"I Am a Poet of Workers and Peasants": Working-class Poets of Pakistan.

Memon, Qalandar Bux ; Yousaf, Zeeshan ; Qaiser, Iqbal 等

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The sky bore witness, the earth too cried,
 Someone passed in splendour, someone else passed away.
--Josh Malihabadi 

Like Sufi and progressive poets, today's Pakistani working-class poets stand with their class in daily toil and struggle, enlightening it, highlighting it, and enriching it.

Pakistan is a vastly inequitable society. The elite--an oligarchy consisting of military generals, feudal landowners, and state sponsored industrialists--live in mansions, import nannies from the Philippines, import luxury cars, wine, and champagne. Living apart from the workers of their land and factories, their existence is one of splendor. The poor--peasants and workers--live in poverty and daily die in poverty. It is widely agreed that at least 60 percent of Pakistanis live below the poverty line of $2 a day, and 22.6 percent live under $1 a day. Two dollars is roughly 200 rupees. Today, in the market, 12 bananas were selling for 90 rupees. A liter of milk varies from between 70 to 90 rupees depending on one's location, and a kilo of rice costs 165 rupees. Therefore, it is no surprise that 44 percent of those under five in Pakistan are stunted and 32 percent are underweight.

Stunted and malnourished Pakistanis are also its labor force. 57.2 million women, men, and children work: 43 percent in agriculture, 20.3 percent in industry, and the remaining 36.6 percent in other services. Eleven million children work in the country, with nearly half of these working under the age of ten. Further, since the 1970s, millions of Pakistanis have migrated to take up working-class jobs in the Middle East and the UK--often taking jobs that locals refuse to do--and earn vastly lower pay than the locals for the same jobs. Statistics don't tell the whole story. The typical Pakistani worker moves from urban to rural, industrial, and farmwork both frequently and with fluidity. Peasants often move from rural areas for months at a time to urban industrial sites, only to return a few months later with a few thousand rupees saved up for the yearly wheat harvest. Thus the Pakistani working class is simultaneously peasantry and working class, and its poets are the registrars of its sufferings and resistance.

The life and work of Arif Shah is illustrative. Arif Shah was born in a working-class family in 1948 in Faisalabad, Pakistan's biggest industrial city. At the age of twelve he ran away from the poverty of home to earn a living. After wandering around for a while, he began driving a horse cart in the town of Toba Tek Singh. "I was the youngest coach driver in the city," he told me. A few years later, he migrated to Muscat, but he couldn't find a regular job there and soon returned, enrolling in the military. The 1960s and 1970s were fevered with leftist revolutionary momentum. Left organizations had played a leading role in overthrowing two dictators during this period. Arif Shah began to recite his poems at political rallies. His superiors in the military were not happy with his political activities. They were further dumbfounded with his refusal to partake in operations in what was then East Pakistan (today Bangladesh), where a national independence movement was being brutally put down by the military.

Court-martialed and dismissed from the military, Arif Shah has spent the rest of his life wandering from one laboring occupation to another: sometimes in factories, sometimes in fields, sometimes as a studio hand or an actor in Lollywood (Pakistan's film studios based in Lahore), and sometimes as a security guard. Always writing and storing experiences, he recited his poems wherever people would listen, between shifts at tea-stalls, on the job to workers around him, and at Sufi shrines and at political rallies. "I feel happiest reciting at tea stalls sitting with workers ... literary gatherings do not suit my type of poetry," he told us. Arif Shah is emblematic of the working-class poetry of Pakistan. Terse, written in local vernaculars (Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Saraiki, Balochi) as opposed to the official and state-promoted language of Urdu, recited in informal gatherings rather than formal literary gatherings, seldom written down but remembered orally and passed on as such. Rather than provide an escape from it, the poetry often magnifies working-class existence itself. Two traditions--that of rebel Sufi poets and the Progressive Writers Movement--influence contemporary working-class poets of Pakistan.

Sufis--radical theologians from the Islamic tradition--from the tenth century started to arrive in Southeast Asia from other parts of the Islamic world. Radical Sufis were opposed to the orthodox Islamic clergy (Ulema). The Ulema, on the other hand, preached strict interpretation of religious texts, emphasized ritual, used Arabic as the language of instruction, and were centralized and had connections to local rulers (often working under their patronage). Sufis, often educated at the best seminaries of the time, proficient in numerous languages, and widely traveled, saw religion as being about love, equality--above all, for the downtrodden. Sufis did not carry or believe in accumulating material possessions. They settled in various villages in small houses and hamlets. At their compounds, they composed and recited poetry, accompanied by musical instruments, in the local vernacular.

