Lenin for Sale? A ‘Factional’ Account of the Rise and Fall of the Left in Pakistan
Raza Naeem*
The paper focuses on factional (fact plus fiction) narratives about the rise and fall of the (communist) Left in Pakistan. Over the years many novels, autobiographies and memoirs have been written in both Urdu and English to explain the rise and fall of the Left in Pakistan. It is this author’s contention that both fictional and factual creations need to be taken into account in order to make sense of how and why the nascent Left in Pakistan rose during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and dramatically declined in the 1980s leading to the present day; one without the other would leave the narrative incomplete. The author has made use of novels, autobiographies, as well as first person interviews in both Urdu and English to explore the causes and consequences for the rise and fall of the Left in Pakistan. These include the Urdu novels Ae Ghazaal-e-Shab and Naadar Log by Mustansar Hussain Tarar and the late Abdullah Hussein; the autobiographies/memoirs of two veterans of the Left movement in Pakistan, namely Surkh Siasat by Rauf Malik and Sixty Years in Self-Exile: No Regrets by B.M. Kutty; and first person interviews with Malik, Kutty and Tarar. In the bicentennial year of Karl Marx, the paper is a unique, novel and timely attempt to combine little-used but recent fictional, factual and primary accounts and sources in both Urdu and English to attempt to explain the crisis of the Left in Pakistan and what lessons can be learnt from its legacy about its present and its future.
* Mr Raza Naeem is a Pakistani social scientist, book critic, and an award-winning translator and dramatic reader currently engaged as Instructor in History at the Senior School in the Beaconhouse School Systems, Lahore, Pakistan. He is presently working on translations of the selected work of Sibte Hasan, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi and Abdullah Hussein. He is the recipient of the 2013-14 Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship for his translation and interpretive work on Saadat Hasan Manto’s essays.