by RAZA NAEEM
2016 marks the birth centenary of Pakistan’s own Gramsci, the pioneer of the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) in undivided India and of the Communist Party in Pakistan, Sibte Hasan. Like the famed Italian thinker and activist, Hasan endured repeated jail terms, first during his sojourn in the United States, and then in Pakistan in 1951-55, and again during the Ayub dictatorship. Both thinkers chose to write in their native languages, Italian for Gramsci and Urdu for Hasan. But unlike Gramsci, Hasan was lucky to escape continuous jail terms, as well as an overzealous prosecutor who had decided in Mussolini’s Italy that Gramsci’s intellect had to be stopped from functioning for twenty years. Hasan’s intellect though, flourished after his release from prison. Both Gramsci and Hasan were also concerned with producing organic and original theories, using Marxist concepts to apply to their material realities rather than the other way round. Chances are that Pakistan’s younger breed of comrades know their Gramsci, but not their Sibte Hasan.
It’s surprising that despite Hasan’s iconic stature in the Indian subcontinent, very little is known about his biographical details; neither he himself nor some of his closest comrades like Sajjad Zaheer and Faiz Ahmad Faiz wrote anything about him. He was born in a village of Azamgarh district of India in 1916 and graduated from Aligarh Muslim University. He embarked on a distinguished journalistic career, serving Pioneer (Lucknow), National Herald (Allahabad) and the Bombay Chronicle besides Urdu daily Payam of Hyderabad, Deccan. He was also the editor of the renowned literary journal Naya Adab and the famous Lahore weekly Lail-o-Nahar. His own initiation into socialism began while he was a student in undivided India. In the preface to Moosa say Marx Tak (From Moses to Marx), which has for decades served as the bible of Marxism for thousands of left activists in the Indian subcontinent, he admits:
“I learnt the first principles of socialism from the prominent revolutionary historian the late Dr Muhammad Ashraf. Those were the days when the English were dominant in the country and the entry of socialist literature was totally prohibited. Sometimes a book by Karl Marx, Engels or Lenin would arrive clandestinely, its cyclostyled copies would circulate secretly, but we had no access to these documents. We would just be happy to read the works of Bertrand Russell, Bernard Shaw, D. H. Cole or Sidney Hook, even though none of them was a real socialist or communist.”
I have it on good authority that the two personalities which served as his lifelong inspirations were the maverick Dr Rashid Jahan, part of the group which published the incendiary short-story collection Angaaray, which later on served as the early pioneers of the PWA and the revolutionary Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz.
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