Book Review
Jindriey: Tan Desaan Tera Tana: Burjwala
ton Washington by Dr
Manzur Ejaz (Wichaar Publishers; US, $ 15; Sahiwal, Rs 200; 2018)
An intellectual
life’s journey
Rashed Rahman
Dr Manzur Ejaz
is familiar to the Pakistani audience through his newspaper columns over many
years. But perhaps only his friends know the interesting details of his life. That
gap Manzur Ejaz has now filled by penning his autobiography, Jindriey: Tan Desaan Tera Tana: Burjwala ton
Washington in Punjabi.
Manzur Ejaz has
written a great deal about Punjabi literature and culture in Punjabi. However,
an autobiography is essentially a different kettle of fish. Here he traces his
life’s journey and intellectual growth, influences and directions. Born in a
small Canal Colony village Burjwala near Sahiwal, Punjab, Manzur suffered an
early grievous blow when struck by polio as a child. In those days, our
villages were still stuck in a historical time warp and most villagers were
unaware of what havoc polio could cause to children. The result was that one of
his legs was badly affected. Something like crutches to get around with were
almost unheard of too in the antediluvian universe of village life, and it took
a while before he acquired a pair.
Manzur describes
life in his native village, its culture, way of life, traditions, etc, in a
manner that evokes, as he himself points out, Karl Marx’s descriptive analysis
of the Asiatic mode of production, in which the Subcontinent's villages existed
in an ancient system of minimal self-sufficiency, cut off from the world and
even neighbouring villages to a large extent. This system, at least two
thousand years old, interestingly was reproduced by the British colonialists
even in the new Canal Colonies they set up and inhabited with the yeoman peasantry
they awarded lands to and settled there. This minimal self-sufficient village
structure proved for a very long time to be impervious to the revolutions,
invasions, changes of kings and dynasties at the top that form the warp and
woof of the Subcontinent’s history. Marx ascribed the inability of the
peasantry under this system to change their fate to precisely this isolated,
relatively self-sufficient system. Certainly Manzur Ejaz’s description of his
early years, childhood and education bears out Marx’s descriptive analysis and
critique.
What is thinly
alluded to by Manzur Ejaz but remains a subject requiring inquiry and research,
of which perhaps too little if any exists, is how this system has changed after
Pakistan came into being and the effects of being enfolded in the developing
capitalist market that connected these once isolated villages and hamlets to
the wider world beyond. No doubt subsequent technological developments in later
(more recent) years have had a transforming effect through the by now almost
universal availability of newspapers, radio, television and the connectivity
provided by the internet and social media.
But in Manzur
Ejaz’s childhood and growing up years, the village was all but isolated from
all beyond its boundaries. Despite his physical handicap, it is a testament to
the courage and determination of the author that he fully participated in the
games children traditionally played in village culture, got around on a bicycle
and utilised his natural gifted intelligence to advance along the road of
educating himself through school, college (Sahiwal) and university (Lahore).
His years studying at Punjab University in the 1960s were a seminal turning
point in his intellectual development. His subsequent move to Washington DC in
the US, where he still lives, brought rich dividends in his education
(including a PhD) and opened the doors to financial stability through
employment in the academic field.
Given the
radical currents of the time, it comes as no surprise that Manzur Ejaz was
swept along by the then vibrant Left movement of the 1960s. His delineation of
some of that movement’s leading lights and their worldview and politics leaves
one hungry for more, but perhaps Manzur Ejaz was in this project more
interested in recording his life’s journey as succinctly and briefly as
possible and decided to leave a discussion of the history and trajectory of the
Left in those heady days to another time and place.
Nevertheless,
some of his tantalizingly brief references to the politics of the Left in those
years open up the mind to new paths of largely unexplored inquiry. For example,
when he dilates on the trends of the time in the Left, he mentions the history
of a united Left and how and why it split in the 1960s in response to the rift
between the Soviet Union and China in the international communist movement.
However, for reasons already touched upon above, he does not go into depth to
explain what were the debates, differences and fallout of these developments on
our own indigenous Left.
It goes without saying
that the traditionally pro-Moscow Left that suffered extreme repression in the
early 1950s, starting from the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case that led to the
banning of the Communist Party of Pakistan, subsequently sought to revive itself
and continue the struggle under the umbrella of a broad coalition of the Left,
nationalists and democrats that had come together in the National Awami Party
(NAP). It is a tribute to the unity of these forces and the efforts and
leadership of such heavyweight political leaders of the time as Maulana
Bhashani and Khan Abdul Wali Khan that the Left seemed poised to win the first
elections in Pakistan scheduled to be held in 1959. Many analysts consider this
‘threat’ to have fed into, if not triggered, the military coup of 1958 as a
pre-emptive move to keep the Left-nationalist-democratic forces away from
capturing power through the ballot box.
It is also a
tragic fact that by the 1960s, this coalition had split between NAP (Bhashani –
pro-Beijing) and NAP (Wali – pro-Moscow). Subsequent events in Pakistan’s
history moved these two factions further and further away from each other,
culminating in 1971 when East Pakistan broke away to re-emerge as Bangladesh.
The New Left
(overwhelmingly pro-Beijing) that emerged worldwide in the late 1960s sought
theoretically to break from the perceived and actual mistakes of the Old Left.
However, in one critical aspect they followed the same path of seeking the
umbrella of larger mainstream parties to work under and in. What this policy
wrought universally, whether the umbrella was earlier NAP or later the Pakistan
People’s Party, was leaving the fate of the Left dependent on the fortunes of
these larger entities. When those umbrellas over time sprang ‘leaks’, changed
direction or disappeared, this left the Left without an independent existence
and it soon after succumbed to the ravages of the time, ideological confusion
and the bitter splits that more often than not break out in a period of defeat
and retreat. By the early 1980s, it was all but over for the ‘orphaned’ Left
and it has still to recover from that local debacle. The collapse of the Soviet
Union and Eastern European socialism in the late 1980s and early 1990s sealed
our Left’s fate, small parties and groups that are still in the field
notwithstanding.
This long
digression has been triggered by some of the questions raised by Manzur Ejaz’s
book. Both the writer and all of us need now to seriously introspect on the
changed state of the world, Pakistan and the politics of the Left to discover
and rediscover the way forward. For this stimulus to critical thinking, the
reader owes a debt of gratitude to Manzur Ejaz.
rashed-rahman.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment