Book Review: An intellectual life's journey

Book: Jindriey: Tan Desaan Tera Tana: Burjwala ton Washington
Author: Dr Manzur Ejaz
Publisher: Wichaar Publishers; US, $15; Sahiwal, Rs 200; 2018
Dr Manzur Ejaz is familiar to the Pakistani audience through his newspaper columns over many years. But perhaps only his friends know the interesting details of his life. That gap Manzur Ejaz has now filled by penning his autobiography, Jindriey: Tan Desaan Tera Tana: Burjwala ton Washington in Punjabi.
Manzur Ejaz has written a great deal about Punjabi literature and culture in Punjabi. However, an autobiography is essentially a different kettle of fish. Here he traces his life's journey and intellectual growth, influences and directions. Born in a small Canal Colony village Burjwala near Sahiwal, Punjab, Manzur suffered an early grievous blow when struck by polio as a child. In those days, our villages were still stuck in a historical time warp and most villagers were unaware of what havoc polio could cause to children. The result was that one of his legs was badly affected. Something like crutches to get around with were almost unheard of too in the antediluvian universe of village life, and it took a while before he acquired a pair.
Manzur describes life in his native village, its culture, way of life, traditions, etc, in a manner that evokes, as he himself points out, Karl Marx's descriptive analysis of the Asiatic mode of production, in which in the Subcontinent's villages existed in an ancient system of minimal self-sufficiency, cut off from the world and even neighbouring villages to a large extent. This system, at least two thousand years old, interestingly was reproduced by the British colonialists even in the new Canal Colonies they set up and inhabited with the yeoman peasantry they awarded lands to and settled there. This minimal self-sufficient village structure proved for a very long time to be impervious to the revolutions, invasions, changes of kings and dynasties at the top that form the warp and woof of the Subcontinent's history. Marx ascribed the inability of the peasantry under this system to change their fate to precisely this isolated, relatively self-sufficient system. Certainly Manzur Ejaz's description of his early years, childhood and education bears out Marx's descriptive analysis and critique.
What is thinly alluded to by Manzur Ejaz but remains a subject requiring inquiry and research, of which perhaps too little if any exists, is how this system has changed after Pakistan came into being and the effects of being enfolded in the developing capitalist market that connected these once isolated villages and hamlets to the wider world beyond. No doubt subsequent technological developments in later (more recent) years have had a transforming effect through the by now almost universal availability of newspapers, radio, television and the connectivity provided by the internet and social media.
But in Manzur Ejaz's childhood and growing up years, the village was all but isolated from all beyond its boundaries. Despite his physical handicap, it is a testament to the courage and determination of the author that he fully participated in the games children traditionally played in village culture, got around on a bicycle and utilised his natural gifted intelligence to advance along the road of educating himself through school, college (Sahiwal) and university (Lahore). His years studying at Punjab University in the 1960s were a seminal turning point in his intellectual development. His subsequent move to Washington DC in the US, where he still lives, brought rich dividends in his education (including a PhD) and opened the doors to financial stability through employment in the academic field.
Given the radical currents of the time, it comes as no surprise that Manzur Ejaz was swept along by the then vibrant Left movement of the 1960s. His delineation of some of that movement's leading lights and their worldview and politics leaves one hungry for more, but perhaps Manzur Ejaz was in this project more interested in recording his life's journey as succinctly and briefly as possible and decided to leave a discussion of the history and trajectory of the Left in those heady days to another time and place.
Nevertheless, some of his tantalizingly brief references to the politics of the Left in those years open up the mind to new paths of largely unexplored inquiry. For example, when he dilates on the trends of the time in the Left, he mentions the history of a united Left and how and why it split in the 1960s in response to the rift between the Soviet Union and China in the international communist movement. However, for reasons already touched upon above, he does not go into depth to explain what were the debates, differences and fallout of these developments on our own indigenous Left.
It goes without saying that the traditionally pro-Moscow Left that suffered extreme repression in the early 1950s, starting from the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case that led to the banning of the Communist Party of Pakistan, subsequently sought to revive itself and continue the struggle under the umbrella of a broad coalition of the Left, nationalists and democrats that had come together in the National Awami Party (NAP). It is a tribute to the unity of these forces and the efforts and leadership of such heavyweight political leaders of the time as Maulana Bhashani and Khan Abdul Wali Khan that the Left seemed poised to win the first elections in Pakistan scheduled to be held in 1959. Many analysts consider this 'threat' to have fed into, if not triggered, the military coup of 1958 as a pre-emptive move to keep the Left-nationalist-democratic forces away from capturing power through the ballot box.
It is also a tragic fact that by the 1960s, this coalition had split between NAP (Bhashani - pro-Beijing) and NAP (Wali - pro-Moscow). Subsequent events in Pakistan's history moved these two factions further and further away from each other, culminating in 1971 when East Pakistan broke away to re-emerge as Bangladesh.
The New Left (overwhelmingly pro-Beijing) that emerged worldwide in the late 1960s sought theoretically to break from the perceived and actual mistakes of the Old Left. However, in one critical aspect they followed the same path of seeking the umbrella of larger mainstream parties to work under and in. What this policy wrought universally, whether the umbrella was earlier NAP or later the Pakistan People's Party, was leaving the fate of the Left dependent on the fortunes of these larger entities. When those umbrellas over time sprang 'leaks', changed direction or disappeared, this left the Left without an independent existence and it soon after succumbed to the ravages of the time, ideological confusion and the bitter splits that more often than not break out in a period of defeat and retreat. By the early 1980s, it was all but over for the 'orphaned' Left and it has still to recover from that local debacle. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialism in the late 1980s and early 1990s sealed our Left's fate, small parties and groups that are still in the field notwithstanding.
This long digression has been triggered by some of the questions raised by Manzur Ejaz's book. Both the writer and all of us need now to seriously introspect on the changed state of the world, Pakistan and the politics of the Left to discover and rediscover the way forward. For this stimulus to critical thinking, the reader owes a debt of gratitude to Manzur Ejaz.
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