad economic policies to bring women into the workforce (Kirmani, 2013), with little focus on oppression at home. Afiya Zia’s Faith and Feminism in Pakistan (2020 [2018]) has recently been the central voice of feminist politics in Pakistan. Zia critiques the “postsecular” postcolonial diaspora scholars such as Saba Mahmood, Abu-Lughod, and the like who do away with the binary of subordination and resistance and find in Muslim women’s piety agential capacities. I will undertake a critique of Mahmood and other postcolonial feminists below. However, Zia’s charged critique comes from her liberal disposition that seeks to secularize (read: liberalize) 4

https://www.jamhoor.org/read/2020/11/25/the-sindhiyani-tehreek-revolutionary-feminismin-sindh. 5 Other formal organizations that dealt with women’s issues include: “PAWLA, Anjuman Jamhooriyat Pasand Khawateen, the Family Planning Association of Pakistan, the Pakistan Child Welfare Council, the Pakistan Red Cross, the Pakistan Nurses’ Federation, The House Wives Association, Girl Guide’s Association, and International Women’s Club” (Khan, 2011, p. 1075). For a detailed analysis of women’s movements and organizations in Pakistan in the 21st century, see (Saeed, 2020).

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feminism in Pakistan. Her affront is essentially with Islam in that instead of finding women’s rights and agency in Islam, secular feminists “[adhere] to international human rights tenets” (Zia, 2020, p. 24). In her book, Zia also tries to undertake a (modernist) Marxist analysis in the chapter, “The Limits of Capital: Commodifying Muslim Feminity,” where her central argument seems to be around the commodification of the Muslim woman through the veil: “Muslim feminity has become a consumer category that allows capitalists interests to launch products wrapped in religiosity, or to market gendered developmental programmes that are tailored in an essentialist and limited framing for Muslim contexts” (Zia, 2020, p. 125). However, her defense of liberal feminism remains wanting. She acknowledges the critique of liberal feminists by many scholars, yet her proposals remain fixed toward a right based, universalist advocation of feminism which overlooks that the public sphere doesn’t necessitate liberation, as women’s work begins with and through their bodies in capitalism, where religion becomes a dominant structural force that sustains that. In another essay on sex and secularism, she offers an exploratory analysis of how women’s increasing sexual agency in Pakistan troubles the state, but her framework remains abstractly structured in the dialogue of faith versus secularism, whereby she “shrink[s] love down to sexual activity” (Gilman-Opalsky, 2020, p. 135; Zia, 2021). This kind of love based on sexual agency only absolves love from its expansive morality and does not tell us much about a Marxist Feminism framework of revolutionary love. On the other hand, postcolonial feminism has been a major influence in Pakistan. As a postcolonial society, the basic premise of this literature, drawing from Chandra Mohanty (1991), Saba Mahmood (2005), Abu-Lughod (2002), and others, is to talk back to the West to negate the idea that Pakistani women, or other women of the Global South, are oppressed. These scholars tried to counter liberal notions of women’s agency to show how Third World Women do have power and agency and are not a homogenous category. Scholars writing on Pakistani women draw from these theories to show that indeed Pakistani women, just like women in other parts of the Global South, have been “perceived as monolithic subjects living ahistorical lives, a perception . . . particularly prevalent for them as apart from belonging to the ‘developing’ world, the majority of them are also Muslim, another label that seems to facilitate many to forget that women’s lives are historically and culturally heterogenous” (Ahmad, 2010, p. 15; see also Jamal, 2005). Saba Mahmood (2005), who is central in postcolonial feminist thought, outlined the dilemma of a “secular-liberal-left” politics in Pakistan and finding feminist Islamic inclinations in the Islamist movement. She argued that while Zia ul Haq’s Islamization regime, largely backed by the United States, led to a heightened belief in the equation of Islam equals women’s oppression, progressive feminists of the time slowly realized that secular feminists had paternalistically believed that all those who practiced religion weren’t enlightened enough while the former believed there was much agency within it. Mahmood thus problematizes the notion of agency that is uncritically adopted by liberal feminists as the

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capacity to act. In the first chapter of her book Politics of Piety, she claims how Leila Abu-Lughod argued against feminists who tried to romanticize resistance by seeing in every action as that without tracing the structures of power that the women acted against (Mahmood, 2005, p. 9). While Abu-Lughod had proposed, the idea of “diagnostic of power” as a corrective whereby the structures of power under which resistance was enacted would also be analyzed (1990, p. 42). However, Mahmood finds the former’s critique to be unfounded as she questions “does the category of resistance impose a teleology of progressive politics on the analytics of power – a teleology that makes it hard for us to see and understand forms of being and action that are not necessarily encapsulated by the narrative of subversion and reinscription of norms?” (Mahmood, 2005, p. 9) The problem, however, with this narrative, although it provides a useful lens against imperialist conceptions of women of the Global South, is that in trying to do away from the subversive/repressive binary, it does not center women as forces of history and restricts them to coping within their given circumstances. Although “agential,” this does not lead to underscoring how women might dismantle the structures that they find themselves in. Thus, while liberal feminists rely on a universal conception of human rights, secularism, modernization, and empowerment, postcolonial feminists look for agency but do not move beyond refuting Western conceptions of the oppressed Muslim woman. In this way, the latter resorts to settling for a limited reading of feminist politics, restricted to coping, but not pushing toward a revolutionary praxis. Liberal feminists, on the other hand, end up abstracting class analysis and disillusion those who argue that they speak for bourgeois women. The overemphasis by liberal feminists (or so-called modern Marxists) of integrating women into the workforce or seeing the working-class women as the only potential road to emancipation, paternalistically refuses to see the exploitation of women in the household as a necessary means of the “externalization, or ex-territorialization of costs which otherwise would have to be covered by the capitalists. This means women’s labour is considered a natural resource, freely available like air and water” (Mies, 1986, p. 110). This critique applies equally to postcolonial feminists who, while locating agency within the household in order to push back against the Western gaze, only highlight that agency in relation to the latter, but again fail to identify the nuance of the family, the man–woman relationship in that household. Mies points out that, Housewifization means at the same time the total atomization and disorganization of these hidden workers . . . As the housewife is linked to the wage-earning breadwinner, to the ‘free’ proletarian as a non-free worker, the ‘freedom’ of the proletarian to sell his labour power is based on the non-freedom of the housewife. Proletarianization of men is based on the housewifization of women. (1986, 110)

The cases in my essay aren’t restricted to the proletarian man and “housewifized” woman relationships but highlight the context of feudal Sindh. However, as my chapter will show, this feudal context is not isolated from capitalist structures but instead is a consequence of colonialism, unequal development, and polarization of the world-system (Amin, 1974). Akhtar historicized this process

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by claiming that these feudal relations did not always exist as such but were bounded by the British. She argued: . . .these elite may [sic] be responsible for the exploitation of indigenous Sindhis. The British Raj awarded them estates and orchards belonging to the poorer Sindhis in return for their enslavement. Now they enjoy the luxuries of life, visit foreign lands, live in bungalows, consume rich food and wear clothes of silk – while the original owners of the property are dying of hunger, with no clothes to cover their naked bodies, let alone owning other luxuries of life! (45)

The notion of the “original” owners shows that these relations are not precapitalist but instead the very result of colonization. The remnant of the feudal relations continued to exist in the Pakistan that on the other hand was on its road to “development.” Postcolonial feminists celebrate the “agency” in this housewifization in the postcolonial nations. While that intervention is important for an anti-imperialist understanding of women in the Global South, especially to counter the savior-complexed Western narratives that homogenize Third World Women (Mohanty et al., 1991), as Plys points out “[a]nti-[i]mperialism is not an inherently leftist endeavor” (2021, p. 289). And so, while postcolonial feminists overturn the oppressed woman of the Global South narrative, they fail to question the historical necessity of the woman to remain in the very household where they locate her agency and be the force of production and reproduction. In the following sections, I turn to Akhtar’s jail diaries to show how, counter to the bankrupt ideas of liberal and postcolonial debates, the theory of love and revolution center women at the forefronts of history as they overturn the structures that inhibit them.

PRISON NARRATIVES AS AN ARCHIVE Akhtar Baloch was born in Hyderabad, Sindh, on December 16, 1952. Her mother was Zarina Baloch, a renowned activist and folksinger, who was “one of those rare personalities who were respected and whose presence and musical contribution was sought after by all politicians and nationalist parties in Sindh” (Makhdoom, 2005). Born in a political background, Akhtar Baloch had grown up reading Lenin and about the struggles of women in China, Vietnam, and Palestine (Karachi Literature Festival, 2017). Later, when her mother married Rasul Baksh Palijo, the founder and leader of the Marxist party, Awami Tehreek, Akhtar became even more involved in politics. In 1970, at the age of 18, Akhtar demonstrated her first hunger strike against the One Unit Scheme of 1955 that, as the name suggests, sought to “build parity between East and West Pakistan by amalgamating all five units of West Pakistan – Sindh, Balochistan, Bahawalpur, Punjab and the NWFP – into a single administrative unit” (Palijo, 2017, p. 1). Along with that, she demanded that the electoral lists of the upcoming elections be published in Sindhi so that could make an informed decision about whom to vote. The decision to protest was made in a whim one night when she had been taking care of her mother and stepfather who were hospitalized for an infection.

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Rasul Baksh Palijo, recounting Akhtar’s decision to begin the hunger strike, at the beginning of the book, shows how Akhtar made the decision. Reading newspapers to her sick parents, she lamented that if only she were a boy, she would join the protest as well: Students, young people, all of us should rise! . . . The Chinese and the Vietnamese did it. Everyone stood up valiantly. Men, women, children and the elderly – every single one of them were offering their heads at the altar for the cause. We will do the same. If people were to stand up now, then you have my word, I would immediately enlist myself. [. . .] I swear, if I were a boy, I would immediately go and join the Vietnamese and the Palestinians. They are the honourable ones, not us. We lead purposeless lives; [sic] worse than animals. (2017, 18)

This charged proclamation was followed by her decision the next day: Can I sit in the hunger strike? [. . .] Would the people make fun of me and say, ‘Here is a shameless woman staging hunger strikes?’ (2017, 20)

Palijo, quoted Shah Abdul Latif, a Sindhi poet, as an answer: There is no place for cowards in the night of oppression. Dumm taunts ten times a day, but I will happily sacrifice my flesh and bone for my beloved Mehaar. (2017, 20)

Over the course of the next decade, Akhtar was imprisoned thrice and was later involved in the Movement for Restoration of Democracy (MRD) and was one of the founders of the peasant women’s movement, Sindhiani Tehreek. In 1972, she married Ghulam Qadir Palijo, another socialist worker, and spent her time in Junghsahi village in Sindh as a political worker and schoolteacher (Makhdoom, 2005). Prison Narratives is based on her diaries at the time of her third imprisonment when she had undertaken a hunger strike to demand “that all false cases against . . . hari [peasant] and nationalist activists be dropped and they be set free . . . [and] that free domiciles obtained by nonresidents of the province be cancelled” (Baloch, 2017, pp. 57–58). Akhtar first published her diaries in Sindhi in 1972 as Qaidyani Ji Diary (Diary of a Female Prisoner) (Baloch, 2017). Although lost in translation for the non-Sindhi speaking population until it was translated in English in 2017, the diaries were a major influence on Sindhi political thought. They were also published in summary in 1977 in the journal Race & Class, with a preface by Mary Tyler, an English teacher who had previously been incarcerated in India. However, this publication has not been cited or acknowledged in the 2017 edition of the book or anywhere in relation to it. This signifies how lost Akhtar Baloch’s contribution has been to feminist politics in Pakistan beyond Sindh. In this chapter, I read Akhtar Baloch’s diaries as an archive. Beginning in July 1970 in Central Jail Hyderabad, the diary is divided into four parts: Part I in Hyderabad, Part II in Sukkur, Part III again in Hyderabad where she returns to take her board exams, and Part IV at her home. Kathi Weeks, a Marxist Feminist scholar, recently in her talk on the Marxist Feminist archive, argued that instead of relying on terms such as “body of work,” “canon,” “tradition,” and other such conventional words which canonize knowledge, a Marxist Feminist archive should be a more collective endeavor. She proposed to not find a “body” of Marxist

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Feminist texts, especially since the body is a central tenet of this scholarship, and further, because these terms are based on a criterion that doesn’t always fit women’s lost voices (Weeks, 2021). Women’s voices have often been silenced in the archive leading to the acceptance that there were few women revolutionaries in history. This, I contend, is because of the formalization of the archive based on the rubrics of precision and authenticity (Platt, 1981). Instead, as Ann Stoler argues in her essay on the colonial archives where she tries to read the “archive-as-subject,” (2002, p. 93) I also contend that Akhtar’s diaries was not just a source to understand her own revolution. When theorizing for a Marxist Feminist scholarship then, I chose to read Akhtar Baloch’s diaries as a single work, aware that she hadn’t written much elsewhere, or much of it is lost. I also contend that although she is the author of her diaries, the other women that are part of it are equal participants in the archive through which this theory could be built.

COMMODIFICATION OF THE BODY When I’d reported to the couple, thus That up there no one murders now for gain Since no one owns a thing, the faithless spouse Who’d beguiled that woman so improperly Lifted his hand, now tied to hers by chains And looked at her and turned perplexed to me So no one steals, if there’s no property? I shook my head. And as their hands just touched I saw a blush suffuse the woman’s cheeks. He saw it too and cried, She hasn’t once Shown so much since the day she was seduced! And murmuring, Then there’s no abstinence? They moved off swiftly. And the ties that fused Them tight were of no weight or consequence. “When I’d Reported to the Couple, thus” – Bertolt Brecht, translated by Thomas Kuhn, 19646

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argued that “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon” as the “violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world” will be “claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters” (1963, pp. 27, 31). I stretch Fanon’s provocation to argue that the commodification of women is also a violent act, as they are exchanged as property, kidnapped, forced into marriages, and thrown into prison by the state. And so, I will show how the “sale” of women into marriages, their alienation in those marriages, their choosing of lovers, murdering their husbands, sentencing 6

Copyright by David Constantine, granted by Bloodaxe Books. Source Poetry (November 2014).

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by the capitalist-patriarchal state to prisons, and finding of platonic female friendships follows the trajectory of a violent overcoming of the oppression of their bodies toward “embodying history in [their] own person[s].” Akhtar’s own struggle for Sindh also began through her body. The parallel between her national revolution and the women’s resistance should not be glossed over. They are not separate revolutions as both underscore the historical exploitation of the downtrodden. Akhtar’s encounter in the military court at the beginning of her imprisonment shows how she weaponizes her body against the regime. As the army major says “since you are a student, you must be aware that observing hunger strike is forbidden in Islam. Hunger strikes belong to non-Muslims like Gandhi. Why did you commit this sin?” (Baloch, 2017, p. 58) She replies: You are strong and you have an army, weapons, jails and police [sic]. You have the means to suppress us. What do we have? How do we get out rights from you? How do we fight against the cruelty you inflict on us? Today, our weapons against you are hunger strikes, demonstrations, protests and rallies. It doesn’t matter to whom these traditions belong or relate to. (Baloch, 2017, p. 58)

As “the agents of government speak the language of pure force” when it comes to the Sindhi question and are “the bringer of violence into the home,” I argue that for Akhtar the most immediate action was hunger strike, the exploitation of women’s bodies in the feudal regime left murder the most urgent and radical option. The centrality of the women’s bodies is highlighted in the preface to the 1977 version of the diaries, where Tyler shows how the woman is a constant source of threat to the hari (peasant) in the feudal economy of Sindh. She cites a report which states: The hari, who has cultivated a piece of land for several generations, does not know how long he will be allowed to stay on it. Fear reigns supreme in the life of the hari – fear of imprisonment, fear of losing his land, wife or life. He might have to leave his crop half ripe, his cattle might also be snatched [away] and he might be beaten of the village. He might suddenly find himself in the fetters of police under an enquiry for theft, robbery or murder . . . A good-looking wife is a constant source of danger even to [the hari’s] life. The hari is asked to surrender her and he is subjected to intimidation, threat or coercion. If he does not yield, the wife is kidnapped or he is sent behind the bars in a false criminal case and the wife left alone is compelled to live with the Zamindar [landlord]. The hari is even murdered if the Zamindar sees no other hope of success. (Tyler, 1977, p. 392)

This passage shows how the woman was pushed around in this lord-hari relationship. Moreover, it shows the violence of the state and police that loom over the lives of the peasant household, with the woman being superexploited at the will of the landlord. The hari’s fear of “losing his land, wife or life” to the Zamindar, or feudal lord, subtly alludes to how women and land are conjoined because it is both through women and nature that capitalist relations are mediated, “through the appropriation of nature’s life-making capacities” (Moore, 2015, pp. 94–95). Thus, while the hari’s labor power – both men and women’s – is exploited, in addition, the women are appropriated, along with the land. The hari’s combined fear of losing his wife, land

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(and life) to the feudal lord shows that the latter has the power of appropriating and exploiting all three. But while the hari would either be killed, imprisoned, or have his “good-looking” wife taken away, the wife herself becomes an extension of nature, the life-making capacity, property, for both the hari and the feudal lord as she could be kidnapped or made to be left alone. It is through her that the feudal lord exercises his power of the hari, through the knowledge that he can take her at will, just as he can take his land at will. This exposition situates Akhtar’s own analysis of women’s bodies in the economy of Sindh. As Tyler notes, Akhtar “understood that the feudal system had reserved its worst harshness for the womenfolk” (Tyler, 1977, p. 392). Akhtar points out how women, daughters, “are usually made scapegoats and given in marriage” or, Sometimes this act of forced marriage paves the way for the even more inhumane act of not allowing daughters to marry at all. Either marriage is solemnised with the Holy Quran (Haq Bakshish) or their right to marriage is extinguished. The hypocrisy of our mirs [caste], pirs [saint] and waderas [feudal lord] is such that they keep a number of wives, legal or otherwise, for themselves. Yet they consider it a sin to marry off their daughters and sisters. They think: ‘How can we, the nobles, give away our daughters to the common folk? This is against our honour. (Baloch, 2017, pp. 35–36)

In order to refute any notions that withholding women from marrying is a “backward” practice or Sindhi exceptionalism, it is worth pointing out that the logic behind this is not backward or precapitalist at all. Instead, Federici (2004) and Mies (1986) have provided us with an extensive historical analysis of how at different moments in history, women’s bodies have been used to support the capitalist demand of the time: the usurpation of women’s reproductive knowledge and the professionalization of medicine went hand in hand with the demand of a larger population, hence women were forced to bear children, rape was decriminalized, prostitution legalized; in the colonies, prostitution was encouraged, slave women were made to reproduce when required, raped, and exploited, while at the same time the process of housewifization created the docile woman (Federici, 2004; Mies, 1986). Thus, it is not some primordial mode of existence, instead shows the logic of capitalism. The feudal lord also uses the woman as an extension of his property. As Tyler (1977, p. 392) explains: The concept that the marriage of a daughter is demeaning is buttressed by the role of sex in the display of property and power. The status of a landlord is reflected not only in the size of his holding, his political influence and his ability to cause damage to others, but also by the lavishness with which he engages in the various feudal sports, including seducing, snatching, marrying and raping women. His sexual appetite is supposed to reflect his social power. Sexual conquest also accomplishes social submission. The exercise of the droit du seigneur and other sexual abuses over the peasant women may only mean the satisfaction of the landlord’s sexual lust and further humiliation of the peasant,7 already terrorized into submission by other means,

In “Algeria Unveiled,” Fanon showed how the colonizer used the wife of the male colonized as a means of emasculating him also, thus women have historically been used as collaterals (Fanon, 1965).

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but it is not uncommon for a powerful landlord - particularly a politician - to humble a recalcitrant bureaucrat or a landlord opponent by raping his daughter.

Thus, women as property are violently exchanged or withheld from marrying at all. The women whose stories Akhtar relates in her diaries were mostly married forcefully. Ama Mehlaan, 40 years old, was married to her “aged husband” (Baloch, 2017, p. 79), Ratni, “a girl of about fifteen” had been twice married forcefully by her family (81), so was Mariam (91), Khanzadi “had been married to a religious man with whom she did not enjoy a loving relationship” (103), 15 or 16 year old Halima had been married to an 80 year old man (107), Zebo “was from Iran, where a Pathan had abducted her to sell her to a nawab in Sindh. She had a son by the nawab and now the father and son lived in Jacobabad” (108), and many others. The commodification of women is thus a violent act. In the Subverting the Commodification: Murder as Praxis? section, I will outline how women overturn that violence by the act of murder in the name of love.

SUBVERTING THE COMMODIFICATION: MURDER AS PRAXIS? Murder, as an act of spontaneous defense, as a rejection against work, as the quest for lovers, opens many lenses to understanding women’s resistance when other options seem nonexistent or limited. It opens up an analysis of how the women’s bodies were integrated in the feudal exchange, it shows hierarchies of class and caste, but it also shows the radicality of the women’s actions through love, through friendship, and through their struggles that surpassed their immediate acts. Murdering as an act of resistance is not a novel phenomenon. Slaves used “[p]oison [as] their method” (James, 1963, p. 16). CLR James outlined in The Black Jacobins how slaves would poison their masters, the master’s wives or children in order to secure their own positions by ensuring that the master had only one son left who would inherit his property. “By this means they prevented the plantation being broken up and the gang [of slaves] dispersed” (James, 1963, p. 16). They also murdered themselves in order to spite the masters or keep their gangs’ numbers low. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon also argued how the lumpen-proletariat, “that horde of starving men, uprooted from their tribe and from their clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people,” and how through militant action “[t]he prostitutes too, and the maids who are paid two pounds a month, all the hopeless dregs of humanity, all who turn in circles between suicide and madness will recover their balance” (Fanon, 1965, pp. 103–104). Mies also argues that when the colonial government tried to “encourage local breeding of slaves by slave women on the plantations” after the abolition of slave trade, “slave women had internalized an anti-motherhood attitude as a form of resistance to the slave system: they continued a kind of birth strike. . . [w]hen they became pregnant, they used bitter herbs to produce abortions or when the children were born,

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‘many were allowed to die out of the women’s natural dislike for bearing them to see them become slaves, destined to toil all their lives for their master’s enrichment’” (Moreno-Fraginals, 1976, quoted in Reddock, 1984, p. 17, quoted in Mies, 1986, p. 91). These few examples of murder used in different forms underscore the oppressive systems under which they were conducted and the radicality of the resistance. All of the women Akhtar encountered in the prison had been convicted for murders. In Central Jail Sukkur, Akhtar observed that there were “about forty to fifty female prisoners [t]here. Almost all Sindhi, charged mostly with murder” (Baloch, 2017, p. 69). When Kishwar, one of the inmates, said to Akhtar one day after witnessing the wailed cries of Karma, another woman, as she called out for her sons who had abandoned her after she murdered her husband, “So many Sindhi women commit murder,” Akhtar replied: “This may be because they have no other option. There is total feudal control over their village, their lives and their property” (Baloch, 2017, p. 141: emphasis mine). Because there is no other option the murder becomes radical. So, when Tyler asks in the preface, “So many innocent and affectionate village women had stained their hands with the blood of their husbands and relatives! How could these humble and mute creatures, who did not even have the right to love and marry by their choice, commit the most serious crime in eyes of the law!” she, quite paternalistically, misreads the cases and takes away from the radicality of their actions. Akhtar understood that they had no choice. It is the desperation in these actions that makes them radical. Tyler’s misreading can be aptly understood in the words of Gowrinathan in the case of women fighters: “[t]he analysis of a narrow mind centers the fighter as an individual: she was feeling insignificant, she was pulled by a lover, she was brainwashed. Each assumption easily locates its gendered avatar in the weaknesses believed to be inherent to women” (2021, p. 2). The first step that the women take to overcome the alienation and estrangement in their marriage is through choosing a freer form of love. “[T]he importance of love is bolstered. . . because love is a tendency contrary to that of the system of exchange” (Gilman-Opalsky, 2020, p. 101). When Akhtar asked Kaz Bano, one of the women, why she killed her husband, she simply said, “Because I fell in love with another man” (Baloch, 2017, p. 77). Fifteen-year-old Ratni also murdered her husband to be with her lover. Akhtar writes: I asked what brought her to the prison at such a young age. She told me that she was serving a fourteen-year sentence for poisoning her husband. She began by telling me how she used to live and work at a landlord’s house, where she fell in love with the landlord’s son. Her parents married her to another man, whom she swiftly left to be with her lover. Her parents got her married once again, to another man. It was the second husband who she murdered with poison provided by her lover. . . When I asked what happened to the lover who bought her the poison, she said he was now with his family during leading a normal life. I asked why she didn’t name him during her trial. She said, ‘Sister, I’ve already destroyed my life, there’s no point in destroying his life too. May God bless him.’ However, she added that her only regret was that he never wrote to her or came to visit in prison. ‘I wish him a long life,’ she said. (Baloch, 2017, p. 81)

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Another woman, Khanzadi had been charged for marrying her aged husband. Akhtar relates her story: Aged about twenty-four or twenty-five, she also has a twelve-year-old son, Hassan. She hails from Pir Jo Goth. She had been married to a religious man with whom she did not enjoy a loving relationship. Then she met Abdul Qadir, a small landlord in her village. They became very close. One day, her husband died suddenly under mysterious circumstances. The doctor’s report showed that the deceased had been poisoned. The police arrested both Khanzadi and Abdul Qadir on the charges of the husband’s murder. A jirga was set up to decide the case. (Baloch, 2017, p. 103)

While Khanzadi was convicted for murder, Abdul Qadir’s father was able to “have his son’s case transferred from the jirga to the district court. Eventually, even the court acquitted Abdul Qadir, given his father’s influence. Khanzadi remained an under-trial prisoner for two years before being sentenced to ten years of rigorous imprisonment” (Baloch, 2017, pp. 103–104). Now that she was in the prison, her son, Hassan, had also abandoned her for murdering his father. Yet, when Akhtar and Naseem asked her later if she would ever marry again after getting bail, she replied: “I am still very much married to the one for whom I sacrificed my freedom, my kids and everything. I am languishing here in jail for him, how can I think of another marriage? [. . .] Let him ignore me as much as he wants, but I will remain his till my last breath” (Baloch, 2017, p. 121). There is a stark contrast in their descriptions of their love for their lovers as opposed to how they were exchanged from one man to another as property. Gilman-Opalsky calls this “expansive love,” the kind that doesn’t shrink in jealousy and moves beyond the boundaries established by the legal codes of marriage or custom. It is resistance against loveless marriages, where “adultery [becomes] the natural counterpart to marriage. It [is] the woman’s only form of self-defense against the domestic slavery to which she [is] subjected. Her social oppression [is] a direct reflection of her economic oppression” (Sankara, 1990, p. 13). The murders then can’t be reduced to the mere acts of taking someone’s life, instead it showcases the oppressions on women and their bodies and their resistance to it. Thus, when compared to the loveless marriages where “capital only succeeds in commodifying love by destroying it” (Gilman-Opalsky, 2020, p. 3) based on the logic of exchange, the women’s perseverance for their beloved shows their choice of experiencing real love, a love beyond marriage based on custom or tradition but instead a violent, risky love, which has much more meaning. It is important to focus on murder here as a tool of resistance against the use of the women’s bodies against their will and for their lovers. The choice or a dream of a full life, as Ratni laments “I was a fool to think killing my husband would allow me to marry and live with my paramour in his big house!” shows an imaginary that breaks the bound of a marriage based on feudal relations (Baloch, 2017, p. 81). Yet, one should keep from glossing over that the women could not end up with their lovers despite their radical acts. Does that mean we lose into the melancholy of a failed utopia? Akhtar’s diaries show that as seen from the examples cited above the radical potentiality of hope in love. Daadli, whose lover

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was also serving time in jail for murdering her husband with her, was willing to give up her child Soomar’s freedom in order to eventually “spend the rest of [her] life with [her] paramour,” instead of accepting bail in exchange of marrying her ex-brother-in-law (Baloch, 2017, pp. 121–122). And so, to read the unbounded logic of love against the logic of relations based on capital in exchanging women as property is where we find the revolutionary praxis. The murders also open up how love was the only resistance against the oppressions conducted by the feudal lords and the state. For example, while the women were convicted for committing murders of their old husbands, the practice of Karo Kari, punishment for adultery, legitimized their murders against love in the name of religion. In the epilogue to her diaries, Akhtar laments, “[t]he Sindhi woman still has no say over her own life. Every day we witness scores of innocent women silenced in the name of Karo Kari (literally black man and black woman; those accused of fornification and adultery; the practice of honour killing), yet the culprits go free with their heads held high” (Baloch, 2017, p. 162). Tyler also expands on this practice in the preface, In making woman a scapegoat for redeeming the exaggerated sense of honour of man, Sindhi society has yet another distinction8: the custom of Karo and Kari. The two words are masculine and feminine for black, meaning sinner. . . a man who suspects his wife or a female relative of having a love affair, kills her and her lover without hesitation. For this he needs no evidence; a false rumour or a taunt is sufficient to provoke the ‘man of honour’ to pick up is axe and chop off the head of his wife. . . The killer of a Kari is regarded as a hero – a brave and self-respecting man who vindicated his honour. . . A man murdering another man over property or some other quarrel, often kills his own wife, throws her corpse beside that of the murdered man, declares them Karo and Kari. . .. (Tyler, 1977, p. 393)

The different social logics of murder are prominent here. While the women are imprisoned for their actions, in the practice of Karo and Kari, the murders are sanctioned by custom and also the capitalist-patriarchal state which sends the women to prison but acquits the men coming from powerful families.9 If a woman committed a murder, she could also be forsaken by her family, as shown by the case of Karma. Akhtar notes that Karma calls out to her sons, “O, my shama (luminance), O, my dear sons Manzoor and Nazir Hussain!” as she desperately waits for them to visit (Baloch, 2017, p. 141). However, Karma’s sons have abandoned her and “call her a Kari” (Baloch, 2017, p. 141). So, while the man could be lauded for killing his wife over his own honor or property, the 8

As I mentioned earlier in the essay, I disagree with the notion implied by Tyler that these practices are rooted in Sindhi exceptionalism. My point in citing these instances is not to show some sort of backwardness inherent in these practices. On the contrary, as Mies points out citing examples of the European witch hunt and other instances of violence against women, “[v]iolence against women, therefore, seems the main common denominator that epitomizes women’s exploitation and oppression, irrespective of class, nation, caste, race, capitalist or socialist systems, Third World or First World” (1986, p. 169). 9 This historical phenomenon is highlighted by Engles: “In order to guarantee the fidelity of the wife, that is, the paternity of the children, the woman is placed in the man’s absolute power; if he kills her, he is but exercising his right” (1978 [1884], p. 737).

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woman could be deemed a Kari not only for taking a lover but for also murdering her husband. The arbitrary logic of murder is prominent here. Moreover, the state imposes religion on the women in exchange for their bail which shows the permeation of the capitalist-patriarchal state into their lives. Akhtar notes that Mariam, who was in the seventh year of her sentence, was “[i] nitially awarded the death sentence at the age of twelve, her sentence was later committed to life imprisonment,” She was in love with her cousin, for whom she killed her husband. She was a Kohli Hindu and later converted to Islam in jail. Initially, her mercy appeal against capital punishment was turned down and the date of her hanging set. However, when she converted, the superintendent of the jail wrote to the President of Pakistan, asking him to reduce her sentence to life imprisonment. At the time, President Ayub Khan was on a foreign trip abroad and Speaker Abdul Jabbar was the acting president. He decided to commute her sentence. (Baloch, 2017, p. 91)

“Four Hindu Bheel inmates [were also] persuaded to convert to Islam with the promise that they would be released soon” (Baloch, 2017, p. 147). Akhtar noted, “[t]hey have also been assured of a passage to heaven in the hereafter and thus avoid the wrath of hellfire” (Baloch, 2017, p. 147). One of the inmates, Ratni, who had converted to Islam received a letter from her brother who told her that she no longer belonged to their family because of this. Akhtar, although could not do much to change their situation, lamented in her diary that “I feel your pain, Ratni! Come out and tell everyone, ‘I don’t need your heaven, I am better as a Bheel. My brothers, my mother and my father are the ones most dear to me. I am their and will return to them” (Baloch, 2017, p. 147). Akhtar realized that their “life was spared only because of [their] religion,” noting, “So there is no mercy for the rest of humanity. Only Muslims can hope for mercy!” (Baloch, 2017, p. 93) These examples show that not only did women resist the exchange of their bodies through murders and chose real love, the murders themselves also highlighted the different logics used as to who would be punished and who would be pardoned. In this section, I showcased that, although women commit the murder to overturn the structures that oppress them, they are separated from their lovers through their incarceration by the capitalist-patriarchal state. In the Love and Revolution section, I will argue that the final, unexpected outcome (albeit the latter most common one) in which the male lovers also mostly abandon the women as remain imprisoned while the lovers roam free in most cases, the defiantly brave female lover finds platonic love in jail through close female friendships with other women who are similarly brave in both love and in revolution.

LOVE AND REVOLUTION It is not surprising, given the nature of violent and oppressive trajectory at the hands of the feudal economy, men, and the capitalist-patriarchal state so far outlined, that Akhtar notes, “if anybody taunts a prisoner for killing her husband, all the women charged with murdering their husbands come to her rescue

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and attack the women taunting them” (Baloch, 2017, p. 156). While Akhtar finds it strange (Baloch, 2017, p. 156), the women’s comradery shows not only their friendship but exposes an underlying understanding of why murders become the only resort against the violence conducted against them. The women’s comradery is also showcased when Akhtar reflects when she can hear the other women are showering one night: These night-time showers almost make the observer believe these women are in their villages and not in prison because of the way they laugh and crack jokes with the matrons. These are full moon nights so it’s pleasant outside. Naseem and I are content to just sit and watch these little joys in their lives. Sometimes Naseem asks me, ‘Akhtar, how can we ensure that these women come out of the prison? Perhaps I can offer my liberty for the freedom of one of them.’ When Naseem, so young and with a heart free of hate and full of innocence asks such questions, I love her so much. (Baloch, 2017, pp. 79–80)

The serenity in this description is palpable. The prison, albeit an enclosure to punish the women, becomes a place of comradery and friendship. It was in the prison that they supported each other against matrons and the upper class “Miss,” the superintendent, and where Akhtar would read them poetry, write their letters, and they would share stories. All the women brought together because of the individual actions they committed for their lovers or their families, or even when they were wrongly framed, provided them with a space of solidarity. Away from the loveless marriages and unable to get their lovers, it was the prison that became the place for this platonic love in the form of female friendship.10 Akhtar related her last moments in the prison when she and Naseem were released when Yahya Khan, the President, decided to release all political prisoners upon the election of the ex-foreign minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto of the Pakistan People’s Party who the Sindhi people had voted for: Upon news of our immediate release, women began to gather in our ward. Many of them were teary-eyed. Some said: ‘When you go out, please tell Bhutto about us. Pray for us so that we are set free like you!’ Others asked us to write letters for them before leaving. Each woman made us write three or four letters. . . Ama Khani cooked vermicelli for us, but we were so overwhelmed that we could not eat. However, looking at these helpless women, I became sad. I recalled how I met each and every one of them. The starry summer nights spent here with these women flashed before my eyes. I recalled the sweet songs we had sung together and the tears when I would write their letters. I have still not forgotten their support and care when I was ill. . . Khani came, while embracing me, she began to weep and said, ‘Akhtar! You too are leaving us!’ I burst out crying. We both wept, along with all the other women. At last, the matron came and said it was time for us to leave. Everyone was emotional when we were leaving. The poor women waved at me and said, ‘Akhtar! Don’t ever forget us, please don’t forget us.’ (Baloch, 2017, p. 159)

10

Prisons do become a space of opposition despite efforts to mitigate resistance. As Kristin Plys shows in her book on the Emergency in India, for the political prisoners, the jail also became a space for reading circles, political thought, and conversations (Plys, 2020b, pp. 224–237). See also, Kalpana Dutt’s memoir, Chittagong Armoury Raiders: Reminiscences (1973) where she outlines how she would meet old comrades in different prisons where should we sentenced for her political activities against the British.

