By Vyshakh Thaliyil & Mukulika Radhakrishnan
Academic, musician and activist Taimur Rahman grew up in a Pakistan that was in the midst of extreme state and military repression in the hands of the Zia Ul Haq government of the late 1970s-80s. At the same time, this repression was corresponded by discontent and more importantly, growing resistance from the public against it. Protest theatre & music were at the heart of this resistance. Art and politics are always inseparable, says Rahman in this interview — which has made him lead a life in which the two are merged.
For years now, Rahman has been a spokesperson of people’s causes in Pakistan and elsewhere, and is very much in sync with the developments of the Left in the country. He is, at a time, the General Secretary of the Mazdoor Kissan Party as well as the lead guitarist at his radical, exuberant music band ‘Laal’ (Red). This is besides being a faculty of Political Science at the University of Lahore.
This interview, done by Vyshakh Thaliyil and Mukulika R, through digital correspondence, draws out from childhood to present, the formation of the man that Rahman is and his politics, placing them in the contexts that have existed in Pakistan over many years, giving us a picture about all the three. It’s an attempt to map the fascinating mind of a man who sings and strums for progressive politics.
Vyshakh Thaliyil (VT) & Mukulika R (MR): Could you briefly explain the context in Pakistan that led to the formation of ‘Laal’?
Taimur Rahman (TR): What’s very important to understand about Pakistan’s context is that it’s very much cut off from the rest of the Communist movement in South Asia. The Left in Pakistan therefore is cut off from the Left in India, Nepal, Bengal, Sri Lanka or anywhere else in the world. As a result, it has been beaten, bludgeoned and is badly isolated.
When I came back after my studies abroad, I joined what was at the time the Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party, which is the Mazdoor Kissan Party now. We were looking for a way to make an intervention into mainstream discourse and politics, so that we could be heard by more than the couple of hundreds we were heard by; we wanted to break out of our circle. The Lawyers’ Movement had already begun at the time and I used to frequently pick up my guitar and, along with my students like Shahram Azhar and other followers, perform protest music.
One day, a Pakistani-British filmmaker named Taimur Khan, living in London at the time, approached me saying that he wanted to make a film on me and my activism. As part of it, he asked, “Why don’t we record a song?”. Once that was done, he asked, “Why don’t we give it a name?”, to which I replied, “Lets call it Laal”, because, you know, we are ‘reds’. We put the video up on YouTube and didn’t think it would make an impact, but soon, got thousands of views. We then got an offer to make an entire album for the Lawyers’ Movement, which we did and it was a huge success. That’s pretty much how ‘Laal’ was formed.
It took birth in a context where the Left in Pakistan needed a voice in the mainstream and was difficult to get that via direct political action. The Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party wouldn’t be given any coverage even if we held press conferences. So I set up the music group primarily in order to give wider exposure to Marxist ideas in Pakistan, and it was an attempt, I think, that worked out well.
VT & MR: You have been associated with theatre, music, and politics from a very young age. What led you to all this? Where do these converge and why?
TR: Yes, that’s quite right, I have been. The inspiration for it came from my parents. When Ajoka, the Marxist theatre group in Pakistan, was founded in the 1980s against General Zia, my father was involved with it in the early stages. In one of their initial plays, he played the villain (laughs) and I remember that quite vividly. Ajoka used to perform in people’s backyards, particularly because they were prohibited from staging their plays in halls. Their performances were both political and successful, and many of these were adaptations of (Bertolt) Brecht and so on. Besides, I grew up listening to music that was politically engaging as well — Tracy Chapman, Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd, and others. So even the Western influences were political in nature. Besides, in Pakistan, the Progressive Writers’ Association has had a huge impact on Urdu literature.
Therefore, I remember realising from a very young age that art and music were very much involved with politics. I never saw them as disconnected from each other. In fact, to me, anybody who thought otherwise were being absurd. I grew up in a period where there was no disconnect at all. Any artist would be influenced by their times — history shows us this. How can art be not influenced by society and in turn, not affect what’s happening around it? Of course, it’s an expression of individuality, but that too is shaped by the circumstances of one’s history and times. I fail to see any credible argument about art being uninfluenced by politics. Some art is explicitly political, some not, but all of it is influenced by the politics of its time.
