Cheema and Lyon’s edited volume featuring editorials, articles and commentary from the Pakistan Left Review (PLR) joins a recent surge in scholarship on left and oppositional politics in Pakistan. Pakistan Left Review: Then and Now highlights the crucial role played by print culture in developing, debating and disseminating South Asian Marxisms. In particular, the political magazine or cultural journal became an important institutional site for the South Asian left in the twentieth century. Its collectively authored, cheaply-produced and accessible format contributed to the forging of progressive political and cultural infrastructures. The magazine’s content, circulation and creation encouraged the consolidation of political communities, the ideological training of cadres, and the development of left-wing intellectual and literary cultures. Catalysed by the introduction of the printing press in nineteenth-century colonial India, the region’s oppositional print culture has had a long and illustrious history. This includes the proscribed poetry pamphlets of the Hindustan Ghadar Party, the literary journal Savera published by the Progressive Writers’ Association, and the Pakistan Forum edited by US-based Marxist Feroz Ahmed. This reprint of the PLR is a significant addition to this under-studied archive of the Pakistani and South Asian left.

The editors introduce the PLR as a “short-lived leftist journal” curated by Pakistani academics and research students under the auspices of the University of London Union Society in 1960s England. (2) As the editors elaborate in the Introduction, the group of students, exiles and intellectuals that coalesced around the PLR were deeply invested in struggles for democracy, freedom and equality in Pakistan. Their worldview was shaped definitively by the global reverberations of 1960s’ left-wing and anti-imperialist radicalism among racialised and colonised populations from the Americas to Asia. The editors do not specifically state this, but the issues that have been reproduced suggest that the PLR was a tri-annual publication, churning out three issues every year during its short existence. The multilingual magazine was edited by Aziz Kurtha and Iqbal Khan, and featured analysis, interviews and articles by iconic Pakistani Marxists Hamza Alavi and Tariq Ali among others. The editors must be commended for reproducing for the reader the PLR’s multilingual form through the inclusion of Bengali and Urdu materials in their original scripts. However, scanned images from the PLR are missing, and could have been included to allow the reader to engage with the material form and print aesthetic of the journal.

The volume reproduces the PLR’s table of contents from a range of issues, allowing us to map and survey the themes and political concerns that animated the organising of solidarity and political critique among Pakistanis abroad. Through its book reviews, interviews, articles, poems and editorials, the PLR engages in pressing debates around national culture, development, economic crisis and ethnic identity that preoccupied Pakistani progressives in the early decades following formal decolonisation. Discussions about Islamic socialism, Communist internationalism and anticolonialism undergird the PLR’s analyses of the political situation back home, helping situate the Pakistani left within global debates around Marxisms of the Global South. The pages of the PLR featured Urdu and Bengali translations of Herbert Marcuse, an Urdu poem by Communist leader and progressive poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, an interview with Maoist peasant leader and National Awami Party member Maulana Bhashani and critical essays on topics like constitutionalism, educational policy and military aid. While Nadeem Farooq Paracha presents a caricatured and reductive reading of the Pakistani left as ‘sectarian’, ‘immature’ and ‘academically juvenile’ in his review of Lyon and Cheema’s volume, the range of concerns engaged in the PLR testifies to the breadth and vibrancy of 1960s Pakistani Marxism, showing how it was internationalist even as it remained deeply embedded in regional struggles and traditions of dissent.

The volume also features three chapters by or about individuals associated with the PLR. These include Salima Hashmi’s reflections on the PLR and early art writing, Rehman Sobhan’s piece titled “Identity and Exclusion: The Making of Three Nations”, and Mubarak Ali’s biography of Iqbal Khan. These essays provide some background and context to the PLR’s publication, and the political and cultural activism that defined its milieu. Hashmi revisits an earlier piece she had authored for the PLR to highlight the crucial contributions of East Pakistan to progressive art, politics and culture. Through this article and others, the PLR offers a window into Pakistan’s pre-1972 geographies and attendant political and cultural formations that remain marginal to dominant historiography. The complexities of an era ripe with revolutionary possibility is captured in many of the PLR’s pieces, for example, Feroz Ahmed’s essay on “Leftist Debate in West Pakistan” details the activities and composition of the many left-wing political groups active in the country and elaborates an analysis of contemporary Marxist debates on the tactical and ideological questions surrounding democracy, nationalisation, feudalism, secularism and military rule in Pakistan.

By reproducing articles of this ilk, Pakistan Left Review: Then and Now offers a slice of left-wing intellectual culture and political history in 1960s Pakistan, excavating an important source for scholars and students of the region’s progressive past. The volume presents a timely contribution to research into the Pakistani left, highlighting in particular its internationalist and diasporic connections. For left-wing organisers and workers, it offers a rich opening to revisit the political vision of veteran revolutionaries as we continue to fight, against all odds, for a revolutionary future.

© Bloomsbury Pakistan 2024