From the inside cover of the magazine. The Urdu text on top is the magazine’s slogan, which reads “Khuda ke mazloom awaam ka tarjuma” [The translation of God’s oppressed people]. Al-Fatah, 10 September 1979. Source: SARRC, Islamabad.

Al-Fatah (“The Victory” in Arabic) was a weekly Urdu-language socialist periodical published out of Karachi, Pakistan, from May 1970 till approximately July 1990. It published a wide variety of content, although there was a distinct proclivity towards political topics. Al-Fatah‘s socialist leanings informed many stances that it took during its run. It was decidedly pro-China and staunchly opposed oppressive imperialist powers like the United States and Israel. Furthermore, on a domestic level, it was rather critical of landlords and owners, and instead advocated for greater worker and union rights. Perhaps this proclivity is what allowed it to become a staunch supporter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which ultimately gained popular support for the same reasons.

This teaching tool aims to shed light on the team behind Al-Fatah while simultaneously tracing its involvement in press movements, in which both the publication and journalists associated with it became champions of press freedom. In doing so, figures such as Irshad Rao, Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, Shaukat Siddiqui, Minhaj Barna, Hajra Mansoor and Wahab Siddiqui, while journalists by profession, found themselves shaping the very direction Pakistan would take in the tumultuous period which were the 1970s and 1980s.

The magazine was a part of the cultural war between the United States and the Soviet Union for instilling socialist ideology into global south populations, specifically Pakistan. The magazine was published at a time when significant global events were taking place within the context of the Cold War. In 1975, the Vietnam War finally came to an end, and the reunification of North and South Vietnam occurred in the same year. The global south was also experiencing a strong tide of pro-communist movements, with communist governments in Laos and Angola, and the Soviet Union following an intensive détente policy in southern Africa.

This teaching tool translates and contextualizes the articles, letters, and photographs published in Tulu between 1971-1976. These issues have been retrieved from the Magazine Archive in Punjab Public Library, Lahore, and divided into four major themes: Countering anti-Communist Propaganda, Art and Socialist Realism, Socialism and National Development, and Women and Socialism. These themes are prominent in each issue of the magazine, while some issues are solely dedicated to a single theme. For example, the issue of January 1976 places a huge emphasis on the newly introduced five-year economic plan along with industrial developments. This overlaps the themes of the countering of anti-communist propaganda by repeatedly mentioning the national industrial development of the country that was in a state of cold war with the champion of capitalism and industrial development, the USA.

The themes also help us create an understanding of the core and periphery relationship between the Soviet Union and countries in the Global South, through the publishing of the magazine for the Pakistani audience. Some issues of Tulu catered to a bilingual readership, while some issues were completely in Urdu. Apart from aiding the Soviet Union in the cultural war, Tulu became an important historical memorialization of Soviet sociocultural lives and their peripheral interactions with Pakistan within and beyond the Comintern.

For instance, right-wing columnist Abdul Qadir Hasan was given autonomy over the thematic concerns of his publications and, consequently, could publish articles that did not have communist or socialist undertones. Hence, on the one hand, several editors of Lail-o-Nihar supported the ideology of socialism and were staunchly against American imperialism. Therefore, several articles found in the magazine propagated beliefs that the Progressive Writers Association widely held. In contrast, intermittently, one could find literature on religious and nationalistic sentiments.

Over the next few years, several reputable Urdu authors wrote for the magazine. This list includes Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, Ishfaq Ahmed, and Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum. Similarly, Lail-o-Nihar covered a wide range of topics, from film reviews to reports on nationwide protests. However, the magazine underwent a sudden transformation in 1958. When President Ayub Khan declared Martial Law across Pakistan, he banned all left-wing activities. As a result, armed forces raided Progressive Papers Limited and nationalized all its publications, including Lail-o-Nahar. Moreover, left-oriented editors were arrested, including Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Zaheer Babar. During Ayub’s regime, the magazine ceased publication as most writers were imprisoned or in exile.