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This emotional passage shows the solidarity formed in the prison. I argue that this solidarity and comradery, which, despite the different circumstances of each woman, is formed in the name of revolution, love, and death, which most of the women in the prison had all experienced. While the women were willing to stay in the prison instead marrying someone other than their lovers for bail, as the following cases show: Qaimaan: The feudal lord from our village convinced my parents that he would get me released on bail if I agreed to be his wife. I refused and voluntarily had my bail cancelled. (150) Daadli: I have heard that my late husband’s brother has asked for my hand in marriage in exchange for dropping the murder charges against me. He claims to have the influence to get my bail granted if I were to agree to his proposal. (121)

Akhtar was similarly prepared to give up her life for Sindh. The letters from her mother, Zarina, and her stepfather, Rasul Baksh Palijo, emphasize this. In one letter, Palijo writes, “I have prepared myself for the sacrifice of my life at any given time. I am also mentally prepared to receive the most horrifying news of your death at any time” (Baloch, 2017, p. 39). The similarity between the two parallel struggles is underscored by how death becomes the inevitable pivot which leads to overcoming the oppressions, through murder in the case of the women, or through martyrdom for Sindh as shown in the following examples. Akhtar’s mother, Zarina writes: “You must know that the true meaning of life is struggle and hardship. When you have experienced prolonged pain, only then will you truly understand the condition of the downtrodden masses and their suffering at the hands of their exploiters” (Baloch, 2017, p. 47). In another letter, she writes: “Life and death are nature’s prerogative. I would rather you are remembered for ages to come. You know hundreds and millions of people perish daily without any purpose. How can you escape the inevitable? Would you not meet your end even at home?” (Baloch, 2017, p. 52). And in another, Sometimes I fear for your life but then I am reminded that Palestinian Laila [Leila Khalid] also had a mother, Quratul Ain Tahira [Fatima Baraghani] had a mother too and the millions of Vietnamese had mothers too. I firmly believe that great is the nation whose men and women are equally brave. . . I pray that you will be a slave to nobody. You are my only daughter, but even if I had a hundred such daughters, I swear that I would have sacrificed them all for Sindh. (Baloch, 2017, p. 130)

The valor that Akhtar receives from these letters comes through in her own convictions as well. Time and again, she tells Naseem and herself that their sacrifices are hardships are in the name of Sindh. When on the way to the prison where they were made to sit in the male compartment where men gawked at them, “[Akhtar] consoled Naseem, saying that [they] had to bear this for the sake of [the] Sindhi people, who had themselves suffered great hardship for centuries” (Baloch, 2017, p. 65). She wasn’t immune to the hardships, however, learning from the revolutionary women in other parts of the world, she believed that women need to prioritize revolutionary struggles over other indulgences of life. She writes, “there are the Palestinian girls and those from China and Vietnam who valiantly face volleys of bullets for the sake of their homelands. How

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self-serving we are in comparison to those valiant girls!” (Baloch, 2017, p. 47). But while Akhtar understood her own perseverance for Sindh, it is interesting that she found the women’s decisions to refuse bail surprising: I was stunned at her resolve and wondered how a person could be willing to spend a difficult life in jail for the sake of love. These lovers are willing to trade their life for fidelity and consider infidelity more heinous than murder. If our people shared even a fraction of this loyalty to their nation, they would change the very fate of society. (Baloch, 2017, p. 122)

But while for Akhtar the resolve is strange, when we read this fidelity to the lover alongside her Akhtar’s own love for Sindh, we can see that love and revolution do not have to be separate. As Akhtar narrates Ratni’s story mentioned above, she also reflects on how the authorities want her to apologize and get immediate release from bail as the male prisoners had done so. But just as the women refuse to accept bail from those they didn’t love as a compromise, Akhtar “was adamant that [they] would not bow down before the martial law authorities” (Baloch, 2017, p. 82). She questions, Why seek forgiveness for standing up for our principles? If we cowered, the coming generations would never be proud of us. We are laying the foundations for liberty and freedom for the people of Sindh. What would our children say if we could not sacrifice even a single year to change the fate of nations? True revolution needs the blood and sacrifices of many people and if we gave up now our future would be in jeopardy. (Baloch, 2017, p. 82)

Reading love and revolution together in Akhtar’s diaries thus highlights how she provides us a better theory for praxis. Sre´cko Hovart (2016) provides a useful lens for reading love and revolution and how love moves beyond solidarity. Although he doesn’t write explicitly or specifically for a Marxist Feminist praxis, reading him with Akhtar’s diaries help us extend this notion. He cites instances of solidarity at the Tahrir Square when Christians protected Muslims or during the Iranian Revolution when men formed a circle around the women but claims that “it is still not love. It is solidarity. Every act of solidarity contains love, it is a sort of love, but love can’t be reduced to solidarity” (Hovart, 2016, p. 7). Instead, he posits that “[t]o love would mean to do it even when there is no event, no special occasion, or level of consciousness. That would be the true event: when love is not (only) provoked by extraordinary cracks in the world, but can be found in the seemingly boring dairy activities, even repetitions, or – reinventions” (Hovart, 2016, p. 8). At the same time, he argues that true love is a violent act (Hovart, 2016, p. 10). The above narration of Akhtar on finding friendship in their everyday lives, despite the exploitative circumstances in the prison, shows the building of female friendships in the most mundane of days, as they longed for their lovers, or thought about Sindh. The two revolutionary actions cannot be understood as separate. The women’s revolutionary actions of murdering their husbands for love, for refusing bails, for standing up for love despite giving up their children shows that the vigor in their struggles was just as prominent as Akhtar and Naseem’s struggles for Sindh. The exploitation of women’s bodies in the economy of Sindh was not an isolated

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phenomenon, instead, as Akhtar made it clear, it was the feudal relations that were historically situated in colonization and the postcolonial nation state that led to these unequal relations where women became property both of their husbands and families, the feudal lord, and the capitalist-patriarchal state. I have argued that the feudal/capitalist binary abstracts the commodification of women’s bodies, which in its exchange in forced marriages, remains the property of someone other than herself, just as the laborer becomes a commodity, or the slave becomes the property of his master. Their actions against this exchange in the name of an expansive love are thus pivotal. Love and revolution should not be seen as separate because they aren’t. Both Akhtar’s struggle for her land, and the women’s struggle for their bodies and their lovers, provide an alternative to the private, capitalistic logic running through the state and the feudal economy.

CONCLUSION In the essay, In Praise of Marx, Terry Eagleton noted that Marx’s “moral goal is pleasurable self-fulfillment” and “How does this moral goal differ from liberal individualism? The difference is that to achieve true self-fulfillment, human beings for Marx must find it in and through one another. It is not just a question of each doing his or her own thing in grand isolation from others. . . The other must become the ground of one’s own self-realization, at the same time as he or she provides the condition for one’s own. At the interpersonal level, this is known as love. At the political level, it is known as socialism” (2011). Akhtar Baloch’s jail diaries also show that Marxist Feminism in Pakistan can be better theorized through taking love and revolution together. While Akhtar narrated her own hardships and struggles for Sindh, her land, the other incarcerated women’s revolutionary acts of murdering their husbands for their lovers show the dialectical relation between revolutions at home and revolution outside. Women are integral to revolution because they are intertwined in this system as shown by the different ways women were exchanged or exploited by men, their families, and the capitalist-patriarchal state. The struggle for Sindh, or the land, could not be separate from the struggle that the women undertook. Thomas Sankara, in his address on women’s liberation in the African freedom struggle notes, “Comrades, no revolution. . . can triumph without first liberating women. Our struggle, our revolution will be incomplete as long as we understand liberation to mean essentially that of men. After the liberation of the proletariat, the liberation of women still remains to be won” (Sankara, 1990, pp. 43–44). Akhtar’s diaries have shown that while women’s liberation is essential to revolutionary struggle, this liberation cannot be co-opted by a larger struggle. In this chapter, I have uncovered Akhtar Baloch’s diaries, where I unravel the revolutionary struggles of women who overturn the structures of oppression – men, family, and the capitalist-patriarchal state – that commodify them by choosing a freer form of love which is bound by a different imaginary of hope. I have shown how, despite the lovers abandoning the women in most cases, they resist the usurpation of their bodies by the state or by those who offer them

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“freedom” from the prison in exchange for their further commodification by marriage again. In the end, I have claimed that the most common outcome, and that which brings Akhtar’s own struggles for Sindh and the women in the prison together, is the praxis based on love and revolution, where the women come together for each other as they are brave in their sacrifice for love and for Sindh.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to Kristin Plys for her incredible insights and conversations around love and revolution. Thanks to Joseph Bryant, Kanishka Goonewardena, Ayyaz Malick, Priyansh, and the members of the Marxism Research Working Group at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Thank you to Alexander I R White, Julian Go, Zophia Edwards, and the participants at the SASE Decolonizing Development miniconference for their helpful questions.

REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, L. (1990). The romance of resistance: Tracing transformations of power through Bedouin women. American Ethnologist, 17(1), 41–55. Abu-Lughod, L. (2002). Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others. American Anthropologist, 104(3), 783–790. Ahmad, S. (2010). Pakistani women: Multiple locations and competing narratives. Oxford University Press. Ali, K. A. (2015). Surkh Salam: Communist politics and class activism in Pakistan 1947–1972. Oxford University Press. Amin, S. (1974). Unequal development. Monthly Review Press. Baloch, A., & Tyler, M. (1977). ‘Sister, are you still here?’: The diary of Sindhi woman prisoner. Race & Class, 18(3), 219–245. Baloch, A. (2017). Prison narratives [Trans. by Asad Palijo]. Oxford University Press. Dalla Costa, M. (2019). Women and the subversion of the community. In C. Barbagallo (Ed.), Women and the subversion of the community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa reader (pp. 17–50). PM Press. Dutt, K. (1973). Chittagong Armoury Raiders: Reminiscences. People’s Publishing House. Eagleton, T. (2011). In Praise of Marx. In The Chronicle of Higher Education (Vol. 57(32)). Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the Earth [Trans. by Constance Farrington]. Penguin Books. Fanon, F. (1965). Algeria unveiled. In A dying colonialism [Trans. by Haakon Chevalier]. (pp. 35–68). Grove Press. Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch: Women, the body, and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia. Gilman-Opalsky, R. (2020). The communism of love: An inquiry into the poverty of exchange value. AK Press. Gowrinathan, N. (2021). Radicalizing her: Why women choose violence. Beacon Press. Hegel, F. (1966). Who thinks abstractly? In W. Kaufmann (Ed.), Hegel: Texts and commentary (pp. 113–118). Anchor Books. Hovart, S. (2016). The radicality of love. Polity Press. Jamal, A. (2005). Feminist ‘selves’ and feminism’s ‘others’: Feminist representations of Jamaat-e-Islami women in Pakistan. Feminist Review, 81, 52–73. James, C. L. R. (1963). The black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo revolution. Vintage Books. James, S. (2012). Sex, race, and class: A selection of writings, 1952–2011. PM Press. Karachi Literature Festival. (2017). Book launch: Prison narratives by Akhtar Baloch. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v5Ct-VsqkKFMQ. Accessed on April 14, 2017. Khan, L. (2008). Pakistan’s other story: The 1968–69 revolution. The Struggle Publications.

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Khan, S. (2011). Challenges and prospects for women’s movements in Pakistan: A case study of women action forum. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 72(2), 1074–1081. Kirmani, N. (2013). Contentious encounters: A comparison of developments in the contemporary Indian and Pakistani women’s movements’ realtionships with Islam. In N. Reilly & S. Scriver (Eds.), Religion, gender, and the public sphere (pp. 197–207). Routledge. Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton University Press. Makhdoom, S. (2005). Zarina Baloch: The voice of Sindh No more. Baask.com. Last modified November 2nd, 2005. http://baask.com/diwwan/index.php?topic5536.0 Malik, A. (2020, May). Pakistan: Radical demands of the 1960s and lessons for our present. Europe Solidaire Sans Fronti`eres. Mies, M. (1986). Patriarchy and capitalist accumulation on the world scale: Women in the international division of labor. Zed Books. Mohanty, C., Russo, A., & Torres, L. (1991). Third world women and the politics of feminism. Indiana University Press. Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the web of life: Ecology and the accumulation of capital. Verso. Mumtaz, K. (1991). Khawateen Mahaz-e-Amal and Sindhiani Tehrik: Two responses to political development in Pakistan. South Asian Bulletin, 11(1/2), 101–109. Palijo, R. B. (2017). A historical introduction to the events of the book. In A. Baloch (Ed.), Prison narratives (pp. 1–15). Oxford. Platt, J. (1981). Evidence and proof in documentary research, I & II. Sociological Review, 29(1), 31–66. Plys, K. (2020a). The poetry of resistance: Poetry as solidarity in postcolonial anti-authoritarian movements in Islamicate South Asia. Theory, Culture & Society, 37(78), 295–313. Plys, K. (2020b). Brewing resistance: Indian coffee house and the emergency in postcolonial India. Cambridge University Press. Plys, K. (2021). Theorizing capitalist imperialism for an anti-imperialist praxis: Towards a rodneyan world-systems analysis. Journal of World-Systems Research, 21(1), 288–313. Saeed, F. (2020). On their own terms: Early twenty-first century women’s movements in Pakistan. Oxford University Press. Sankara, T. (1990). Women’s liberation and the African freedom struggle. Pathfinder Press. Stoler, A. (2002). Colonial archives and the Arts of governance. Archival Science, 2, 87–109. Tyler, M. (1977). Preface to Akhtar Baluch’s prison diary. Race & Class, 18(4), 389–395. Wallerstein, I. (2011). The modern world-system I: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. University of California Press. Weeks, K. (2021, February 9). Scaling up: A Marxist feminist archive with Kathi Weeks. The New School. Zia, A. (2020/[2018]). Faith and feminism in Pakistan: Religious agency or secular autonomy? Folio Books. Zia, A. (2021). Sex and secularism as resistance politics. In B. Zahoor & R. Rumi (Eds.), Rethinking Pakistan: 21st century perspective (pp. 281–296). Folio Books.

CHAPTER 6

MOHAMMAD AZHARUDDIN AS A THEORIST OF SHOCK: THE LIFE OF AN INDIAN MUSLIM CRICKET CAPTAIN IN THE TIME OF HINDU NATIONALISM Priyansh University of Toronto, Canada

ABSTRACT Mohammad Azharuddin’s arrival in professional cricket served, to quote Karl Marx, as a reform of consciousness that awakened the sport ‘from its dream about itself’. His expertise with the bat invoked the wide expanse of human sensorium, provoking reactions of shock and admiration among observers. In this chapter, I examine Azharuddin’s life in cricket and public through a dialectical probing of the relationship between shock and aesthetics. Azhar and cricket appear as a productive terrain to carry out the analysis, as it pushes the possibility of what or who can be considered as a valid subject for theoretical scrutiny. Taking cues from Walter Benjamin and CLR James, I theorise the shock effects created by a cricketer most unusual. From his wristy wizardry with the bat to his appointment as captain of the Indian men’s cricket team during the rise of Hindu nationalism in the country, Azharuddin’s presence and popularity extended beyond the boundaries that are often imposed on a sportsperson. Through his involvement in the match-fixing scandal that was exposed at the turn of the 21st century, Azhar (the name by which he was popularly known) challenged the mores of a game that had emphasised Victorian notions of purity on and off the field. For the purposes of this chapter, I discuss how Azhar constructed a bodily discourse that pushes us to reassess our very notions of art and aesthetics. Marxist Thought in South Asia Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 40, 99–119 Copyright © 2024 Priyansh Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-871920230000040007

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Keywords: Sociology of sport; politics of sport; cricket; Mohammad Azharuddin; CLR James; Marxism Every presentation of history must begin with an awakening (Benjamin, 1999). The awakening here, with reference to the cricketer Mohammed Azharuddin as our subject, begins with a video clip of him batting on a wintry afternoon in Kolkata almost three decades ago. India was facing England in a Test match (the longest format of the sport that lasts five days) and Azharuddin (or Azhar, as he was popularly called) was fresh at the crease. For the uninitiated, in Test matches, a batter usually takes some time before they can unleash their range of stroke play. Azhar, though, was in his elements early. He judges the pitch of the ball very quickly, steps back and pushes it past the bowler. It’s a counter-intuitive stroke, for a ball of that length would conventionally be played on the front foot. But therein lay the hallmark of a cricketer at ease with ripping apart cricket’s grammar, leaving those who stick to the manual seem duller in comparison. With a swift movement of the feet, a deft manoeuver of his wrists, the ball is dispatched with a casual disdain. Reflecting on a method of cinematic montage, Sergei Eisenstein (1949) described it as, ‘Hewing out a piece of actuality with the ax of the lens’. In the case of this stroke by Azhar, his skill actualises reality with the ax of the willow. This moment, like countless others, is a reminder of the aesthetic possibilities that cricket holds. As CLR James (1963, p. 274) reminds us during his painstaking case for cricket to be considered an art, ‘Cricket, in fact any ball game, to the visual image adds the sense of physical coordination, of harmonious action, of timing. The visual image of a diving fieldsman is a frame for his rhythmic contact with the flying ball. Here two art forms meet’. While making the case for cricket to be considered as a form of art, James undertook a journey through bourgeois conceptions of art as a benchmark for assessing cricket’s artistic form and content. By measuring the sport in relation to the Greek tragic drama and the theory of form in painting, James passionately demonstrated that cricket was no less artistic in comparison to other forms that are readily accepted into the canon of art. While James’ polemic has served the interests of cricket rather well, in terms of its status as a subject worthy for the study of art and aesthetics, this chapter will aim to go beyond the Jamesian project. In that spirit, I offer a new reading of Mohammad Azharuddin’s life and career. Before assessing the value of focusing on the former Indian cricket captain, I would like to outline the two major objectives that inform this contribution to existing scholarship on sport and Marxist aesthetics. First, like James, it pushes against bourgeois aesthetics by dismantling hierarchies of high and low art. Instead, it is keen to push an understanding that sport or play is not merely an avenue for recuperation from work (Marcuse, 1964). As James suggests, the act of playing sport is an endeavour that can redesign and reshape its existing moral, social and political codes.

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Secondly, this chapter will aim to make a new contribution to the rich field of Marxist aesthetics. I will argue here for a conception of aesthetics that plays an integral role in the critical appreciation and the general reception of cricket. This argument is informed by the recent interest in the political actions undertaken by sportspersons, especially Black athletes in North America. Differing from that approach, I will here point to the usefulness of paying attention to the form of a sportsperson’s praxis as a starting point for elucidating its political potential. There is an obvious political significance for shedding light on Azharuddin’s life today. With the rise of Hindu nationalism in Indian society and politics since 2014, Muslim cricketers who represent the country have had to undergo a kind of scrutiny that would not be unfamiliar to those who followed cricket in Azharuddin’s time (Ayoob, 2020). These cricketers today are being put through variations of loyalty tests that would not have been entirely unimaginable in the 1990s. Yet, a qualitative difference exists in the current situation as the pressure of religious intolerance is beginning to emerge in newer formats within the cricketing sphere. Azharuddin is a unique figure in Indian men’s cricket as he was the longest serving Muslim captain of the national team. He performed this role for the majority of the 1990s, when the spectre of Hindu nationalist politics began to exert an unprecedented force on Indian society. However, the focus of this chapter is not to see him as a symbol of resistance or merely to remark on the incongruity of his position. Instead, I am keen to explore his way of playing cricket through which one may discern a politico-aesthetic code. The outline of this code can be traced outwards from the form of his batting, leading to a reflection on his life inside and outside the playing field. Many analyses of sportspersons who are politically active begin from their speeches or statements in the political sphere. They appear to us as athletes who refuse to stick to their job, and they actively intervene in politics. So did Azharuddin, but his political interventions arrived much after his sporting career was finished. But his success as a cricketer, and the manner in which it was achieved, raises other political possibilities that are not directly available through his words or his involvement in electoral politics. Instead, we must turn to his skill with the bat to discern an alternative aesthetic imagination that is often brushed under the umbrella of entertaining batting. Among the many Azharuddins available to us through the medium of cricket videos, writings and public reception, I choose to focus on his role as a theorist here. In line with the theme of this special issue, I would like to disturb the conventional notion of who can theorise and what we generally understand as theory. Azharuddin’s sporting praxis is a rich terrain to explore this question. His arrival in professional cricket served, to quote Karl Marx, as a reform of consciousness that awakened the sport ‘from its dream about itself’. Azharuddin’s expertise with the bat invoked the wide expanse of human sensorium, provoking reactions of shock and admiration among observers. Through a probing of the relationship between shock and aesthetics, I will examine Azharuddin’s life in cricket, and in public life. Taking clues from Walter Benjamin and CLR James, I aim to theorise praxis in sport and its revolutionary potential.

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From his wristy wizardry with the bat to his appointment as captain of the Indian team during the rise of Hindu nationalism in the country, Azharuddin’s presence and popularity extended far beyond the cricket field. But his involvement in the match-fixing scandal that was exposed at the turn of the 21st century brought about a fall from grace from which he is yet to recover. The revelation of his act of corruption, though, amplified the shock value of his reception. Through the inconsistencies and the contradictions that Azharuddin aroused in public, we begin to identify a complicated subject who collapses the seemingly opposed trajectories of shock and aesthetic appreciation of sport. I begin here with a review of what has been said about Azharuddin, before proceeding to the question of cricket heroes, aesthetics and shock.

THE RECORDING OF AZHARUDDIN’S MEMORY For a cricketer of Azharuddin’s stature, it is indeed surprising that there exists nothing by the way of a biography that records his life in full. The Indian journalist Harsha Bhogle (1994) did chart his rise in the world of cricket, although his account ends well before the match-fixing scandal scarred Azharuddin’s reputation. Bhogle situates the cricketer within the history of Hyderabad’s rich cricketing heritage. Cricketers from the city are often described as ‘nawabs’. Such (lazy) stereotyping is a nod to the rule of the Nizams in the city that came to an end with the independence of India. In Bhogle’s account, Azhar emerged as another export of a tradition where cricketers were judged on their ‘nawabi’ (nawab-like) elegance. Azhar fit the bill of that stereotype for Bhogle, and the author details multiple vignettes from the cricketer’s early days that serve as narrative devices to situate Azharuddin within that nawabi school. The overarching account, though, fits the form of sports biographies that are produced for popular consumption, where the story is devoted to proclaiming the inexorable rise of the sports hero. Azharuddin’s relationship with his own grandfather and the humble beginnings from which he emerged on the national scene also take centre stage in Bhogle’s account. But the ‘authorised’ biography – authorised here seems to suggest that it is written with the blessing of Azhar, as is often the case in cricket journalism – draws to an end before many of the tumultuous events that define Azharuddin now had come to pass. To trace the remaining threads, I turned to journalistic writing about the former Indian captain to assess how he is remembered. A sense of pathos and nostalgia seems to cover the tributes to Azhar. Written in the aftermath of the cricketer’s sudden retirement forced by the match-fixing scandal, there is much room for regret and lament. Journalists often spin a single-theme narrative to explain a sportsperson to the reader, wrestling with words in a desire to ‘capture their character’. In essence, this is a futile experiment. There is no one story, or an overarching narrative that can capture life histories without serious erasures. The contradictions and conflicts in the narrative are the necessary diversions for any serious examiner, if they wish to grasp a complete picture.

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Rohit Brijnath (2008) acknowledged these limits that are implicit in writing a coherent account of an individual while paying tribute to Azharuddin. In Brijnath’s account, Azharuddin appears inscrutable. ‘A reticent, private’ man was ‘caught in the most public of careers’ is how the writer chooses to explain the cricketer’s coup de grace. In another tribute, Suresh Menon (2020) chose pity to come to terms with Azhar’s tainted reputation in public. I select Brijnath and Menon’s accounts here because they keenly felt the aftershocks of the match-fixing expose. Implicitly or directly, they acknowledge their feelings of disappointment because of the high esteem and fascination that they had reserved for Azharuddin. So did Bhogle, who shared an intimate friendship with Azhar. In another tribute, Prayaag Akbar (2017) points towards another kind of intimacy with the cricketer. A kinship based on religion, he saw in Azhar an idol that a young Muslim fan could admire in light of the political tensions of the 1990s. Akbar wrestles with the eventual revelation of his hero’s involvement in match-fixing. But his lament points to a significant political implication of the scandal. Every other Indian cricketer who was impugned by the revelations was rehabilitated by the Indian cricket administration and media not long after the news broke. But not Azharuddin who, according to Akbar (2017), was being held to a different standard of probity owing to his identity as a Muslim. Akbar goes on to list the insinuations and the knowing suggestions that were uttered during the cricketer’s time as a player, especially whenever India squared up against Pakistan. It was not corruption that was the crux of the issue. Azharuddin, it would be suggested in private conversations, was guilty of mixed or confused loyalties. An Indian version of the Tebbit Test1 would be replayed by playing up his poor displays in matches that India lost to its neighbouring rival. Despite the existence of these suspicions, Azharuddin was a much-loved cricketer and a national hero. Fans, pundits and journalists were unified in their admiration of his skill as a batter. Akbar (2017) writes, ‘If he was feeling good the delivery would be dispatched, flourished through the covers or turned over like an egg through the on side, a gangly man finding poetic unison for a startling second’. Menon found gentleness to Azhar’s skill, as ‘even the fiercest drives never screamed’. Whereas, Brijnath found in his style an ‘unhurried, wristy, impossibly careless’ with an ‘intoxicating grace’. Indeed, the form of Azharuddin’s batting caused great difficulty to writers who struggled to capture the essence of his brilliance in words. Although it was a different challenge from having to explain the scandalous news that was never too far away from him, be it India’s losses on the cricket field or stories about his personal affairs, it would often appear as an insurmountable task to anyone who wished to do it justice. Azharuddin’s skill shocked the observer and the expert alike, for it required a readjusting of one’s intuitions. The proverbial cricket 1

The Tebbit Test was named after the Conservative politician and peer Norman Tebbit who argued in 1990 that all British Asians should be subjected to a ‘Cricket Test’ to know where their true loyalties lie. His insinuation was that most of the immigrants tended to support their countries of origin when their representative sides faced England on the cricket field.

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manual would not come handy here. Often people would repeat overused adjectives about the form of Azhar’s batting, and seek refuge in the astringent spray of his cricketing record. The spray here is a reference to James’ (1963, p. 177) famous comment in Beyond a Boundary when he registers his disappointment over Donald Bradman’s less than charitable comments about the abilities of the West Indian star Learie Constantine. The astringent spray, in other words, is a summary of the cricketer’s exploits in numbers. For all the lament about what could have been in Azharuddin’s case, it is worth recalling that he did have a long and a more illustrious career than most players who play the game as a profession. His statistics would be the envy of most international cricketers. The record is formidable. Over a decade and a half, he dominated the cricket pitch with the willow in his hand and his catching in the slip cordon. The shock of his enforced retirement remains, but it has not been able to erase the memory of the way it all began. Azharuddin started his Test career with a record that he still holds, a century (100 runs) in each of his first three matches.2 He went on to prove that he was no flash in the pan as for most of the 1990s, a decade during which the Indian men’s team was more often a pretender than a contender. In fact, as captain, he is the only cricketer to have led India in three fifty-over World Cups. If not for the match-fixing scandal, Azharuddin would certainly have gone on to play more than 100 Test matches, which is the most challenging level of cricket. When his career was suddenly terminated, only 21 players had the honour of reaching that much-coveted figure of a century of Tests in the then 123-year-long history of the game. The asterisks aside, Azharuddin retains a legitimate place among the cricketing greats within India and beyond. But these numbers do not tell his story properly. We shall try now to tread the ground where many wordsmiths failed. But before we do so, I will outline the theoretical devices that help us make sense of Azharuddin as a cricketer theorist.

THE AESTHETICS OF CRICKET; THE POLITICS OF SPORT I submit finally that without the intervention of any artist the spectator at cricket extracts the significance of movement and of tactile values. He experiences the heightened sense of capacity. Furthermore, however the purely human element, the literature, the illustration, in cricket may enhance the purely artistic appeal, the significant form at its most unadulterated is permanently present. It is known, expected, recognized and enjoyed by tens of thousands of spectators. Cricketers call it style.

CLR James’ (1963, p. 267) words hang heavy as we call upon our aesthetic imagination to assess Azharuddin. Let us begin with a theoretical outline of the ideas about aesthetics at play here. According to the Jamesian aesthetic, the spectators themselves take on the work of art criticism when they watch cricket. 2

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The somatic knowledge of the game extends towards a critical appreciation. This understanding of aesthetics here is built on the original meaning of the word, taken from the Greek word aisthitikos, as noted by Susan Buck-Morss (1992). It is a sense of intelligibility invoked by the corporeal sensorium, ‘perception by feeling’ as the literal meaning goes. Sensory perception in this context is ‘born as a discourse of the body’ (Eagleton, 1990, p. 13). Cricketers often speak about the game in a manner that amplifies sensory experiences. Certain batters are acknowledged as touch players, implying their ability to play the ball with deftness. This judgement is not made only through the eyes, or the way the stroke feels while playing, but also how it sounds as well. The sound of the shot from the bat invokes judgement, it can tell the spectator where the ball landed on the bat. The place of smell on the cricket field is important as well, as denoted by the term ‘perfume ball’, which is used to describe a delivery where the ball passes by the batter’s nose. It is a threatening occurrence, and the batter in question can almost smell their vulnerability. It is through the nose that they learn of the threat. Finally, taste is part of the experience of cricket at all levels even though it is primarily off-the-field. From cricket among local teams to the professional game, food and refreshments are an integral part of the game and its conversation. This is not just suggested from the ‘lunch’ and ‘tea’ breaks during a day of red-ball cricket, but also from the fascination aroused by the cricketers’ diets during and between matches. Food retains considerable interest among the fans with much talk in recent years devoted to the players’ fitness regime. Hence, with the way the game is structured, a true appreciation of cricket would demand thinking with the five senses, although all of them may not be required at the same time. By paying attention to the sensory experience of playing and watching cricket, we can also appreciate the ways in which knowledge of the game is developed among those who engage with the sport and its various iterations. Although it would not be possible to explain it here, a sensory focus on cricket also helps us appreciate the game differently when we think of how it is designed for the disabled. To build from Buck-Morss’ (1992) understanding, paying attention to the sensory experience of playing sport has a political implication. Aesthetic appreciation moves beyond the realm of the theoretical into the playground of the material. The feeling itself matters, the sensations aroused and perceived by the observer bear the seeds for a corporeal knowledge. For James, it was the term ‘style’ that was invoked by such knowledge. Cricket watchers, then, develop a critical appreciation of the game by reacting to the proceedings sensorially. A shift towards the study of material sensations can be undertaken by studying the act of playing a sport. James refuses to see it as merely ‘play’, as a respite from labour (Wynter, 1981). The practice of sport, in his view, is an irrevocably creative act. As Wynter (1981), in an analysis of cricket and aesthetics in the writings of James, urges us to think, sport according to the bourgeois aesthete is just a ‘residual social activity’, stripped of the meaning attached to it by those who play. It is a refuge from work, just a form of mass entertainment. But to theoretically conceive a sporting aesthetic, we must instead be led by the athlete’s creative praxis.

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The question of which athlete is considered an artist is a vexed debate. In the context of cricket, some cricketers are considered more artistic than others. It is indeed true that batsmen have historically been considered aesthetically superior to bowlers, which is a glimpse into the class politics of the game where the aristocratic patrons of the game preferred the willow in their hand to the more strenuous effort involved in delivering the ball. But the artistic appeal of cricket is not invested in special individuals. Rather, as James’ (1963) words remind us, it is the dialectical exchange between the batter and the bowler that produces a dramatic contest. Responding to scholars of classical art like Bernard Berenson, James makes a persuasive case for cricket to be considered on the same pedestal as other arts like the Greek tragic drama and painting. If we were to think with the Trinidadian intellectual, a starting point for sketching out this dialectic would be the relationship between the individual and the community on the playing field. Any cricketer on the field is not only representing themselves, but also their team. The contest between the batter and the bowler is being played out at an individual level, but also simultaneously as a duel between two sides. This dynamic, dialectical contest is not unique to cricket, as we can see its replication in other team sports or even individual games where athletes represent a larger whole (for example, Davis Cup tennis). When played between teams or nations, the contest assumes other meanings that are dictated by the respective histories, past matches and the communities that the sides represent. As James wrote (1963, p. 258): This fundamental relation of the One and the Many, Individual and Social, Individual and Universal, leader and flowers, representatives and ranks, the part and the whole, is structurally imposed on the players of cricket.

Furthermore, each delivery in cricket when the batter faces the bowler is a self-contained event. However, that event is only meaningful in relation to the hundreds of deliveries that are played out over the course of a match. In essence, these dialectical relationships afford a dramatic quality to cricket. This is where the Jamesian aesthetic ends in relation to drama. He goes on to build the case with a discussion of painting where he analyses the importance of movement and tactile values as identified by the art critic Bernard Berenson. Through examples of writings on cricket and the popular reception of the game by spectators, James persuasively demonstrates how integral those two qualities are to appreciating cricket as well. This is where the Jamesian project draws to a close. In the context of cricket, though, I believe further claims can be made. Cricket’s value as an aesthetic activity is enhanced when we consider its unique spatial nature. Although much of the action takes place between the 22 yards that separate the two ends of the cricket pitch, the playing of the game is hugely influenced by factors below the ground. No two playing surfaces or pitches are exactly the same in cricket. The pitch’s nature changes dramatically over time, when we consider that the soil, the grass, the dust and the cracks that can come into play deeply influence the direction of a match. Cricket is a rare sport with an ever-changing playing surface that differs greatly from place to place, which is wholly dependent on natural conditions.