VT & MR: In one of your earlier interviews, you talk about the need for artists and cultural activists to be committed organisationally in their pursuit of resistance. How feasible is this?
TR: I think it’s totally feasible for an artist to be committed organisationally in pursuit of resistance. What’s an organisation? It’s a group of people that have come together to work as a collective, rather than as individuals. Obviously, when people come together as a collective, they’ll be much stronger than when the same people are not organised. And if they want to make a political impact, they have to be organised into a political party.
Artists are no exceptions to this. We have bricklayers, brick-makers, construction and factory workers, and in the same way, artists. We are also, in certain a sense, workers and shouldn’t think of ourselves as distinct from the rest of society. Of course, we do something different, quite extraordinary perhaps — highly venerated, loved and appreciated — but we too are a part of the society. Why should an artist be exempted from joining an organisation, but a factory worker shouldn’t? Are we different or superior than them in some metaphysical way? (chuckles) Of course not. A political party is an organisation set up for political change. So, if you are part of a setup for political change, you are influencing politics, and that’s what you need to bring about real political change — you need power, not money, but political power.
If an academic or an artist feels that joining a political party would affect their credibility, in my opinion, it’s a rather bourgeois attitude. We’ve had people in history who were involved with politics and parties during the Renaissance, Enlightenment, French Revolution and the like, and have been recognised as important historical figures, academics, artists, philosophers, scholars and such. Some of these great intellectuals and artists were not non-partisan; they sided with the progress of history and humanity, and that’s what makes them great. A great artist is not a great technician, but somebody who is sensitive to what’s going on in their times and is unafraid to take the risks to change it.
I think all political parties on the Left broadly understand that artists and academics need to be free and cannot be dictated to to pick a particular party line. They should be allowed to experiment, think differently and critically about their own work, politics, and society. There should be some degree of flexibility, and most progressive political parties are aware of this. But artists and academics themselves have become too paranoid about political parties. This is a habitual problem, which I think is bourgeois in many ways. Taking a strong partisan position in the affairs of the society is important for any scholar who believes in the strength of their own convictions.
VT & MR: The incorporation of revolutionary music into mainstream pop-culture is something that many on the Left criticise as “appropriation”. For instance, the use of “Bella Ciao” by a popular TV series recently and subsequently, in weddings and so on. You are someone who has expressed your displeasure with this criticism. Could you elaborate?
TR: Of course there exists cultural appropriation around us. One can think of the appropriation of African American blues music, which is a very clear case of it. In the context of Pakistan, we have Coke Studio, which is an appropriation of Sufi, folk music by big corporations. The strong will always appropriate the intellectual, creative, and artistic products of the weak, and often when they do so, they rob it of its intellectual or revolutionary content.
But first and foremost, I think those of us on the Left must understand what this process is. I don’t believe cultural appropriation occurs when an individual plays some revolutionary music in their car or on their wedding. They are the consumers of that music and they are consuming it because they like it, isn’t it? In my dictionary, at least, that’s not cultural appropriation. The real appropriators, on the other hand, are multinational corporations who make billions out of this and towards whom we must direct our criticism. These corporations with money more than entire countries appropriating popular folk culture and utilising it to sell a product, or distorting it in such a way as to make it into an advertising campaign are forms of appropriation on a vast scale. Or say, the music industry taking over the voices and ideas of black artists and giving them to white artists who then go on to become superstars, with no credit given to those who actually created it — this too is appropriation.
The Left has always been on the margins, in the context of Pakistan, and so sometimes we think the Left can remain as the “Left” only if it exists in the margins. This is wrong. The whole point of the Left is that its ideas must go into the mainstream and become a part of it. And its when that happens, that revolutions or big changes occur. When a piece of music produced by a left-winger or from a revolutionary tradition, for example, “Bella Ciao” from Italy, becomes part of the mainstream, we should celebrate that. Why not? What we don’t want is a corporate appropriation of the song to make profits, or the song’s distortion as part of corporate sponsorship. But if someone comes up with a great piece of Leftist music or an interpretation of it, puts it up on YouTube and gets millions of hits, should we say, “Oh no, this is terrible. Why did they get so many hits!” Of course not.
