Volume 8, No. 7, July 2026
Editor: Rashed Rahman
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Post-1947, the situation has remained unchanged. The Sindhi language is used at the lower levels of administration only in a few parts of Sindh, while Urdu and English dominate in the armed forces, bureaucracy and judiciary in all other provinces of Pakistan (Ayers, Alyssa:“Language, the nation and symbolic capital: the case of Punjab” [The Journal of Asian Studies: 2009, 274f.]). Despite the predominance of Punjabi speakers in the country, literacy in Punjabi is well below literacy in Urdu, to which employment is still tied (Rahman 2002). As Mansoor (2005) and Zaidi (2005) point out, Urdu remains a prestige symbol among the middle and lower middle classes in Pakistan, while Punjabi is seen as a marker of low socio-economic status. With the creation of Pakistan, Urdu’s status as the ‘national language’ also became intertwined with state ideology and nation-building.4 This factor, combined with its establishment as a language of administration and high culture under colonialism has led to the linguistic stratification of Pakistani society along lines of class as well as ethnicity (Ayers 2009: 77).
In the political realm, this postcolonial linguistic hierarchy was reflected by the subversive power of Pakistan’s regional languages, including Punjabi, despite its position as the language of the dominant province. As early as the 1950s, Punjabi intellectuals and language activists were viewed with suspicion, branded “traitors” and “Sikh sympathisers” for their association with a language that was seen as the exclusive preserve of Sikhism – much like the British had perceived it a hundred years ago. The Punjabi Writers Guild, an organisation of Punjabi writers and poets was banned and declared “anti-Pakistan”, and “socialist” labels of disparagement were tacked onto key activists of the Punjabi movement (Rahman 1995: 206).
An insight into the colonial restructuring of the social space of language and its postcolonial continuities reveals that the modern history of language politics in South Asia cannot be told simply through the lens of ethno-nationalism. Anti-colonialism and postcolonial cultural resistance are necessary currents in bringing together a more complex picture of the relationship between language, region and politics. For our purpose, it becomes imperative to tease apart this “given-ness of language as a (self-contained) category” (Jalal 1996: 34).
Viewing the Marxist-inspired writings produced within the Punjabi movement as a discourse of Punjabiyat divorces it from the context that gave it decisive shape and vigour. Many among the Punjabi movement’s leading exponents were members of the Mazdoor Kissan Party. The party’s ideology, practice and cultural politics as a distinct, Maoist-inspired strand within the Pakistani Left influenced them critically, ushering in a new model of radical cultural production that directly challenged the paradigms of progressive writing in Pakistan.
The Maoist Left and cultural politics in Pakistan: Regionalism, the countryside and the Left
The Mazdoor Kissan Party (MKP) was formed in 1968 by Afzal Bangash, when the National Awami Party (NAP) split along Pro-China and Pro-Soviet lines (Ahmed 2010). Maoist members of the NAP gravitated towards the MKP, with Major Ishaque joining it in 1970. In his own words, “the party’s Guideline is […] the working class ideology of revolution. We use that in analysing situations and in training our cadres. The study of their own people, of the history of Pakistan, of the class structure of Pakistan, of the state of the class struggle here is done from the point of view of the proletarian revolutionary theory. But our main stress is working in the countryside” (cit. in Butt and Kalra 2013).
The MKP’s formation was influenced by the rising prominence of Maoist ideas internationally. However, Kamran Asdar Ali points out that it also represented the fruition of a critical strand within Pakistani communism, articulated most forcefully by Eric Cyprian in the early years. Cyprian was an old Communist Party of India (CPI) member who later came to associate with the MKP (Ali 2013). Cyprian criticised the nascent Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) for its urban emphasis, advocating instead for organising the landless peasants and migrants in West Punjab (ibid.: 490). The CPP on the other hand, based its strategy on a class analysis of Pakistan that categorised the society as capitalist. They concentrated on the urban industrial working class, and emphasised trade union activity in the cities.
The MKP’s rural focus maintained a militant edge, with its biggest success being the liberation of 200 hectares of land in Hashtnagar in present-day Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in 1970. This struggle involved extensive clashes between armed MKP cadres and peasants against the state (Ali and Niaz 2009). The movement inspired similar struggles all over Pakistan, and the Punjab MKP initiated kissan movements in the western and southern parts of the province where landlordism was most entrenched (Ahmed 2010). The Punjab party did not attain successes like the Hashtnagar uprising. However, its ideology and practice have left an indelible mark on cultural politics in the region.
MKP’s cultural politics
In Punjab, the party was led by Ishaque Muhammad. Much like Sajjad Zaheer,5 his figure brought together literature and politics, inspiring a new tradition of Left-wing cultural politics in Pakistan. Ishaque Muhammad’s main works include two plays written in Punjabi, Quqnus and Mussali. Quqnus is based on Dullah Bhatti, who was allegedly hanged in Lahore in 1599 by the Mughal emperor Akbar on criminal charges. In Muhammad’s play however, Dullah is appropriated for an alternative historical narrative, one which celebrates his rebellion as a people’s movement that united the lower castes. The play makes heavy use of folk songs and popular Punjabi poetry by the likes of Bulleh Shah, Shah Hussain and Waris Shah, grounding an invitation to revolutionary struggle in the historical, cultural and linguistic context of Punjab. This instrumental use of Punjabi as a mobilisational tool was an important aspect of the MKP’s line, which sought that its “philosophy, strategy and tactics may be communicated to people […] in a simplified and easy to understand manner” (Muhammad 1978: 306).