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Indeed, it has been said that any cricketer has to master the five elements to be able to succeed at the game (Krishnaswamy, 2018). The cricketer is constantly negotiating not just the vagaries of land, but also wind, rain, heat and its 360degree playing arena. The game demands that a player dialectically navigate the challenges posed above and below the ground. It is hard to think of another sport that is embedded so deeply within mankind’s relationship with ecology. No wonder then, that the climate crisis is supposed to threaten the game’s very existence (Aldred, 2016). The aesthetic nature of cricket, then, can be adequately grasped only by a dialectical mode of thinking at multiple levels – the simultaneous contest between two individuals, and their respective relationship to their teams and communities; the challenges of the playing surface and the conditions above, the human relationship with nature and its spatial dimensions. Some of these negotiations can be discerned in other sports as well. The conflicts and the confluences produced by such a sport require a sophisticated practitioner who can artfully master the game. Although this section on the aesthetics of cricket disrupts the hierarchy of high and low art, we must not lose sight of its other political implications. If cricket is structured in a way to invite aesthetic appreciation, how may a practitioner of the sport like the great West Indies all-rounder Gary Sobers or Mohammad Azharuddin interpret and practice it in a way that could help us discern the political content of performance? To begin to think of such a possibility, here we must go beyond James. Historically, the study of athletes and their political activities has cast them in relation to wider political changes and their active or even passive involvement in the social churn. Recently, the rise in activism by sportspersons who have spoken out against police violence, racism, sexual and gendered discrimination has led some to draw the conclusion that we are witnessing a return of the kind of athlete-led politics within and without sport that has not been seen since the heady days of the civil rights movement and anti-war protests in the 1960s (Hartmann, 2019). In his comparative study of political activism half a century ago and the protests that came to life in the aftermath of police violence in the United States over the past decade, Hartmann argued that Black athletes are making political interventions today on the basis of racial discrimination as experienced by them and also through conversations with activists and community leaders. The sharp public reaction from different ideological poles to the political work done by the likes of Colin Kaepernick would suggest that the current moment is particularly fertile for sportspersons who wish to engage in politics and work towards social justice. Such acts and statements are generally amplified in the Anglophone Global North, especially since many of the politically active athletes are media-savvy and keen to assert their position. However, many such athletes have borne serious costs for their involvement in politics. For example, Colin

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Kaepernick was frozen out by the National Football League and effectively forced into retirement (Schmidt et al., 2019). However, a different story emerges when we shift our lens to India where right-wing assertion is at its peak. Here we encounter a peculiar case where national sporting heroes often speak for the central administration in charge, with the voices of these celebrity athletes under constant scrutiny of the pro-government mainstream media. The endorsement of government policies and a general enthusiasm for the Hindu-nationalist project is widely shared (D’Cunha, 2019). It could be surmised that many athletes choose to go down this path because they are aware of the costs that they may have to pay if they do not seem pliable to the prevailing and dominant political agenda. However, there are others who are keen to challenge the status quo, and interestingly the challenge often does not come from male Indian cricketers whose material riches tend to distance them from most Indians, such is the wealth on offer in men’s cricket (Priyansh, 2021). Irrespective of the political positions that athletes intentionally take, there exists plenty of literature on sport activism today. However, not enough attention is directed towards embodied performance, and its subtle political implications in competitive sport. While the speeches, interviews and other political statements by athletes retain huge significance for understanding the politics of sport, and politics in sport, a novel approach would be to start an analysis from the playing of sport for tracing the politics of bodily performance. Such an approach is not without precedent. Charles Lemert’s (2003) work on Muhammad Ali thinks of the celebrity boxer as a trickster, a performer who sheds light on politics and culture not only through his ironic pronouncements but also through his displays with the gloves. Lemert used the definition of a trickster, borrowing from Lewis Hyde, to analyse how Ali queered the conventions of the boxing ring and life beyond. Queering here suggests a rearrangement of given understandings. Ali aimed to upend norms, a restructuring that acted as a subversion of what was expected from him as a boxer and a public figure. Hyde’s (1998, p. 7) description of a trickster is worth reproducing here: Trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. . . Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the crossdresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.

As we will see later, these words have a deep resonance when we consider how Azharuddin navigated and upturned cricket’s moral code around match-fixing. But for now, what I would like to add here is a separate concreteness to the ‘ambiguity and ambivalence’, to avoid its determination as a free-floating signifier. How may a trickster perform their creative idiocy? How may they cross boundaries?

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In Lemert’s account, Ali’s pronouncements on the matter of politics still assume primacy (Lemert, 2003). After all, the legendary boxer’s fertile interventions in public life facilitated an engagement on those terms. Yet, Lemert is keen to assert that we must not assume that Ali undertook the mantle of a trickster intentionally. This argument reveals an opportunity to determine the theoretical coordinates of a sporting praxis. Whether the athlete themselves situates their play within a theoretical system of thought and practice is not necessary, for what they articulate to us appears through the embodied performance of their skill and not just words. The theoretical lens worn here disrupts the primacy of the said or the written word, instead it seeks to identify a language of skilled play that can be discerned by paying attention to the performer and their practice.

AZHAR WITH THE WILLOW Let us now place Azharuddin alongside the theoretical arguments discussed above. The incomplete Jamesian project is a useful starting point. As previously mentioned, a key concern for James (1963, 1992a) in his writings on cricket was to outline a special, individualised style for cricketing heroes, from WG Grace to Garfield Sobers. This attempt was informed by an objective to place them as a meeting point for the streams of thought that emanated from the society to which they belonged. These cricketers were not exceptional because of their cultivated skill, which remained undisputed. Instead, their dynamic presence served as a symbol of the many dialectical relationships that informed the practice of cricket. For example, Learie Constantine’s success went beyond mere sporting recognition. For James (1963, p. 146), Constantine’s performances within cricket, and in social life generally, implied a ‘West Indian renaissance’, when viewed alongside the movement for self-determination. Westall (2010) reads the influence of G.W.F. Hegel’s thought on James here, to make sense of the Trinidadian intellectual’s fascination with male protagonists in his writings generally. She argues that the Hegelian concept of the world-historical figure has not been paid due attention when it comes to assessing James’ contributions on cricket. In Hegel’s (1837) words, world-historical figures are: Men who appear to draw the impulse of their life from themselves; and whose deeds have produced a condition of things and a complex of historical relations which appear to be only their interest, and their work. Such individuals had no consciousness of the general Idea they were unfolding, while prosecuting those aims of theirs; on the contrary, they were practical, political men.

We can also see the importance of Hegel for James in his Notes on Dialectics (1981). The emphasis on the absence of ‘consciousness of the general Idea’ places Lemert and James in agreement over not reading an intentional drive within their chosen subject to determine the ideas the authors prioritise. Again, it is about tracing the contradictions that emerge in the movement of the times that the

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individual hero inhabits. The question does arise, then, how do we make sense of James’ fascination with cricket’s heroes? How does his commitment to a Marxist mode of thought illuminate cricket and politics simultaneously? And is it useful to cast Azharuddin in the garb of a world-historical figure? Roberts (2020) persuasively argues that James’ focus on individual leaders, in the context of political action, was not a lingering desire for heroes. Instead, it amounted to an antipathy towards the political party or institutions in general. The resonance of this argument can be extended to cricket. As James (1963, p. 87) noted in Beyond A Boundary, ‘Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it. When I did tum to politics I did not have too much to learn’. What was it about cricket that its lessons could serve as guidelines for his involvement in politics and how did this process help him reflect on the sport itself? In Notes on Dialectics, we find not only James’ fascination with Hegel, but also his exploration of what anti-capitalist praxis can look like. We find here an insistence on free activity, the only mode of living that can counter and overcome the oppression and the corruption of life that capitalist life engenders. As a response to this challenge, James seeks a disciplined spontaneity – a systematised free activity that is not satisfied with seeking refuge through the medium of a political party or any such institution (Roberts, 2020). As James (1981, p. 118) argues pointedly, If the free activity of the proletariat is to emerge, it can emerge only by destroying the communist parties. It can destroy these parties only by free activity. Free activity means not only the end of the communist parties. It means the end of capitalism.

The discussion of disciplined spontaneity raises two important, albeit contradictory, points about the assertion that cricket had already prepared James for a life in politics. First, we note the similarity in the position that James took on the significance of leaders in cricket. They matter immensely, for they are the figures whose praxis brings to witness the historical problems of their time. They are not merely static, exalted figures who suggested a better world is possible. Rather, James was invested in explaining them as actors who engage in a dialectical play between ‘conflict and movement’ (Westall, 2010). The world-historical figure then, for James, exists as a centripetal object for the society in which they are birthed and nurtured. In a cricketing context, they are a totemic figure who shed light on the political logics that undergird the institution of cricket. It is the disciplined spontaneity of their praxis that suggests the possibility of free activity. Free activity here does not signify an autonomous exercise, instead it exists as a pathway for subverting the moral and the racial code that defined cricket (Wynter, 1981). But secondly, and this is where the contradiction arises, how does one explain the importance of the leader within a team sport? If politics indeed is a useful medium to refer back to James’ views on cricket, does the importance of a leader reduce when we place the cricketing hero in relation to their team? This tension in James’ work, I would argue, is productive. For this is where the artistic dimension of cricket flourishes, as its particularly dramatic aspect is brought to the fore.

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While we may otherwise see apathy for party politics in James, the dialectical relationship between the individual and their team is a fertile ground for political education. The linking of the fortunes of the West Indies cricket team and the movement for independence in the Caribbean islands, astutely documented by James, become meaningful here. With the terms outlined, we can begin to consider the merits of seeing Azharuddin as a world-historical figure. Building from James’ interpretation of the Hegelian concept, the case for presenting Azharuddin in a similar light is suspect. Solely in cricketing terms, Azharuddin was not the totemic figure of the Indian men’s cricket team. Although he was the captain of the side for most of the 1990s, his prime as a cricketer was eclipsed by his teammate Sachin Tendulkar. Tendulkar went on to scale much greater accomplishments, and he still holds the batting records for most runs in both the Test and ODI formats. But it was not just about the runs he scored. Even with Azharuddin in the side, India’s prospects in most cricket matches hinged on Tendulkar. He was the undisputed star of the team who played countless memorable knocks. Tendulkar accumulated his runs in an attractive style too and with a technique of batting that would be considered conventionally sound, unlike that of Azharuddin. Such was Tendulkar’s outsized influence in the world of cricket that he has served as an interesting subject for those looking to comment on the politics of cricket and Indian society. For some, Tendulkar was the quintessential national hero of India as the country underwent a neoliberal transformation in the 1990s. Journalist Vaibhav Vats (2021) summed up this line of argument by describing him through this critical reading: He was an apposite mascot for a kind of centrist status-quoism and the gradualist, incremental mobility that marked India in the first two decades after liberalisation. Tendulkar became the epitome of values prized in the conventional, hierarchal, and self-congratulatory milieu of the middle class, showing no eagerness to challenge the many prejudices of society and state.

This view of Tendulkar, however, is analytically insufficient. For it is merely working with a symbolic notion of what he represented, as is often the case with popular critique, and does not dig deep enough to think through the political import of the cricketer’s praxis. Cricketing statistics alone can be misleading too for those interested in undertaking such analysis. When we think beyond the symbolic, and move towards imagining disciplined spontaneity, a picture emerges which points to the world-historical import of Azharuddin. Peeling away the bourgeois mask of a wealthy cricketer playing for a major international team, we find a player who remained dedicated to his own style of batting as a life-affirming activity (Wynter, 1981). Here, it is worth recalling how Azhar was repeatedly criticised for his cavalier way of playing. He would sometimes be dismissed for a low score, inviting brickbats from critics who never miss the chance of reminding an athlete that it is their duty to devote their life to the single-minded pursuit of winning. Azhar did win every now and then, leaving a sparkling array of memories for the spectator to parse. But in success and failure, he remained true to his style.

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Azharuddin convincingly demonstrated that the rationalised, winning-iseverything idea of sport could be married to the life-affirming pleasure of playing the game. Seen in this light, Azharuddin was like the footballer Diego Maradona. He was among those rare athletes who stuck by the form that actualised their affection for the game even as the instrumentalised pursuit of victory remained the dominant and much-coveted objective. A disciplined spontaneity can be discerned from his praxis. Even though Azharuddin participated as a professional sportsperson who savvily navigated its capitalist trappings, his free activity challenged the norms that would guide the actions of his contemporaries. Despite their hand-wringing over a ‘lack of consistency’, pundits, fans and journalists would praise Azharuddin for his ability to stimulate their senses through a display of his batting skill, and still do as we saw above. Indeed, it is through a combination of the rationalised pursuit of success and an aesthetic code of batting that Azharuddin elevated himself to a plane where few had reached or could ever reach. While the former trait was found to be lacking in him, Azharuddin did emerge as a figure who could guide the artistic form of his batting in a way that materialised success. He was a centripetal figure for those contradictory energies. The dialectical movement between the objective to win and the pleasure of play continues to be a tussle at the heart of sport, but Azharuddin’s batting unified its direction towards free activity. In that sense, Azharuddin can be seen as a world-historical spirit. Not only did his life as a cricketer mark an incongruity on account of his identity as a Muslim captain of India in a time of Hindu nationalist assertion. But we can also see here a cricketer in whom the conflicts about how to play the game found a debate. Furthermore, in the very playing of the game, Azharuddin the cricketer forced a dialectical resolution by dealing with those contradictory ideas in a dynamic fashion. He accomplished this while leaving the possibility of free activity in a capitalist sport open. Even though the theme of the world-historical figure is useful to understand Azharuddin, his performances as a cricketer and as a public figure reveal to us another interesting possibility. It is to read the individual as a theorist, to create a reverse motion which does not take the existing conditions as its starting point. We analysed here what would emerge if we dug deeper than just seeing cricketers as a symbol of their times. But what if we were to arrive at life outside the cricket field by beginning from an analysis of the cricketer’s praxis? To borrow from James, can the form of cricket plunge an individual into politics even though the process does not appear as an intentional undertaking? It is time for us to think with shock and aesthetics.

SHOCKER! ‘The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present’. In the Economic and Philosophic manuscripts of 1844, Marx (1988) pushed for an appreciation of life that would be incomplete without a recognition of our sensory knowledge. To take his point further, one can think

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aesthetically only by invoking a somatic understanding of the world. This understanding also highlights a meeting point for Marx and Walter Benjamin (Buck-Morss, 1992). In his meditation on the poet Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin (1983) had identified shock as an aesthetic impulse for appreciating the jarring quality of life under capitalism. Shock here works in a dialectical mode for Benjamin. It does not only shake our senses into sheer numbness due to the violent mood of capitalist life. But shock also brings forth an awakening as well (Mills, 2007). While inducing frigidity, it simultaneously forces one to sit up and take notice. To come to terms with the reality of life as it is, a recognition of the exploitation that is built into seemingly quotidian existence. It makes the oppressive logic of capitalism intelligible, thereby urging more attention to one’s sensory perception of the world. The violent shock that imposes numbness on its subject also creates the possibility for an aesthetic mode of living that is built on feeling and perceptiveness. By the time Azharuddin was appointed captain of India for the first time in 1989, the logic of M-C-M had been fundamentally welcomed by its administrators (Goonewardena, 2011). Cricket was decisively turning into a spectacle for the television viewer, with increasing amount of capital investment and uneven development in store. Increasingly, one of the metrics for measuring a player’s worth came to be their financial worth to the sponsor and the marketing executives. Although the game from its origins was run by rich, aristocratic patrons, it was the advent of satellite television that turned into a game awash with wealth. In the backdrop of this huge transformation, the form of Azharuddin’s batting served as a shock relief. One could truly grasp the scale of his genius only by putting our five senses into labour. As mentioned earlier, it was the manner in which he undid the conventional grammar of batting that made him stand out. There have been batsmen like him before and after him who have played the game in an unusual way. But the historical conjuncture where he unfurled his repertoire did put Azharuddin in a unique position. In a time when cricket was embracing neoliberal mandates in its administration, it was Azharuddin’s batting that provided the salve of aesthetic appreciation. Even as the game’s contours shifted and changed in some ways beyond recognition, the shock was tempered by the positive stupefaction that accompanied the Indian cricketer’s performances. We turn to another aspect of Azharuddin’s life as a cricketer now. The conversation around his position as the captain of India, and the prevailing political situation in the country is worth detailing here. Azharuddin’s ascent to captaincy took place during the height of the Ramjanmabhumi movement that culminated in the collapse of the Babri mosque, in Ayodhya, in 1992. Even as Hindu nationalist forces like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) made unprecedented gains in their ideological project to remake India into a nation for those who identify as Hindu, their political cousin Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was coming into its own as a formidable political outfit. Azharuddin appeared as a conflictual presence while leading India at a time when Hindutva supremacists were raging in the streets. The conflict was aroused among his detractors in a contradictory fashion. Those who were keen to imagine

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India as a nation for Hindus could not overlook his exceptional skill with the bat and the popularity that he enjoyed. When he failed, though, they had a ready explanation for his performance. The irrational spectre of a disloyal cricketer was imagined to make a political claim about the nation, which in its own way created a shock effect. This effect lives on in the present moment for India. To appreciate its sting, a recent example is worth discussing here. A former Indian cricketer, Wasim Jaffer, was sacked by a state’s cricket board over trumped-up charges of religious favouritism in the selection of players (Ellis-Petersen, 2021). Jaffer was forced to leave as a media trial put pressure on him with none of his former teammates, barring one exception, coming forward to vouch for him. This is a qualitatively worse situation when compared to what Azharuddin faced. Now that Indian cricket finds itself in a place where Muslim cricketers are being hounded for their religious identity, the possibility of imagining one of them leading India on the cricket field seems distant at best. Yet, the kind of scrutiny that Azharuddin encountered was an inkling of things to come. The kind of loyalty tests that were run in private conversations (Akbar, 2017), though, could not be explained only through the prism of religion. They were also influenced by the way Azharuddin played cricket. Azharuddin was scapegoated for India’s frequent losses to Pakistan, and his commitment to the national team was questioned not just so because he was Muslim, although that remained as a concern front and centre.3 It was also amplified by how cavalier he looked while batting. Because Azharuddin would be dismissed while playing casual or rash strokes, it would invite accusations of unserious play. In such criticism, one could witness a pattern where religious hatred was placed in partnership with capitalist expectations which demanded a rationalised code of winning. Such frustrations with Azharuddin’s style were concretised years later when the match-fixing scandal in 2000 blew the pandora’s box open. Azharuddin, as captain of the Indian side, was identified as the ringleader of this organised scam once his ties with bookies tumbled out in public (Bhatia, 2001). He was subsequently banned for life as the world of cricket underwent a partial cleansing of those cricketers who could be pinned down for their association with the betting rackets. Although Azharuddin’s ban was overturned later as conclusive evidence remained elusive, there was little debate over his involvement in what remains a landmark episode in the history of the game. The shockwaves were not limited to India as multiple cricketers across countries were found guilty by inquiry commissions that were presided over by judges and administrators. Some accepted wrongdoing, others like Azharuddin deny the charges even today. But alongside the South African skipper Hansie Cronje, Azharuddin was arguably the biggest star of the day to be implicated in the process. The scale of efforts to ‘cleanse’ the game was such that it numbed the senses of many cricket fans. Many former aficionados of the sport still remember that period as a decisive moment in their connection to the sport. The inevitable corruption in a sport that had its origins in gambling had let its mask slip. The consequent shock turned away plenty of fans

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who could not fathom that their heroes had feet of clay (Akbar, 2017; Jha, 2021). Here we find an example of the double effect of shock. Not only did it cause outrage among the fans, but it also woke them up and made them recognise cricket for what it was. Yet, the aesthetic shock of Azharuddin’s batting has not been erased by the shocking end of his career. Indeed, the match-fixing episode is at best a lamented footnote in many of the tributes that still appear in the media. What is remembered more fondly is his disdain for the rationalised code of batting, and the many transgressions that this trickster performed. Once at a press conference from the late 1990s, before the curtains had come down on his fascinating career, Azharuddin planted his feet on a table and clipped his toenails while sharing his thoughts on a match with journalists. It was a moment of transgression that was recalled in Brijnath’s (2008) tribute, the shock palpable in his words. It is an image that stands out when we think of Azharuddin, a different kind of shock that expands the scope of analysing the many contradictions within the cricketer. The many iterations of shock in relation to Azharuddin and their connections with each other are made intelligible by his prowess with the bat. We could think of them separately, but it is his success or the lack of it on the cricket field that guided their movement. Whether it was the question of a Muslim cricketer leading India, a reckless batsman or a player involved in corruption, each of the shock-inducing events circulated in popular consciousness would often be explained by keeping Azharuddin the batsman in view. When he did not meet expectations, on and off the cricket field, the sadness was marked by the realisation that you may not be able to see him bat again. His success, of course, was more often than not measured through his batting. It invited an appreciation that focused on the style that he would employ for playing the game. Thinking about Azharuddin, then, begins with him batting on the cricket pitch. Thinking with shock brings forth an aesthetic appreciation of cricket and its political implications.

CONCLUSION The best tragedies center less on the question of the flaw that disfigures and finally destroys the hero or heroine than on tragic conflict. (James, 1992b, pp. 156–157)

Lament lends itself neatly to a sense of tragedy. As is the case with many tributes over the years, Azharuddin is often rendered a near-tragic figure, if not completely so. Although James was himself moved to present certain cricketers such as Wilton St Hill in a tragic light (Westall, 2010), he perhaps would not approve of the accounts that leave Azharuddin’s story on the precipice of tragedy. In Beyond a Boundary, James (1963) registered his utmost disapproval for gambling on cricket matches. For other reasons too, despite the fall from grace, Azharuddin’s life after cricket does not translate to a tragedy. In fact, in recent years, the former cricketer has been able to move past the shadow of the match-fixing scandal.

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Azharuddin went on to become a member of the Lower House of the Indian Parliament in 2009, and now he heads the cricket board of his native team Hyderabad.4 The sheer material wealth that Indian cricketers tend to accumulate over their playing career has left him with a comfortable life too, in retirement. Yet, an element of shock is at play here. Azharuddin’s resurgence in public life is merely surprising when compared to the manner in which cricket recovered from the tumultuous period of match-fixing episodes to retain its journey towards a position where it now mirrors other popular sports that are flush with cash. Today, cricket exists in a state of uneven development with India, England and Australia as the undisputed financial powerhouses. The popularity of the sport in its longer formats is on the wane, while the burgeoning growth of the shortened Twenty20 format raises interesting questions. To that end, it is worth recalling James’ (1963, p. 210) words on the origins of cricket: It was created by the yeoman farmer, the gamekeeper, the potter, the tinker, the Nottingham coal-miner, the Yorkshire factory hand. These artisans made it, men of hand and eye. Rich and idle young noblemen and some substantial city people contributed money, organisation and prestige. Between them, by 1837 they had evolved a highly complicated game with all the typical characteristics of a genuinely national art form, founded on elements long present in the nation, profoundly popular in origin, yet attracting to it disinterested elements of the leisured and educated classes.’

While the version of cricket that James discussed was rubbed out long ago, since the 1990s, the social character of cricket has been altered beyond recognition thanks to the influx of television money and other sources of growing private investment. One of the ways in which this transformation can be assessed is by judging the growing social distance between the players and the spectators. One of the striking anachronisms when one returns to the book Beyond a Boundary (1963) or the documentary Fire in Babylon (2010), which charts the rise of the West Indies men’s team from the 1970s, is the shared social milieu between the player and the spectator. In a way, Frantz Fanon’s (1968, p. 158–59) cautious tone when speaking of the revolutionary potential within sport has proven to be prescient. He warned that: Sport should not be a pastime or a distraction for the bourgeoisie of the towns. The greatest task is to understand at each moment what is happening in our country. We ought not to cultivate the exceptional or seek for a hero, who is another form of leader. We ought to uplift the people; we must develop their brains, fill them with ideas, change them and make them human beings.

The question of uplifting a people through a world-historical figure in James’ case or through a medium of a national popular culture as Fanon suggests leaves us in an interesting situation. In both cases, a shared preoccupation is to think with sport and politics. This analytical mode provides fertile ground for analysing cricket in India. Cricket is a serious pastime, but also a national popular culture.

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It is a sport where conversations about national or local politics are not out of place, especially when you consider the number of administrators who are politicians as well. This chapter suggests a different mode for thinking through the same question. Like I argue here, it can be intellectually generative to think with the form of sporting praxis. A similar attempt was made in a different sport. The former World Cup winning coach and communist Cesar Luis Menotti spoke of a Left-wing football in Argentina. It was a philosophy of play articulated in the playing of football. Menotti summed it up as ‘A dialectical articulation between bodily and mental speed. . . he did not want players running without thinking or thinking without running’ (Archetti, 2006, p. 139). This way of playing found its most successful exposition in 1978 when Menotti led Argentina to the men’s World Cup title, while negotiating his position as a known communist who coached the national side during a military dictatorship that murdered thousands of his fellow comrades. Menotti, unlike Azharuddin, addressed this incongruity publicly. He frequently commented on political matters while training the team according to principles that were decidedly conceived through an engagement with Left-wing politics. Menotti’s stance was at odds with influential Marxist thinkers, like Jean-Marie Brohm (1978) and Bero Rigauer (1981), of the time who conceived of sport as a capitalist enterprise where workers were condemned to exist as alienated subjects. But the view of such theorists overlooked the political potential of a project where sporting praxis was the site for action. An urgent Marxist response today must be to recover the histories of sport and of those who played them in a manner that would foreground Left-wing politics. Even when we encounter actors who did not make such claims through their statements, like Azharuddin, it would be important to think dialectically about the form and the aesthetics of sporting praxis. A theoretical attempt in this vein can shed light on the material content of sport, and it will dispense with the tendency to view it merely as an avenue for entertainment. To summarise, this chapter thinks through the study of sport in a politically generative fashion by paying attention to sportive forms of praxis. Through this attempt, notions about theory and who can theorise are displaced. The revolutionary potential of sport till date has been articulated in limited terms as only those athletes attract attention who explicitly lay down their political motivation. To expand this narrow conception, we should analyse athletes at large and not restrict our focus to the ones who identify as activists. Ironically, this chapter takes this route by discussing an exceptional figure in Azharuddin. But despite his special qualities, Azharuddin never articulated the political significance of his sporting praxis. In a sense, he is the perfect figure for presenting the argument discussed here. In tracing Azharuddin’s life as a cricketer, we find a popular project for an aesthetic appreciation of cricket and its political cognates that develops from CLR James’ work. This chapter suggests how we may go about extending the scope of the Trindadian intellectual’s path-breaking contributions.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to Kanishka Goonewardena, Ayyaz Mallick, Chandrashri Pal, Kristin Plys and other members of the Marxism and South Asia Working Group at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. I am also grateful to John Kelly and other attendees of the 2022 South Asia Graduate Student Conference at the University of Chicago for their immensely helpful and encouraging feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter.

REFERENCES Akbar, P. (2017, December 23). The Azhar connection. The Cricket Monthly. https://www. thecricketmonthly.com/story/1130264/the-azhar-connection Aldred, T. (2016, May). The waste of cricket. The Cricket Monthly. https://www.thecricketmonthly. com/story/999431/tanya-aldred-on-cricket-s-impact-on-the-environment Ayoob, M. (2020). The rise of Hindu nationalism in historical perspective. India Review, 19(4), 414–425. Benjamin, W. (1983). Charles Baudelaire, a lyric poet in the era of high capitalism. Verso. Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades project. Belknap Press. Bhatia, S. (2001). The fall of Azharuddin. ESPNCricinfo. https://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/content/ story/144219.html Bhogle, H. (1994). Azhar: The authorized biography of Mohammad Azharuddin. Brijnath, R. (2008, May 17). The inscrutable Craftsman. ESPN Cricinfo. https://www.espncricinfo. com/story/the-inscrutable-craftsman-346898 Brohm, J. (1978). Sport, a prison of measured time: Essays. Ink Links Ltd. Buck-Morss, S. (1992). Aesthetics and anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s artwork essay reconsidered. October, 62, 3. D’Cunha, Z. (2019). Why India’s top athletes find it difficult to spurn government requests to tweet propaganda messages. Scroll. https://scroll.in/field/942215/why-indias-top-athletes-find-itdifficult-to-spurn-government-requests-to-tweet-propaganda-messages Eagleton, T. (1990). The ideology of the aesthetic. Blackwell. Eisenstein, S. (1949). Film form: Essays in film theory. Harcourt. Ellis-Petersen, H. (2021, February 21). Not cricket: Religious divide threatens a last bastion of secular India. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/21/not-cricket-religiousdivide-threatens-last-bastion-secular-india Goonewardena, K. (2011). Space, time and cricket: From M.C.C. to M-C-M. Dissenting Dialogues. Hartmann, D. (2019). The olympic “Revolt” of 1968 and its lessons for contemporary African American athletic activism. European Journal of American Studies, 14(1). https://doi.org/10. 4000/ejas.14335 Hegel, G. (1837). The philosophy of history. Hyde, L. (1998). Trickster makes this world: Mischief, myth, and art (1st ed.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. James, C. L. R. (1963). Beyond a boundary. Duke University Press. James, C. L. R. (1981). Notes on dialectics. Lawrence Hill Co. James, C. L. R. (1992a). A majestic innings: Writings on cricket. Aurum. James, C. L. R. (1992b). The CLR James reader. Blackwell. Jha, A. M. (2021, March 11). Setting. FiftyTwo. https://fiftytwo.in/story/setting Krishnaswamy, K. (2018, August 28). The frustrations of M. Vijay. The Cricket Monthly. https://www. thecricketmonthly.com/story/1156706/the-frustrations-of-murali-vijay Lemert, C. C. (2003). Muhammad Ali: Trickster in the culture of irony. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/ BA75046776 Marcuse, H. (1964). One dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Beacon Press. Marx, K. (1988). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. Prometheus Books.

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Menon, S. (2020, March 9). My friend Azhar. The Cricket Monthly. https://www.thecricketmonthly. com/story/1217821/my-friend-azhar Mills, N. (2007). The dialectic of electricity: Kenneth fearing, Walter Benjamin, and a Marxist aesthetic. Journal of Modern Literature, 30(2), 17–41. Priyansh. (2021). Stumped by a tweet: The irrelevance of Indian cricketers. The Wire. https://thewire.in/ sport/stumped-by-a-tweet-the-irrelevance-of-indian-cricketers Rigauer, B. (1981). Sport and work. Columbia University Press. Roberts, W. C. (2020). Centralism is a dangerous tool. The CLR James Journal, 26(1), 219–240. Philosophy Documentation Center. https://doi.org/10.5840/clrjames202111971 Schmidt, S. H., Frederick, E. L., Pegoraro, A., & Spencer, T. C. (2019). An analysis of Colin Kaepernick, Megan Rapinoe, and the national anthem protests. Communication & Sport, 7(5), 653–677. Vats, V. (2021, February 12). Establishment man: The moral timidity of Sachin Tendulkar. The Caravan. https://caravanmagazine.in/sports/the-moral-timidity-of-sachin-tendulkar Westall, C. (2010). Brian Lara in poetic form: Tradition, talent and the Caribbean ‘mwe’. In D. Malcolm, J. Gemmell, & N. Mehta (Eds.), The changing face of cricket: From imperial to global game. Routledge. Wynter, S. (1981). Quest of Matthew Bondsman: Some cultural notes on the Jamesian journey (Vol. 12). Urgent Tasks. http://www.sojournertruth.net/matthewbondsman.html#7r

CHAPTER 7

CRISIS AND REVOLT IN SRI LANKA: THEORIZING A HORIZON OF POSSIBILITIES AMID THE UNRAVELLING OF THE GLOBAL ORDER Devaka Gunawardenaa and Ahilan Kadirgamarb a

Independent Researcher, USA University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka

b

ABSTRACT The popular uprising in Sri Lanka on July 9th, 2022, led to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fleeing the country. It represented a stunning culmination of a wave of protests during the recent past. The proximate cause of the uprising was the worst economic crisis that Sri Lanka had experienced since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The breakdown was long in the making since the island nation became the first country in South Asia to take the neoliberal turn in the late 1970s. The dramatic collapse was catalyzed by a sovereign debt crisis with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Nevertheless, like all great revolts, it has led to a counter revolution by the ruling class, including the reconfiguration of the old regime. We examine the tremendous consequences of recent events, both in terms of Sri Lanka’s long history of struggles involving working people and the global unravelling underway. We explore whether Sri Lanka is a harbinger of more global political economic changes to come. The process includes the possibility of systemic resistance to financialization in the scores of countries in the Global South experiencing tremendous debt distress. In this regard, we ask whether Sri Lanka’s revolt could yet become a revolution. To frame the potential implications, we turn to a deeper interrogation of classic Marxist theories and concepts. Marxist Thought in South Asia Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 40, 121–151 Copyright © 2024 Devaka Gunawardena and Ahilan Kadirgamar Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-871920230000040008

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Keywords: Revolts and revolutions; class struggles; financialization; global unravelling; self-sufficiency; Marxism

BACKGROUND TO THE CRISIS The Great Revolt The popular uprising on July 9th, 2022, against the government led by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was a major event in Sri Lanka’s history.1 The masses of people who came to the streets threw out an authoritarian government that had become entrenched in power. In many ways, the uprising could even be said to have surpassed the Great Hartal of 1953 in the degree to which the masses intervened in the historical process.2 They forced a direct change of the president outside of elections. The proximate cause was the mounting problems ordinary people faced because of the economic crisis, which burst into international view in the early part of 2022. From fuel queues that stretched for kilometers in some instances to power cuts that lasted more than half the day, daily life was becoming impossible by the time protests occurred at Rajapaksa’s house on the night of March 31st. These kicked off what became known as the aragalaya (“struggle”) in Sinhala and porattam in Tamil. Throughout our chapter, we use the term the people’s movement to refer to this struggle. The immediate reason for Sri Lanka’s collapse was the country’s sovereign debt crisis triggered by longstanding external loans. Sri Lanka could not roll over its commercial borrowings after it was locked out of international capital markets because of downgrades by global credit ratings agencies in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The question now is, under what circumstances will the consequent uprising be remembered? Will it force a shift in elite consciousness away from its comprador mentality? Will it create a possible path forward for working people’s politics to articulate a solution to the ongoing economic crisis? In this open-ended yet critical moment, strands of resistance diverge and coalesce. Accordingly, we envision the current moment as an interregnum, between revolt and revolution. The questions raised by the July 9th uprising have yet to be settled. Historically, of course, revolution in the Marxist sense signified the end of capitalism. But we maintain an open-ended definition in terms of a fundamental transformation that paves the way for further struggles. We do not assume what it would take to transcend capitalism on a global scale. Accordingly, for us, the question of revolution is defined in a way that is more tentative rather than definitive in an epochal sense. It is more about whether resistance to global capitalism can be strengthened through the materialization of a new order in Sri Lanka. The conjuncture is uncertain because it remains to be determined whether the working people will be successful in their struggles, or whether they will be deflected through various forms of co-optation and suppression; what Antonio 1

https://edition.cnn.com/asia/live-news/sri-lanka-protests-07-09-22-intl/index.html The Hartal was another widespread struggle opposing cuts to the food subsidy of the time.

