Daily Times

“Stop all the clocks … let the mourners come” — W H Auden.

December 1 marks the 10th death anniversary of the late Hamza Alavi. My reflections for this piece will chiefly consist of memories of my lone meeting with him in the last years of his life, before reflecting a bit on how that meeting changed me both professionally and politically, and concluding with the relevance of his work for our own times, chiefly for Pakistan.

I cannot help but compare Hamza Alavi’s legacy to another towering intellectual who, like Alavi, was a rootless cosmopolitan — uprooted from his country of birth, made to make his professional name in the west both as a distinguished scholar and as an activist, vilified and shunned by the orthodoxy but, unlike Alavi, denied the satisfaction of passing away in his native land. I am talking of course of the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, whose 10th death anniversary was also observed earlier this year in September. Both Said and Alavi, in their own distinct ways, one as a literary critic and the other as an anthropologist/sociologist, strove to defend the oppressed and marginalised, and investigate the cultural structures that give birth to such oppression in an attempt to challenge them. Both of them were marked by seminal events in their lives: Said by the 1967 Arab defeat to Israel and Alavi by the liberation of Bangladesh, which dismembered Pakistan a few years later in 1971.

However, one also cannot help but note the irony that while Said’s legacy continues to be celebrated worldwide from Ramallah and Beirut to New York and London, who but a few prominent devotees (in the East) choose to dwell on Alavi’s — our own Edward Said — contributions, 10 years on?

As we remember Hamza Alavi ten years after his death, one often wonders what he might have felt and what he may have written about of some of the things that have been happening in the world since then? He was not a passive witness to 9/11 but, for example, what would he have felt about the meteoric rise of Islamophobia and western imperial campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya? How about the rising sectarian intolerance and religious fundamentalism that has characterised Pakistan, and indeed India and Bangladesh as well, and appears bent on consuming it? What would he have felt about Pakistan’s imperfect transition to democracy following an equally imperfect military dictatorship? Or, indeed, the rising tide of honour-related crimes against Pakistani women rooted in patriarchy and obscurantist religion, and the rise of a barely-teenage girl named Malala Yousafzai, who has become a symbol of resistance against creeping Talibanisation in the time of drone attacks? What would he have to say about the rise of a nascent middle-class, sections of which for its own reasons ended up supporting Pervez Musharraf, then the successful lawyers’ movement, and later Imran Khan’s PTI, and the weakness of the Pakistani left?

In many ways, Hamza answered these and other questions in his seminal essays on imperialism, socialism, the contours of the postcolonial state, the role of the peasantry in revolution, state and class in Pakistan, the contradictions of the Green Revolution, Pakistan’s dependence on US aid and the anthropology of biradiri (community). Reading and rereading these essays today still considerably repays attention in these troubled times, while for others the new times we live in as well as the changing nature of imperialism and structures of state and society in developing countries demand a reappraisal and creative critique of his work.

I was introduced to Hamza Alavi while studying sociology as an elective, as an apathetic product of a typically privileged, private school educated, middle-class milieu, not uninterested in the world, an Economics undergraduate at the Lahore School of Economics. I later carried my enthusiasm for Hamza’s work in the form of a mini-rebellion against three years of studying neoclassical economics by taking up Development Studies as my postgraduate major at the University of Leeds, which I later discovered had been the site of some of the most fulfilling years of Alavi’s professional life. There I was taught by one of Alavi’s students, a very fine instructor, and later chose to write my dissertation on state and class in Pakistan, influenced by Alavi’s work. In Leeds, during 2002, I e-mailed Hamza, introducing myself, and requested him to see me when I came to Karachi later in the summer that year to conduct some interviews for my research. Not used to Pakistani professors going out of their way to help their students (while those in the west took this privilege for granted), I was shocked when, in a couple of hours, Hamza e-mailed his response, encouraging me to see him.

(To be continued)

Raza Naeem is a social scientist, literary critic, translator and longtime political activist of the Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party (CMKP), engaged as a research fellow in the Graduate Institute of Development Studies at the Lahore School of Economics in Lahore