Volume 8, No. 8, August 2026
Editor: Rashed Rahman
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“Hamlets will hum again” was a paper published anonymously in 1970 in English as a collective document representing the ideas circulating in the Punjabi public sphere at this point.6 It constituted a polemical response to the understanding of culture and language within the Pakistani Left: “This is because a majority of our progressively inclined intelligentsia, in spite of its revolutionary sentiment, was too deeply entrenched in the cultural mores of its own class to understand the inner requirements of a revolutionary movement. For them revolution consisted only in the propagation of a certain textbook formula of public ownership of means of production. They could not or did not wish to understand that the collective ownership and management of the means of production by the people implied a profound cultural reorientation and language was a central factor in such a reorientation” (Faridi Daira 1970).
The primacy of language for these intellectuals flowed from an understanding of language that saw it as a receptacle of collective consciousness: “The Punjabi language was not merely a medium of popular communication, it was a vast and rich repository of the memory of the people’s existence through centuries. It represented their consciousness, their knowledge, their intuitions, their love, hatred, anger, compassion and will to struggle against falsehood and oppression […] it had been the means of essential relatedness with our surroundings, with our past and ourselves” (ibid.).
It was thus much more than simply a medium of communication or a form that could be harnessed uncritically by the Left by simply adding ‘progressive content’. Shafqat Tanveer Mirza, another leading exponent of the Punjabi movement in this period critiques the progressive writers on precisely this count: “[…] the more prominent [among the progressive writers] did pay lip service to the importance of Punjabi, but never wrote anything in it […] You need to de-class yourself to be part of a politics which seeks to create a classless society […]. This applies to language and literature as well. If you want to talk about literature for the people and language for the people, then you need to de-class yourself on a linguistic basis as well” (Pancham 2004: 347).
A linguistic revolution was seen as integral to a cultural revolution, which was central to the revolutionary struggle as a whole: “The cultural reorientation cannot be brought about by some smoothly conceived post-revolutionary legislation. It is a product of revolutionary struggle. And it is a product which is used by the revolutionary struggle for augmenting itself. A profound cultural reorientation is thus both the end and the means of a revolutionary struggle” (Faridi Daira 1970).
This point is crucial to the Marxist approach to language politics within the Punjabi movement, developed most consistently in the writings of Maqsood Saqib, an erstwhile MKP activist from Sheikhupura. Linguistic oppression is inseparable from economic and social oppression, hence a true workers’ revolution is constantly engaged in transforming, inverting and creating alternatives to existent society, economy and language. Language as an object, as “Punjabi” can only lead to the “peddled lie” and “mockery” that is “Punjabiyat” or ethnic nationalism (Saqib 2013: 65). As editor of the MKP’s Punjabi publication, Ruth Lekha, a magazine started during the 1970s, as well as later publications such as Maa Boli and Pancham, Saqib prefers to use the term ‘lok boli’ (people’s language) to disassociate language from ethnic identity, clarifying that “by Punjab we do not mean any Turkish, Mughal, British or national geographical space, instead we are referring to the rich and intensely varied collectivity shared by the people” (ibid.: 60, my translation). This collectivity is seen as the locus of cultural politics by the Punjabi movement, renewed constantly through revolutionary practice. Language and culture are thus de-objectified in Saqib’s theorisation, placed instead in a state of ‘becoming’, shaped creatively by being part of the revolutionary process itself.
What is to be done? The goals of radical cultural politics in Punjab
According to the article, “The creative writer of today in order to fulfil his [or her] responsibility […] has to continue to learn his [or her] language from the working people and to give it back to them after selecting, synthesising and consolidating [it]” (Faridi Daira 1970). From this perspective, “rescuing literature from the conservative classes” cannot happen simply by blending Marxism with the traditional styles of Urdu poetry (Malik 1967: 652). For this reason, the essay articulates a stinging indictment of progressive writers based in Punjab who are writing in Urdu: “Writing in Urdu in the Punjab is inherently a conscious or unconscious romantic indulgence in self-effacement and acquisition of a pseudo personality” (Faridi Daira 1970).
Therefore, an overhauling of the conservative content of literary traditions is futile without changing the language, the cultural forms themselves. The paper calls for extensive research on the language, music, literature, folklore and culture of Punjab, which flourished precisely due to their autonomy from the colonial state. Their location outside the domains of power constituted the essential grounds for their relevance to radical cultural politics in the contemporary period. The poetry, drama and creative prose produced by the Punjabi movement needs to be read in the context of this polemical understanding of language politics.
Missing heroes – dramatising dissent from the margins
Alyssa Ayers’ discussion of Syed’s work, which she identifies as “central” to the “Punjabiyat project”, begins with his identification as a “lone intellectual” and “cultural entrepreneur” working in the 1960s (Ayers 2009: 75). Rahman on the other hand, highlights his “Leftist reputation” as well as the “socialist inspiration” (Rahman 1996: 204) behind his writings. Syed was a member of the MKP and a close associate of Ishaque Muhammad. Many of Syed’s poems written during the 1960s and 1970s were sung and recited at rallies organised by the party, mostly in rural Punjab. Hence, Syed was and is actively tied to the Marxist stream within Punjabi literature, and his work must be analysed in that context. Viewing him as a “lone intellectual” can only lead to a distortion in his use of “Marxist inspired literary methodologies” (Butt & Kalra 2013).
Haarr de phull – a subaltern critique of Marxist art
Najam Hosain Syed’s Haarr de Phull is set in 1978 Lahore, in a “working class area” where a “cultural programme” (playwright’s inverted commas) organised by a workers’ party is about to begin. An opening speech by a member of the party’s “cultural committee” is rudely interrupted by the sound of clumsily played street instruments, announcing the entry of a family of bhaands who push the embarrassed organisers off the stage with their loud and colourful introduction. Bhaands are traditional folk entertainers of North India, well known for witty retorts expressed through song, dance and dialogue. The play is an engagement with the debates around culture within the Pakistani Left, offering the playwright’s perspective on the relationship between art and radical politics, culture and social transformation, and more generally, revolutionary theory and practice.
The bhaands control most of the action in Syed’s play. Bhola, Gulabo and Mohraan offer a stark contrast to the “celebrated intellectuals, performers and poets who are sympathetic to the plight of the working class” (Syed 1989: 11) and had been officially invited to the programme but failed to show up. The choice of bhaands as the characters who lead a critique of the party’s leadership and ideology is significant. For Syed, they represent the subaltern figure of cultural politics, shaped equally by their precolonial cultural landscape and the alienation of their artistic labour under modern capitalism: “Don’t you ‘make’ words? When the labour of our hands reaches us as wages, it becomes hollow. When your words are weighed with money they drop into your lap like a dead bird” (ibid.: 53). 7
The bhaands are opposed by two characters, Kamil and Farooq, who represent the dominant male leadership of the party. Kamil attacks the bhaands as part of a “cultural conspiracy” to undermine the “Islamic foundations of Pakistan”, and is thus painted as the quintessential figure of Pakistani religious nationalism. The irony is that he “agrees completely” with Farooq, who sees the hand of rival Leftist parties in sabotaging the “united struggle of the workers under the name of culture” (ibid.: 37f.). While highlighting the fragmentation and mutual distrust within the Pakistani Left during this period, the speech also echoes Kamran Asdar Ali’s reading of Sajjad Zaheer, who made the classical Marxist argument that glorifies certain class struggles, notably that of the industrial workers, in his polemic against Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi. “The industrial proletariat is the foremost regiment of the international revolution. Its consciousness in its totality is derived from its experience with capitalism. If this isn’t the noblest occupation, then what is?” (ibid.: 40, my translation).
Therefore, Farooq’s very first lines in the play, essentially his introduction to the audience, are a rejection of the bhaands’ art as valuable to political consciousness. Whereas as the play within the play demonstrates, it is the bhaands’ non-theoretical discussion of political struggle as ishq (love), khed (play) and kasb (art) that elicits an awakening in the workers and cadre in the audience. The indigeneity of the bhaands is a sharp counter to the top down approach towards culture adopted by Farooq and Kamil. The bhaands are also linguistically differentiated from the leaders. Their use of language is playful, drawing mostly on more rural dialects of Punjabi. On the other hand, the grammatical structure, vocabulary and style of Farooq and Kamil’s sentences are visibly closer to Urdu. Thus, Haarr de phull is a Punjabi play, however, the bifurcation of its language into two versions of Punjabi corresponds with the different political and cultural worldviews their speakers present. Language thus becomes much more than a receptacle for content, reinforcing the emphasis in the Punjabi movement on language as fundamental to social structure and hence, to social transformation. The bhaands’ switch into Urdu when caricaturing the leaders and their retort that this “cultural programme” is “English-medium” also alludes to the linguistic and literary choices of the All Pakistan Progressive Writers Association (APWA).
The bhaands’ critique is complemented significantly by Shakeela’s accusations against her male comrades in the party. “Everyone told me that without you joining us, we cannot take a single step forward. But when I joined, I found out everyone really only wants to talk to the old woman inside of me. This new collective is an act. A new way of fulfilling old needs” (ibid.: 66). As Malik has pointed out, women have been painfully missing from the politics, history and ideology of Pakistan’s Left, and Shakeela’s character serves as a stinging reminder of this gap (Malik 2013: 22). The play ends with Shakeela sagely removing the party’s banners adorning the stage, symbolising the start of a new politics to be led by the ‘Others’ of Pakistani Marxism, women and bhaands!
Recovering the folk memory of resistance
For Ayers, “Syed’s writings clearly inaugurated the discourse of recovery which marks all the Punjabiyat efforts” (Ayers 2009: 75). She reads two of his plays, Takht Lahore (1978) and Ik Raat Ravi di (1983) as an aim to recover a lost past (ibid.: 76), an attempt to present “a new kind of Punjabi person – strong, valiant, unfazed by confronting authority” (ibid.). In her analysis, Syed’s treatment of the historical figures of Dulla Bhatti and Ahmad Khan Kharral is aimed primarily towards a representation of Punjab as heroic (ibid.: 75). I will here analyse the two plays in the context of the Marxist theoretical roots of the Punjabi movement outlined in this paper.
Takht Lahore (1978) is a play written around the figure of Dulla Bhatti, a rebel of the Mughal regime under Akbar. He was allegedly hanged in 1599 in Lahore. His last recorded words, cited in Ayers’ discussion of Syed’s plays were,“No honourable son of Punjab will ever sell the soil of Punjab” (ibid.). However, these words do not appear in the play itself. Even more interestingly, the cast of characters in Syed’s Takht Lahore does not include Dulla Bhatti. Similarly, Ahmed Khan Kharal, who led an anti-British insurgency in Punjab in 1857, appears in Ik Raat Ravi di only halfway through the play, for half a scene, and not to decisively drive forward the action. I argue that Syed’s plays present these figures as symbols of collective resistance, an emblem for mass movements whose protagonists are subaltern characters, marginal both to mainstream nationalist historiography and to the progressive revolutionary narrative 8 in Pakistan that identified the urban, industrial working class as the central actor in a socialist revolution.
The hero inverted: mirasis and musallis in Syed’s plays
The characters in our plays are divided along class and caste lines. In Takht Lahore, functionaries of the Mughal empire, factory owners, merchants and spiritual leaders join forces to oppose ‘Dulla’, himself absent in the play but represented through a servant, Ramja, of “unknown parentage, unknown tribe” (Syed 1972: 133), a group of low caste workers on strike, and Madho Lal Hussain, the most popular 16th century Punjabi poet who also belonged to the low weaver (jolaha) caste. Thus, the main opposition is between the state, capital and religion nexus and subaltern rebellion, as evidenced by the accusation against Dulla in the trial scene: “Your honour, Dulla’s rebellion is no ordinary rebellion. When a rich governor revolts against the Mughal king to spread his own power, it is a household matter for us. It is a babe to mother kingship […]. Dulla’s revolt is different. He doesn’t desire kingship, he desires to shake the very foundations of kingship. He doesn’t want the throne, he wants to invert the throne, once and for all. He wants to deliver the reins of rule into the hands of the people. Into the hands of the workers, the peasants, the servants […]. He has snatched the rights of ownership from the masters. He has told people that the land belongs to them all… Your honour, the foundation of kingship stands on the promise that every individual, according to his mental and physical strengths, has the right to own exclusively, a piece of land on God’s earth… Dullah is bent on erasing all divisions upheld by Nature” (ibid.: 154f.).
Similarly, a female character in Ik Raat Ravi di states, “Ahmed Khan has no existence if he does not rise for the people. If the people’s sorrow and happiness do not seem his own to him” (Syed 1983: 45). Moreover, Syed’s dramatisation of Kharal can be read as a representation of Punjabi heroism and nationalism only if the context of his anti-colonial politics is ignored. In the play, Kharal asserts that “[…] maybe knowledge is that which people themselves produce through their experience. Progress and prosperity that which people create through their own labour… We realised that this knowledge which we have learned after coming under the British will only serve to build their house. Not ours […]” (ibid.: 84f.). At this point he is responding to the arguments of collaborationist feudal lords who regard siding with the British in 1857 as the surest means of maintaining the status quo. The primary conflict driving the action in both plays is between conservative, upper-class forces on the one hand, and politically radical, marginalised groups on the other.
Beyond – Syed’s use of historical fiction
Given the Leftist influences within the Punjabi movement and Syed’s political association with the MKP, his work needs to be extricated from the Punjabiyat discourse that Ayers exclusively grounds it in, and located more widely within radical streams in post-colonial cultural politics across South Asia and the rest of the world. For example, a comparison with the works of Utpal Dutt proves quite fruitful to understanding the playwrights’ shared interest in a trans-historical theory of rebellion. Mahavidroh and Ik Raat Ravi di are written in the vernacular languages of Bengali and Punjabi respectively, make heavy use of folk traditions such as the jatra and the dhola and place low-caste, low-class characters at the centre of their action. In fact, Najm Hosein Syed has translated Dutt’s Mahavidroh into Punjabi as Vadda Dhro, indicating an interest in transcending Punjabiyat to forge the kind of cross-regional solidarity claimed exclusively by the hegemonic cosmopolitan/national languages.
These plays serve as recollections of collective histories of resistance with the subaltern as their subject. As Bhatia points out, “Dutt seeks, through his reinterpretation of the 1857 rebellion, to reinforce the Naxalite insistence on going back to the source of all revolutions, the peasantry” (Bhatia 2007: 108f.). As his choice to dramatise peasant rebellions using alternative historical sources such as folk songs and oral history indicates, Syed was similarly inspired by the MKP’s insistence on organising in the countryside.
Further, Syed also uses the genre of historical fiction to comment on contemporary Pakistan. As Van Erven points out, direct parallels can be drawn between contemporary Lahore and Mughal-era Lahore as depicted by Syed. For example, in the city’s handing over to the commander of the Mughal army who steps in to save the ‘”sultanate’ and “country”, the playwright invokes the recurring pattern of military rule in Pakistan (Van Erven 1992: 56). In addition, the Pakistani state’s ideological use of religion to suppress regional and particularly, Marxist dissent as “atheistic” and “anti-Islamic” is echoed in the plot of Takht Lahore, in which the spiritual leadership oppose Dulla for upsetting the belief nurtured by them that “religion is the pillar of the throne” (Syed 1972: 118).
Syed here deploys a well-worn practice within Subcontinental drama, the use of mythological or historical themes to allegorise contemporary state, society and politics. As Bhatia points out, this usage of historical fiction was cemented during the early colonial period following the passage of the Dramatic Performances Censorship Act 1876, since anti-state politics dressed in historical and mythological themes could evade the censors much more skilfully (2007: 20). The circumscribed freedom of expression and of political activity during the period in which Syed was writing called for similar creative manoeuvres.
For Ayers, Syed’s work as the fountainhead of the Punjabi movement represents an attempt to recover Punjab’s lost self and restore its historical valour. However, the deliberate obscuring of geography in Takht Lahore, with Punjab being invoked only once and that too by opponents of Dulla, indicates that Syed is not concerned with the ethnic question of Panjab vis-a-vis the other provinces. His use of historical fiction, folk forms and marginalised figures from society as protagonists is tied intimately to the cultural politics inaugurated by the rural focus of the MKP’s activities, drawing on the historical stratification of Punjabi society along linguistic lines to fashion a new self – a radical political subject embedded in the language, land and lives of the people.
Conclusion
Studies of the Punjabi movement in Pakistan have overwhelmingly characterised it as a classic case of regional nationalism in which Punjabi language and literature contribute to an ethnic identity promoted by the regional elite. However, these accounts ignore the intimate involvement of sections of the Left, which encouraged the rise of Marxist-inspired approaches to culture in the Punjabi movement. Further, the linguistic stratification of Punjabi society under colonialism linked language with class in ways that problematise a simple equation between language and ethnic identity.
Kaviraj has argued that languages such as Urdu, Hindi and English had a dual nature, simultaneously public and private (Kaviraj 2005). They were public to insiders and closed, esoteric to those who lacked the requisite skills. For him, the implication is that while elite discourse can range across the entire Subcontinent, the discourse of the subaltern, articulated in the vernacular, remained necessarily trapped within its regional confines (ibid.). In our analyses, we often extend these geographical limits to bear on the ideological bounds of vernacular production, as if it is only capable of expressing regional politics and local identity.
As the outlook and texts of the Marxist Punjabi movement in Pakistan demonstrate, this localisation of vernacular literature blinds us to its connections with cross-regional literary currents and universalist political projects. Expanding the scope of Najm Hosein Syed’s plays beyond the discourse of Punjabiyat to wider traditions of radical art promises to enrich our understanding of the Punjabi movement in particular, as well as Leftist cultural ideology and language politics in general. It also unsettles established historiographical links between language politics and nationalism, vernacular culture and regionalism, and language and ethnic identity.
Endnotes:
6. I am grateful to Maqsood Saqib for sharing the text with me from Pancham’s archives. For its Punjabi translation by Saqib, see Faridi Dara, Jhokaan Theesann Abaad Wal, Pancham, Ma Boli number (2004), pp. 90-102.
7. See Syed, Hosain, Najam: Kehdi rooh te kehdi ghaza in Khaako Jaid Na Ko (Lahore: Suchet Kitab Ghar, 1995) for the playwright’s perspective on the alienation of art as labour in South Asian history covering the Mughal, colonial and contemporary periods.
8. For Syed’s exposition of subaltern history and historiography through a literary analysis of the classical Punjabi epic, Najabat di vaar, see Syed, Hosain, Najam: Gall Vaar Di (Lahore: Suchet Kitab Ghar, 2010).
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(Concluded)
Courtesy South Asia Chronicle.