Radical Sufis opposed oppressive landlords, emperors, and the orthodox clergy. Their poetry abounds with challenges to all such powers. For example, Baba Fareed, a twelfth-century Punjabi poet, recited in one poem, "Fareed," "When there is greed, what love can there be? When there is greed, love is false." This thought is furthered in the fifteenth century by Guru Nanak, who famously refused a dinner invitation by a landlord and accepted that of a poor carpenter instead. When asked to explain his choice, he pointed out that the bread of the landlord contained "blood" of others (their labor power), while the bread of the carpenter was sweet as it was made from his own labor. In this vein, Bulleh Shah, a seventeenth-century iconoclast, writes, "Drink wine and eat the heartiest meals but only if the meal is fired from the bone of your own flesh." Also in the seventeenth century, Shah Inayat set up a commune for the poor, which at its height was forty thousand strong and built on the principle that "those who sow should eat." The local landlords and the Mughal Empire colluded to have Shah Inayat killed and the commune destroyed.

Yet Sufis continued their opposition to landlordism, emperors, gender inequality, and other oppressions. The protagonists of much of their poetry are working women. As such, Sufi poets aimed to give voice to the voiceless. It is then no surprise that for working-class Pakistanis, Sufi shrines (when an acknowledged Sufi dies, his death place is made into a shrine) remain a space of comfort and salvation. Millions throng to Sufi shrines daily to listen to the recitation of Sufi poetry, get free food, or just have a space to sit and think or pray. Class, caste, and religious differences are often erased in many such spaces--with everyone being treated equally. Given that mosques teach in Arabic, a language few in the country understand, but Sufi poetry is orally transmitted and in the local vernacular, the working class of Pakistan is intertwined from birth with Sufi traditions, and this vast tradition forms one of the main influences of its contemporary poets--both in terms of form and content.

Sufis were rebels of their time and often martyred for their championing of the downtrodden. The twentieth century saw another group of rebels take up the mantle of the poor. In the 1930s a group of anti-imperialist Indian (this being before the creation of Pakistan) writers met in a Chinese restaurant in London and agreed to form the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) and soon issued a manifesto. Their aim was revolutionary. The manifesto states that in a time when "radical changes are taking place in Indian Society" and yet "the spirit of reaction" though "moribund and doomed to ultimate decay, is still operative and making desperate efforts to prolong itself," the writer's duty is to "give expression to the changes taking place in Indian life and to assist in the spirit of progress in the country." The PWA wished to "rescue literature and other arts from the priestly, academic, and decadent classes in whose hands they have degenerated so long; to bring the arts into the closest touch with the people; and to make them the vital organs which will register the actualities of life, as well as lead us to the future." The manifesto further states, "We believe that the new literature of India [Pakistan] must deal with the basic problems of our existence today--the problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness, and political subjugation." These sentiments are well summed up in renowned novelist Premchand's presidential address to the first meeting of the PWA, where he announced, "We will have to change the standard of beauty." The progressives now conceptualized beauty and love as belonging to anticolonialism and class struggle. Progressive writers took up this challenge and infused traditional Sufi martyr poetry with a political dimension suited for their time.

Among them, Ustad Daman stands out. A tailor by profession, he wrote in Punjabi and recited his poems among workers and during political rallies up to the 1980s--in particular antidictatorship rallies. His most famous line is directed against the militarization of Pakistan: "Pakistan is a great joy, wherever you look the army." Another working-class progressive was Habib dalib. Jailed many times for his political poetry, his verses are well known to commoners, and he is respected for both his political convictions and unbending solidarity with the oppressed--even though many of his friends changed sides and began to serve power, often as ministers. Alluding to former friends, he writes,

 The status of the poor is still the same
 the days of the ministers have indeed
 changed every child of the country is
 under debt while the poor of the country
 walk without shoes 

Today's working-class poets, then, write in the local vernacular, in terse, uncomplicated rhymes, often building on the easily understood metaphors and vocabulary built up by Sufis and the progressive writers. These poets work outside formal literary associations and operate among other workers in local settings. Their work is known by word of mouth as they are seldom published. Yet, as with the Sufis and progressives, they stand with their class in daily toil and struggle, enlightening it, highlighting it, and enriching it.

Lahore

Qalandar Bux Memon lives in Lahore, where he is assistant professor in the political science department of Forman Christian College. He is editor of Naked Punch Review (www.nakedpunch.com), an interdisciplinary poetry, art, politics, and philosophy magazine run by a collective of activists and writers, and founding member of Cafe Bol, an intellectual cafe based in Lahore that holds regular political, poetic, and philosophical gatherings.

Zeeshan Yousaf is cofounder of Bol Media Collective, which works in video reportage, documentaries, and fictional films to shed light on otherwise neglected issues. He lives in Lahore and is pursuing graduate studies in political science at the London School of Economics.

Iqbal Qaiser is a historian and Punjabi poet. He has published two books of poetry and six nonfiction books in Punjabi and two books of history in Urdu. He is the director of Punjabi Kohj Garh, an institute promoting research in Punjabi history and culture.