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Gramsci called a passive revolution. Either way, the outcome will reveal the vantage point from which we interpret the July 9th uprising over a much longer historical period. In the meantime, our purpose is to draw, as clearly as possible, the conceptual and ideological oppositions at stake. This aids analysis. But our hope is that it also helps solidify an incipient progressive movement that can recapture the initiative. The tasks are daunting. Already, there has been an opportunity for reactionary forces to intervene. They have attempted to stabilize the political situation through a reconfiguration of the old regime led by the Rajapaksa family. Ranil Wickremesinghe, a personal associate of the Rajapaksas, was elected President on July 20th, 2022, in parliament with the majority support of the Rajapaksa-led Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP). This occurred even though his own party, the United National Party (UNP), only secured one seat through the National List in the previous parliamentary election held in 2020. Wickremesinghe’s arrival has thrown up new challenges and prolonged old ones. Forces of resistance, such as student protestors, have encountered severe repression, in addition to a subdued national mood. Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s elite greeted with celebration the approval of the country’s bailout agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on March 20th, 2023. The agreement has allowed the elite some breathing space. They claim that patience is required for economic recovery, even as the Wickremesinghe-Rajapaksa government commits to further austerity. Nevertheless, the economic depression and the related global downturn persist. Sri Lanka’s conjuncture is inseparable from the unravelling of the global order. We must specify Sri Lanka’s challenges in relation to this question. Otherwise, in the absence of a clear horizon of possibilities, it will be even more difficult to produce a progressive alternative. Will the ruling class be able to stabilize the situation through selective repression and distant promises of an eventual return to normal? Or is there now the possibility of a deeper shift in society, because of the suffering that ordinary people are forced to endure during the ongoing and prolonged crisis? Could the resulting frustrations and agitations anticipate decisive political economic changes ahead? In responding to these questions, any progressive movement that attempts to propose an alternative must be able to frame the solution in terms of a larger narrative about Sri Lanka’s place in the global order. The country’s crisis could represent a tipping point in a broader trend that “might spin out of control and become generalized,” meaning “that the ‘othering’ will provoke a revolt against the system that creates it” (Harvey, 2005, p. 152). Ongoing debate within an incipient progressive movement about the balance of class forces remains critical. But for any potential progressive movement in Sri Lanka to succeed, much like the rest of the global left, only by understanding its participation in a world historical project can it endure ongoing defeats to realize its core goals (Traverso, 2021, pp. 43–44). Sri Lanka’s Trajectory Within the Global Order The purpose of our essay is to provide a schematic understanding of the trajectory of the global order, to help progressives situate themselves and to identify the fundamental relevance of the uprising and the wider social opposition it has

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revealed. We do so self-consciously, from the perspective of Sri Lanka’s positioning on the periphery. The question of what shapes Sri Lanka’s experience requires further engagement with the analytical categories of political economy. Specifically, we recognize the degree to which Sri Lanka has been excluded from those opportunities for advancement that the classic developmental states in East Asia, such as South Korea and Taiwan, obtained after World War II. In contrast, we argue, Sri Lanka is a representative of the crisis of neoliberal financialization. That process undermined, if not defeated, prospects for development among many other countries in the Global South since it took hold in the aftermath of the global economic crisis of the 1970s. Poorer countries, marginalized within their own respective regions, have not enjoyed the same strategic advantages as, for example, regional hegemons. Considering Sri Lanka’s role as a representative of this subcategory of dependent countries, we are compelled to think deeper about the specific mode of its incorporation into the global order. The IMF has long served as the representative of global capital in dealing with Southern countries. Since the 1980s, it has negotiated Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) with countries facing balance of payments crises. These have been imposed on populations with the active consent of their domestic comprador elites. The process has created untold pain. It has also been complemented by a changing horizon of speculative opportunities for global capital. On this basis, domestic elites have tried to sell a narrative of development to their populations. They have proposed that global trade growth would create economic opportunities for ordinary people, while imposing severe restrictions on public spending. In the case of Sri Lanka, it underwent 16 IMF programs since 1965 before the most recent one that was approved in 2023.3 In addition, Sri Lanka’s governments were eager to exploit the so-called peace dividend in the aftermath of the country’s civil war. The military conflict ended in 2009 with the government’s Pyrrhic victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In the ensuing postwar period, Sri Lanka’s comprador elite, which makes up the country’s ruling class, has benefited from speculative opportunities in luxury real estate and other forms of fictitious growth. It drew from the outflow of portfolio investment from core countries to “Emerging Markets” in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. This dynamic of accumulation has coexisted with the preexisting tendency of wage repression in major export industries such as tea and garments, which have come to symbolize Sri Lanka’s economic dependency. The reconfiguration of capital resulted in the increasing financialization of the state (Fine, 2013). That included the issuance of predominantly dollar-denominated International Sovereign Bonds (ISBs) from 2007 onward (for an overview of financialization, see Bonizzi, 2013). For example, commercial borrowings made up half of Sri Lanka’s external debt in 2021. Roughly a third of external debt was in ISBs. The process of financialization, however, appears to have reached its end point

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in the economic disaster that is now unfolding. The trigger was the sovereign debt crisis and Sri Lanka’s resulting inability to pay external loans. Nevertheless, it is difficult for domestic elites – to the extent that their interests are subordinate to the global process of accumulation – to accept that the solution cannot be steered by interests outside of Sri Lanka. Instead, elites continue to envision opportunities for further accumulation through dispossession. That includes the repression of working people’s incomes through the skyrocketing cost of living and a fire sale of the country’s publicly owned assets. In this context, intellectuals within Sri Lanka’s incipient progressive movement, which is facing off against the Wickremesinghe-Rajapaksa government, must contend with wider changes in the outside world. The goal may not be a readymade formula that can be applied to the country. Much will come through experimentation with domestic possibilities, such as self-sufficiency in essential items, especially food. But the crisis also implies the need to identify the universal characteristics of the contradictions that are revealed through Sri Lanka’s crisis.

THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK Global Unraveling The last great global crisis that produced a world historical political model occurred in the aftermath of World War I. The Bolshevik Revolution succeeded and ended up defining the horizon of subsequent revolutionary movements. As Enzo Traverso (2021) points out, even the national liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s took shape within the “common matrix” of the Bolshevik Revolution. At the same time, while they related to it, they also distinguished themselves from it by considering alternative paths that could accommodate the historical trajectories of their respective countries (Traverso, 2021, p. 391). These diverse possibilities – engendered by national liberation struggles and progressive experiments on an international scale, such as the New International Economic Order (NIEO) – collapsed with the triumph of neoliberal globalization. Neoliberalism reproduced capitalism’s contradictions on a global level. It continued to embody the recurring dysfunctions that threaten to undermine capitalism itself. Specifically, as Giovanni Arrighi (2010) has pointed out, financialization from the 1970s onward did not represent a robust form of global capitalism. Rather, it indicated a terminal phase in a cyclical, longue dur´ee pattern of hegemonic decline and breakdown. Meanwhile, global opposition to neoliberalism began to emerge by the 1990s in the form of the anti-globalization movement. David Harvey (2005) and Silvia Federici (2004, p. 24; 2012, p. 106), for example, have argued that this movement represented “deep continuities with struggles of long ago” (Harvey, 2005, p. 162). This process now confronts structural obstacles with the heightening of strategic rivalry between states. The tendency toward geopolitical polarization epitomizes the reassertion of a territorial logic of power over a purely capitalistic one (Arrighi, 2010; Harvey, 2005, p. 97). The evidence is visible in the profound shift in global

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consciousness of renewed hegemonic rivalry in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Accordingly, despite Samir Amin’s (2010, p. 128) wish, for example, for a “second wave of Southern awakening” in the early part of the 21st century , the reality is that the global conjuncture in fact has only become more uncertain. Global unravelling proceeds apace. Complex political problems have burst into the open. But the solutions required – including, for example, a just mechanism for resolving sovereign debt crises in case of countries such as Sri Lanka – have yet to be realized in a new global arrangement. Despite fanfare about the possibility of an alternative rooted in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS), the reality is that the underlying problems with financialized globalization remain. That includes the export of surplus capital, and the reliance of poorer countries on demand created elsewhere. The latter continues to be the basis of wage repression, insofar as the economic logic insists that workers produce for distant export markets, regardless of whether they are based in the West or not. The IMF may be the most obvious arbiter of a cruel and unjust order that imposes austerity on poorer countries. But a progressive alternative grounded in self-sufficiency will only emerge through deeper engagement with social and class struggles at home. In this regard, we cannot construct an alternative model based on the growing assertiveness of non-Western capitalist states alone.4 Instead, the years ahead are likely to involve even greater conflict on a global scale. That includes the extreme possibility of open warfare between hegemonic powers. In the past, progressive movements have taken their cue from the strategic debates that Lenin developed in his famous work, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, in the context of World War I. Our current conjuncture demands an equally innovative response. To offer an answer, we must conceptualize the class forces that are emerging through struggles over the question of social reproduction, specifically, the breakdown of working people’s livelihoods in countries such as Sri Lanka. Until that perspective on social and class struggles comes into clearer focus, it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the scope for a progressive alternative to global unraveling. Accordingly, the question is open-ended. What will emerge through this period of tremendous disruption: a path forward for progressive movements, or one that creates even more obstacles?

In addition, we must be careful about how we frame the “rise of the non-West,” especially if it remains rooted in Eurocentric realpolitik assumptions about the balance of power. Such an approach, which is implied in celebratory discussions about “multipolarity,” neglects other contradictions. Specifically, the fact that the balance of power that was constructed in Europe after the Napoleonic wars – and which was solidified after the failed Revolutions of 1848 – was designed both to promote peace between states and to suppress class struggles at home. Thus, Marx and Engels argued in The Communist Manifesto, “Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first settle matters with its own bourgeoisie” (Marx & Engels, 2008).

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Pluralizing Class The choice points to a deeper question: what resistance movement can even gain traction in this fractured global context? The query returns us to the original model of revolution constructed by the Bolsheviks in 1917. In the aftermath, especially with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has become clear that the historical actor that was supposed to represent the progress of history, the proletariat, must contend with other social forces. The latter – which includes groups ranging from small cultivators to daily wage earners in the informal sector – does not fall behind a monolithic leadership. In this regard, it is useful to go back to our creative predecessors when thinking through the complexity of class, especially amid the consolidation of systemic alternatives to global capitalism in the 1930s. Gonzalez (2019), following Oshiro Higa’s reading of the creative interwar Peruvian Marxist thinker Jos´e Carlos Mari´ategui, argues that Mari´ategui’s concept of the “multitude” was an initial attempt to propose a pluralistic understanding of collective agency. Mari´ategui believed that the multitude could articulate a proletarian ideology capable of realizing historical forms of solidarity, such as precolonial forms of communal organization that persisted into the modern era. The multitude could embody these possibilities as diverse, egalitarian expressions of a multilinear historical process (Gonzalez, 2019, pp. 74–75). It is useful to leverage this idea when theorizing our own preferred concept, the working people.5 The 1930s was a critical moment for thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci and Mari´ategui to question the claims of Stalinist orthodoxy and to put forward new ideas of collective agency. But it was during the 1960s and 1970s, in which national liberation struggles became a critical feature of the global political landscape, that the attempt to rethink the classic alliance between workers and peasants took off. Critical engagement meant extending the Marxist canon to analyze the specificity of Third World social formations. Guyanese Marxist Walter Rodney’s work offers a useful example through his implicit engagement with the concept of the working people. Issa Shivji (2017) has made this idea explicit as a question for continued theoretical engagement. For us, the concept of working people appears to encompass a diverse range of actors – workers and peasantry, those who perform work in the formal and informal sectors, and so on – by highlighting the shared challenges involved in the their social reproduction (see also Gunawardena & Kadirgamar, 2021, p. 259). Observing these historical parallels from the perspective of Sri Lanka, we argue that in the process of translating concepts into political practice, it is useful to think in terms of a conjunctural understanding of working people’s politics. This angle also 5

We distinguish Mari´ategui’s concept of a multitude, which implies a pluralistic understanding of social and class struggles, from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (2005) definition. Hardt and Negri propose that the multitude emerges in a more advanced stage of capitalism, in which “immaterial labor” becomes decisive. In contrast, we prefer the tentative theorization of the concept illuminated in Mike Gonzalez’s analysis of Mari´ategui’s work. His engagement places a general emphasis on the intrinsic plurality of the working people. This is outside any supposed historical tendency toward real subsumption within global capitalism that Hardt and Negri cite.

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helps explain the changes that have occurred. That includes the dramatic implications of the July 9th uprising. For us, praxis is what defines a collective political identity. Accordingly, we prioritize the term working people’s politics, as opposed to working people as such. Our goal is to overcome the ontological reflex that has often shaped (post-)Marxist attempts to either define or deconstruct political subjects in terms of the question of production (Colpani, 2022). Having considered critiques that emphasize the role of political action in the construction of the working class (for example, Eley, 2002), we instead theorize working people’s politics as a question of social reproduction. The latter is shared by people regardless of the diverse ways in which they survive – whether through, for example, cultivation, petty commodity production, or wage work. Working people’s politics is a more flexible and contingent dimension for considering the possible transformation of the social order to accommodate social reproduction, or the need for survival in a given context. Such a politics can only be deemed progressive in a historical sense, however, from the perspective of an egalitarian social imaginary that must be created, not assumed. Revolution and Resistance in the Meantime In this regard, Lenin’s point in his canonical work, The State and Revolution, about the need for the left to capture state power, remains the long-term goal. But we frame it in a different way. For us, what is at stake is not the objective self-realization of a class, such as the proletariat. Balibar (1977), for example, famously tried to defend the orthodox Leninist thesis during the 1970s. Instead, our perspective focuses more on the way in which capitalism often prevails through the failure of progressive movements and the elite reaction it inspires, especially fascism. Accordingly, interpreting the direction of history implies a much higher degree of vigilance.6 At the same time, we do not prescribe a method for struggles, whether elections or revolution. We keep the strategic question open. We do so by combining an ethos of caution with audacity in those moments where it becomes necessary to work toward a rupture with the dominant order. A revolutionary stance may become inevitable to avoid the fate of a reaction otherwise prescribed by the failure to come up with an adequate solution to crisis. In the case of Sri Lanka, that means an IMF agreement that seems to fail to offer relief to working people during the country’s worst economic depression since the 1930s. The balance of these two modes of political action – reform and revolution – may be better embodied in the concept of a progressive regime that we specify in terms of the global division between core and periphery. Our goal is to hold in tension the uncertain temporality of social transformation and the constraints imposed by capitalist imperialism, for which we have a long way to go before it 6

¨ This perspective is summarized by Goran Therborn (2008/1978, p. 24). He argued that Nicos Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband, among others, were much clearer on the distinction between democracy and dictatorship internal to the capitalist state after the historical disaster of fascism in the period between the World Wars (p. 26).

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can be transcended (Wallerstein, 2011, p. 53). What we ultimately call such a state capable of strengthening resistance in the periphery, and the regime that can consolidate it – no less than the political tactics and strategy required to initiate the process – requires a far wider discussion. Meanwhile, the point is that a progressive social movement may act as the demiurge of an alternative economic basis for securing working people’s survival. Specifically, we argue that a focus on working people’s politics and its engagement with the state could expand an existing realm of production, in which working people produce their means of subsistence within alternative market structures, such as cooperatives. We refer to this space as Department III. Our goal is to extend Marx’s initial division between Department I, the production of the means of production, and Department II, the production of consumer goods. Marx made this distinction in the second volume of Capital to theorize the reproduction of the capitalist system. For us, Department III signifies a terrain of quasi-autonomous relations of production. We outline its key features in the latter sections of this chapter. Such a space demonstrates the diverse methods by which working people reproduce their livelihoods, inside and outside capitalism.7 At the same time, Department III is always in danger of being raided by the forces of capital, including processes of formal subsumption. Accordingly, in the end, there is no escaping the political question of state power in any potential project to transcend capitalism on a global level. Nevertheless, in the meantime, for countries such as Sri Lanka, it is incumbent to explore economic alternatives within this tentative space that we call Department III. This economic realm may at least guarantee working people’s survival during the ongoing depression. Whether this approach provides the perspective for a renewed political movement rooted in the principles of global solidarity remains to be seen. We sketch possibilities in our conclusion.

EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL DIMENSIONS The Longue Dur´ee Origins of the Present Crisis An alternative imaginary may emerge through exploration of the specific forms of resistance that have emerged in contemporary Sri Lanka. But before we undertake such an inquiry, we must consider the global context of crisis and breakdown. The July 9th uprising, as an implicit example of working people’s politics, must be situated within the global political economy. The cartography of the modern world is being shaped by many different events, key among them the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The changes have further revealed underlying trends that reflect the possible end of neoliberal globalization, though not necessarily the deeper structure of financialization. 7

As mentioned earlier, this domain cannot be reduced to the classic analysis of the need for the proletariat to survive through capitalist wage relations. But neither is a dichotomous understanding of the separation between capitalism and its outside sufficient for interpreting Department III (see, for example, Sanyal, 2013).

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These tensions, which are inherent to the neoliberal solution to the last global crisis of the 1970s, are now maturing to the point of rupture. But the resulting space for alternatives must be contextualized within a much longer historical pattern. Adopting this approach allows us to better understand the degree of radical change required. Accordingly, we must further distinguish the neoliberal framework from the earlier period of state-centered accumulation in Southern countries in the aftermath of World War II. Experiments such as import substitution attempted to break with neocolonialism during a period of decolonizing struggles, especially in Africa and Asia. In this sense, dealing with the contemporary crisis of financialization requires further situating it in the longue dur´ee of (neo)colonialism. The process, occurring over centuries, has involved the enduring subordination of peripheral countries to the hegemonic global order. Plys (2021), for example, argues that in contrast to much of the conventional Marxist theorization that has built on Lenin’s conceptualization of imperialism rooted in late 19th century dynamics, we must extend the time frame further back through engagement with the work of Walter Rodney. We must grasp the centuries-long expansion of capitalist imperialism. This shift in perspective need not imply, however, that the current conjuncture is irrelevant. Rather, to discern the potential for resistance against today’s financialized order requires embedding struggles in the framework of the longue dur´ee. The latter stretches all the way back to the origins of global capitalism. Such a perspective enables us to keep in view the global distinction between core and periphery, especially the ways in which it has been constitutive of the world system. This division also implies a deeper critique of assumptions around the spread of global capitalism, namely the generalizability of capitalist wage relations. Federici (2004, p. 17) has argued that global capitalism involves a highly differentiated geography of exploitation and dispossession. Or as she puts it: On the other side, the metropolitan wage became the vehicle by which the goods produced by enslaved workers went to the market, and the value of the products of enslaved-labor was realized. In this way, as with female domestic work, the integration of enslaved labor into the production and reproduction of the metropolitan work-force was further established, and the wage was further redefined as an instrument of accumulation, that is, as a lever for mobilizing not only the labor of the workers paid by it, but also for the labor of a multitude of workers hidden by it, because of the unwaged conditions of their work. (Federici, 2004, p. 104)

Federici recuperates the resulting resistance under the rubric of the commons. This was lost through the capitalist enclosure movement and its global expansion, including slavery, from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Linking the dynamic of colonial dispossession to the contemporary moment, Mies (2014) distinguished the “old International Division of Labor” from the new one that emerged in the 1970s. That included the transplantation of production processes to “the colonies, now called developing countries, the Third World, etc.,” with a special emphasis on the gendered exploitation of women (Mies, 2014, pp. 113, 116–117). This tendency must be contextualized within the dismantling of social supports, which, for example, forced people in Sri Lanka to migrate from rural areas to coastal enclaves such as Free Trade Zones (FTZs), and even abroad.

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In this regard, Harvey (2005) has expanded on the work on primitive accumulation done by Rosa Luxemburg at the turn of the twentieth century. The concept refers to the appropriation of value outside the market, usually involving methods of extra-economic coercion, such as land grabbing. Luxemburg (2003) took Marx’s argument that capitalism requires primitive accumulation in its formative phase as her own point of departure. She developed the point by demonstrating that capitalism in fact relies on the continuous dispossession of noncapitalist societies, including the destruction of rural subsidiary occupations. Or as she put it, “An important final phase in the campaign against natural economy is to separate industry from agriculture, to eradicate rural industries altogether from peasant economy” (Luxemburg, 2003, p. 375). Although the contemporary world has been subsumed by capitalism, Harvey sees a similar logic of dispossession that continues to be at work. Financialization Versus Industrialization The goal of our theoretical exercise is to not only understand the ways in which Sri Lanka’s trajectory reflects the longstanding division between global core and periphery. It also involves acquiring a clearer sense of the mode in which global capital extracts value from people living in the country. In addition to the most visible example of land grabs, dispossession can also occur through other methods, such as the privatization of public assets. In this regard, dispossession is less about a temporally bounded phenomenon relegated to the past destruction of noncapitalist societies. Rather, it is about a tendency that persists long after capitalism has spread across the globe. The process continues to rely on appropriating value outside the direct exploitation of the workforce. At the same time, it has become more prominent in the context of the cyclical pattern of hegemonic decline and breakdown. On this basis, Harvey (2005, p. 144) has described the predominant logic of global capitalism since the 1970s as accumulation by dispossession. A key dimension is the “sinister and destructive side of spatial-temporal fixes to the overaccumulation problem” (p. 135; see also Harvey, 2017, p. 150). In trying to grasp why accumulation by dispossession has taken precedence over expanded reproduction within capitalism, Harvey (2005, p. 176) analyzes the global order in terms of financialization. By subordinating countries to capital markets, financialization in Southern countries such as Sri Lanka involves pervasive dispossession. That includes increases in the price of essential items along with interest rate hikes that result in people losing personal assets due to their inability to pay exorbitant loans. These measures are justified in terms of the public’s need to pay off powerful external creditors such as hedge funds that hold sovereign bonds. The logic involves eliminating subsidies and other forms of social support – or imposing austerity through a program of “fiscal consolidation” that restricts government expenditure and raises revenues through direct and indirect taxation – in addition to shock financial policies such as interest rate hikes and devaluation of the local currency.

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Meanwhile, financialization originated as a response to the falling rate of profit within core countries as well. That includes devaluation – such as the deindustrialization of entire geographic regions – through the purchase and stripping of assets to restore profits. Contextualizing Harvey with his late Marxist interlocutor, Arrighi (2010), we can see that this pattern of financialization exposed the limits of the previous hegemonic order. The constraints became visible in the competition that the United States encountered in the 1960s and 1970s from newer centers of manufacturing, such as Germany and Japan (Brenner, 2006). Economic pressures further engendered a distinction between the interests of financial elites and those engaged in domestic production.8 Capital became financialized. It overcame the controls of what John Ruggie (1982) famously called the embedded liberal order (for a critique of the global applicability of the concept, however, see Martin, 2022, p. 244). It threw everything, from assets to livelihoods, into the dizzying vortex of speculation. Nevertheless, in an earlier essay, Arrighi (1978) anticipated opportunities for the consolidation of working classes in the periphery through the strengthening of an industrial form of capitalism. Arrighi expected capitalism’s expansion around the world to provoke new forms of resistance, including the possibility of establishing alliances with working classes in the advanced capitalist countries. He wrote, for example, of “a tendency to further strengthening of the working class, decentralization of accumulation, and intensification of conflict between labor and capital” (Arrighi, 1978, p. 16). Beverly Silver (2003) has extended this argument by analyzing the global making and unmaking of the working classes as a contradictory process. The theoretical assumption shared by both Silver and Arrighi is that capitalism engenders resistance through the global process of incorporating labor into its expansion. According to Silver, this process must be further analyzed in terms of its unevenness. Despite this nuance, however, the question of labor’s incorporation into the global economy acquires a different theoretical character when we approach it from the perspective of the structural dynamics that pushed Sri Lanka into crisis. Specifically, there has been a strong divergence between the trajectory of East Asian developmental states, which managed to industrialize, and the rest of the 8 We must nevertheless be careful here in pushing the point that financialization evolved sui generis. As Amin argued, it must instead be understood as a latent possibility embedded within the very inner workings of capitalism itself. Or as he put it:

The real capital/fictitious capital duality is thus not the result of a “deviation,” still less of a “recent deviation.” Through it, even at the beginning, was made manifest the alienation specific to the capitalist mode of production. . . Financialization is thus in no way a regrettable deviation, and its explosive growth does not operate to the detriment of growth in the “real” productive economy. There is a whole lot of ingenuousness to propositions in the style of “social democracy taken seriously” that suggest controlling financial expansion and mobilizing the “financial surplus” to support “real growth.” The tendency to stagnate is inherent in the monopoly capitalism superbly analyzed by Sweezy, Baran, and Magdoff. Financialization then provides not only the sole possible outlet for surplus capital, it also provides the sole stimulus to the slack growth observed, since the 1970s, in the United States, Europe, and Japan. (Amin, 2010, pp. 64–65)

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Southern periphery. The bifurcation has revealed the fundamental limitations of a global development model for poorer countries driven by financialization. Despite Arrighi’s initial optimistic forecast, the reality is that industrial capitalism in the Southern periphery has been undermined through what economists, from Samir Amin to Dani Rodrik, have called premature deindustrialization. Economic Breakdown and the Political Response in Sri Lanka In the case of Sri Lanka, for example, domestic manufacturing was slowly hollowed out and replaced with a narrow range of export industries. In addition, construction driven by speculation in urban real estate became a central part of the economy, contributing to high rates of postwar Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth. The basic outlines of this model continue to establish the limits within which Sri Lanka’s political regimes have operated. The parameters of this regime of accumulation obtained their fullest expression in the postwar regimes of Mahinda Rajapaksa and Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Despite their rhetorical appeal to small Sinhala cultivators, the political regimes led by the Rajapaksas embraced the illusions of the neoliberal economy and its supposed opportunities for high rates of postwar growth. The driving force behind accumulation became financialization. That model is now spinning out of control. Sri Lanka is in the eye of the storm when it comes to the looming global debt crisis, which occurs amid a longer economic downturn that first became apparent with the onset of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The advanced capitalist countries adopted different policy approaches and experiments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the long-term sustainability of the system remains in doubt given the growing debt overhang facing poorer countries (Baqir et al., 2023). For Sri Lanka, the costs of imported goods have greatly increased because of the shock devaluation of the rupee in April 2022 to accommodate the IMF’s demand for a flexible exchange rate. Accordingly, we must further scrutinize the trajectory of trade liberalization, including the decades-long ballooning of the import bill. In 2021 alone, for example, imports were $20 billion while exports were $12 billion, which constituted a significant drain on badly needed foreign exchange. The fact, however, that Sri Lanka’s governments have lacked an industrial policy or plan, including the need to prioritize imports, is not limited to the lack of strategic foresight among the political leadership. Instead, it represents the intellectual atrophy of the ruling class.9 The same elites who envisioned Sri Lanka

9

Or as Mike Davis (2022) put it in one of his last essays before his passing: It also may be the case that our rulers are blind because they lack the penetrating eyesight of revolution, bourgeois or proletarian. A revolutionary era may dress itself in costumes of the past (as Marx articulates in The Eighteenth Brumaire), but it defines itself by recognizing the possibilities for societal reorganization arising from new forces of technology and economics. In the absence of external revolutionary consciousness and the threat of insurrection, old orders do not produce their own (counter-)visionaries.

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as the next Singapore have been reduced to asking for increased access to concessional financing from donors such as the World Bank. The country may even downgrade from middle to low-income status to try and unlock more aid. This prostration before powerful international actors is a consequence of the elites’ inability to obtain traditional forms of private credit from international capital markets in the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s sovereign debt crisis. At the same time, the long origins of Sri Lanka’s crisis also anticipate the emergence of a political force, or an oppositional movement, rooted in the struggles of working people (Shattuck et al., 2023). Depending on the trajectory of struggles, Sri Lanka could become a beacon around which progressive forces could coalesce. To engage that possibility requires articulating Sri Lanka’s role in the global order as a precursor not merely of a new wave of sovereign defaults, but also a potential new wave of struggle against the financialized order. This implies a developmental model entirely different from neoliberalism, one grounded in a renewed understanding of self-sufficiency. Accordingly, when we talk about the class forces that are divided between the ruling class and working people, we must approach this axis from the ways in which these fractions are represented in the struggle over the state. The July 9th uprising ejected Gotabaya Rajapaksa from power. But powerful forces worked behind the scenes to maintain the old order.10 This was evidenced in Ranil Wickremesinghe’s election as President on July 20th, 2022, by a delegitimized parliament. Nevertheless, even these international and domestic forces have recognized that the way in which they can consolidate power requires a new strategy for dealing with the crisis of political representation. Through various forms of appropriation and co-optation, the WickremesingheRajapaksa government has managed to undermine the initial wave of resistance embodied in the people’s movement. After achieving its initial victory, the defining slogan of “GotaGoHome,” the movement was unclear on what else it sought to accomplish. It embraced the slogan of ill-defined “system change,” as opposed to the concrete demand of abolishing the all-powerful Executive Presidency. At the same time, repression has now clarified the stakes for the people whose lives have been thoroughly devastated by the crisis. In addition to explicit state repression, wage repression, or the devaluation of working people’s real incomes, for example, has become a persistent issue. In this context, struggles might shift to the periphery and take up new issues. Furthermore, there exist those intellectuals who are perhaps cultivating a stronger sense of the far-reaching transformation of the social order that is required to overcome the economic depression. In this regard, the political reaction, as Marx might put it, has made the class struggle more apparent. The existing Sri Lankan state, embedded in the financialized global order, may be able to delay the political reckoning for an uncertain period of time. But eventually that reckoning will come. The question is will progressive forces have

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https://www.economist.com/asia/2022/07/09/sri-lankas-president-resigns-in-the-face-ofmassive-protests

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not only the tenacity but also the vision to transform the state through confrontation with their class adversaries? Or will they be hamstrung in ways that enable powerful forces to intervene – whether international actors or even a homegrown fascist movement – to rescue the failed ruling class? To speak to these issues, it helps to start by clarifying the relationship between the state and social transformation. We must dig deeper into Sri Lanka’s own experience to ask whether there are clues that may guide us in our search for a new progressive horizon.