The objective is to make art which will be appreciated by people; the criteria of popular music itself is that it must be popular, unlike other forms like classical music. Of course, one has to make compromises in the context of a society that is run by capitalists; you are to work with people that you may not ideologically agree with, but the result we are hoping for is that progressive ideas become mainstream.
VT & MR: You recently have been receiving a lot of backlash from many supposedly progressive yet reactionary groups on social media. Is there an influence of postmodernism on Pakistani society’s progressive sections? What do you account this to?
TR: Yes, you’re right to point out that I’ve been receiving backlash from progressive and reactionary groups. The backlash that I’ve been receiving from the right-wing is now 10-15 years old, so there’s nothing new about it. One can see that on my social media profiles, going all the way back to when I started Laal’s page and when I started writing. So they dont have anything new to tell me (chuckles).
But more recently, there has been the development of a new kind of Left (in Pakistan), primarily because of social media. This has occurred mainly on Twitter; Facebook is a very different kettle of fish, because there, you connect mostly with the people you know in some sense. Pakistanis mainly connected with Pakistanis and the discourse was very much Pakistan-centric on Facebook, and continues to be so. Twitter is more open that way, and the English-speaking intelligentsia based in the US and the UK has a greater influence on Pakistani Twitter users, than they do on Facebook users of Pakistan. New ‘hashtag movements’ inspired by postmodern thought in action seem to have enhanced this trend. I began to engage more with people on Twitter very recently and have begun to see where these influences, in the context of Pakistan, are coming from. Right now, the big hashtag is #BlackLivesMatter, and instead of organising around a political party, people are now organised around hashtags. Now, this is an international hashtag — so how can Pakistani intellectuals and Twitter users feel connected to that? Well, they try to translate it into the context of Pakistan, when they’re not easily translatable out of their original contexts. These trends have their roots in the contradictions of Western societies that are very different from ours. So when one implements the same model in Pakistan, without critically engaging with what’s going on locally, one ends up with strange conclusions. This is what I’ve seen of late with a lot of people who consider themselves left-wing, radical, or ‘woke’, to use a new term. They haven’t given sufficient thought to the country that they’re trying to change, and many of their strategies have been, in my view, quite counterproductive.
Back in college, I thought postmodernism was so bizarre that it wasn’t even worth engaging with. It’s surprising that many years later, not only is it still around but also has international impact! There’s a lot of youngsters who want to be involved with the Left’s politics, but I see most of them being taken towards identity politics, in a way that undermines class struggle. In fact, it ends up becoming a politics engaged with their own class and its issues alone.
As a Marxist, I criticise postmodernism not only at an epistemic or philosophical level. I’m also saying that if one considers oneself a Leftist and wants to bring about some change, they must realise that change can come only from the poor and the oppressed. Of course, the intelligentsia can be a part of that struggle, but at some level at least, every issue taken up must engage with the poor of Pakistan. Rather than alienating them from it, these struggles must be able to politicise and organise the oppressed. It shouldn’t lead to the breakdown of working class solidarity along the lines of different identities that would only work against their benefit.
VT & MR: In India, the anti CAA/NRC protests have come to a halt due to COVID-19’s alarming spread. When the country-wide protests took place, many groups tried to establish it as a “Muslim issue” alone and not anything else. What are your thoughts?
TR: The problem with Islamist organisations is that they have the agenda that at least their community, ie the Muslim community, must be made to accept their theocratic interpretation of the world. At some level, they dream that one day, they will manage to establish a Khilafat or a theocratic state. Therefore, when they come out into the political domain over things like the CAA-NRC where millions are participating from different walks of their life, the influence of those people will also be felt on the Muslim community. For instance, if the Left is agitating, common Muslims will be inspired by the Left as well.
