Mazdoor Kissan Party Circular; later circulated as Proletari​

The Mussalli Speaks: caste, regional identity and language in the poetry of the Mazdoor Kissan Party

This paper closely examines the party organ of the Mazdoor Kissan (Workers and Peasants) Party (MKP) in Pakistan, with a particular emphasis on the party’s polemical engagements with Left-wing debates around language, culture and caste. The MKP emerged from a split along the lines of the Sino-Soviet rift within the National Awami Party in 1968, and championed a program of “people’s revolution” that trained its energies on the countryside, propagating armed struggle against the postcolonial state in Pakistan. While militant peasant insurrection did not eventually take off in Punjab, a thriving cultural sphere organized around the radical deployment of the regional vernacular and its folk traditions emerged. Through close readings of the poetry and cultural commentary appearing in the circular that offer an insight into this counter-cultural space, I aim to highlight a history of literary dissidence in Pakistan that remains marginalized due to the heavy emphasis on Urdu, the national language, a bias that ranges across the ideological spectrum. In particular, I wish to examine the record of and reflections on the party’s “Harappa Conference,” an event organized by the party’s “dehaat mazdoor” (agrarian worker) unit. This unit identified the “mussali” or “Muslim Sheikh,” a regional term denoting Dalit Muslims in North India, as the primary revolutionary subject. The mussali was the central figure whose experience of exploitation became the prism through which MKP intellectuals undertook a radical revision of Pakistani and Punjabi history. Invoking Harappa, the ancient archaeological site of the Indus valley civilization, in its oppositional literary-cultural vision, the circular’s literary content conjured an imaginative geography of an un-partitioned, historical Punjab, mapping a four-thousand-year old cultural formation through a multi-lingual literary method that foregrounded subaltern critiques from the margins of religious identity and caste. Hitherto relegated from the “progressive writing” canon in North India, this body of literary and cultural writing can help reconstellate debates around Left-wing cultural activism, language politics and literary methodology, unlocking a new template for theorizing templates for revolutionary subjectivity and the postcolonial intellectual, through a political practice rooted in regional imaginaries and pre-colonial pasts.