RELATIONS BETWEEN STATE AND SOCIETY State, Political Regime, and Regime of Accumulation What has been the historical trajectory of the relationship between state and regime Sri Lanka? In asking this question, we must specify the conceptual distinction. In our understanding, the state represents the tension between state power and the state apparatus made famous by Marxist theorists such as Nicos Poulantzas, whereas a political regime mediates this tension. The use of the generic term “regime” further implies a distinction between a political regime and a regime of accumulation. For us, a political regime manifests and directs the power of the state that is embedded within a given hegemonic order, which is sustained economically through a regime of accumulation (see, for example, Lipietz, 1988 for a brief definition). Meanwhile, the political regime invokes the question of political representation. From this perspective, the state both reproduces the social order and itself becomes a field of political struggle (Poulantzas, 1975). When we think about the diverse class forces that coalesce within and stabilize a political regime through representation, we also consider the broader implications in terms of relations between state and society. To the extent that these forces intervene in more direct and self-conscious ways, they may even be able to use state intervention to transform the society of which they are a part. This strategic question directs us to the main political objective of the left, both in Sri Lanka and on a global level: capturing state power. As mentioned above, such a path may no longer appear as direct as when it was first formulated by radical theorists within the Second International, at the turn of the twentieth century. But we revisit this question by theorizing the collective agency capable of achieving social transformation, the working people. This hinges on a deeper claim about the existence of a realm of production through which working people survive, especially in times of extreme crisis, such as the one currently affecting Sri Lanka. This alternative space remains to be strengthened. The question of the ways in which a resistance grounded in this space can consolidate vis-`a-vis the capitalist state in Sri Lanka, and the need to think through the related political strategy, remains open-ended. Meanwhile, to gain better understanding of these issues, it helps to take a detour through history. In the past, the left’s approach in Sri Lanka was shaped by the long debates between various factions inside and outside the foundational political party of the left, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). The LSSP was

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formed in 1935 during the colonial era. There was a preexisting terrain of politics on which the left sought to intervene. It involved contradictions specific to Sri Lanka’s own political economy. In the aftermath of independence from Britain in 1948, and even beforehand, the distinctions between town and country, small cultivators and urban working class, and so on multiplied and were constrained by the dependent nature of Sri Lanka’s plantation economy (Silva, 2013/1982). External and internal relations of power set the parameters within which the left parties operated. The situation came to a head in 1953, in the aftermath of the Korean War export boom.11 Elites sought to undermine the generous welfare state – specifically, the food subsidy – that had emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. The British had initially established the food subsidy as part of a ration system during World War II to cope with the effects of food shortages. But after independence, it came to be viewed as part of a complex of entitlements, including free health care and free education. This welfare state was consolidated through both the explicit intervention of left leaders in official forums such as the State Council and the implicit pressure of working people’s politics. Working people demanded that the state secure the conditions of their social reproduction. Furthermore, after independence from Britain, political leaders were theoretically held even more accountable to the people. The rulers had to justify their decisions in terms of the exercise of democratic representation on the people’s behalf. The new forms of international extraction, or what was called neocolonialism, however, involved the economic subordination of Sri Lanka within a global order dominated by the former colonial powers. This structure of dependency raised new issues about the type of domestic political regime that could operate within the global regime of accumulation. The Great Hartal of 1953 and the Intermediate Regime Because of the post-Korean War balance of payments crisis caused by the decline in the price of rubber, one of Sri Lanka’s major exports at the time, the government decided to adopt policy measures earlier proposed by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, which became the basis of the World Bank) on its first mission to Sri Lanka in 1951.12 Specifically, the IBRD recommended cuts to the food subsidy. The government pursued these cuts in 1953, resulting in the price of rice skyrocketing from 25 to 70 cents a kilo. The dramatic popular backlash, however, revealed a broad constituency across rural and urban areas capable of resisting such austerity. Some scholars referred to the emergence of an intermediate regime after the Great Hartal of 1953 with the subsequent election of 1956, in which the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) defeated the UNP (Shastri, 1983). The intermediate regime was a concept formulated by the radical Polish economist Michal Kalecki to describe political regimes in Third World countries in which the domestic bourgeoisie was not yet strong enough to rule on its own. Therefore, Kalecki 11

https://www.himalmag.com/60-years-since-the-great-hartal-2/ https://www.himalmag.com/60-years-since-the-great-hartal-2/

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argued it had to find allies within the petty bourgeoisie, among other class forces, which could even direct the state itself. Newton Gunasinghe (1996), as a critical interpreter of Kalecki, however, argued that the concept of an intermediate regime could not be applied to the case of Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the election of 1956. Gunasinghe claimed that the notion of an intermediate regime reflected unjustifiable assumptions about the willingness of the ruling class to cede power to other groups for the purpose of governing (Gunasinghe, 1996, p. 227). Instead, Gunasinghe preferred to use Marx’s category of Bonapartism to describe the reconfiguration within the ruling class that enabled the SLFP to emerge victorious over the UNP. He argued that this process helped consolidate majoritarian Sinhala Buddhist nationalism (pp. 230, 234). Originally, Marx developed the concept of Bonapartism to describe the backlash to the failures of the French constitutional republic after the Revolutions of 1848 in his famous work, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Earlier, in The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850, he focused on the ways in which the French establishment resisted further working class advance amid the eruptions that spanned the entire European continent. Marx argued that the French bourgeoisie was unable to provide a concrete solution to the economic malaise people faced. As a result, Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon’s nephew, was able to maneuver his way into power by consolidating his political base among the French peasantry (Marx, 2001, p. 79). Meanwhile, Bonaparte also protected the interests of the financial bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie in general, who, Marx emphasized, were not yet capable of assuming direct rule themselves (pp. 150–151). Extending this point further, Gunasinghe argued in the context of Sri Lanka that the aftermath of the Great Hartal of 1953 – specifically, the election of SWRD Bandaranaike in 1956 – was not reflected in an intermediate regime that could be characterized as progressive. Instead, it was a Bonapartist attempt within the ruling class to try and contain the eruption of popular protest that had threatened to undermine its rule. In contrast to Gunasinghe, however, we believe that the intermediate regime remains a useful concept to describe the moment from 1956 until 1977, when neoliberalism in Sri Lanka eventually triumphed. Unlike the Bonapartist moment described by Marx, the process leading up to 1956 was the outcome of working people’s victory, though the SLFP captured and circumscribed these energies by diverting them toward Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. The SLFP’s leader, SWRD Bandaranaike, of course, used nationalism to project his own image as a member of the common people (Gunasinghe, 1996, p. 234). This strategy catalyzed polarizing ethnic divisions that would eventually provoke a nationalist response within the Tamil community as well. The tensions ultimately led to outright military conflict by the 1970s and 1980s. In this context, we nevertheless argue that 1956 must be distinguished from the catastrophic defeat of the working class during the Revolutions of 1848, because of which Marx developed the concept of Bonapartism. Instead, the election of 1956 came after a successful struggle. The Great Hartal of 1953 etched itself in the consciousness of the ruling class. The elites realized that the threat of popular uprising was ever-present, thereby setting limits on what they could extract from

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the population. The Hartal forced the ruling class to acknowledge hard limits on its ability to impose unpopular changes, such as austerity, on the masses. Working People’s Resistance to the Bonapartist Regime Ultimately, however, the left led by the LSSP crashed on the fault lines of ethnic division over the long 1960s. Furthermore, between 1956 and 1977, the movement struggled to push Sri Lanka’s intermediate regime in a radical direction, which would have put it into outright conflict with the ruling class. The failure of land reform, despite the passing of the Paddy Lands Act in 1958, is a key example (Jayasekera & Amerasinghe, 1987, pp. 41–42; Shastri, 1983, pp. 8–9). Consequently, a majority of the left gravitated toward coalition with bourgeois parties, specifically the SLFP. The LSSP and Communist Party’s (CP) eventual shift compounded existing and emergent social divisions. The left abandoned its earlier progressive stance on the ethnic question, seeking accommodation with Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. In addition, the majority of the LSSP and CP participated in the SLFP-led United Front (UF) coalition government (1970–1977) that brutally crushed the adventuristic uprising of rural educated youth led by the People’s Liberation Front (known by its Sinhala acronym, the JVP, or Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna) in 1971 (Abeysekera, 1979). In contrast to the Sri Lankan left’s moral and political disorientation, Walter Rodney, Issa Shivji, and others, theorized the concept of working people to grapple with the constraints of the regimes that they worked with at the time. They had encountered similar limitations of the Tanzanian state under Julius Nyerere during the 1970s. Nyerere, like the Bandaranaike-led regimes in Sri Lanka – including the UF government led by SWRD’s widow, Sirimavo Bandaranaike – took an explicit stance on resistance to neocolonialism. Nyerere’s regime also invoked the concepts of self-sufficiency and self-reliance in the famous Arusha Declaration of 1967. His state-led project, however, like Bandaranaike’s, resisted pressures from below. It eventually became trapped within a process of bureaucratization (see Zeilig, 2022, pp. 270, 286). Rodney, although an initial supporter of Nyerere’s government, nevertheless survived with his intellectual and political integrity intact. He continued to work out his concepts through praxis. He thought through the need for further organizing around working people. He ultimately recognized that this project was the only true basis on which a qualitative transformation state power could be achieved (Zeilig, 2022, p. 297). In comparison, during the 1970s, the left in Sri Lanka failed to deploy a critical concept such as the working people to identify the constraints and peculiarities of the intermediate regime. But through the lens of present struggles, the past also affords us an opportunity to identify these gaps. In this regard, in recent years, there has been far greater opportunity to survey the contemporary forms of political reaction from the vantage point of working people’s struggles. Through a concrete analysis of the postwar situation in Sri Lanka, we can further link such struggles to the defeat of the type of Bonapartist regime first theorized by Marx. Long after the LSSP and CP were wiped out in the elections of 1977, and the intermediate regime collapsed along with them, Mahinda Rajapaksa, Gotabaya

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Rajapaksa’s elder brother, was elected President in 2005 (Herring, 1987, p. 237). He constructed a Bonapartist regime, which involved patronage, coercion, and ideological hegemony through Sinhala Buddhist nationalist mobilization. Working people’s struggles, however, contested his regime. These included the Katunayake FTZ workers’ protest against a pension reform bill in 2011, the fishing community’s resistance to a massive fuel price hike in 2012, and the long protest of families of the disappeared seeking justice in the North and East, where the bulk of the civil war had occurred. To understand the state and the opposition it engendered, we argue that Bonapartism is in fact the relevant category for describing the regimes of Mahinda Rajapaksa, especially his second term (2010–2015) in the aftermath of the civil war, and Gotabaya Rajapaksa (2019–2022), rather than the one that was established after 1956. The Rajapaksa-led regimes emerged in response to the growing crisis of neoliberalism. The state was increasingly forced to undertake unpopular austerity measures in parallel with the increasing financialization of the state. Kadirgamar (2013) has referred to this process as the second wave of neoliberalism in Sri Lanka, after the initial wave in the late 1970s. The Rajapaksas’ Bonapartist solution involved extending networks of patronage while engaging in selective repression. It was an attempt to contain popular resistance to the changes brought on by financialization. But the regimes themselves experienced cycles. Mahinda Rajapaksa was defeated in 2015 by a diverse coalition of electoral forces, led by Tamil and Muslim communities, while Gotabaya Rajapaksa was ousted in the massive popular uprising of July 9th, 2022.13 From our own vantage point, then, it becomes clear that working people’s politics is linked to the question of the Bonapartist regime via the postwar conjuncture in Sri Lanka. These two concepts emerged from two very different spatial and temporal contexts – the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s in the case of working people and the Revolution of 1848 in the case of Bonapartism. Nevertheless, when we combine them, they provide a useful way of analyzing the contemporary changes that have occurred in postwar Sri Lanka. These trends paved the way for the conjuncture of both crisis and resistance that the country is now experiencing. Ruling Class Reaction and Ongoing Struggle With the consolidation of the government led by Ranil Wickremesinghe and backed by the disgraced Rajapaksas’ party, the SLPP, we witness the clarifying effect of counterrevolution. Marx first described this phenomenon in his analysis of the class struggles in France in the aftermath of the failed Revolutions of 1848. In the case of Sri Lanka, the process of rebellion is ongoing. Although the repression may have been effective up to a point, as in Marx’s time, it also allows us to discern the possibility of a deeper social transformation rooted in the emerging attitudes and reflexes of a potentially more “class conscious” opposition. Accordingly, the major challenge is to redefine the relationship between state and society on principles implied by the incipient forms of working people’s 13

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politics, including those that have become more visible in the aftermath of the July 9th uprising. To understand the implicit potential of the revolt in Sri Lanka, we must envision the ways in which it could overcome the neoliberal financialized order. That means contending with a plurality of social forces and movements, specifically by considering their struggles from the perspective of an alternative, democratic relationship between state and society. In this moment when working people especially are struggling to survive in Sri Lanka, we believe it is necessary to engage the underlying categories of their experience. From the difficulties of keeping the lights on to the very threat of food shortages, we must consider the possible response to these challenges. So far that has included protest. But it also encompasses the need for investment in the cooperative sector engaged in food production. The latter tendency especially may indicate the basis for a more sustainable project to transform social relations. Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s incorporation into the global economy does not necessarily create a collective agency rooted in capitalist relations of wage labor. Instead, workers in Sri Lanka are losing jobs and income, which forces them to rely on other social relations, such as those rooted in food production, to survive. Even squatting and cultivating a small plot of land may be the difference between surviving or not. The type of resistance that emerges is not so much the forward march of a proletariat becoming self-conscious of its historical tasks within the development of capitalism. Rather, it flows into a bigger project required to break with the dominant financialized order by recognizing that it has become incapable of securing the basic conditions of working people’s survival, or social reproduction. Accordingly, we argue that more, not less, democracy – including both freedom for dissent and active participation in democratic institutions – is needed to transform the productive relations of a failing system. This broken order is being propped up by the tragicomic Wickremesinghe-Rajapaksa government, which is backed by guarantees of IMF funding. We distinguish ourselves from Marx (2001, pp. 143–144), however, when he argued that universal suffrage has exhausted its possibilities and must be displaced by revolution or reaction. Instead, the way we see it, in our own conjuncture, it is only through the ongoing struggle for democratic space – culminating in a change of both the political regime and the regime of accumulation – that people’s basic needs can be met. The irony is that it has been the extra-constitutional struggle, especially the July 9th popular uprising, that has kept alive the question of the way in which the people’s will is exercised through representative government.

REVISITING THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY The Image of Crisis The trajectory of relations between state and society, reflected in the changing dynamics of the political regime, brings us to our final question: what would it take to transform productive relations themselves in Sri Lanka? The hegemonic order, of course, is sustained through a regime of accumulation. Furthermore, to reiterate a point that we made above, the crisis in Sri Lanka cannot be thought

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outside the crisis of the global order. In contrast, many commentaries have focused on the specific dynamics of the country, especially the predatory role of the Bonapartist regime constructed by the Rajapaksa family. But there is an urgent need for understanding the way in which the economic breakdown intersects with the reconfiguration of neoliberal globalization. The ongoing crisis of neoliberalism is not simply a crisis of ideology. Instead, it reflects contradictions within material relationships that have once again come to the fore. But the way in which the crisis will be resolved is inevitably political. Accordingly, we cannot assume that it has a predetermined solution within economic relations alone. If, however, we think in terms of historical dynamics, there are clues in the past that could help us understand the gravity and depth of the transformation. Interpreting the past allows us to envision the scope of progressive possibilities, in addition to enabling us to anticipate the dangers of reaction. The first step is to frame Sri Lanka’s crisis in terms of the global conjuncture, and to ask about the ways in which the present breakdown compares with the past. Posing the question at a high level of abstraction, Arrighi (1978, p. 22) is a useful interlocutor, given his tentative yet generative analysis of the global economic crisis of the 1970s. The shift established the regime of accumulation that is now under tremendous strain because of today’s crisis. For Arrighi, the crisis of the 1970s presented challenging problems because it did not simply map onto the “image of crisis” derived from the Great Depression of the 1930s that had become entrenched in the popular imagination. Instead, Arrighi argued that the crisis of the 1970s revealed the consolidation of the working class within capitalism. The process led it to adopt a different approach to the one it had taken in response to the initial crises of global capitalism. These included one that lasted from 1873 to 1896, which was followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s (Arrighi, 1978, pp. 6, 15–16). According to Arrighi, the crisis of the late 19th century paved the way for the development of monopoly capital and interimperialist conflict, which eventually sparked the Great Depression. The collapse in working class demand provoked a crisis of realization for capital, or what Keynesian economics calls the collapse in aggregate demand. The difference between the solutions to the Great Depression and the late 19th century crisis was the fact that capital had consolidated to a much greater degree during the former. Accordingly, workers implicitly had a bigger role in shaping the eventual solution (Arrighi, 1978, pp. 6–9). This shift in the position of labor led to the emergence of the welfare state as one response. Nevertheless, the economic boom after World War II eventually developed into another crisis in the 1970s. Arrighi claimed that the crisis of the 1970s was based on the falling rate of profit rather than a crisis of realization. This indicated the far greater “collective strength of the working class” within Western countries (Arrighi, 1978, p. 15). The bargaining power of the working class induced capital to raise prices to protect profit margins. Nevertheless, Arrighi argued that even capital’s emerging strategy to decentralize production would only increase the strength of the working class in the periphery, without necessarily undermining labor in the core. The working class in advanced capitalist countries could accordingly demand a

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more far-reaching socialization of investment to counteract price increases, or the “need for workers’ control over social production” (Arrighi, 1978, p. 21). Labor Inside and Outside Capitalist Wage Relations In a postscript written several years after his initial draft, however, Arrighi implies that he had to some extent neglected the political dimension through which the working class could be hegemonized by capital, including the role of the “ethnic and cultural composition of the labor force.” This ended up producing an outcome far more favorable to capital (Arrighi, 1978, p. 24). Specifically, what we see implied in Arrighi, and which other critical authors such as Stuart Hall (1980) explicitly outlined, is that authoritarian populism provided a way of creating a popular base to attack the welfare state. The reaction, as Hall put it, involved “restoration/revolution” (p. 160), meaning the coalescing of political forces under the banner of an assault on “inefficient state bureaucracy” in places such as Great Britain (p. 177). This neoliberal counterrevolution in the 1970s and 1980s undid many of the postwar economic gains that ordinary people had achieved. In addition, the global dimension involved the spread of financialization. The process in the core countries, especially the West, came to signify the growing dependence of Western consumers on debt. In contrast, in the periphery, the economic tendency became one of wage repression. For many scholars, the East Asian developmental states such as South Korea and Taiwan nevertheless represented the most successful examples of what could be achieved through incorporation into the global economy.14 But we argue that exclusive focus on paradigmatic East Asian states – from Japan to South Korea to China – obscures the far more pervasive interplay of financialization and austerity that has shaped many other countries’ paths, especially in the periphery of the Global South, in places such as Sri Lanka. Having noted the authoritarian populist and financialized responses to the crisis of the 1970s, we can see where we must distinguish our own argument from Arrighi’s given the characteristics of today’s crisis of the 2020s. Arrighi thought that capital’s success in decentralizing production would enable the consolidation of working classes in the periphery. Or as he put it, “. . .the resistance and the obstacles to the decentralization of capitalist accumulation have largely been removed,” because of the completion of colonialism’s project of primitive accumulation, which supposedly destroyed the last nonmarket barriers (Arrighi, 1978, p. 15).

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Their success also required a critical form of state intervention, which the Bretton Woods institutions, the IMF and World Bank, downplayed. These institutions argued that surrendering control of policymaking to market-led forces would be sufficient to reap the gains of an expanding global market. The resulting debate spawned an entire critical literature on the developmental state (see, for example, Amsden, 1992; Johnson, 1982).

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But in contrast to Arrighi’s anticipation of the future conclusion of this process, in many countries such as Sri Lanka, wage repression in fact has been accompanied by deepening financialization. Accordingly, wages have not been enough to meet many households’ requirements for social reproduction. Important and highly visible segments of the working class indeed emerged in industries such as export garments over the long period of liberalization since the 1970s. But most people have continued to rely on residual elements of the welfare state along with activities in agriculture and the informal economy as well.15 In his own analysis of the crisis of the 1970s, Arrighi (1978, p. 7) originally proposed that capital’s consolidation narrowed the space for subsistence outside the market in the advanced capitalist countries in the run-up to the Great Depression. But we must contextualize this broad claim, which he made on a global scale. Instead, we must consider the degree to which working people’s politics in Sri Lanka, for example, very much depends on the persistent character of social reproduction of people’s livelihoods inside and outside the market mechanism. In addition, we must recognize the fact that capital has not invested in production in places such as Sri Lanka to the degree that was anticipated. Moreover, amid the ongoing economic breakdown, capital is now fleeing the country. It will likely continue to do so as patterns of trade are disrupted, while Central Banks around the world respond to shocks through further financial tightening. In the end, whatever investment flows back into the country is likely to raid public assets, rather than create a sustainable basis for domestic accumulation. The Alternative Realm of Production We come then to an awkward point in the trajectory of global capitalism. Many theorists of diverse political orientations have often assumed that capitalism will eventually incorporate populations from all around the world. Instead, our own question is what happens when Department I – the production of means of production – and Department II – the production of consumer commodities – become disarticulated to the extent that the latter includes many goods that have become out of reach of ordinary people? What do working people do if states in

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Here as well, it is interesting to note the debate over semi-proletarianization, sparked by Wallerstein’s argument that most of the global working population is not in fact fully able to survive on wages alone. Rodney went further by arguing that working people in Guyana have historically fought for proletarianization, to be able to meet more of their needs through the wage (see the summary in Wallerstein, 1986, p. 335). In our own understanding, however, we argue that by exploring the basis of an alternative realm of production, we may be better able to see this question not in terms of the dichotomous choice to be proletarian or not. Rather, this approach enables us to envision the possibility of creating other social forms, such as cooperatives. These could offer immediate relief to people during an economic crisis and, in the long run, facilitate resistance to capitalism as part of a wider movement.

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the Global South are unwilling to intervene to guarantee the social reproduction of their own populations?16

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Joseph Lim (1991), for example, argues that the work of Kalecki offers an entry point for thinking about the emergence of a distinction between Department II, based on luxury goods, and Department III, based on wage goods, due to the imposition of an extraverted model of accumulation on underdeveloped countries. Meanwhile, Amin (2013, pp. 37–38, 71–72) – from whom Lim borrows the distinction between extraverted and autocentric forms of development – argues that Department III is in fact the way in which capitalist overaccumulation is resolved. He points to spending, mostly public, but occasionally private, in large infrastructure, services such as health care and education, and so on. For Harvey (2017, pp. 86–87, 184), building on Amin, this reflects Department III’s role in engendering “anti-value.” It sucks up all the wealth that cannot be consumed due to the persistent stagnation of workers’ real wages despite the incredible growth in productive forces under capitalism. Regardless, for us, Department III refers to an implicit idea that there is an alternative realm of production that becomes more critical during moments of economic breakdown, such as the one occurring in Sri Lanka. In this case, capital flees the peripheral country, rather than investing in it. While Department III may be distinguished between this and the zone of anti-value that Amin and Harvey describe, the point for us is not necessarily to get caught up on the term. We remain focused on whether it answers the underlying problem originally theorized by Rosa Luxemburg, who revealed the ways in which capitalism necessarily relies on an “outside” for its own reproduction. This approach returns us to Harvey’s (2017, p. 222) point that Marxist theorizing must move beyond “early twentieth-century theoretical debates on capitalist imperialism,” to taking up a “value theoretic perspective” that distinguishes capitalism and the regimes capable of resisting it. Accordingly, our theorization is the flip side of Luxemburg’s argument, by pointing out the ways in which investment in Department III could become the basis for developing alternative productive relations – for example, domestic food production within the cooperative sector – that are neither reducible to “non-capitalist” social relations nor the classic model of relations between Departments I and II developed by Marx. The question remains whether the social forms embedded in this terrain, such as cooperatives, can indeed provide the basis for buffering the citizenry against economic depression. The extension of this inquiry could include whether Department III can also provide the basis for a revised understanding of development that sees the process not as a question of formalizing and expanding private property rights but strengthening cooperative association. That includes, for example, devising new mechanisms of credit that can facilitate accumulation by cooperatives while enabling them to resist subordination to the capitalist market and the persistent tendency for capital to raid this type of production. Indeed, as many, including Marx himself, have long noted, cooperatives do not embody a political solution on their own. They depend on the intervention of forces in the national conjuncture. Nevertheless, much greater analysis must be done to identify the scope for their expansion through an active strategy of state intervention and planning that guarantees the autonomy of these social forms to resist the inevitable counterattack by capital. Here, the formation of the People’s Bank in Sri Lanka, for example, as bank for the cooperatives – and built with cooperative funds – was easily reversed through a similar, top-down decree to transform it into a commercial bank instead. In contrast, it is the social form of the cooperative, and the ownership of working people over this institution, that, combined with an appropriate political strategy, provides the most secure basis on which to resist such moves.

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In Sri Lanka, for example, many people in villages may own cell phones. But during the current depression, the range of their consumption has been reduced to the barest means of subsistence. These are not necessarily obtained, for example, in retail outlets for mass consumption. Accordingly, we must uncover what we tentatively call Department III – the production of the means of subsistence – under conditions very different from the conventional logic of the market. That includes production for shorter supply chains and obtaining food and other essentials via alternative methods, such as cooperative stores and communal kitchens. The process implies what we have elsewhere referred to as relations of productive consumption, or the embedding of production within the horizon of consumption implied by the livelihood needs of working people. Further analysis will require examining gendered relations within the household and considering these as part of the domain of social reproduction explored by scholars such as Harriss-White (2012, p. 130), specifically, by theorizing the rural household as both a unit of production and consumption. Moreover, this question highlights the reproductive burden on women, which is essential for understanding the ways in which people are coping with everyday challenges from a lack of adequate schooling to child malnutrition (Kadirgamar, 2023). Meanwhile, the potential growth and expansion of cooperatives to rescue production in a moment of the collapse of the market in Sri Lanka offers clues as to how and where investment could be directed if a government committed to actual spending measures for relief were to eventually come into power. For example, by establishing a public distribution system comparable to the historic food subsidy. Ultimately, the transformation of the market does not occur on its own. It also requires an institutional framework in which to operate. The leverage different actors have – from private business to cooperatives – depends on the system of sanctions and incentives that are imposed by the state. Or as Traverso (2021, p. 66) puts it in response to the autonomist argument put forward by anti-globalization activists such as John Holloway, the “question of [state] power” has in fact proved “inescapable.” Accordingly, in proposing Sri Lanka’s cooperative system as an important method for managing the immediate crisis, we are inevitably thrust back into the political question, specifically, the dynamics between state and regime. Our horizon is the one created by the people’s movement in Sri Lanka. Marx (2019, p. 764) made a similar point long ago when, as he put it in his Inaugural Address to the First International in 1864, “. . .Cooperative labor, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen [sic], will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses. . ..” He argued instead that, “To save the industrious masses, cooperative labor ought to developed to national dimensions, and, consequently, to be fostered by national means” (p. 764). The political question returns us to the broader interpretive framework, and the way in which the national dimension is inserted into a global dimension. Arrighi was one of the boldest interpreters of the vast historical canvass during the last major global crisis of the 1970s. He offered a schematic understanding of the shifts in the global order. While considering the breadth of his perspective, we must nevertheless change methodological tack when approaching the current crisis in Sri Lanka. We must work within the interstices to identify the real

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possibility of breakthroughs, or anti-systemic alternatives. By mediating between the global and national moment, we can observe the way in which the ongoing struggle in Sri Lanka offers one of the clearest possibilities for the emergence of an alternative, that is, if we think carefully and patiently through its implications.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS Will the Revolt Become a Revolution? The upshot is that a core tension has been revealed in Sri Lanka’s crisis. The country is undergoing massive changes because of the breakdown of the system, specifically, financialization. It has had a devastating impact on people’s living standards. The process may result in even more extreme dispossession over an uncertain period, what economists call in haunting terms a “lost decade.” But because Sri Lanka is in a geographic region with an inescapable hegemonic power – India – it may appear as if revolution is outright impossible because of the possible scope for external intervention. This feeds into the endless stream of analyses that seek to frame the country’s politics in terms of different geopolitical rivalries. In contrast, and in summarizing our argument above, we argue that the real problem is not that Sri Lanka is cut off solely in a physical sense. Rather, it is isolated in a far deeper ideological sense from the rest of the world. Up to this point, there have been few attempts to outline a unifying, imaginative geography in which a “Sri Lankan revolution” could be theorized. This absence contrasts with more recent waves of struggle and subsequent repression such as the Arab Spring, which have come to be interpreted on a global scale (for example, see Badiou, 2012). Nevertheless, there are clear ways in which international forces continue to insinuate themselves into the reproduction of Sri Lanka’s political and economic order, and which will provoke questions about the global political economy relevant to other places facing similar challenges. No less than in May 2022, for example, the United States among others declared their official support for the appointment of Ranil Wickremesinghe as Prime Minister, despite his alarming lack of legitimacy.17 In this regard, empire still sees the example of protest in Sri Lanka as a threat. Regardless of whether other countries identify traces of their own experience in the ongoing struggles in Sri Lanka, clearly there is a possibility of comprehending the revolt in Sri Lanka as the first shot in a potentially wider battle. That struggle consists in a movement that, even if it has yet to exist in practice, we must imagine as one that could overturn the entire system of financialization. The neoliberal process led to the renewed subordination of many countries in the Southern periphery from the 1970s onward. It has now reached its culmination in 17

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the case of Sri Lanka. The question is what will replace it, a reactionary or a progressive alternative? Before Sri Lanka’s struggles can acquire a revolutionary dimension, the progressive forces that consolidate within the space opened by the people’s movement must first articulate a clearer sense of the possibility of overturning the neoliberal financialized system. They must do so by clarifying their own world historical role. The limits of the people’s movement in Sri Lanka, then, become the limits of its imagination. We have argued that there is a deeper possibility to uncover an entire new category by which to understand working people’s experience – Department III. It is incumbent on the movement that consolidates to articulate its universal implications. That means transcending its narrow origins in the revolt that met its initial conclusion in the July 9th uprising (on the distinction between revolt and revolution, see also Traverso, 2021, pp. 34–35). If that occurs, Sri Lanka could become a platform for the wider international struggle to develop pluralistic alternatives to neoliberal financialization. This process could encompass the diverse social forms with their own histories that could become resources for resistance. In the past, these have been grouped under the rubric of the commons (for one interpretation in terms of the creative work of Mari´ategui’s efforts to rediscover Andean forms of communal organization, see also Gonzalez, 2019, pp. 112–113). These collective efforts must be further conceived in terms of their interrelated attack on the system of financialization that has become a target of struggle. Accordingly, the difference between today’s global moment and previous iterations such as the anti-globalization movement – or even the recent episodes of default that provoked major upheaval in countries such as Argentina and Greece – is the degree to which Sri Lanka’s breakdown has made visible the fault lines of the global order with respect to the Southern periphery. This is apparent in much of the popular commentary that fixates on whether Sri Lanka is a forerunner of other possible post-pandemic defaults. We turn our perspective inward by articulating this possibility in terms of the potential transformation of social relations. That requires grasping the historical trajectory of relations between state and regime in Sri Lanka and drawing out the relevant implications for today’s struggles. The Political Horizon We take a theoretical risk by asserting that self-sufficiency – specified in terms of the development of alternative economic relations within what we are calling Department III – in fact represents the most proximate horizon of a far deeper transformation of the global order that could take place. This is not to say that Sri Lanka, or the global order in general for that matter, cannot head in a different and far more regressive, and even fascistic, direction. But we would argue that the breakdown of the regime in Sri Lanka also forces open the question of multilinear trajectories for development that have remained

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underexplored. They can only be revealed through historical reinterpretation and experimentation. Musto (2020, p. 66), for example, argues that “In 1881, after three decades of profound theoretical research and careful observation of changes in international politics, not to speak of his massive synopses in The Ethnological Notebooks, [Marx] had quite a different view of the transition from past communal forms to capitalism.” In our own work, we have attempted to show the ways in which the ongoing struggles in Sri Lanka in fact could be interpreted as an example within a nonlinear yet universal history. This approach could enable us to develop an analytical framework for comparison. At the same time, we are careful in recognizing that by applying these questions to other places, they necessarily reveal historically specific forms through which the question of social relations as revealed in Department III is operationalized in practice. Whether they are cooperatives, communes, village associations, workers’ councils, Soviets, or other social forms depends on the conjunction of territory and circumstance. Nevertheless, we attempt not only to construct a framework for analytic interpretation but to assert that the current global conjuncture is also refracted through Sri Lanka in ways that reveal the limits of the financialized order. That includes the inability of Southern countries on the periphery to overcome the crisis through existing hegemonic methods, namely, austerity imposed through an IMF-led bailout mechanism. To the extent, for example, that many have compared the current economic crisis in Sri Lanka to past ones such as those of the 1930s and 1970s, we see the potential value in identifying these similarities and recognizing the limitations of the political responses to those moments. That includes the ways in which a solution to today’s crisis must now push further than, for example, the left that grappled with the crisis of the intermediate regime in the 1970s. The concatenation of challenges means that we confront a 1930s-style breakdown in Sri Lanka while now being able to interpret it through the widened lens of social struggles revealed in the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, especially the increased visibility of working people’s politics. This linkage creates the possibility of synthesis in imagining a new global order in which the struggles of working people make visible the question of social reproduction as a point of departure for transforming relations between state and society. The long-term goal would be to create a new progressive bloc on an international level that cuts across geographic regions, much like the one that underpinned the initial formulation of the NIEO in the 1970s. Such a bloc of debtor countries, for example, could demand both policy autonomy to pursue goals on behalf of their working people and to constrain the aggressive maneuvering of powerful states. Meanwhile, to resolve the economic crisis in Sri Lanka requires a dramatic transformation of social relations, especially in what we have sketched in terms of Department III. That involves not only increased state investment as such. It further entails a deeper critique of the vision of the failed ruling class and its inadequate appeal to internationalized solutions such as the IMF. To the extent

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that the political dynamics and possible scenarios involving the reconfiguration of political parties remain unclear, we are agnostic about the ultimate resolution of the crisis in Sri Lanka. But given the dramatic collapse of the Sri Lankan regime – defined both as political and in terms of accumulation – much more needs to be done to clarify the historical tendency toward self-sufficiency. We must frame the task in terms of the democratic transformation of the relationship between state and society. We may not be able to assert with the same confidence as Marx did in the Class Struggles in France that this process will ultimately lead to political conquest by revolutionary forces and the creation of a communist society. That would imply a whole set of interrelated strategic questions, which requires a much deeper rethinking of the question of capturing state power. But we can reflect on and compare with the examples that have emerged in similar political openings throughout Sri Lanka’s history, and the need to transcend their limitations. Working people’s resistance to the Bonapartist regime of the Rajapaksas could end up transcending the model of the intermediate regime that emerged in the aftermath of the Great Hartal of 1953. The July 9th uprising has opened an entirely new vista that we must draw out and explore in all its richest implications. It is with this task in mind that we pose our hypotheses, both as elements of analysis but also as provocations to those who wish to produce, rather than assume the radical subjectivity that can transform the decaying social order. Above all, that means reaching for new possibilities through a deeper conceptualization of working people’s struggles and the economic terrain on which they operate. Though the concepts reflected in the analysis that we provide appear abstract, we offer them as part of the theorization necessary for identifying the historical and contemporary dynamics of the people’s movement in Sri Lanka. We do so in the hope that this dialectic may further enable progressive forces to overcome the political blockages of the current moment. This task is even more urgent because of the unravelling of the global order and the overwhelming need to envision a horizon of alternatives.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We wish to thank Kanishka Goonewardena and Kristin Plys for their generous feedback and comments, along with the editors and staff of Political Power and Social Theory for their assistance with publication.

REFERENCES Abeysekera, C. (1979, November 15). Insurgency ’71. Two new studies (3): JVP’s ideological roots. Lanka Guardian. Amin, S. (2010/1978). The law of worldwide value (2nd ed.). Monthly Review Press. Amin, S. (2013). Three essays on Marx’s value theory. Monthly Review Press. Amsden, A. H. (1992). Asia’s next giant: South Korea and late industrialization (Revised ed.). Oxford University Press.

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Arrighi, G. (1978). Towards a theory of capitalist crisis. New Left Review, 3–24. Arrighi, G. (2010/1994). The long twentieth century: Money, power and the origins of our times (Updated ed.). Verso. Badiou, A. (2012). The rebirth of history: Times of riots and uprisings (Trans. Gregory Elliott). Verso. Balibar, E. (1977). On the dictatorship of the proletariat. NLB. Baqir, R., Diwan, I., & Rodrik, D. (2023). A framework to evaluate economic adjustment-cum-debt restructuring packages. Bonizzi, B. (2013). Financialization in developing and emerging countries. International Journal of Political Economy, 42(4), 83–107. Brenner, R. (2006). The economics of global turbulence: The advanced capitalist economies from long boom to long downturn, 1945-2005. Verso. Colpani, G. (2022). Two theories of hegemony: Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau in conversation. Political Theory, 50(2), 221–246. Davis, M. (2022). Thanatos Triumphant. Sidecar (New Left Review). https://newleftreview.org/ sidecar/posts/thanatos-triumphant. Accessed on May 25, 2023. Eley, G. (2002). Forging democracy: The history of the left in Europe, 1850–2000. Oxford University Press. Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia. Federici, S. (2012/2008). The reproduction of labor power in the global economy and the unfinished feminist revolution. In Revolution at point zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle (pp. 91–111). PM Press. Fine, B. (2013). Financialization from a Marxist perspective. International Journal of Political Economy, 42(4), 47–66. Gonzalez, M. (2019). In the red corner: The Marxism of Jos´e Carlos Mari´ategui. Haymarket Books. Gunasinghe, N. (1996). A sociological comment on the political transformations in Sri Lanka in 1956 and the resultant socio-political processes. In Newton Gunasinghe – Selected essays (pp. 217–235). Social Scientists’ Association. Gunawardena, D., & Kadirgamar, A. (2021). Crisis and self-sufficiency: The left and its challenges during the long 1960s in Sri Lanka. International Quarterly for Asian Studies, 52(3–4), 253–282. Hall, S. (1980). Popular-democratic vs authoritarian populism: Two ways of “taking democracy seriously”. In A. Hunt (Ed.), Marxism and democracy (pp. 157–185). Lawrence and Wishart. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2005). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire (Reprint ed.). Penguin Books. Harriss-White, B. (2012). Capitalism and the common man: Peasants and petty production in Africa and South Asia. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1(2), 109–160. Harvey, D. (2005). The new imperialism (Revised ed.). Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2017). Marx, capital, and the madness of economic reason. Oxford University Press. Herring, R. J. (1987). Economic liberalization policies in Sri Lanka: International pressures, constraints and supports. Economic and Political Weekly, 22(8), 325–333. Jayasekera, P. V. J., & Amerasinghe, Y. R. (1987). The economy, society, and polity from independence to 1977. In D. M. Dunham & C. Abeysekera (Eds.), Essays on the Sri Lankan open economy, 1977–83 (pp. 25–53). Social Scientists’ Association. Johnson, C. A. (1982). MITI and the Japanese miracle: The growth of industrial policy, 1925–1975. Stanford University Press. Kadirgamar, A. (2013). Second wave of neoliberalism: Financialization and crisis in post-war Sri Lanka. Economic and Political Weekly, 48(35), 7–8. Kadirgamar, N. (2023). How the economic crisis hit “home” for Sri Lanka. RESURJ. https://resurj. org/reflection/how-the-economic-crisis-hit-home-for-sri-lanka/. Accessed on May 25, 2023. Lim, J. Y. (1991). A Kaleckian three-sector model for third world countries. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 21(1), 3–12. Lipietz, A. (1988). Accumulation, crises, and ways out. International Journal of Political Economy, 18(2), 10–43. Luxemburg, R. (2003/1913). The accumulation of capital (Trans. Agnes Schwarzschild). Routledge Classics. Routledge.