The clerics may also be uneasy by the fact that the CPI, CPI (M), CPI (ML), or some other organisation is becoming more popular with young Muslims. Because of this, they try to assert their hegemony and ideological control, saying it’s a “Muslim issue” and that they are going to be in-charge of it and tell people what to do with it. However, this particular issue can be viewed as a citizenship issue or as an attack on India’s secular constitution as well. It could even be seen as a struggle between secularism and fascism. It’s not just Muslims that are going to face the brunt of fascism, but workers and farmers too. Don’t we have rampant farmers’ suicides in India?
Unless people get it out of the ghettoised consciousness of their religious identity based politics and are able to form a collective that embraces all these issues, they wouldn’t win. It’s as simple as that. There must be a united political enterprise. If people are divided along different identities, there will be so many different competing issues. To put it bluntly, everybody will be competing to establish that their oppression is the worst and needs the most immediate attention. This is a great strategy to divide the Left as well, and so, it has to strengthen their criticism of identity-based politics.
VT & MR: What is the condition of the pandemic in Pakistan and how has the response of the government been? Doctors were picked up by the police in Balochistan and elsewhere for demanding more protective gear. What’s your take?
TR: The response of the federal government has been absolutely terrible. For the most part, they weren’t even clear what coronavirus was and what kind of response to shape up. The response of the Sindh government, at the same time, has been much stronger and better.
By some stroke of luck, Pakistan has not had a high mortality rate as yet. It’s not clear if this is because of natural immunity, if the strain of COVID-19 is weaker here, or if there are other circumstances that play. Luckily anyway, the number of deaths have been very low, even though millions must have caught the disease. Official statistics say that there are about 300,000 confirmed cases and about 6,340 deaths, which means that 282,000 people recovered [details as of 5/9/2020]. The recovery rate, therefore, has been high. At the same time, the number of confirmed cases is underestimated as per many, because most cases have not even been detected since the cost of testing is as high as around 8-9,000 rupees. The actual number of cases could easily have crossed a million in Pakistan, and yet the number of deaths is much lower.
Economically, however, it’s been a disaster here — the number of people begging on the streets is horrific. Doctors are being mistreated, you’re absolutely right. They asked for more protective gear, which they were denied; against which they protested and were picked up. Ridiculous, isn’t it? I think the government is conspicuous by its absence; it hasn’t done anything. We’ve just been quite lucky that we haven’t had the kind of deaths occurring in the USA, Italy, Spain or even India.
VT & MR: Lastly, where do you see the Pakistani Left in a few years’ time?
TR: Well, it’s difficult to predict the fate of an individual political movement as it’s contingent upon different factors. But I think it will be in a better position than it is today for the simple reason that social media has provided a huge avenue. As you know, printing and publishing were expensive exercises, but with social media, we’re able to reach thousands in a matter of days. This will definitely have an overall positive impact in the next couple of years for the Left.
At the same time, the Left will have to watch out for the very deleterious impact of postmodern identity politics, and it’s quite prevalent on Twitter, as mentioned earlier. If this becomes the face of the Pakistani Left, I think there will be a disaster (laughs). I don’t think the Left will get very far with postmodern identity politics.
I’m pretty much an un-reconstructed Marxist and I strongly believe that class oppression is one of the most important forms of oppression that determines the face of the society and of course, the course of patriarchy, race and sexual relations and the like. The rich exploiting the poor is how society functions and allocates its resources. Therefore, I feel this must be the central — but not the exclusive — focus of our politics. For me, the Left is about supporting the poor against the rich. To put it bluntly, it’s really about the rich versus the poor. When I became a Marxist or a left-winger, it was because I felt Pakistan’s poor were dispossessed, that society and the world were unfair to them, and that they were exploited and brutalised. To work for their emancipation by organising them was what I wanted. If that is what the Left is about, it will be successful. But if it stays away from class politics and the poor of this country, then the Left will simply be an intellectual exercise amongst the upper classes. Instead, if it has to transform into a rooted mass movement, the Left here has to appeal to the poor, dispossessed, and the workers and peasants of Pakistan.
Vyshakh Thaliyil is a journalist with Peoples Dispatch.
Mukulika Radhakrishnan is a member of the Editorial Collective at the Indian Cultural Forum. She is also part of the Editorial Team at Student Struggle.
Cover Illustration: By Midhun Puthupattu, University of Delhi
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