With the passing of Jam Saqi an era comes to an end. During my undergraduate years in Karachi, I lived in a room with two posters mounted above the writing desk. Presented to me by Nasir Arain — then an activist of the Democratic Students Federation — one was a sketch of Bhagat Singh with an inscription that I still remember by heart, and the other was a picture of Jam Saqi with a demand for his immediate release. Saqi was a declared prisoner of conscience, who was incarcerated more than any other political activist. He spent about two decades in prison in over 50 years of his political struggle for the rights and dignity of labour, peasants, the wretched and the dispossessed of this country. Many of the freedoms we enjoy today, or the consciousness we have for realising fundamental rights and liberties, is an outcome of the struggle waged by these less sung — if not completely unsung — heroes. Saqi, born in 1944 in Tharparkar, breathed his last earlier this week in Hyderabad.

The factionalism within the progressive movement disturbed me as a student and it still disturbs me now. Once Professor Jamal Naqvi, who also passed away last year, tried to explain why different groups existed within this movement. He said that besides the oppressive arms of the state intervening time and again and proscribing the communist and socialist parties in Pakistan, people who subscribe to progressive thought are all thinking and critical beings. That makes it difficult to have a single platform. However, I still believe that if the egos and self-righteousness of some were not at play and people such as Saqi, C.R. Aslam, Dr Aizaz Nazeer, Mairaj Mohammad Khan, Dr Rasheed Hasan Khan, Shamim Ashraf Malik, Ajmal Khattak, Professor Amin Mughal, Professor Azizuddin, Ghaus Bux Bizenjo and Abid Hassan Minto had all stayed together in a single left-wing political party, there would have been a different trajectory for the progressive movement. Coming to the present day, this has been mentioned before in this column, but there’s no harm in reiterating that many left-wing political parties are virtually the size of clubs, and the Progressive Writers’ Association with half a dozen factions, continues to reflect our leadership’s inability to convene broad and inclusive platforms.

But there is one thing in common among that generation to which Saqi belonged that has eroded since — they all understood the importance of, and encouraged the interaction between, the world of letters and the struggle of the working class. While Minto is a published literary critic in Urdu and Khattak was a poet of definite merit in Pashto, others also cherished poetry and fiction and the role they play in shaping minds. Likewise, many writers and artists associated themselves with labour and peasant movements, from Faiz Ahmed Faiz to Habib Jalib, Gul Khan Naseer to Shaikh Ayaz. Some of us now move on after an initial brush with social-realism as an approach to creating literature because it poses constraints and compromises aesthetics. But artists are nonconformists in the first place who deconstruct, disrupt, unsettle and overturn the order imposed by the powers that be within the society or the state, family or community, narrative and themes. There is no reason why a relationship is not established between the struggles against the oppressive order and the artist’s act of creation even if he or she does not use social-realism as a technique.

If the suffering that they see outside blends with the inner angst of an artist, a different sensibility emerges. Without losing individuality and the depth of personal emotion — which is unique to any important creative writer and artist — artists have the possibility of lending their voice to the causes pursued by people’s movements that aspire to create a more beautiful and liveable world. It is not necessary at all that each poem that is composed, or each story that is written, has the same subjects, but the subversion inherent in art that challenges the established norms provides the basis for both critiquing and ridiculing power.

The writer is a poet and essayist based in Islamabad

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 11th, 2018