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Martin, J. (2022). The meddlers: Sovereignty, empire, and the birth of global economic governance. Harvard University Press. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2008). The communist manifesto. Oxford University Press eBooks. Marx, K. (2001/1850). The class struggles in France, 1848–1850. The Electric Book Company. Marx, K. (2019). The political writings (Edited by David Fernbach). Verso. Mies, M. (2014/1986). Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale: Women in the international division of labour (Reprint ed.). Zed Books. Musto, M. (2020). The last years of Karl Marx: An intellectual biography (Trans. Patrick Camiller). Stanford University Press. Plys, K. (2021). Theorizing capitalist imperialism for an anti-imperialist praxis: Towards a Rodneyan world-systems analysis. Journal of World-Systems Research, 27(1), 288–313. Poulantzas, N. (1975). Political power and social classes. Verso Books. Ruggie, J. (1982). International regimes, transactions, and change: Embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order. International Organization, 36(2), 379–415. Sanyal, K. (2013). Rethinking capitalist development: Primitive accumulation, governmentality and post-colonial capitalism. Routledge India. Shastri, A. (1983). The political economy of intermediate regimes: The case of Sri Lanka 1956–1970. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 3(2), 1–14. Shattuck, A., Grajales, J., Jacobs, R., Sauer, S., Galvin, S. S., & Hall, R. (2023). Life on the land: New lives for Agrarian questions. Journal of Peasant Studies, 50(2), 490–518. Shivji, I. G. (2017). The concept of “working people”. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 6(1), 1–13. Silva, S. B. D. de. (2013/1982). The political economy of underdevelopment (Paperback ed.). Routledge. Silver, B. J. (2003). Forces of labor: Workers’ movements and globalization since 1870. Cambridge University Press. Therborn, G. (2008/1978). What does the ruling class do when it rules? In State apparatuses and state power under feudalism, capitalism and socialism. Verso. Traverso, E. (2021). Revolution: An intellectual history. Brooklyn: Verso. Wallerstein, I. (1986). Walter Rodney: The historian as spokesman for historical forces. American Ethnologist, 13(2), 330–337. Wallerstein, I. (2011/1983). Historical capitalism with capitalist civilization (3rd ed.). Verso. Zeilig, L. (2022). A revolutionary for our time: The Walter Rodney story. Haymarket Books.

CHAPTER 8

ANTI-COLONIAL MARXISM IN FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE INDIA COMPARED: VARADARAJULU SUBBIAH AND AQUINO DE BRAGANÇA’S THEORIES OF COLONIAL INDEPENDENCE Kristin Plys University of Toronto, Canada

ABSTRACT This essay examines how two Marxist anti-colonial intellectuals from Portuguese India and French India – Aquino de Bragança and V Subbiah – differentially theorized movements for independence from colonial rule. Through the analysis of primary source documents in French, Portuguese, Italian and English, I compare V Subbiah’s Dalit, anti-fascist anti-colonial Marxism to Aquino de Bragança’s internationalist anti-colonial Marxism. Both theorists’ approaches have similarities in (1) theorizing the relationship between fascism and colonialism given that the Portuguese Empire was administered by Salazar’s Estado Novo and the French Empire was under Vichy rule, (2) rethinking Marxism to better fit the Global South context and (3) intellectual and political connections to Algeria were critically important for theory and praxis. Despite the distinct geographic and social spaces in which they lived and worked, both produced remarkably similar theories of anti-imperialism. Keywords: Pan-Africanism; French Empire; Portuguese Empire; comparative empires; anti-colonialism; anti-fascism; class struggle; class-caste struggle; armed struggle Marxist Thought in South Asia Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 40, 153–179 Copyright © 2024 Kristin Plys Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-871920230000040009

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In the South Asian context, little attention has been given to the Dutch, Oldenberg, Portuguese and French Empires compared to the British Raj. Certainly, the British Empire held most of the territory of South Asia and wielded the greatest political power, but through comparing empires, we gain important insights into the nature of political power and modernity (Go, 2011, p. 13). In our relative neglect of the trajectories of Dutch, Oldenberg, Portuguese and French holdings in South Asia, valuable insights into the multiple colonial inheritances of South Asia are left largely unacknowledged. The comparative sociology of empire impresses us with the need to examine multiple imperial trajectories, but tends to focus on the administration of political power from metropole to colony (Adams, 1996; Go, 2011; Steinmetz, 2007) to better understand the nature of modernity. Because, as comparative sociology of empire illuminates, there are important differences in political formation among Empires, these variations also beget different anti-colonial strategies for movements against Empire. Much important work has been done by historians to recover the agency of the anti-imperialist left of British India (Acharya, 2019; Loomba, 2019; Moffat, 2019; Ramnath, 2011; Raza, 2020), but the lives of anti-imperialist leftists residing in South Asia’s other European empires along with their unique theoretical and practical contributions to national independence are far less commemorated. My task in this essay is to bring together (and build on) scholarship in historical sociology of empire along with recent scholarship by historians tracing the South Asian anti-imperialist left to analyze how various imperial political formations and linkages engendered different anti-colonial strategies to foment movements for national liberation, which in turn, led to different opportunities to decolonize after independence. To levy this comparison, I compare the theories and praxis of two anti-colonial Marxists; Aquino de Bragança and Varadarajulu Kailasa Subbiah. V Subbiah, born in Pondicherry City in 1911, was Secretary of the Parti Communiste de l’Inde Française (PCIF), Secretary of the Pondicherry branch of the All-India Harijan Seva Sangh, and credited with founding the trade union movement of French India. Aquino de Bragança, born in Bardez, Goa in 1924, became a key strategist for the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO), Mozambique’s Marxist-Leninist movement for independence from Portugal. While both theorists were key strategists for movements that successfully won colonial independence, FRELIMO was more successful than the PCIF in its post-independence efforts to decolonize. When FRELIMO won independence from Portugal in 1975, it undertook extensive programmes to decolonize Mozambique’s economy, state and society and implement anti-colonial socialism. French India, in contrast, was granted voting rights in 1948, became independent from France in 1962, and then was incorporated into the Indian State in 1963.1

1

The timeline to independence and incorporation is a bit different, however, for the former French Indian territory, Chandernagore.

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The PCIF never had an opportunity to implement reforms that would truly decolonize economy, state and society. This variation in outcomes prompts the question of why Aquino de Bragança’s anti-colonial praxis was more effective in crafting anti-colonial strategies after independence compared to V Subbiah’s? This question is even more puzzling given their commonalities. Both became Marxists after their disillusionment with the Gandhian Freedom Struggle, and both were well attuned to thinking about the larger imperial context in which they were situated, yet FRELIMO was more successful in its aims for anti-colonial praxis compared to the PCIF. I begin by providing some historical context on the French and Portuguese Empires in India. I then detail the biography and theoretical perspective of V Subbiah, emphasizing his Dalit, anti-fascist, anti-colonial Marxism. I then recount Aquino de Bragança’s biographical trajectory and his theories of internationalist anti-colonial Marxism. I then compare these two theoretical perspectives and draw some conclusions about their continued relevance.

ˆ DA PORTUGUESE INDIA (ESTADO PORTUGUES ´I NDIA), 1505–1974 Portugal was both the first and last modern European empire. Portugal was first to colonize Africa in the 15th century and the last to leave in 1975. Historiography of the Portuguese Empire, however, has long been plagued by ‘Lustian specificity’ (Gupta, 2007, p. 96) emphasizing Portugal’s strategy of acquiring port cities across Asia, Africa and the Americas as part of a unique maritime-oriented approach to colonizing. This historiography largely dismisses the Portuguese Empire as an outdated approach to colonialism by the 17th century, but this critique fails to account for the Portuguese Empire’s longevity in Africa (until 1975) and Asia (until 1999) when compared to the French (in Africa until 1962 and in Asia until 1954) and British Empires (in Africa until 1968 and in Asia until 1984). Portuguese India was initially conquered by Vasco de Gama in order to provide the Portuguese Empire with an entry point into South Asian trade and as a way of connecting Portugal’s trade routes through the South China Sea with those in the Indian Ocean (Gonçalves, 2003, p. 56). Because of its role as a key port within Portuguese Afro-Asian trade routes, by the 16th century, the Goan economy was intimately linked with that of Mozambique. The Portuguese trade route for wood, coffee, tea, spices and cinnamon began in Goa, stopped in Mozambique and ended in Lisbon. From 1560 on, Goans migrated to Maputo to participate in these trade routes as merchants and colonial administrators (Gupta, 2007, pp. 102–103). Multiple migration waves from Goa to Mozambique and ties through intra-Empire trade created a unique and close relationship between the two territories. ´ In 1932, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar established Europe’s longest lasting dictatorship, the Estado Novo. One of Salazar’s main preoccupations was securing the positions of Mozambique and Angola as the largest colonies within the Portuguese Empire. His imperial strategy was not only instrumental in his rise

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to political power, but also was the cornerstone of his fiscal strategy to have Portuguese holdings in Sub-Saharan Africa fund the Estado Novo, particularly through the exploitation of comparatively cheap African labour (Gallagher, 2020, pp. 40–42). The ideological justification for the Portuguese Empire cohered around the concept of Lusotropicalism, coined by the Salazarist Brazilian anthropologist, Gilberto Freyre (Pearson, 1987, p. 102). Lusotropicalism was a one nation theory that Portugal’s overseas holdings were part of a singular Portuguese nation united by language, culture and religion. Through this unitary culture, along with fluid racial categorizations and multiracialism, Lusotropicalism made no distinction or hierarchy between colonizer and colonized within the Portuguese Empire under Salazar (Gupta, 2007, p. 100). Salazar used the concept of Lusotropicalism to push back against Jawaharlal Nehru’s attempts in the late 1940s and through the 1950s to incorporate Goa into the independent state of India. Salazar said, ‘geographically Goa is Indian’, but ‘socially, religiously and culturally it is European’ (Salazar quoted in Gonçalves, 2003, p. 56). Salazar also evoked two treaties between Portugal and Britain, one signed in 1661 and the other in 1899, committing Britain to help Portugal defend its imperial holdings in India thereby enlisting British support to prevent Nehru from seizing Goa (Gallagher, 2020, p. 175). However, Britain refused to honour these treaties. Instead, Salazar leaned into Lusotropicalism as ‘a new type of civilization had originated thanks to the voyages of discovery which the Portuguese had embarked upon in the 16th century. It was a symbiotic one merging European and tropical cultures’ (Gallagher, 2020, pp. 176–177). Or as Aquino de Bragança and Immanuel Wallerstein (1982) sarcastically defined it, ‘a beautiful web of theory called, lusotropicalism, which argued that the Portuguese civilization was specially and magically non-racial’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V1, 1982, p. 138). The reality of Lusotropicalism in Goa, however, was distinct from Salazar’s rhetoric. In 1960, only 5% of Goans were fluent in Portuguese because it was widely seen as a useless language that would limit one’s job and migration opportunities (de Souza, 1997, p. 377). One-third of this 5% of Goans who were fluent in Portuguese were sex workers who catered to tourists, other common professions of Goans who were fluent in Portuguese included landed elites who levied their fluency in Portuguese as cultural capital, and historians and archivists who worked with Portuguese colonial records. One could make a better case for unified religion, as conversion to Catholicism was prevalent in Goa, but many ´ Goans nonetheless remained Hindu. Teotonio de Souza (1997) contends that the concept of Lusotropicalism was propaganda of the dictatorship meant to pacify anti-colonial movements across the Portuguese Empire, and then after independence, used to maintain Portuguese market access to former African and Asian colonies. However, across Portugal’s Asian colonies in particular, there was never significant Portuguese cultural penetration, de Souza posits (de Souza, 1997, p. 383). While Salazar was not successful in widely promoting Portuguese language and culture in Portuguese India, the Portuguese Empire under Salazar did successfully build a reputation for the most authoritarian and brutally repressive empire within early 20th century South Asia (Namakkal, 2017, p. 346). A significant node of opposition to Portuguese rule in Goa was through East African networks that had been established for centuries through trade and Empire (Frenz, 2014, p. 250). These trans-national and trans-imperial connections played

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an important role in Goan independence from Portugal in 1961.2 Lusophone African resistance to Empire was similarly important in contributing to the end of Salazar’s reign in 1974. Strike waves in Angola and Mozambique were a decisive factor in the Carnation Revolution which overthrew the Estado Novo’s decades of authoritarian rule (Varela, 2019, p. 55).

´ FRENCH INDIA (ETABLISSEMENTS FRANÇAIS DE L’INDE), 1664–1954 French India consisted of several non-contiguous territories across what is today, India; Chandernagore in Bengal, Yanam in Andhra Pradesh, Mah´e in Kerala, along with Karaikal and Pondicherry. By World War I, Pondicherry had established itself a major centre of global textile production within the French Empire (Sridharan, 1997, p. 607). Most of those who laboured in Pondicherry’s textile mills were Dalit (Sridharan, 1997, p. 608). In the 1910s and 1920s Pondicherry workers were known across South India to be so docile that they were often brought in as scabs in order to break strikes in Madras where labour was far more militant (Veeraraghavan, 2013, p. 67). But after the start of the Great Depression in 1929, inspired by the founding of the Madras Labour Union in 1919 (Jha, 1970, p. 89; Ramanujam, 1986, p. 14; Rao, 1939, p. 181; S. Sen, 1997, pp. 130–132) and the All India Trade Union Congress in 1922, workers in Pondicherry textile mills engaged in sporadic wildcat strikes (Sridharan, 1997, p. 608). In 1934, the first trade union in Pondicherry was established when V Subbiah founded and became Secretary of the Pondicherry branch of the All India Harijan Sevak Sangh (Sridharan, 1997, p. 609). On 22 June 1940, the Franco-German Armistice allowed France to retain its colonial empire, but created a collaborationist regime aligned with Nazi Germany (Veugelers, 2020, p. 89). France’s colonies were of strategic importance to the Third Reich, supplying essential commodities and cultivating French reliance on the German economy (Jennings, 2001, p. 16). Across the empire, Vichy authorities established penal, labour and internment camps for Jewish and other refugees from Axis Europe, Allied Prisoners of War, Jews of the colonies and others (Boum & Bejan, 2018).3 In 1940, French citizenship was revoked from Jews across the empire, and in Algiers, September 1940 was marked by what has been called ‘little Kristallnacht’ (Gildea, 2015, p. 244). Jews living in France with origins in the colonies were deported to Nazi camps in North Africa (Boum & Bejan, 2018). Communists in French colonies were persecuted as well. Their organizations were destroyed, and Communist leaders were imprisoned (Gildea, 2015, p. 244). In 1941, the Second Jewish Statute barred Jews in the colonies from 2

The rest of Portuguese India, Damão and Diu, became independent and were incorporated into India in 1974. 3 Camps in Tunisia were an exception among France’s African colonies as they were administered, not just by Vichy France but also directly administered by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy (Laskier, 1994, p. 73).

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working in finance, and from becoming members of the professional class, including medicine, law, architecture and the professoriate (Laskier, 1994, p. 72). While the Jewish population of French India was not nearly as large as elsewhere in the French Empire, such as in North Africa for example, there were communities of Paradesi Jews across the former Deccan Sultanates who had fled the Iberian Peninsula after the Alhambra Decree of 1492 which expelled Muslims and Jews from Spain and Portugal.4 However, the brutality of Vichy rule was not solely borne by Jews and Communists, though they were the primary targets of the Vichy state. While it is now practically a clich´e to point out that ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ did not apply to the colonies, the French Empire under Vichy rule was, ‘avowedly anti-universalistic and anti-assimilationist’ (Jennings, 2001, p. 4). The politics of Vichy France resulted in increased political repression for all colonial subjects Empire-wide.

VARADARAJULU KAILASA SUBBIAH (1911–1993) V Subbiah was born a Brahmin in Pondicherry City in 1911. His mother tongue was Telugu, which was not commonly spoken in Pondicherry. Observers noted that he was reluctant to give speeches because he was insecure about his speaking abilities in English and Tamil. He attended French schools in Pondicherry where he was ‘branded an arch-agitator’ for organizing students and workers against French colonialism (Namakkal, 2021, p. 56). As a student, both the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the Gandhian Freedom Movement made a strong impression on a school-aged Subbiah. When he was a university student in Madras, he participated in the Satyagraha Movement and upon his return to Pondicherry in 1930, became an active member of the French India Youth League, an anti-imperialist organization (Subbiah, 1990, p. 24). Subbiah became a Communist after meeting Dada Amir Hyder Khan, a Rawalpindi Communist who travelled to South India in the early 1930s while he was underground in order to avoid arrest in the Meerut Conspiracy Case (SN Sen, 2012, p. 259; Sridharan, 1997, p. 609). Khan disguised himself as a North Indian Brahmin named Shanker in order to evade detection while continuing to organize the trade union movement (Khan, 2007, p. 737; Subbiah, 1990, p. 44). On Pondicherry’s freedom struggle, Khan wrote, ‘Though the place had been under French jurisdiction, but I considered it as a part of India. . . I am against any European jurisdiction anywhere in Asia. As for Pondicherry, it is a part of India the same way as the Portuguese Goa’ (Khan, 2007, p. 738). Even though underground, Khan took efforts to meet leftists in Madras Presidency and Pondicherry to help build the Indian Communist movement in the south. Khan reflected, ‘After all, I was an outsider and absconding from arrest. I did not expect to stay safely in South India for a long time. I wanted to get trained some suitable cadres who could in their own region organize the working class and build up a strong communist organization’ (Khan, 2007, p. 739). 4

There were also small communities of Dalit converts to Judaism in Andhra Pradesh and Kerala (See Egorova & Perwez, 2013; Katz, 2000).

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Labour historian, Sukomal Sen, has stressed that the accused in the Meerut Conspiracy Case became incredibly active in building the trade union and communist movements across South Asia (Sen, 1997, p. 305; see also Loomba, 2019, p. 96; JP Narayan Papers I & II File no. 39, NMML). Subbiah recalled meeting with Khan, just days before Khan’s arrest, to discuss organizing a Communist Party of Madras Presidency. Khan introduced Subbiah to a Marxist study group based in Madras through which Subbiah read The Communist Manifesto, John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, Maxim Gorky and other Marxist theory. Subbiah credits this group with opening him up to a more internationalist outlook. Subbiah recalled that, I was regularly getting from this Marxist study group international correspondence which dealt with the activities of the Communist parties in various countries in the world and the problems that they faced in those countries in building the revolutionary movement. These contacts, in this period, with the leaders of the revolutionary movement in the country, the political literature which I studied and my constant meeting ever since with groups of revolutionaries in Madras, went a long way to shape my concept in favour of Marxian political ideology. This was a turning point in my political life from Gandhian ideology to that of Marxism and Leninism. (Subbiah, 1990, p. 45)

These exchanges with Khan and his comrades inspired Subbiah to organize Dalit workers in Pondicherry. In 1934, Subbiah founded and became Secretary of the Pondicherry branch of the All India Harijan Sevak Sangh (Sridharan, 1997, p. 609), an India-wide Dalit trade union organization. In his memoirs, he wrote that organizing Dalit workers as a Brahmin was an eye-opening experience for him, The miserable and appalling conditions to which a considerable section of our society was subjected, was not only shocking and deeply revealing to me but also provoked my thoughts to examine deeply the basic economic cause for this state of affairs. . . The agricultural labour was a slave labour under conditions of the old feudal order of that epoch and as such, were treated like serfs in a most inhuman condition. It was still more abhorrent to note that the textile labour was paid a famine wage, even less than that of agricultural labour. (Subbiah, 1990, p. 36)

Subbiah’s first major action was to organize a textile workers’ strike in Savana Mills in 1935 in order to demand a wage increase, reduction of the working day and abolition of child labour (Sridharan, 1997, p. 610). During this strike, Subbiah formed contacts with the Conf´ed´eration G´en´erale du Travail (CGT), who was in the midst of organizing working class coalitions against Fascist organizations infiltrating France. Subbiah credited this exchange with not only helping him to strategize on how to organize the mill strike but also impressed upon him the latent strength of the working class in fighting Fascism (Subbiah, 1990, p. 48).5 The strike was ultimately successful, with Savana Mills conceding to all demands. 5

A 1937 pamphlet of the Communist Party of India (Undivided) provides an analysis of the CGT and the lessons trade unions in South Asia can learn from its strike actions against ‘the Fascist insurgents’. The pamphlet states, ‘The lesson which we Communists and militant trade unionists in India must learn from our comrades in France is this: that Trade Union Unity cannot be patched up round the negotiations table but will be forged in innumerable United Front Struggles in the factories and the streets’ (JP Narayan Papers I & II file no. 39, NMML).

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In 1936, Subbiah led sit-down strikes at all of Pondicherry’s major textile mills – Savana, Gabele and Rodier – to win legal recognition for trade unions within French India. The larger structural conditions seemed ripe for such a struggle given that the newly elected French Prime Minister, L´eon Blum, had recently formed a cabinet under the Front Populaire, a Socialist and Communist alliance built on working class support. But after 84 days of striking, colonial military police began to open fire on striking workers in the Pondicherry mills. Seven to twelve workers were shot and killed (Sridharan, 1997, p. 610) and 120 were critically wounded (Subbiah, 1990, p. xvii). Subbiah recounted in his memoirs that, . . .on 30th July 1936 morning, French Imperialism set its armed forces with machine-guns to shoot at the workers, who fought heroically against this aggressive action of the French Government when a textile worker called Abdul Majeed standing at the terrace of the Mill building holding in his left hand a red flag with sickle and hammer and with his right hand throwing steel and iron material machine parts at the Army Corps. At that time a bullet of the machine gun pierced his left leg causing profuse bleeding. Abdul Majeed after a few minutes fell down holding the red flag in his left hand. (Subbiah, 1990, pp. xvi–xvii)

When news of the strike, and the violence of the colonial state against striking workers, travelled back to France, Socialist and Communist Parties pressured the Blum Cabinet to compel the Governor of Pondicherry to begin negotiations with the union. Soon thereafter, Subbiah had won key changes to French Indian labour laws including an eight hour work day with overtime for work beyond eight hours, pensions for retirees, paid medical treatment for accidents occurring on the job, five months of fully paid maternity leave and guaranteed employment for the children of workers who were killed on the job (Sridharan, 1997, p. 611). These new labour laws offered far more protections to the working classes compared to the labour laws of British India. However, conditions changed dramatically when Hitler seized Paris in 1940. Subbiah describes this moment as a ‘green signal to the Governors in colonial countries of France to adopt a policy of brutal repression’ (Subbiah, 1990, p. 188). Public meetings were banned, press censorship on all leaflets and periodicals was enacted, and May Day celebrations were banned. French officials recruited loyalist vigilantes to assist the French Armed Forces in attacking anti-colonial nationalists and when a demonstration against the vigilante violence began to form in front of the Muthialpet Police Station, French police opened fire on the peaceful demonstrators, killing two students (Subbiah, 1990, p. 190). Public libraries, cultural centres and leftist newspaper offices were looted and closed and leaders of left, trade union and anti-colonial movements were arrested and tortured (Subbiah, 1990, pp. 190–191). One notable act of resistance against the initial Vichy clampdown in Pondicherry was the assassination of N Selvaraj Chettiar, a political prot´eg´e of the Governor of Pondicherry, by a young PCIF textile worker, R Ramaiah, who was inspired by Bhagat Singh’s resistance against the British Empire (Subbiah, 1990, pp. 196, 198). Leftists who fled Pondicherry to go underground in Madras Presidency were apprehended by British forces and remanded to French custody (Subbiah, 1990, p. 197). Subbiah himself was arrested in Madras and remanded to Pondicherry at the start of the Vichy repression, and

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after his release from Pondicherry Jail in 1941, was banned from addressing public meetings in Madras Presidency by the British Police. He disobeyed this order and was arrested in Tanjore later in 1941 (Subbiah, 1990, p. 208). This Fascist turn increased the urgency for independence as seen by anti-colonial movements across the French Empire (Yehchury, 2015, p. 1146). While the trade union and Communist movements, across 1930s, in India were implicitly tied to the struggle for independence, the Fascist takeover of the French Empire led Subbiah to think about launching an explicit freedom struggle for Pondicherry and the other territories of French India. In this pivot towards political independence as the primary goal of the Communist and trade union movements of French India, Subbiah was inspired by Ho Chi Minh’s response in Indochina to an increasingly brutal French colonialism under the new Vichy state which prompted Subbiah to think of organizing an analogue movement in Pondicherry. Wrote Ho of the Vichy Empire, Since France was defeated by Germany, its power has completely collapsed. Nevertheless, with regard to our people, the French rulers have become even more ruthless in carrying out their policy of exploitation, repression and massacre. They bleed us white and carry out a barbarous policy of all-out terrorism and massacre. . . . Alas! What sin have our people committed to be doomed to such a wretched fate? Plunged into such tragic suffering are we to await death with folded arms? No! Certainly not! (Ho Chi Minh, 2007, p. 44)

The increased urgency for independence was felt across the French Empire. In Pondicherry this was compounded by the fact that the Governor of Pondicherry during the Vichy period, Louis Bonvin, was a known and open Fascist (Subbiah, 1990, p. 214). Upon Subbiah’s release from Vellore Central Jail in 1942, he began to coordinate with Communist groups in Karaikal and Mah´e to grow the PCIF beyond Pondicherry to other French territories in India. He also re-established contact with the CGT which was similarly organizing against the Vichy state but from within the heart of Empire. Through his contacts in the CGT, he was put in touch with ‘Combat’, an anti-fascist group operating out of Algiers and Oran, Algeria with ties to the student movement at the Universit´e d’Alger (Gildea, 2015, p. 246).6,7 Algeria was a hub for underground armed resistance movements against 6

Combat was one of the eight largest resistance movements that together comprised the Conseil national de la R´esistance. It initially operated out of unoccupied Southern France but soon spread to North Africa when leaders of the French Resistance fled to North Africa to evade the Gestapo. The Resistance journal, Combat, that Albert Camus edited from 1943–1947, was named after this group (Wilder, 2015, pp. 77–78). 7 It’s worth noting that in both Algeria and French India, the colonial state had a policy of non-assimilation, both culturally and juridically, unlike in other colonies such as the Antilles and in R´eunion where there was implementation of French jurisprudence along with cultural policy (Girollet, 2008, p. 311). The approach in these two colonies was to ‘Inclure dans la nationalit´e, exclure de la citoyennet´e’ (Girollet, 2008, p. 328). Through schools and other socialization mechanisms, Algerians and French Indians were taught the language, culture and values of metropolitan France but were excluded from French citizenship.

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the Vichy Empire. The G´eo Gras Group, for example, was a clandestine group of mostly Jewish Algerian men who met at a boxing gym under the guise of sports activity to organize armed resistance against French and Nazi rule (Laskier, 1994, p. 82). Combat sent Adiceam, a Pondicherry native and professor at Universit´e d’Alger, back to Pondicherry in March 1944 to organize a branch of Combat in Pondicherry enlisting professors, lawyers, trade unionists and Left party leaders (Subbiah, 1990, p. 213). The organizers of Combat’s Pondicherry chapter were soon arrested, but much to Subbiah’s surprise, the organization itself was never banned (Subbiah, 1990, p. 214). Under the leadership of Saraswathi Subbiah, Varadarajulu’s wife, Combat organized an anti-fascist conference in September 1944 to strategize to liberate the French Empire from Nazi influence. Anti-fascists from the Algiers group of Combat were invited to travel to Pondicherry to participate. The Subbiahs and their comrades tried to extend invitations to Communists from other French colonies as well, but didn’t have connections from which they could draw. The PCIF had heated debates with the Socialist Party of French India, led by Eduard Goubert, and devotees of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram both of whom wanted French India to remain separate from independent India (Sen, 2012, p. 110). However, in 1954, Subbiah and Goubert formed an alliance between the Communist and Socialist parties and began to liberate Pondicherry from French rule village by village (Miles, 1995, pp. 61–62). While Goubert wanted Pondicherry to remain separate from India to preserve Francophone culture (Miles, 1995, p. 63), pressure from Indian nationalists both within Pondicherry and across India, made this position difficult to realize. During the liberation of Pondicherry from French rule, the French Indian military police killed several PCIF members (Miles, 1995, pp. 62–63). But after fighting against this nexus of Fascism and Empire for years, Subbiah and his comrades believed independence was a pressing issue no matter what form it took. At first Nehru wanted to postpone French India’s independence until after the Partition question was fully resolved (Miles, 1995, p. 76), but once Subbiah convinced Nehru of the importance of French Indian independence, Nehru planned to incorporate the French territories into the Indian state. Subbiah agreed that incorporation would be the best strategy to lessen French cultural influence (Miles, 1995, p. 85), a position the Socialist Party of French India opposed as the party was mostly comprised of Francophone settlers who wanted to preserve French culture in the absence of French rule. Representatives of the French Empire made it known to Nehru that they would readily concede the ‘virtually worthless colonies’ to India in order to end the PCIF menace in the territories (Sridharan, 1986, p. 109). This project of incorporation was aided by the pervasive Indian perception of France as having renewed its commitment to democracy and liberalism after 1945 with the fall of the Vichy state (Namakkal, 2017, p. 346). Given that the PCIF was ‘the main instigator of the liberation movement’ (Sridharan, 1986, p. 109) the French colonial state worked with Nehru after British India’s colonial independence to disempower the PCIF no matter the costs to French imperial holdings.

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FOR A DALIT, ANTI-FASCIST, ANTI-COLONIAL MARXISM V Subbiah’s Marxist thought can be characterized as a Dalit, anti-fascist, anti-colonial Marxism. While Subbiah edited the Communist Party newspaper, Swadanthiram, he wrote very little (Divien in Subbiah, 1990, p. xiii). His theoretical perspective therefore, according to historian E. Divien, is best culled from the oral testimony he left. In his earlier political work, Subbiah emphasized the importance of caste in the context of trade union organizing. Though his initiation into the labour movement stemmed from a more classical Marxist perspective, he adapted his thinking about the class struggle after spending a significant amount of time with workers listening to their problems. In order to orient himself to trade union organizing, particularly as a Brahmin organizing Dalit workers, Subbiah would spend his evenings in the working class areas of Oulgaret, Mudaliarpet and Ariyankuppam conversing with workers ‘the whole night’ in order to ‘get fully conversant with their problems’ (Subbiah, 1990, p. 46). These experiences, ‘brought me into closer contact with the life of the Harijans in cheries’, he recounted (Subbiah, 1990, p. 36).8 The working conditions of Dalit labour in textile factories was far worse than what caste labourers experienced, which led Subbiah to ponder the economic causes for these discrepancies among different caste categories of Pondicherry’s working class. For Subbiah, this meant that a workers’ movement needed, as its first and primary objective, to eradicate untouchability. Trade union organizations similarly had to be rethought in order to support Dalit workers’ unique struggles. Subbiah believed that trade unions in India should, in addition to their traditional objectives, provide social services to Dalit cheries such as night schools, bathing facilities and drainage of sewage and other liquid waste. Subbiah’s style of labour organizing involved spending time in working class neighbourhoods and listening to the needs of workers. Through this ethnographic approach to labour organizing, Subbiah’s nascent Marxism was rethought to better grapple with the caste inequalities he observed in Pondicherry and the surrounding region. His approach to organizing Dalit workers demonstrates a refashioning of Marxism to better meet Subbiah’s political commitments to the class-caste struggle. One of Subbiah’s most admirable strengths as a labour organizer was his ability to listen to the needs of others and adapt his thinking and strategies in order to better accommodate their needs. He not only listened to Dalit workers and modified his trade union strategy to centre caste inequalities but he also had exchanges with the CGT in the mid-1930s, through which he listened when French labour organizers relayed to him that the biggest threat to the French working class movement was the ‘Fascist organization of Hitler’ (Subbiah, 1990, p. 48). Through these exchanges with labour organizers in the metropole, he was attuned to and prepared for the eventual fascist takeover of France and the refashioning of the French Empire in the Vichy mould. Subbiah sums up his 8

Cheries are caste segregated neighbourhoods outside of the city in which Dalits have been forced to reside.

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commitments to anti-Fascism, ‘I led an anti-fascist movement’, he wrote, ‘I was received by the people of Pondicherry with great e´ clat and expression of unbound glory’ (Subbiah, 1990, p. 233). For Subbiah, it was impossible to disambiguate fascism in the metropole from the articulation of colonialism in French India. For example, in describing the French Governor of Pondicherry he wrote, that he ‘dominated and acted in the correct Hitlerian style’ (Subbiah, 1990, p. 282). Colonial officials were, in Subbiah’s view, an articulation of European fascism. As such, Subbiah saw a victory against colonialism as a defeat for fascism and support for global Communism. He looked with rapt attention to Ho Chi Minh’s struggle in Vietnam, in particular, but also to independence movements in Algeria, Madagascar and Senegal with hope, seeing not just a victory for one as a victory for all, but any blow to Empire as a blow to the morale of colonial officials in French India (Subbiah, 1990, p. 305). Subbiah’s organizing strategy and nuanced thought about both caste oppression and Fascism has many resonances for contemporary India. Unfortunately, contemporary India has many of the same features of 1930s and 1940s Pondicherry – an increasingly authoritarian state, Dalit oppression and persecution, police brutality against labour organizers, against Dalit rights advocates and Communists. In this context, we would do well to remember Subbiah’s anti-imperialist Marxist approach to fighting class-caste oppression, as the global resurgence of Fascism has pervaded both India and Indian diaspora communities around the globe.

TOMAZ AQUINO MESSIAS DE BRAGANÇA (1924–1986) Aquino de Bragança was born in Bardez, Goa in 1924. As a young man he was involved in the Goa People’s Party but felt he had to leave in order to better engage anti-colonial politics because he was disillusioned with the Gandhian approach to national independence and saw no hope to eschew that yoke as long as he remained in India (Littlejohn, 2019, p. 169). He moved to Mozambique in 1947 to work in the customs office, as his father was a customs officer in Goa, but soon learnt that customs posts in Mozambique were reserved for whites (de Sousa, 2018). In 1948, he moved to Lisbon where he completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy at the University of Lisbon while living at the Casa dos Estudantes do Imp´erio, a dormitory for students from the colonies that served as a key incubator for anti-colonial thought (de Sousa, 2018).9 There, Bragança met Marcelino dos Santos and they became lifelong friends (Bragança, in fact, first impressed on dos Santos the importance of armed struggle (Littlejohn, Ruth First Papers). He then moved to Paris in 1951 to pursue a PhD. In Paris, he met Frantz Fanon and deepened his friendship with Marcelino dos Santos who also went to France for graduate school. In grad school, he joined the Paris-CasablancaAlgiers Group which was an informal group of Marxist anti-colonial 9

For more on the importance of Casa dos Estudantes do Imp´erio see Passos (2020) and Reza (2016).