The MKP’s mobilisational approach and its emphasis on the countryside where Urdu was almost non-existent called for a new perspective on regional languages: “As part of living in a village and interacting with musallis […] Firstly, I thought that they were always speaking in a free poetic form, but when needed, they could play with words to maintain the flow. Waves of words flowed whatever the topic, ranging from the plough to love affairs. Secondly, the range of this language surprised me; these people who had been kept away from pathshalas, madrassas and schools, and for whom words were kept out of reach. They had a full command of their own language. Sitting in their school I became convinced about the importance of Punjabi” (cit. in Butt & Kalra 2013).
The party’s interest in the vernacular was also stoked by the wider political context. The 1960s and 1970s saw rising provincial assertion against the Centre, including the Sindhu Desh movement led by GM Syed in the 1970s, the Pakhtunistan secessionist struggle of the 1960s and most importantly, the creation of Bangladesh from Pakistan’s eastern wing in 1971 (Talbot 2012: 36f.). Language and regional culture played a central role in these claims, and the Pakistani Left on the whole supported these claims. The MKP thus fused prevailing regionalist discourse with a Maoist emphasis on popular idiom and structures.
As mentioned, leading language activists and writers of the Punjabi movement were either members of the MKP or closely associated with it. Thus, its politics and ideology, especially with regard to language and culture critically informed their work, and threw them into dialogue (and sometimes passionate polemic!) with the All Pakistan Progressive Writers Association (APWA) and its associated intellectuals. APWA was the longstanding cultural front for the CPP.
Urdu and APWA
According to Sadia Toor, Pakistan’s national culture emerged as a field of contestation during the nation’s first two decades, a field where struggles for hegemony were played out between different social blocs (Toor 2005). The Marxist cultural Left, with the APWA as its locus, also participated in these debates. Given the increasingly vocal resentment from the provinces, particularly East Pakistan, the sine qua non of Leftist politics became support for regional autonomy vis-a-vis the Centre (ibid.: 334). Despite this, many Leftist intellectuals remained committed to a project of forging a national identity and a progressive national culture. Toor points out how “Faiz [Ahmed Faiz] was careful to state that a ‘national culture’ could not be evolved ‘from above’ but must come about gradually through a dialectical process determined in large part by the relationships between the different groups of people who made up Pakistan” (ibid.: 333).
While Toor interprets the APWA’s politics around national culture as a secular counter to Right-wing religious nationalist discourse, Kamran Asdar Ali has highlighted the structural similarities between progressive and conservative approaches to culture (Ali 2013). According to him, despite their stated support for vernacular cultures and a denigration of ‘culture from above’, the discourse of the progressive writers broadly took an elitist approach towards the masses, looking to “tame and harness the particularistic identities of various ethnic and linguistic groups” (ibid: 506). A majority of APWA’s members were drawn from the middle and upper classes, and were therefore comfortable speaking, writing and reading in Urdu (Malik 1967: 652). However, it was hardly spoken and understood among the working classes and peasantry, and its poetic traditions were alien to their cultural landscape.
However, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the most “visible and iconic figure” (Toor 2005: 335) in those times, emphasised that such distances between the writers and the workers could be circumvented through the power of artistic imagination, literary expression and a writer’s natural sensitivity. For him, the APWA’s emphasis on Urdu and modern literary forms could play an important role in radicalising the urban, educated sections of Pakistani society: “If the message of the progressive writers does not reach the uneducated workers at least it reaches the middle classes […] Are not we a part of society?” (cit. in Malik 1967: 653). For Ali this shows, how a north Indian Ashraaf elite shared a consensus over the centrality of Urdu and its associated cultural norms, despite being on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum (Ali 2013: 506f).
Debates around the Left and literary radicalism in South Asia almost solely revolve around the activities and ideology of the progressive writers’ movement, whose purview was limited to writing in the “cosmopolitan languages” of Urdu and Hindi. How can vernacular voices contribute to these debates? How did they engage with the ideology and practice of progressive writing in Urdu? As the Punjabi literary movement shows us, radical authors of the vernacular were often engaged in interpreting the project of progressive writing anew, forging revolutionary subjectivities grounded in both universal emancipation and vernacular roots.
Notes
4. Urdu’s choice as the national language of Pakistan stemmed from its status as the ‘Muslim language’ following what was called the ‘Hindi-Urdu controversy’, the communal split of Hindustani due to competition between Hindu and Muslim salariats. See King 1995.
5. Sajjad Zaheer was the secretary general of the Communist Party of Pakistan in its early years, and a prominent member of the All Pakistan Progressive Writers’ Association. His celebrated publications include a novel titled London ki aik raat (a night in London) and Roshnai, a collection of essays on the progressive writers’ movement.
(To be continued)