In this teaching tool, the authors have expanded and translated various articles that were published in four issues of Lail-o-Nihar, which was released in 1970. The first section of the tool provides context to the time in which the magazine was published and provides historicity into the political unrest that plagued Pakistan at the time. Simultaneously, it also highlights brief biographies of the primary editors of the magazine. The second section analyzes the articles that highlight revolutionary movements across the globe, including those in Palestine and Eritrea. Thirdly, the teaching tool explores the depiction and reportage of local protests, such as student riots and the mobilization of farmers. The last section covers how the magazine propagated revolutionary ideology through literature.

The Mussalli Speaks: caste, regional identity and language in the poetry of the Mazdoor Kissan Party

This paper closely examines the party organ of the Mazdoor Kissan (Workers and Peasants) Party (MKP) in Pakistan, with a particular emphasis on the party’s polemical engagements with Left-wing debates around language, culture and caste. The MKP emerged from a split along the lines of the Sino-Soviet rift within the National Awami Party in 1968, and championed a program of “people’s revolution” that trained its energies on the countryside, propagating armed struggle against the postcolonial state in Pakistan. While militant peasant insurrection did not eventually take off in Punjab, a thriving cultural sphere organized around the radical deployment of the regional vernacular and its folk traditions emerged. Through close readings of the poetry and cultural commentary appearing in the circular that offer an insight into this counter-cultural space, I aim to highlight a history of literary dissidence in Pakistan that remains marginalized due to the heavy emphasis on Urdu, the national language, a bias that ranges across the ideological spectrum. In particular, I wish to examine the record of and reflections on the party’s “Harappa Conference,” an event organized by the party’s “dehaat mazdoor” (agrarian worker) unit. This unit identified the “mussali” or “Muslim Sheikh,” a regional term denoting Dalit Muslims in North India, as the primary revolutionary subject. The mussali was the central figure whose experience of exploitation became the prism through which MKP intellectuals undertook a radical revision of Pakistani and Punjabi history. Invoking Harappa, the ancient archaeological site of the Indus valley civilization, in its oppositional literary-cultural vision, the circular’s literary content conjured an imaginative geography of an un-partitioned, historical Punjab, mapping a four-thousand-year old cultural formation through a multi-lingual literary method that foregrounded subaltern critiques from the margins of religious identity and caste. Hitherto relegated from the “progressive writing” canon in North India, this body of literary and cultural writing can help reconstellate debates around Left-wing cultural activism, language politics and literary methodology, unlocking a new template for theorizing templates for revolutionary subjectivity and the postcolonial intellectual, through a political practice rooted in regional imaginaries and pre-colonial pasts.

Jabal, or Mountain in Balochi, was a cyclostyle pamphlet curated, written, edited, printed, and circulated by members and sympathisers of the Baloch Popular Liberation Front (BPLF) in Pakistan. The BPLF was a Marxist-Leninist insurgency organised primarily among Pakistan’s minority Baloch population, who were in armed conflict with a central state dominated by the military and controlled by majority Punjabis and Urdu-speakers between 1973 and ’77. Jabal emerged as a response to the censored and biased media coverage of the counterinsurgency campaign, yet ended up featuring far more than reporting of army operations. Throughout its pages, Jabal includes multiple references to a variety of national liberation figures and movements, including Patrice Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnam War, and movements fighting white majority rule in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and South Africa. It also included alternative analyses about state, sovereign violence, internationalism, and empire. In its pages, it imagined a multi-national, socialist, and anti-imperial revolutionary subject which would replace the mono-national, capitalist, and US-aligned Pakistani citizen.

Through attention to both content and context of Jabal, including its production, circulation, and consumption in Pakistani cities, I explore how Jabal reimagined belonging, community, nation, and the international order. I ask: What other imaginations of identity and collective life were imagined in its pages? What might it mean to reintroduce these ideas, to circulate within Pakistan and elsewhere today?