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intellectuals from North Africa, as many of his friends in graduate school were North Africans. At this time he became invested in the Moroccan independence movement (de Sousa, 2018). And he also had notable exchanges during this period with M´ario de Andrade, Nicol´as Guill´en, Henri Lefevbre and Jean-Paul Sartre (Santos, 2012, p. 21). After completing his PhD, he obtained an assistant professorship in Morocco. In addition to his academic work, he contributed ´ regularly to the magazines, Afrique-Asie and L’Economiste du Tiers Monde writing against French and Portuguese colonial rule and was also a leader of the movement for Goan independence.10 In his role in the Goan independence movement, he was an advisor to Jawaharlal Nehru in Nehru’s negotiations with the Portuguese Empire on the terms of Goan independence and eventual incorporation into India (de Sousa, 2018). In the mid-1950s, Bragança founded Movimento Anti-colonialista (MAC) with Marcelino dos Santos, M´ario de Andrade and Am´ılcar Cabral. In 1962, Bragança and his family moved to Algiers where he was offered a tenured professorship and he became more involved in political work. He founded an anti-colonial news magazine and began to comment on anti-colonial politics across the Portuguese Empire. In addition to his writings, he founded and ran a group based in Algiers called Conferˆencia das Organizações Nacionalistas das Col´onias Portuguesas (CONCP) which trained guerrilla fighters from Portuguese colonies. Through CONCP, Bragança believed it possible to coordinate simultaneous armed uprisings across the Empire so that the Portuguese would be forced to spread resources around the empire making victory more likely (Littlejohn, Ruth First Papers). With Immanuel Wallerstein, he wrote a three-volume work on key issues of African colonialism and became closer friends and comrades with various figures in African liberation movements such as Am´ılcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, Ben Bella and others. After the Carnation Revolution in 1974, he decided to return to Mozambique to join FRELIMO. When FRELIMO won independence from Portugal in 1975, Bragança stayed in Maputo to set up a research institute, the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA) at the University Eduardo Mondlane. Bragança appointed Ruth First as the first director of the centre (Littlejohn, Ruth First Papers). The goal of CEA was to provide intellectual support to FRELIMO’s state building project and to analyze revolutionary movements in solidarity with struggles against imperialism across Africa and Asia. One of the first research projects of CEA was to build on Giovanni Arrighi’s work on the political economy of the land question initially developed in Arrighi’s 1974 essay, ‘The Political Economy of Rhodesia’ in Essays on the Political Economy of Africa (1974) (Mondaini & Darch, 2019, p. xv). Bragança along with his friend and colleague, historian, Jacques Delpechin (originally from the Congo), led a small and exclusive research 10

Similarly important to efforts from transnational Goans were the contributions of the trade union movement of independent India. According to a Communist Party of India (Undivided) pamphlet entitled, ‘Trade Unions and the Doom of Colonialism’ the workers’ movement in Bombay mobilized to lend support to the nascent movement for Goa’s independence and eventual incorporation into independent India (PCJ file no. 59).

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working group called the Oficina de Hist´oria. In addition to conducting historical and historically informed research on FRELIMO, they also published a magazine for a popular audience to encourage literacy and to teach Mozambicans their history. While much of their research focused on forced labour under colonial rule, they also researched questions of patriarchy, sexism and sexual assault which was extremely controversial in the post-independence context since FRELIMO leadership was not amenable to feminist critique, and after independence, quickly rolled back what little gendered progress was made during the national independence movement (Littlejohn, Ruth First Papers). In 1980, CEA launched the journal, Estudos Moçambicanos to better distribute the research of the centre. At this point, Bragança began to write less in French and more exclusively in Portuguese. His work also began to take on a more scholarly and theoretical approach (Mondaini & Darch, 2019, p. 12). Though Bragança’s commitments to his political work are undeniable, Bragança believed praxis was best developed from rigorous academic research. Carlos Lopes remembered, ‘He urged us to have the courage to move forward with our research: “You won’t always understand, it will certainly not be easy,” he said, but we cannot stop doing it because, just like him, we believe that constructive debate cannot happen without a scientific basis’ (Lopes, 2019, p. 168). While he lived with Am´ılcar Cabral, and they even smuggled weapons together (Bragança, 1983, p. 65 in de Bragança, 2019), Bragança believed that Cabral, Samora Machel and Agostinho Neto’s skills were best utilized as commanders in the anti-colonial armed struggle, while Aquino accepted his own strengths as an intellectual and believed that his skills were best suited to building an anti-colonial academia (Bragança, 1983, p. 66 in de Bragança, 2019). Though Bragança was ‘preoccupied with the questions of the political function of intellectual work’ (Mondaini & Darch, 2019, p. xiii), his commitments were not purely intellectual. Many of his close friends were assassinated over the course of his lifetime – Ruth First, Eduardo Mondlane, Am´ılcar Cabral – and he worked tirelessly to reveal the truth behind their assassinations. Bragança was then himself assassinated in 1986 during a flight from Lusaka to Maputo. ‘It was a South African job’, said Gary Littlejohn in an oral history interview, adding that, ‘the British were involved in the coverup’ (Littlejohn, Ruth First Papers). Because of Bragança’s support for and research on anti-Apartheid, South African authorities switched off the plane’s navigation systems and then, from the control tower, guided the plane directly into a mountain (Littlejohn, Ruth First Papers). In the immediate aftermath of his death, Aquino de Bragança’s personal archive mysteriously disappeared (de Sousa, 2018). In his obituary for Bragança, Immanuel Wallerstein wrote, The day that Cabral was assassinated, we spoke. He cried to me: ‘They have killed our Am´ılcar.’ It was, typically, Aquino who would write soon thereafter the most comprehensive, honest reportage of the assassination of Am´ılcar Cabral, and of the role that elements within the movement, collaborating with the enemy, played in it. He grieved the death of Am´ılcar, but he sought to have us all learn from it. (Wallerstein, 1986)

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FOR AN INTERNATIONALIST ANTI-IMPERIALIST MARXISM In Bragança’s view, Am´ılcar Cabral and Samora Machel were the ‘true heirs of Marx’ (Bragança, 1983, p. 63 in de Bragança, 2019). Both thinkers approached Marxism in the way Bragança believed was best; Marxism not as dogmatism, but instead as an analytic tool to better theorize ‘people’s liberation’, the formation of a ‘counter-society’ and a way to understand geopolitics. Following Mao and Ho Chi Minh, Bragança contended, thinkers like Cabral and Machel created ways of theorizing the world that better positioned them to fight to transform the world they inhabited. This break with Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy in the service of anti-colonial praxis, Bragança claimed, was the true spirit of Marxism (Bragança, 1983, p. 66 in de Bragança, 2019). In addition to being influenced by the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist tradition in general, and anti-colonial Marxism in particular, Aquino de Bragança was also a world-systems analyst. He was a contributor to the world-systems journal, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), and his best known writing remains his three volume collaboration with Immanuel Wallerstein, The African Liberation Reader (1982). National liberation, wrote Aquino de Bragança and Immanuel Wallerstein, is ‘born out of popular discontent’ and is the result of ‘class and national struggle’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, p. iii). These class and national agents were shaped by the incorporation of the colonies into the capitalist world-economy from the 16th century on. Incorporation into the world-system meant a reorientation of production so that economic activity in the colonized territory would contribute to the ‘overall division of labour in the world economy’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, p. iii). Political structures were then reorganized to ‘facilitate the flow of factors of production in the world economy’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, p. iii). This reorganization of the production structures of the world economy created new classes and the reorganization of political structures created new nations. Classes and nations of the peripheries of the world-economy, therefore, are a result of historical development of capitalism. The class struggle and the national struggle, i.e. the movement for national independence, contend de Bragança and Wallerstein are, ‘in fact, the principal structural outcome of its [capitalism’s] hierarchical relations’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, p. iv). Class and nation are ‘at one and the same time the mode of social imposition of these hierarchies and the mode of social resistance to . . . the system’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, p. iv). One of the central goals of imperialist expansion, theorized Bragança and Wallerstein ‘is to utilize the labour-power of the peoples of the newly incorporated peripheries at rates of real remuneration as low as possible’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, p. iv; See also de Bragança et al., 1979, p. 100). This typically takes three forms; export oriented production of forced or low paid labour, a sector to produce cheap foodstuffs to feed the urban export oriented working class, and a reserve army of labour of ‘so-called subsistence production’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, p. iv). Because the dynamics of labour markets in the peripheral context are distinct from the core of the capitalist world-economy, Bragança and Wallerstein contend that new class categories

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and new ways of class analysis need to be developed that better theorize labour and imperialism in the Global South. The long standing distinction between workers and peasants, they posit, does not fit the peripheries of the world-system as ‘proletarian’ and ‘peasant’ are more fluid categories in the Global South context. A household might be comprised of both workers and peasants, or one person over their lifetime might oscillate between ‘worker’ and ‘peasant’ or be engaged in both agricultural labour for subsistence while also selling their labour-power for wages. ‘It is this combination of roles’, for Bragança and Wallerstein, ‘which defines the relationship of these workers to the world economy and permits the particular extreme form of exploitation they encountered in the colonial era’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, p. iv; See also de Bragança et al., 1979, p. 101). This theoretical rethinking of ‘the worker’ and ‘the peasant’ also had real implications for praxis. ‘The distinction’ between workers versus peasants as the revolutionary class, Bragança and Wallerstein write, ‘is politically obnoxious’, instead, it is better to think of ‘a worker-peasant revolutionary struggle’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V1, 1982, p. 83). Building on Am´ılcar Cabral’s concept of ‘nation-class’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, p. 79), another aspect of Bragança and Wallerstein’s class analysis is what they call the question of ‘ethnic consciousness’.11 Because recruitment to wage labour in the colonies was often channelled through family, ethnic, or what colonizers termed ‘tribal’ channels, the intersection of class and ethnicity is important in the colonial context and continues to shape class structures after independence (de Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, p. v). Ethnic consciousness among the working class, according to Bragança & Wallerstein was a structural creation of colonial authorities as ‘classic divide-and-rule tactics’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, p. v). Trade unions, therefore, are most effective, Bragança contends, when they are multiethnic (de Bragança et al., 1979, p. 105). The identification of the colonial working class with ethnic membership over class identity becomes a hindrance to the national liberation movement in mobilizing workers and peasants in the class and national struggle. But when working class organization is successful, ‘la classe ouvri`ere a un e´ norme potentiel politique’12 (de Bragança et al., 1979, p. 105). Because of the problem of ethnic consciousness, the anti-colonial struggle is articulated as a territorially bounded force while the ‘enemy’ is ‘the world bourgeoisie’ who ‘has seldom hesitated to combine its strength on an inter-state level’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, p. v; See also V3, p. 115). This geographic mismatch in the articulation of the anti-colonial struggle is the reason why movements for colonial independence fall short of many of their goals and aims. By way of example, Bragança and Wallerstein theorize that because Portuguese colonies in Africa launched separate independence movements for each colony they were at a disadvantage as they soon realized that they were one territory up against an entire Empire and that the Portuguese Empire was itself buttressed by other imperial powers. Furthermore, in the instances where anti-colonial

11

See Cabral (1979). Author’s translation: The working class has enormous political potential.

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movements have won independence, ‘they have found that juridical state sovereignty is in part fiction since they were still bound by the constraints of the inter-state system, the political superstructure of the capitalist world economy’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, p. vi). Because anti-colonial movements have not been aware of these global contradictions, Bragança and Wallerstein argue, movements for independence have made strategic and tactical errors that have real consequences for those who reside within those states, especially after independence when many liberation movements fall ‘by the wayside to become open or hidden agents for the maintenance and further development of the capitalist world economy’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, p. vi). This all too common circumstance, of national independence movements becoming collaborators with the capitalist world economy after independence, is what Bragança terms, ‘Independence without decolonization’ (Bragança, 1985, p. 93 in de Bragança, 2019). The newly independent state had to resist international forces assuring the reproduction of the capitalist world-system along with local class forces ‘amenable to the perpetuation of Lusotropicalism’ (de Bragança & Depelchin, 1988, p. 104) that would inevitably lead to a reformist or repressive postcolonial state.13 The armed struggle for independence, de Bragança and Jacques Depelchin show, ‘could not modify the nature of the colonial system’, and so the most important task for intellectuals in the period after independence is to understand state transformations and the class character of ‘the struggle over the nature of the state’ (de Bragança & Depelchin, 1988, p. 103). Through systematic historical analysis, de Bragança and Depelchin claimed, one can devise a ‘more correct analysis of the contradictions that are appearing today. Because today’s contradictions did not emerge in isolation from the previous historical phases’ (de Bragança & Depelchin, 1988, p. 96). Part of the role of historical analysis, they contend, is to reassess the process of national liberation, particularly through auto-critique of the strategies of armed struggle and the national independence movement in order to better serve state building efforts in the period after independence. ‘Commitment,’ they write, ‘can sometimes blind one to the realities and only see the idealised version of that reality’ (de Bragança & Depelchin, 1988, p. 96). Systematic historical analysis, therefore, was crucial in transforming social and economic relations by better understanding past missteps, current contradictions, and ultimately, building better strategy. Though de Bragança and Depelchin declared ‘history as a front of the political and ideological struggle,’ they warned against ‘producing a propaganda history whose usefulness would be limited to functional counter-ideology’ (de Bragança & Depelchin, 1988, p. 101). 13

In Bragança’s personal notebooks he developed his own critique of Lusotropicalism. In a page of notes labelled, ‘Salazar/Questão Colonial’ he wrote out the following quote from a 1983 interview of Salazar by Le Figaro ‘Não h`a possessões portuguesas mais pedacos de Portugal dissenvivados pelo mundo’. [Author’s translation: There are no Portuguese possessions, just fragments of Portugal spread across the globe]. This quote was underlined and highlighted in Aquino’s notebook, indicating, perhaps, that he found it important.

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Bragança’s approach to historical social science, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2012) contends, presents a strategy that can resolve the epistemological problem of doing social science of the Global South. Santos cites a comment that Bragança made during one of his stints as a visiting researcher to the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton that the difficulty of studying Mozambique led Bragança to develop new ways of doing historical sociology in rethinking what constituted valid data for historical sociology. This was a resistance against what Santos calls, the ‘d´efice cient´ıfico do colonizador’ (Santos, 2012, p. 25); an inability of colonial epistemes to build knowledge about the colonial context for the purposes of liberation, but also, claims Santos, a product of the armed struggle against colonialism that revealed Empire’s impotence in being able to peaceably solve the colonial question.14 European social theories largely failed to explain empirical developments on the ground in the colonies, such as the colonial class structure for example, but were also epistemologically limited in the colonial context. Bragança and his contemporaries knew that the epistemology of the colonial state was completely disconnected from that of the colony itself but they saw that, in that disconnect, there was opportunity (for both theory and praxis) (Santos, 2012, p. 26). For this reason, Santos sees Bragança’s creation of CEA not as an African analogue to Immanuel Wallerstein’s Fernand Braudel Centre, as some commentators have observed given the frequent collaborations between the two centres (and between Bragança and Wallerstein themselves), but as an intervention that re-elaborated world-systems analysis with a Global South epistemology. This re-elaboration involved a turn away from what Santos identifies (correctly or not) as Wallerstein’s more ‘economistic’ approach and instead towards Bragança’s approach which emphasized historical method and a deep understanding of regional context (Santos, 2012, p. 28). Bragança’s Marxism, and the Marxism of his colleagues and comrades at CEA, was flexible and mutable, shaped by the political needs of place and time. Part of what makes Bragança’s theories of imperialism and class unique is that he takes Lusophone Africa as his reference category. In thinking through power, history and capitalism in the context of Portuguese Africa his theoretical work was able to develop unique facets. For example, in the Portuguese imperial context, the question of Fascism loomed large when addressing the question of decolonization and neo-colonialism. Because of Portugal’s relatively subordinate position within Europe, he contended, A burguesia portuguesa, na fase de desenvolvimento em que se encontra, j´a não pode passar ´ sem a suas colonias africanas. Constituem para ela, não so´ reservas ‘protegidas’ de mat´erias ´ primas, mas tamb´em uma v´alvula de segurança suscept´ıvel de reabsorver o seu proprio excedente camponˆes.15 (de Bragança, 1980a, p. 44)

14

Author’s translation: the scientific deficit of the colonizer. Translation: The Portuguese bourgeoisie, at its specific stage of development, could not survive without its African colonies: the colonies were not only protected reserves of raw materials but were also a safety valve that was able to absorb Portugal’s own surplus peasant population (Mondaini & Darch, 2019, p. 13).

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The Portuguese bourgeoisie relied on Empire in order to maintain its economic position just barely within the core of the capitalist world-economy. Bragança termed the Portuguese Empire under Salazar’s Estado Novo as a ‘colonial-fascist’ regime whose African holdings were central to its economic interests, but also to its cultural identity, and most importantly, to the interests of the industrialists who supported Salazar (Bragança, 1985, p. 96 in de Bragança, 2019). Bragança noted that while both the Socialist Party and the Communist Party in Portugal vowed to grant immediate independence for all of Portugal’s colonies, after the Carnation Revolution, when the left came to power, neither Socialists nor Communists made good on their promises to immediately begin the decolonization process (Bragança, 1985, p. 95 in de Bragança, 2019).16 Quoting a FRELIMO communique, Bragança writes, ‘If our struggle will contribute to the struggle of the Portuguese people against Fascism, we can only congratulate ourselves. But just as the Portuguese people possess an incontestable right to independence and democracy, these same rights must not be denied to the Mozambican people’ (FRELIMO quoted in Bragança, 1985, pp. 96–97 in de Bragança, 2019). Samora Machel and FRELIMO strategists, Bragança contended, knew that the capitalist class who supported the Estado Novo could, in the wake of the Carnation Revolution, concede to democracy at home, but the colonial question would be more difficult to resolve (Bragança, 1985, p. 101 in de Bragança, 2019). ‘Chi sono i nemici visto che non li si puo` definire dal colore delle pelle?’ Bragança wrote, ‘il nemico da abbattere e` il “sistema” coloniale fascista e non il “popolo portoghese,” vittima anch’esso dell’oppressione fascista’ (de Bragança, 1980b, p. 58).17,18 Instead, Bragança identifies, ‘la liquidazione delle relazioni capitaliste e imperialiste nel paese, definendo strategicamente il nemico in termini di classe’ (de Bragança, 1980b, p. 58).19 In other words, the ‘enemy’ of the national liberation movement could not be revealed through skin colour because the ‘Portuguese people’ were similarly victims of fascist oppression, in Bragança’s view. The enemy was instead the capitalist class, in Portugal primarily, but also, in Mozambique, across Africa, and across the Global North. Capital as a whole, as Bragança saw it, ultimately acted in concert to defend imperialist forces the world over.

16

Bragança was prescient in his doubts about the limits of solidarity to expect from the Portuguese left. In notes he took in 1979 while attending a lecture by Jos´e Miguel Judice, the leader of the PSD, Aquino wrote that because of PSD critiques of Angolan independence movement leader, Jonas Savimbi, it would be nearly impossible to imagine that the Portuguese left would aid in the post-independence reconstruction of Angola (Bragança personal papers). 17 Author’s translation: Who are the enemies, since they cannot be defined by the colour of their skin? 18 Author’s translation: the enemy to overthrow is the colonial fascist system and not the Portuguese people, also a victim of fascism. 19 Author’s translation: the liquidation of capitalist and imperialist relations in the country strategically defines the enemy in terms of class.

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In the context of political upheaval in Portugal and nominal support for independence from the Communist Party and anti-fascist groups in the metropole, FRELIMO intensified their armed struggle in Mozambique, to the bewilderment of anti-fascist groups in Lisbon who were ‘FRELIMO’s historical allies’ in the metropole. This, Bragança observed, ‘was the only possible reply of FRELIMO’ because Mozambicans were not going to quietly await a coup in Lisbon to see firstly, whether the Left would come to power and secondly, if they the Left was successful whether they would concede Empire (Bragança, 1985, p. 103 in de Bragança, 2019). ‘For Portuguese Communists gave priority to the antifascist struggle’, Bragança & Wallerstein write, ‘whereas the African said the primary focus for them must be the anti-colonial struggle’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, p. 80 emphasis original). ‘You had to dream’, Bragança said in an interview with O Jornal, ‘Demolish the empire! And we demolished it, didn’t we?’ (Bragança, 1983, p. 65 in de Bragança, 2019)

AGAINST COLONIAL-FASCISM, FOR THE CLASS(-CASTE) STRUGGLE In the South Asian context, empire is often synonymous with the British Empire. However, in taking, instead, the Vichy Empire or Portuguese Empire under Salazar as the reference category, new questions arise while old questions are rethought. A new line of inquiry that emerges from Bragança’s concept of a ‘colonial-fascist’ regime is that of the relationship between classic European Fascism (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Salazar) in the metropole and colonialism in the peripheries as a singular process, or at the very least connected, as an important question not just for Africa, but also in the (South) Asian context. Subbiah and Bragança’s theories of class lead to a rethinking of ways to do class analysis in the colonial context and beyond the orthodox Marxist categories. Subbiah’s intervention is around the intersection of caste and class while Bragança’s class analysis blurs the distinction between peasant and worker. Subbiah and Bragança have three main commonalities in their theoretical approach in (1) rethinking Marxism to better fit the Global South context, (2) theorizing the relationship between fascism and colonialism and (3) intellectual and political connections to Algeria were critically important for their theory and praxis. However they also diverged in significant ways. For Subbiah, caste was of central concern, while Bragança did not take up the caste question Bragança spent a great deal of his theoretical efforts on the transition to independence and decolonization post-independence, while Subbiah remained focused on winning independence instead of theorizing what came next, and finally, Bragança took a macro-historical view of capitalism rooted in his commitments to Marxism-Leninism and world-systems analysis, while Subbiah, in contrast, centred on how the transition to Vichy rule adversely affected opportunities for class-caste liberation in Pondicherry. ‘Marxism’s greatest triumph’ claim Maxime Molyneux and Fred Halliday (1984) was its marriage with anti-imperialism in the Global South. While

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Molyneux and Halliday are (correctly) critical of a non-Marxist anti-imperialism – they cite Khomeini by way of example – they contend that Marxist thought has flourished in the Global South because of its focus on anti-imperialism. While Western Marxists have retreated into an analytical approach (Molyneux & Halliday, 1984, p. 19), ‘Third World Marxists’ as Molyneux and Halliday term it, centred pragmatic political questions like revolutionary strategy, class analysis, guerrilla struggle, and most importantly, questions of colonialism and anti-imperialism in their analyses (Molyneux & Halliday, 1984, p. 20). Subbiah and Bragança are clearly in this mould. Marxism was their strategy for colonial independence, albeit it with modifications to fit time and place. Though both were concerned with questions of revolutionary strategy, class analysis, and most importantly, questions of colonialism and anti-imperialism, they modified Marxism in different ways to better fit their contexts as they observed them. Both colonial metropoles with which Bragança and Subbiah operated – the Estado Novo and Vichy France – were fascist, therefore, Bragança and Subbiah were particularly concerned with the nexus of Fascism and Empire. Bragança described Salazar as ‘alla famiglia dei regimi totalitari, alla Germania nazista e all’Italia fascista’ (de Bragança, 1980b, p. 56).20 His only viable opposition, as Bragança saw it, was from Portuguese anarcho-syndicalist groups. In Salazar’s ascent to power, there were a range of rival factions of the bourgeoisie that he had to navigate, but he ultimately found support from landed elites and financiers (de Bragança, 1980b, p. 56). This combination of landlords and financiers promoted colonialism for several reasons: Esse costituiscono non solo delle riserve ‘protette’ di materie prime, come dir`a Salazar, ma anche una valvola di sicurezza per riassorbe il surplus contadino. Oltre a questi motivi “ragionevoli’ per il Portogallo, il dittatore non ignora affatto la logica del sistema imperialista in cui egli occupa una posizione subalterna.21 (de Bragança, 1980b, p. 56)

Bragança has a theory for why certain factions of the Portuguese bourgeoisie supported Salazar, and how in turn, Salazar acted in their class interest to further the aims and scope of the Portuguese Empire. While Subbiah did not have a top-down theory of the French state or the French bourgeoisie, he did see the workers struggle in France and Pondicherry as inextricably linked through the nexus of fascism and empire (Subbiah, 1990, pp. 67–68). While the political takeaway for Subbiah was to seek support for Pondicherry’s trade union movement from the GCT and other French labour organizations, Bragança contended that the only viable response to what he termed, ‘colonial-fascism’ was to take up armed struggle against the empire. ‘The only road open to them [freedom fighters] was the road of armed struggle’ (de 20

Author’s translation: of the family of fascist regimes such as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. 21 Author’s translation: The colonies constitute not only ‘protected’ raw material reserves, as Salazar says, but also a safety valve to absorb peasant surplus. In addition to these ‘reasonable’ motives for Portugal, the dictator can’t ignore the logic of the imperialist system in which he occupies a subordinate (subalterna) position.

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Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, p. 33).22 The armed struggle was so important to Bragança’s thinking that in a mark-up of a manuscript entitled, ‘La lutte des classes et l’emergence du Marxisme au Mozambique’, at several points in the manuscript he crossed out ‘la lutte des classes’ and instead wrote, ‘la lutte arm´ee’ (Bragança personal papers).23,24,25 The road to armed struggle, Bragança and Wallerstein argued, was an easier strategic choice to make against a fascist empire like Portugal, compared to the British Empire where parliamentary values made armed struggle seem like an extreme measure. Tactics of Gandhian satyagraha, they argue, could only work in an empire like Britain ruled by parliamentarians (de Bragança & Wallerstein V2, 1982, pp. 33–34). When the Empire is led by a dictatorship, contend Bragança and Wallerstein, leaders of independence movements are more likely to be assassinated and this is something for which the national independence movement must plan (de Bragança & Wallerstein V3, 1982, p. 2). Instead, Bragança and Wallerstein observed that the Portuguese African liberation strategy was distinct from other imperial contexts in the ‘primacy and autonomy’ of the armed struggle. This strategy, they demonstrate, was influenced by a Guevarian concept of armed struggle (de Bragança & Wallerstein V3, 1982, p. 162).26 ‘Portugal’s role in the world system was substantially different from other European countries who had colonial domains in Africa’, they contended, ‘Hence, the mode of struggle for independence employed by most African states, the demand for decolonization, was seen as an implausible option. Since Portugal could not afford to decolonize, the leaders of the national liberation movements could not afford to count on such a possibility’ (de Bragança & Wallerstein V1, 1982, p. 7). Subbiah was an avid reader of Ho Chi Minh, and through this engagement, seemed to implicitly endorse armed struggle against Vichy France, but never led an armed struggle against the French Empire, though many PCIF members were slain by the French colonial military police in trade union and other peaceful demonstrations that Subbiah led. But Subbiah’s engagement with communists Or as Bragança writes in an earlier essay, ‘Soltanto la “guerra necessaria,” una “guerra popolare,” potr`a “strappare” l’indipendenza del paese. La maggioranza dei padri fondatori del FRELIMO diserteranno la lotta alla vigilia dell’inizio della lotta armata nel settembre 1964: la loro formazione culturale non li aveva preparati “psicologicamente” a questa nuovo fase della lotta di liberazione’ (de Bragança, 1980b, p. 58) [Author’s translation: Only a ‘necessary war’, a ‘people’s war’, will be able to fight for national independence. The majority of the founding fathers of FRELIMO deserted the struggle on the eve of the start of the armed struggle in September 1964. Their cultural background had not prepared them ‘psychologically’ for this new phase of the liberation struggle]. 23 Author’s translation: The Class Struggle and the Emergence of Marxism in Mozambique. 24 Author’s translation: the class struggle. 25 Author’s translation: the armed struggle. 26 However, in earlier writings, Bragança identifies Machel’s strategy for armed struggle as ‘una “assimilazione critica” dei classici moderni della guerra popolare (Mao)’ (de Bragança, 1980b, p. 62). ‘In questo senso’, he writes, ‘non e` facile definire con rigore la parte di influenza straniera nel pensiero militare di Samora’ (de Bragança, 1980b, p. 61). 22

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and trade unionists in France, along with coordination with the Algerian group Combat, and his attention to Ho Chi Minh’s movement to liberate Vietnam, shows a drawing of parallels among colonial rule which was authoritarian, and fascism in the metropole. Or as Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2012) observed, one of the reasons for Aquino de Bragança’s resonance with anti-fascists in Portugal was not just because of his charisma but because he was able to demonstrate that, ‘O paralelismo e´ obviamente entre o Moçambique libertado da dominação colonial e o Portugal libertado da dominação fascista’ (Santos, 2012, p. 20).27 Both Subbiah and Bragança looked to other colonial contexts for inspiration and support for their political work. Subbiah read Ho Chi Minh and thought about what Vichy rule meant in that context, and connected with anti-fascists in Algiers for support and inspiration in building an anti-fascist movement against Vichy from Pondicherry. Bragança was even more global in his outlook. Though from Goa, he lived most of his life in Portugal, France, North Africa and Mozambique. This was not only important for Bragança’s political work but also aided his development as a theorist. As Maia Ramnath (2019) observes, the greatest postcolonial intellectuals have often developed their revolutionary theories in a ‘third country’ context, i.e. neither their country of birth or ethnic-origin nor the (former) colonial metropole. Indian, Mohandas Gandhi, for example, developed most of his core theories in South Africa, while Martinican, Frantz Fanon, developed his in Algeria (Ramnath, 2019, p. 171).28 These ‘third’ contexts provide a space for theorists to develop their concepts and ideas as outside observers, albeit it with commonalities and similar political commitments to locals through a common imperial context. Algerian connections in particular were critically important to both Subbiah and Bragança, and not just as resources for their political struggles for which Algerian connections were undeniably crucial for both. Algeria was more than a solidaristic resource, it was an intellectual incubator for new ways of thinking about anti-imperialism. As Jeffrey Byrne describes it, Algeria offered support and hospitality to a panoply of national liberation movements, guerrilla armies, and insurrectionary exiles from every corner of the globe. As a result, ˆ of subversion, where rebels from such places as Algiers quickly became an entrepot Palestine, Angola, Argentina, and Vietnam, among many others (including, in time, the Western countries Britain, the United States, and Canada) lived together, conspired together, and vowed to die together. (Byrne, 2016, p. 3)

27

Author’s translation: the parallel was obvious between liberating Mozambique from colonial domination and liberating Portugal from Fascist domination. 28 Robert Hill similarly emphasized the attachments Fanon had to Algeria and the way these connections revealed his politics of anti-imperialist struggle: ‘Fanon said, “You men don’t understand me yet. I’ve wasted my time” Fanon said, “I am fighting for Martinique.” The banner of the Algerian Revolution was only the front in which he found himself and there he decided to set down his roots with his brothers. That is not a question of whether Caribbean people are going to be internationalists or can be internationalists. The only people who still don’t understand that are the Caribbean people themselves, and it’s a shocking shame’ (Robert Hill in Austin, 2018, p. 126).

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Bragança was a contemporary of the May 1968 generation when Frantz Fanon, the legacy of the FLN, and the Black Panther Party made Algeria ‘synonymous with Third World revolution’ (Evans & Phillips, 2007, p. 68). But before this heyday of a uniquely Algerian Afro-Asian (and beyond) solidarity, Subbiah too looked to Algeria of the 1940s for similar ‘support and hospitality’ for the empire-wide movement against Vichy.29 Subbiah and Bragança looked to a range of Leftist groups based in Algeria for support in their fight against the French and Portuguese Empires and this engagement not only aided their political struggles but also pushed a creative and more global theoretical development. Despite their many commonalities, however, Subbiah and Bragança diverge in several key ways: (1) the caste question, (2) what happens post-independence and (3) unit of analysis. Firstly, Subbiah cared deeply about caste, while Bragança did not write on caste or incorporate caste into his class analysis. While one might argue that the absence of caste in Bragança’s work comes from his use of Mozambique as his reference category, he did write on and do political work in South Africa and Goa where caste systems were foundational to social oppression. It would have been interesting to see how Bragança would have engaged with the caste question. Secondly, while Subbiah focused his attention on questions of the class-caste struggle and anti-fascism, he did not give much thought to the transition to independence and what the post-independence process of decolonization would look like. This haphazard articulation of decolonization led to a post-independent Pondicherry where the social structures put in place by the French did not change much in the decades following independence and incorporation into the Indian state. Aquino de Bragança, on the other hand, was greatly attuned to this question, and especially after Mozambican independence, the full decolonization of Mozambican society became his central intellectual concern. Bragança’s theoretical approach was rooted in a macro-historical view of capitalism grounded in his commitments to Marxism-Leninism and World-Systems Analysis but Subbiah’s theory was far more local, centred on the class-caste struggle in Pondicherry and how the transition to Vichy rule adversely affected opportunities for class-caste liberation in Pondicherry. In contrast, Bragança was not concerned with Goan independence in particular, but in anti-imperialism across the globe no matter what flag the colonizer flew and whatever territories they conquered.

CONCLUSIONS Through a comparison of Aquino de Bragança and V Subbiah’s theories of colonial independence, it is evident that different imperial political formations and linkages engender different anti-colonial strategies to foment movements for national liberation, which in turn, structure the available opportunities to decolonize after independence. These results have several implications for a 29

Algeria’s support for armed struggle against colonialism in Sub-Saharan Africa was buttressed by its unique diplomatic relationship with Cuba (V´elez, 2016, pp. 79–82).

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Marxist theory of anti-imperialism. First of all, the reference category one takes matters. For example, both Subbiah and Bragança had to develop a modified Marxism to better fit their local context and imperial ecumene. They could not take orthodox Marxist categories as a given and reasonably apply them to Pondicherry or Mozambique. In this move to fit Marxism to their local context they, not only, each developed theories of the nexus of fascism and empire along with new ways of doing class analysis in their respective local contexts, but in so doing, forged new Global South epistemes for social science history. Both Subbiah and Bragança posited new readings of Marxism as a way of remaking the post-colonial self. In so doing, they not only positioned themselves as political subjects but also became what they are. Through these theoretical innovations that remade the French Indian and Portuguese Indian self, a new politics emerged that led communists in both French and Portuguese Empires to win independence.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Noaman G. Ali, Himani Bannerji, Kanishka Goonewardena, Charles Lemert, Ayyaz Mallick, Ajay Rao, Jack Veugelers, and the participants of the University of Toronto Mississauga’s Centre for South Asian Critical Humanities Marxism Research Working Group for their helpful conversations and suggestions.

REFERENCES ARCHIVAL SOURCES University of the Western Cape- Robben Island, Cape Town, South Africa. Personal papers of Aquino de Bragança, in possession of Frederick Noronha, Goa, India. Library (NMML), New Delhi, India. University (PCJ), New Delhi, India.

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CHAPTER 9

INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR HIMANI BANNERJI Himani Bannerjia, Kanishka Goonewardenab, Kristin Plysb and Priyanshb a

York University, Canada University of Toronto, Canada

b

Keywords: Marxism; communism; ideology; class; gender; race Kanishka Goonewardena: How did you become a Marxist? Can you tell us something about your political journey in India and Canada? Himani Bannerji: I have to confess at the outset that the personal ambition of my life was not, and still is not, to become a Marxist scholar, certainly not in the purely intellectual sense of the term. I was introduced to Marx, Engels, and Lenin through the pervasive presence of communism in my growing up years and by the excitement generated in India by its history of peasants’ and workers’ uprising and by the birth of the Soviet Union. Communism was embedded in the politics and cultural consciousness or common sense of my time. The Communist Party of India (CPI) had a long-standing influence on ideas and practices of even noncommunist parties, such as the Indian National Congress. It enlivened, for example, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s political thought, inserting into the Indian constitution the idea of a socialist republic. Serving for a long period as the official opposition in the national assembly the CPI was the most dominant influence among labor unions, peasants’ organizations, and student politics, as well as in the realm of culture and fine arts. I think this could mainly be possible by the absence of the cold war in Asia, from which the west, particularly the United States, suffered, where communism was estranged and demonized. This and anti-colonial communist upsurges in South East Asia allowed for a variety of political perspectives and possibilities in Asia at large. Thus embracing communism was a perfectly ordinary political choice for us, and the most lucid way of understanding

Marxist Thought in South Asia Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 40, 181–188 Copyright © 2024 Himani Bannerji, Kanishka Goonewardena, Kristin Plys and Priyansh Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-871920230000040010

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the basic forms of socio-economic and cultural injustices through capitalist colonialism and imperialism prevalent worldwide both in the past and the present. So it was communism that brought Marx and Marxism to us, combining analysis with practice. Even after the CPI split, resulting in the creation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI (M), in 1964, together they remained the major disseminator of Marxist ideas, which exceeded the immediate purview of electoral parties. So-called independent Marxism or being Left, totally unallied to any version of the CPI, was scarce at this time. Though not a lot of Marx’s own texts were read by many, the Communist Manifesto certainly was. Communist and progressive intelligentsia, both outside and inside of political parties, read Capital and Marx’s other texts written jointly with Engels, especially in terms of their critique of political economy, labor theory of value, and so on. These texts were translated into Indian languages as books, pamphlets, and excerpts and cheaply priced. Reading Marx, therefore, was not only a scholarly critical preoccupation, but it was also inspired by the passion and dream of revolution and necessity for understanding the maladies of the world that needed changing. It so happened that I was fortunate to be surrounded by such scholars, writers, and cultural producers in my life. I also read some Marx and much progressive social realist and modernist creative and critical literature as a matter of course. The Communist Manifesto was my first text and this was followed by Marx’s other joint productions with Engels, whose Socialism Utopian and Scientific was a favorite among the beginners. As for Marxists themselves, unless they were historians, such as Eric Hobsbawm or E P Thompson, I must say that they were harder to read. This is how things were in my mid to late teens, and now I can also see in hindsight that Marx, Engels, and also Lenin were then fused in my mind. The communists that I knew well were undogmatic, permissive, affectionate, and encouraging to young people and open to modernist social mores, critical thinking, and experimental arts and innovations. It seems to me now that modernity in all its multifariousness entered India and other third world countries through communism or socialism rather than through liberalism. Marx was certainly more popular than John Stuart Mill. Our awareness of Russia also helped. It was familiar, with much coming and going by communists, artists, social scientists, and state officials especially engaged with the fledgling program of economic planning in India. When Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations about Joseph Stalin erupted, it caused much less upheaval in India/Asia than in the west. In the post-war era Stalin was even severely criticized, but not demonized. It was accepted that he was the result of the historical circumstances that accompanied the birth of the Soviet Union. Perceived more as the code name of a policy for the survival of the Soviet Union and an instrument for the defeat of the Nazis, Stalin escaped much deserved and undeserved criticism. It was assumed that communism would now take a different turn because sociohistorical conditions of the world had changed, though the cold war and US imperialism could not be discounted. I say all this to acquaint people living in the west and India in other times and political spaces, and to provide a context for why and how, I with countless others became a communist and a Marxist.

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I strongly feel the relevance of our view. It could not be otherwise then or now, because we are still living in neocolonial and imperialist times. The experience of living in two colonies, former and present, has convinced me that a true national liberation is not conceivable outside of Marxism and communism. For this decolonization to happen Fanon has to be stretched to blend with Marx, not only the reverse. Bourgeois nationalism, which shaped Indian or Pakistani independence, could not bring about a genuinely democratic liberation. Therefore, questions of nation and nationality as understood by Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and the communist tradition I still consider vital for fighting capitalism and imperialism. In the Canadian middle-class world, I detected a fear or scorn of organized politics, a fear of loss of individuality. Instead, I have always found my individuated identity in political and cultural movements, such as communism, feminism, and anti-racism. They have given me a place, a sense of belonging. They have led me to Marxism as core praxis, not in a theoretical way. Even as a young woman I got the sense of urgency that the call “arise ye wretched of the earth” and “workers of the world unite!” expressed. They never became empty slogans for me. What happened to me I think was the common experience of many. In this context I must mention the highly influential Student Federation of India (SFI), which brought to the fore Marx and Marxist politics and literature to students and alerted them to labor unrest and closures of industries. The times were the 1960s. There were also Left literary journals and intellectual groups involving progressive writers and artists whom we looked up to. The culture was saturated by communism and Marxist ideas. Speaking of culture as an agent for changing consciousness, I have to also name the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) as a great example of a socially integrated artistic organization which produced powerful original plays and great translations and adaptations of plays of Bertolt Brecht, Maxim Gorky, Ibsen, and many others. KG: With a background influenced by communism, what was it like for you to become a graduate student at the University of Toronto? HB: It was somewhat surprising and shocking. I was 27 and already had taught in the English and Comparative Literature departments in Jadavpur University, Kolkata. As you see, I was shaped by a Marxist outlook. Knowledgeable about the struggle against apartheid, informed by political insurgencies of the American civil rights and Black Panther movements, and totally identified with the anti-imperialist war of the Vietnamese people, the political culture of the university here seemed generally conservative, kind of a throwback in time to a colonial era. Even England had moved on. I remember that Robert McNamara was prevented from landing in Kolkata Airport in the early stage of the Vietnam war and fled in a helicopter to the chants of “go back McNamara” and “Amaar naam, tomar naam, Vietnam” (my name and your name is Vietnam), making a pun on the word naam (name). The university’s conservative atmosphere, in spite of the teach-ins that came later through the activism of the many American draft-dodgers on campus, did not change in any significant way. Toronto of 1969 was somewhat provincial and quite explicitly racist, at least outside of the university. Within the university it was more diffused and polite. It showed in cultural assumptions about India, in orientalism of sorts.

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There was very little presence of communism as a general social politics or of Marx and associated approaches, such as even critical theory, at least in the English department. I found myself increasingly alienated from this way of studying English literary theories, particularly of the prose works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which was the focus of my dissertation, and with a half-written PhD thesis left the program. Subsequently I was reincarnated as a PhD student at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in the department of sociology of education to work with Dorothy Smith, whose writings and supervision were of great help in my understanding of Marx. But that is another story. I want to end by mentioning that those days of pre-feminist and pre-critical race theory energized me to explore and teach in both of those areas. Here I found that Marx and Marxist writings were of enormous importance. I had to extend what I had understood about class, the open and hidden struggles of class politics, the conventional political approach to and interpretation of that concept, by working out the notions and social relations of gender and race. Equally I came to understand that gender and race are not stand-alone categories. Our understanding becomes self-defeating if we cannot grasp formative relations between the three, that is, historicize and socialize the mode of production and implied and organizing forms of consciousness. Kristin Plys: Your most recent book, The Ideological Condition: Selected essays on History, Race, and Gender, came out in 2020. Could you tell us more about this anthology of your work? HB: Well, you know, it is a very big book (laughs). As it marks the trajectory of my life the length might be justified. But it’s not a “book” in the sense of a monograph, rather it is, as you say, an anthology. Unless provided with a few thematic clues, this compilation of selected essays from my previously published books, journals, and book chapters, strenuously revised for this anthology, can create a feeling of being miscellaneous. Furthermore, the absence of writings from the last five years or so does not help to round up a reader’s impression of my whole project. Even so, upon scrutiny, this collection has an integrity and charts the journey of my intellectual and political development. Taking a central theme, namely Marx’s critique of ideology, the chapters here serve as expository examples of an epistemological critique based on historical materialism. Metaphorically speaking, the textual pattern made by these essays is like a Chinese hand fan, which spreads out in different directions, but is held together by a single stem at bottom. Whatever areas I explore here are all animated by my own take on historical materialism, that is, Marx’s method of social enquiry. I apply this method on different issues or themes in specific social moments and times. As such, these essays engage and explore the basic analytical concepts of Marx on the workings of class and class struggle, on modes of production and their social reproduction, and how particular forms of social and political consciousness are implicated in them. For this purpose I constellate class and cultural struggles within Marx’s specific definition and critique of ideology, particularly as found in The German Ideology and The Holy Family. My choice of entering social critique through the concept of ideology and ideological mediations does not imply any ranking between political economy and forms of consciousness and culture.

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Everywhere in the volume it is understood that ideology critique is not possible without the aid of Capital and other texts of Marx’s critique of political economy. My entry point was likely chosen because of my central interest in arts and literature, but also, very importantly, to challenge the prevalent view, for detractors and supporters alike, that Marx was no more than an economic and technological determinist, class reductionist, and a positivist. I should point out that the volume was not chronologically adjusted. Very simply speaking, it was shaped around the concept of ideology and the role ideology plays in politics, culture, and in everyday social relations. I began to be interested in “ideology” from my interest in consciousness, which as a student of literature and literary theories one cannot avoid being. I taught the latter as my specialty before I came to Canada. In India, the communism I knew did emphasize the economy, but as political practice, it involved strong emphasis on changing social consciousness. In our own teaching principles of literary theory, British Marxists such as Christopher Caudwell, Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart were important, as was also Georgy Luk´acs. For historical background, we fell back on Eric Hobsbawm, E P Thompson and Christopher Hill. The questions of changing consciousness and developing class consciousness were crucial for Left theater tradition, such as that of the IPTA, branches of which were widely dispersed across India, Kolkata and Mumbai being the hubs. Plays and performances based on representation of class and class consciousness were fully normalized. The performances were attended by huge audiences. Plays involved the lives of the industrial working class and peasants, but also of the middle classes. The colonial context and Indian freedom and anti-imperialist struggles were theatrically rendered. Numerous plays were international in theme, such as Vietnam’s resistance, apartheid in South Africa, slavery, racism and the Cold War in the United States. My first book, based on my PhD thesis, was The Mirror of Class (1989), about representation of class in Bengali political theater. A couple of chapters from it are included in this collection. Plays in Bengali, other Indian as well as European languages abounded. During my thesis research I counted over 200 adaptations of Bertolt Brecht’s work in Hindi and Bengali. Chekov, Gorky, and Left and anti-fascist theater, such as plays of Garcia Lorca, were frequently translated and adapted in Bengali. Theater was a major tool of political conscientization presented at rallies, on street corners and on the proscenium stage. Having begun my approach to Marx from the question of consciousness, from the relationship of culture to society, I became interested in challenging the base and superstructure approach and the economistic model of reading Marx, and instead pursuing the problem of ideology’s connection to class formation and politics. In this process I naturally became interested in implicating gender and race in class, their constituting effect in the overall mode of production and reproduction. In this way I developed my Marxist-feminism and anti-racism. Relations between power, difference and class became transparent. As a result, I turned my attention to historical sociology. It is this concern which is captured by the first section on method in this volume. My goal all along was to seek an epistemology for communist revolution which cannot dispense with the question of self and social

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emancipation. I became interested in understanding what it means to know what is actually going on in social and individual experiential reality, which knowledge is occluded by ideology or a simple recourse to discourse. I discuss this problem particularly in the essay on sociology of tradition and tradition of sociology, in which an ahistorical, essentialist type of thinking naturalizing class, race, and gender is exposed. This I think is the task of a Marxist sociologist. With regard to the essays on gender and the overall feminist perspective of this volume, I must acknowledge women’s movements and varieties of feminist thought in Canada and the Anglophone west, especially that of Black and Marxist feminisms. My inspiration for writing on women, class, and ideology also came from the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA). But my deepest debts are to Sachetana (meaning awareness), a women’s organization in Kolkata that I have been a part of from the 1970s, and the Women’s Studies Department in the Jadavpur University, which I had the honor of helping to set up. They all contributed to my taking up research on (Bengali) women’s consciousness and class and the ideological role that middle-class women played in developing bourgeois hegemony in pre-independence India. This signals that there was a growing body of women intelligentsia from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and they provided in their writings a hegemonic ideological and moral template to women of other classes. Though propertied women were subordinate to the men of their classes, they also contributed to development of their hegemonic class consciousness. My first inspiration was E P Thompson. My ambition was to do for Bengali middle classes what he did for the working classes of England. But in the course of my writing I benefitted from the works of Leonore Davidoff, Catherine Hall, Anna Davin, and the History Workshop Journal. The result was Inventing Subjects, selected chapters of which are in this volume. In this process I was forced to recognize my own class position both in India and Canada, and how ideologies of class, gender, and race inflected my subject status in both spaces. Thus by inhabiting these antithetical spaces I developed a stereoscopic vision. This is an existential fact for all middle to upper class migrants to the west. Speaking symbolically, we were “white women” in our own countries, but deplaning in the west would switch on a class transfer. At Toronto’s Pearson Airport, for example, I immediately became someone of lower class who could be cleaning the airport, like many of my country women. On the streets of western cities, I am racialized and undergo a class transformation. The ubiquitous presence of ideology, both as/in culture and its institutionalization, makes sure of this. Priyansh: As we see in The Ideological Condition, you deal with a range of theoretical concerns. What do you think should be the vocation of a theorist, and the role of theory today? HB: This is a very difficult question, something with which we are always grappling in the course of our work lives, as we are looking for a knowledge apparatus that can comprehend the reality on the ground in its complexities and contradictions. But the solution to this is not the making of more theories. In fact, one of the main objectives of this volume is to create suspicion of theories. The more seamless they appear, the more they should be open to close scrutiny. The

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knowledge we are searching for is not just an elegant, well-argued theory but a method of social and epistemological inquiry which we need to use for the politics of a fundamental social transformation. We ought to be able to rely on the knowledge produced through this investigative method for devising strategies for change. Ever since secular thinkers like Giam Battista Vico proposed that they should be able to understand human societies because they are “man-made,” not divinely willed, people have tried to link politics with consciously devised ideas. Nor was this politics a matter of statesmanship, just Machiavellian manipulations of power. This methodologically garnered social understanding aims at exposing mediatory apparatuses of class rule and such ideas and justificatory theories of exploitation which Marx in The German Ideology called ruling ideas of ruling classes, and in the same process of analysis and critique devise strategies of resistance to that rule. Marxism’s ability to connect consciousness to Communist/ socialist revolution was the primary reason for my interest in it. Because revolution is a long-term sociopolitical process rather than a once-for-all event, it requires a change at the deepest level of people’s hegemonic absorption, changes in the state of mind. The question of self and collective emancipation is, therefore, the definitive goal of this revolution. This requires that we understand how and what things are like at present, and that we navigate our way from the present to the future. It is a problem which is simultaneously that of knowledge and of organization. We need to ask how we can gain this knowledge of what is actually going on in social reality if ideological discourses, with their erasures of history, occlusion of social relations, and legitimating the status quo cloud our vision or incorporate the existing ruling relations and ideas in our everyday thinking and culture. After all, as we know, ideological thinking is characteristically reifying and essentialist, and thus helps to normalize race, gender, caste, and so on, which together constitute class. Thus, Marx and Antonio Gramsci both provide us with an entry into understanding hegemony. Marx’s ideological critique should be enriched by Gramsci’s analysis of state and civil society, but most importantly for us, we should delve into his analysis of different kinds of intellectuals, both organic and traditional. According to Gramsci, a large portion of the intelligentsia in a bourgeois society is organic to the development of productive forces (both intellectual and mechanical) of capitalist development and its legitimation through scientific, social, and philosophical thought. But there are others, multiplying in the processes of struggles against capitalism, who are organic to revolutionary analytical and critical knowledge for bringing about communist revolution. But what do the traditional intellectuals do, a group to which we as professionals, as academics, belong? Our job in the division of labor is to continue and augment mental production, to generate ideas, theories. In this capacity there is a huge possibility that we are both producers and dupes or even victims of ideologies that we produce. Some of us believe that our success lies in producing ideas for their own sake, and are oblivious to our own embeddedness in class, in bourgeois ways of seeing. Consciously or unconsciously, we create epistemological resources for the bourgeoisie at the cost of our intellectual clarity. This truth holds for all middle-class intellectuals regardless of color and gender,

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including us, the southern intellectuals in Canada. We are also, like others, aiming for upward mobility or are in the thrall of ideology. This is not only a matter of individual decision but because we work for institutions which are vital for the creation of the ruling apparatus in which we are absorbed. Our living has to be made from it, our definition of knowledge is in conformity with it. Even the most politicized among us are in confusion about our roles, about whom we really represent, and finally about who we are. Are we also contributing to the bourgeois view that some people, such as poor women and peasants, cannot represent themselves, therefore they must be represented by us? This flies in the face of the fact that for hundreds of years they have been presenting and representing themselves actively, and our oppositional epistemology relies on that. It is often by being parasitical on their experiences and demands and uprisings that the middle class has learned some insights into inequality and injustice. Our job is to apply the training that we have in thinking, in theories and language, to develop an epistemology of resistance. Yet the question of class remains. As members of the intelligentsia, we have to ask ourselves about which side we are on. How widely applicable is the scope of the knowledge framework that we are seeking? How unembellished is our way of approaching the truth about social relations that bind us? We need to be aware of the dangers that lie along the way, because we could be seduced by the training of our discipline to execute ever finer intellectual maneuvers. We must discard fetishism of theory and write with lucidity, avoiding jargon and obscurantism. The more contrived the writing is, the more obfuscating it can be, hiding from even us the meaning of social reality and our true intent. So, my feeling is that the intelligentsia has to be connected with something other than the university. As Gramsci said, when there is a strong working-class movement, the working class holds the intelligentsia in hostage. We need to remember that the middle class from which the intelligentsia generally comes is opportunist. Standing between the bourgeoisie and working class we are not, really, a primary class. We exist by absorbing the surplus produced by workers of all kinds. We are experts in ambiguity, and in fact valorize it in the name of complex and nuanced thinking. There may be radicals within the university, or in left journals or research groups, but we are still in institutional and social spaces which produce the elite and rulers. So those of us who seek knowledge that bares the organization of the social, who want to weaponize knowledge for revolution, are fighting a battle on two fronts, outside with the social movements and socialist struggles and inside within the university. So, I would say the more we extend our outreach and gravitate downward the more useful our work becomes. It is best not to think so much of theory, but of methods of investigation through which we can shed light on areas of the social that are still dark or being obscured by the scholarship that the bourgeoisie has and produces, or for that matter that capital’s complex mediation creates. To be greatly learned is not to be always right. Surely, Heidegger was a great scholar, but what political affiliation did his philosophy have? I would say the role of the intelligentsia is self-vigilance, actively participating in the most radical anti-capitalist politics of the time and developing an anti-ideological critique with the aid of historical materialism.

CHAPTER 10

POEMS OF RESISTANCE Salman Haider University of Toronto, Canada

Marxist Thought in South Asia Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 40, 189–196 Copyright © 2024 Salman Haider Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-871920230000040013

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YOU KEPT MURDERING THEM – SALMAN HAIDER Translated by Tayyaba Jiwani And you kept murdering them Until Your bullets rent even their sense of security The innocent you snatched from their tranquil beds You pulled them from their vehicles You dragged them from the sanctuary of their families, and Nabbed them from the solace of their friends Those who remained Were consumed from within by the din of the silence Until they started hearing their own voices And without waiting for naught They marched from their havens And found they were surrounded by others like themselves They stopped the cars They abandoned the sanctuaries They left aside all solace for another day And they clamoured for you at your doors Your weapons shook with fear And their fingers, poised on their triggers Clenched, in surprise When you annihilated their peace and security, you never stopped to think That when people are fearful in their homes, They become fearless on the streets

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THIS IS NOT A EULOGY I am missing. And my friends, await my death Sipping their tea they mull over the traits they will recount in my eulogy I was a decent man I never protested Protests suit not the stature of writers Protests have slogans, which are not cultured The government thinks them uncultured too Though I have written about fifty disappearances in three-and-a-half poems But they will debate whether my eulogy should mention these poems Just like protests, this would be uncultured Now they have called for tea, which they will drink before writing my eulogy One can accept praises for eulogies, which are cultured entirely And if they could find some activists, they would hire a protest over my disappearance They have already petitioned the government, for the costs for this contract The government’s aid will support pen and paper for the protest And the costs of the tea consumed in its planning And the tea reminds me that they agonize seated at the same table where we drank tea together The disappeared receive no memorial references, or they would already have completed essays about me. And the costs of tea, at this unorganized memorial reference, can be paid by my bereaved. So they need not worry about it. After tea, they will thank the lord that they need not protest at people’s deaths They need only be implicated in cultured activities,

SALMAN HAIDER

like writing eulogies and sipping tea But if one could get coffee instead of tea? Would that, perhaps, make a cultured protest? If that is so, Then my grievers will be ready to pay for that too

IN SEARCH OF THE SECRET PASSAGE Searching for the secret passage They scratched off the earth Plastered onto walls made from reeds And turned over the oil-stove

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To set them on fire In search of a map of the barracks They ripped the leather off weary bodies Bored holes through their bones So that the seething marrow Could be sent off to the capital To test for germs of rebellion Soiled sheets were trampled under boots Tattered shirts were invaded by drool-streaked hands Grabbing shrivelled breasts Famished stomachs were pounded by guns To make sure of their emptiness Toenails peeping through torn shoes were pulled out To make sure they were real The lakes of their eyes were emptied of tears To reach the ammunition buried deep within Laughter was confiscated Smiles were given broken teeth And those ransacking ragged pockets In search of foreign currency were turned away disappointed But as they left they broke the piggy-banks of the children In which they had been collecting their dreams

Poems of Resistance

SALMAN HAIDER

THE STORY-TELLER’S DILEMMA They want me to tell the tales of their ancestors Those who, coveting white offspring, From the bosoms of tawny women Razed the Amaltas trees And built gallows

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To sacrifice Men drenched in the fragrance of coconut oil Or the tales of those who rose, dreaming Of the lands stretching out across the mountains And took with them sons strumming the rubaab Who had made promises to kohl-rimmed eyes Eyes which witnessed Half-bodies laden on horseback Trampling the rubaabs and the promises Under their hooves, as they returned And their rims soaked The returned bore tales of victory Which were belied by their bodies And the women locked away their songs in trunks And I had left no tales to tell The candle has burnt out But they wanted to hear from me the tales of their ancestors At the close of which, Beseeching the sacred book, They will go the way of the tribes brought down from the mountains But the breeze fragrant of the coconut Reminds me of the promise to the Amaltas And kohl-rimmed eyes will no longer lock away their songs in trunks. . .

INDEX Aashob, 65–66 Aazadi aur Wajodiat (Freedom and Existentialism), 67–68 Adab Braye Adab (literature for the sake of literature), 64 Adab Braye Zindagi (literature for life), 64 Adab-a-Aalia (Great Literature), 63 Aesthetics of cricket, 104–109 Africa, 155 Agency, 79–81 “Agha Khani” period, 55 All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), 186 All Indian Trade Union Congress (AITUC), 4 American civil rights, 183 Analysis of situations, 33 Anti-caste struggles, 9–10 Anti-colonial Marxism, 154–155 colonial-fascism, 172–176 Dalit, anti-fascist, 163–164 French India, 157–158 internationalist anti-imperialist marxism, 167–172 Portuguese India, 155–157 Tomaz Aquino Messias De Bragança (1924–1986), 164–166 V Subbiah, 158–162 Anti-colonialism, 1–2 Anti-fascism, 163–164 Anti-fascist movement, 163–164 Anti-globalization movement, 125–126 Appropriation, 134 Aragalaya (struggle), 27–28, 122 Archetypes, 65 Armed struggle, 164–165

Asian Institute of Development (AID), 24 Awami League, 60–61 Awami Tehreek, 82–83 Awami Tehrik, 78–79 Babri mosque, 113 Balance of forces, 33 Bandung Conference, 59 Barbarism, 23–24 Bengal Indigo Disturbances of 1859, 2–3 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 113 Biraderi ties, 40–41 Black athletes, 107–108 in North America, 101 Black Panther movement, 183 Blue Mutiny of Champaran in 1917, 2–3 Bolshevik Revolution, 125 Bonapartism, 34–35, 37–38, 137–138 Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS), 126 British rule, 2–5 Capitalism, 2, 23, 131–132, 143–144 Capitalist exploitation, 77–78 Carnation Revolution, 171 Caste, 5 Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA), 165–166 Ceylon Communist Party, 24 Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, 24 City, 24 Class, 31, 185–186 class-caste struggle, 163 solidarity, 41 Class struggles, 126, 163 in theory, 68–69 CLR James, 100 197

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Co-optation, 122–123, 134 Collective consciousness, 65 Colonial roots of postcolonial confusion, 54–56 Colonial social formation, 31–32 Colonial-fascism, 172–176 Colonial-fascist regime, 172 Colonialism, 21 Combat, 161–162 Commodification of body, 84–87 Communalism, 55 Communism, 181–182, 184 Communist Manifesto, 181–182 Communist Party (CP), 138 Communist Party of Ceylon (CPSL), 6–7 Communist Party of India (CPI), 3–4, 48, 56, 181–182 Conf´ed´eration G´en´erale du Travail (CGT), 159 Conferˆencia das Organizações Nacionalistas das Col´onias Portuguesas (CONCP), 165 Conjunctural awareness, 41–43 Country, 24 Cricket, 100–102, 106 Cricket watchers, 105 Crisis, image of, 122–125 Cultural centres, 160–161 Cultural Marxism, 52 Dalit, 163–164 Decolonization, 84–85 Defeatism, 65 D´efice cient´ıfico do colonizador, 170 Dependency theory, 12–13, 48, 52 Desertion, 2–3 Development, 19–20 Diagnostic of power, 80–81 Dialectics of form and content, 69–70 of individual freedom and submission to collectivism, 66–68 Dictatorship, 37–38 Disciplined spontaneity, 110

INDEX

Dispossession, 131 Domestic elites, 125 Domestic manufacturing, 133 Economic breakdown in Sri Lanka, 133–135 Electrification, 26–27 Elites, 125 Empire, 154 Epistemology of resistance, 188 Estado Novo, 155–156 Ethnic consciousness, 168 Ethnicity, 35–36 Eventual liberation, 77–78 Expansive love, 89 Exploitation, 77–78 Failed nation-building project, 53–62 Fascism, 52 Female friendships, 76–77 Feminist scholarship in Pakistan, 76–77 Feudal system, 86 Feudalism, 61 Financialization, 124–125, 131, 133 Fiscal consolidation, 131 Free Trade Zones (FTZs), 130 French Empire, 154 French India, 157–158 Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO), 154–155, 171 G.V.S. de Silva, 19–20 Gandhian Freedom Movement, 158 Gender, 184 G´eo Gras Group, 161–162 Geopolitical polarization, 125–126 German Ideology, The, 184–185 Ghazal (lyrical poem), 69–70 Global capitalism, 130 Global unraveling, 125–126 GotaGoHome, 134 Great Hartal of 1953, 122, 136, 138 Great Revolt, 122–123

Index

199

Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 133

Jinnah League, 56

Halqa-e-Arabab-e-Zooq, 64–65 Hamza Alavi, 30 conjunctural awareness, 41–43 peasantry and revolution, 38–41 post-colonial state and related concerns, 31–38 Heer Waris Shah, 66 Hegemony, 33 Heretical Thoughts, 24–26 Himani Bannerji, interview with, 181–182 Hindu nationalism, 13–14, 101–102 Holy Family, The, 184–185 Housewifization, 81, 86

Karo Kari, 90 Khawateen Mahaz-e-Amal, 78–79 Khoti, 10 Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), 58 Krishak Praja Party, 56

Ideology, 184–185 Imperialism, 8, 22, 170 Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI), 39 Independence of Bangladesh, 60–62 Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), 181–182 Indigenous bourgeoisie, 31–32 Industrial Development Board, 24 Industrialization, 131–133 Inquilab (Urdu-language newspaper), 4–5 Institutional materiality, 37 Interlocking oppressions, 42 Intermediate regime, 136–138 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), 136 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 79, 123 International Sovereign Bonds (ISBs), 124–125 Internationalist anti-imperialist marxism, 167–172 Islamization, 78–79 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, 158 Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), 50, 59–60

Labor inside and outside capitalist wage relations, 142–143 Labour Advisory Boards, 4 Labour uprisings, 2–3 Landowning class, 31–32 Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), 6–7, 135–136 Left liberal historiography, 54 Left politics, 50 Leftist newspaper offices, 160–161 Liberal discourses, 49 Liberal feminists, 81 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), 124 Longue Dur´ee Origins of the Present Crisis, 129–131 Love, 91–95 Lucknow Pact, 55–56 Lusotropicalism, 155–156 Madras Labour Union, 3 Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP), 23–24 Mardangi ki Nafsiat aur Inqalabi Amal (Psychology of Masculinity and Revolutionary Activism), 68–69 Marxism, 1–2, 19–20, 52, 154–155, 181–182 British rule, 2–5 after independence, 5–8 issue, 11–16 Marxist aesthetics, 101 Marxist feminism, 76 commodification of body, 84–87 love and revolution, 91–95 murder, 87–91

200

poverty of feminist theory in Pakistan, 77–82 Prison Narratives as archive, 82–84 Marxist Feminists, 77–78 Marxist theorizing from South Asia, 8–11 Masculinity, 68–69 Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP), 60 Metropolitan bourgeoisie, 31–32 Miar-e-Zindagi aur Aazadi (Standard/ Quality of Life and Freedom), 67 Military dictatorship of Zia Ul Haq, 78–79 Mirror of Class, The (1989), 185–186 Mohammed Azharuddin, 100 aesthetics of cricket; politics of sport, 104–109 recording of Azharuddin’s memory, 102–104 shocker!, 112–115 with willow, 109–112 Mojuda Soort-e-Hal aur Adab (Current Situation and Literature), 68 Movement for Restoration of Democracy (MRD), 83 Movimento Anti-colonialista (MAC), 165 Muhajir ethnicity, 35–36 Multitude, 127 Murda Muashray Ki Zindagi (Life of a Dead Society), 66–67 Murder, 87–91 Murdering, 87–88 Muslim feminity, 79–80 Muslim League (ML), 55 Muslim minority provinces of India, 55–56 Muslims–Hindu divide in India, 57–58 Naey Loug (New People), 50 NAP, 60 Nation-class, 168

INDEX

National National National National

bourgeoisie, 23 contradiction, 59 liberation, 167 Students Federation (NSF), 60 National Students Organization (NSO), 50 Navyug (Communist literary journal), 4–5 Naxal Movement, 12–13 in India, 49 Nazism, 52 Neo-imperialism, 39 Neocolonialism, 12–13, 48, 52 New International Economic Order (NIEO), 125 Newly independent countries (NICs), 12–13, 48 Non-Aligned Movement, 59 Non-settler colonialism, 21 Nongovernmental organization (NGO), 79 One Unit Scheme, 78–79 Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), 184 Paddy Lands Act of 1957, 23–24, 138 Pakistan, 30, 48 as “failed nation” or problems of failed nation-building project, 53–62 contours of emergence of postcolonial theory in, 62–70 feminist scholarship in, 76–77 poverty of feminist theory in, 77–82 Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP), 50–51 Pakistan Trade Union Federation (PTUF), 5–6 Pakistani Left, 57 Parti Communiste de l’Inde Française (PCIF), 154–155 Participative Institute for Development Alternatives (PIDA), 24

Index

Passive revolution, 36, 122–123 Peace dividend, 124 Peasantry, 40 Perfume ball, 105 Peripheral capitalism, 31–32 Permanent Settlement law in Bengal, 58 Pessimism, 65 Plantations, 20–21 Plurality, 36 Pluralizing class, 127–128 Poems of resistance, 190 eulogy, 192 Salman Haider, 195–196 secret passage, 193 story-teller’s dilemma, 195 Political activism, 107–108 Political Economy of Underdevelopment, The, 20 Political forces, 59–60 Political horizon, 147–149 Political protests, 76 Political regime, 135–136 Political response in Sri Lanka, 133–135 Politics of sport, 104–109 Portuguese Empire, 154 Portuguese India, 155–157 Post-colonial countries, 19–20 Post-colonial developmentalism, 39 Post-colonial political economy, 2 Post-colonial position, 2 Post-colonial social formation, 31–32 Post-colonial theory, 12–13, 48–49, 51–52, 62, 70 Postcolonial confusion, 60–62 Postcolonial critique, 49 Postcolonial feminism, 80 Postcolonial feminists, 82 Postcolonial nation-building in Pakistan, 56–60 Poverty of feminist theory in Pakistan, 77–82 Prison Narratives (2017), 76 as archive, 82–84

201

Progressive Writers Association (PWA), 54, 64 Provincialism, 30–31 Psychoanalysis of metaphors, 66 Public libraries, 160–161 Punjab Communist Party, 5–6 Qaidyani Ji Diary, 83 Qool-o-Qarar (Giving Consent), 63 Quasi-Weberian flirtation, 35 Race, 184 Racial capitalism, 2 Ramjanmabhumi movement, 113 Ranadive Line, 7 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 113 Regime of accumulation, 135–136 Resistance in meantime, 128–129 Revisionist revolutionaries, 60 Revolts, 122 Revolution, 91, 95, 146–147 in meantime, 128–129 Rowmari Garden Uprising in 1903, 2–3 Ruling class reaction and struggle, 139–140 S.B.D. de Silva, 19–20 Underdevelopment, 20–22 “Secular-liberal-left” politics, 80–81 Self-consciousness, 63 Self-indulgence, 64–65 Self-sufficiency, 125 Settler colonialism, 21 Shafi League, 56 Shakhsiat ka shikasta pan (brittleness of the personality), 63 Shock, 113 Sindh, 76–77 Sindhiani Tehreek, 83 Sindhiani Tehrik, 78–79 Socialism, 23–24 Socialist Party of French India, 162 Solidarity, 94 South Asia, 1–3, 154

202

Marxist theorizing from, 8–11 Soviet power, 26–27 Sri Lanka, 122 conceptual framework, 125–129 crisis, 122–125 critique of political economy, 140–146 economic breakdown and political response in, 133–135 external and internal dimensions, 129–135 future directions, 146–149 relations between state and society, 135–140 trajectory within global order, 123–125 Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), 136–137 Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), 123 State, 30 regime, 135–136 Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), 124 Student Federation of India (SFI), 181–182 Style, 105 Subaltern Studies in India, 52 Suppression, 122–123 Tashkent Declaration, 60

INDEX

Tebbit Test, 103–104 Tomaz Aquino Messias De Bragança (1924–1986), 164–166 Trade unions, 160, 168 Traditional Left, 53–54 Tribal channels, 168 Trickster, 108 Underdevelopment, 20–22 prescriptive nature, 23 United Front (UF), 138 United National Party (UNP), 123 United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), 24 War on Terror, 53 West Indian renaissance, 109 Women Action Forum (WAF), 78–79 Working people, 127 resistance to Bonapartist regime, 138–139 World Bank, 79 World-historical figures, 109 World-systems analysis, 170 Young People’s Front (YPF), 50–51 Zamindars, 58 Zia ul Haq’s Islamization regime, 80–81