Peasant Perspectives: An Anthology of Comrade Hyder Baksh Jatoi’s Writings (1950-1969)
Edited by Zaffar Junejo
Institute of Historical & Social Research
ISBN: 978-969-7985-25-8
728pp.

Peasant Perspectives is a thought-provoking piece of art, literature, and a radical rallying cry, all in one. It is a compilation of culturally sensitised and politically grounded essays, pamphlets and articles. The book compiles 29 pieces composed by Hyder Baksh Jatoi, a key member of the Sindh Hari Committee (SHC), and a prominent figure on Sindh’s political landscape.

Jatoi’s aim was to connect to the working classes of Sindh, particularly to rural populations. Yet, through his writings, his intended audience was also indirectly the political and security establishment that maintained the predominant rural social order.

The preface reads in a nostalgic yet mesmerising tone, outlining the process in which Jatoi’s writings came to be collected and published as this volume. Zaffar Junejo, the editor, situates the reader within a discursive world of rustic bookshop smells and dusty archive shelves, describing his travels and his procurement of manuscripts, the passing of time in libraries and personal collections, and the heartwarming conversations he had with the custodians of these pieces. The foreword and the preface also provide substantial grounding, providing useful anecdotal and biographical details.

The ‘Introduction’ gives an overview of Jatoi’s early life, when he was an officer in the Revenue Department, before he became a vocal advocate for hari [peasant] rights. But even as a revenue officer, or perhaps because of it, he remained keenly observant of the plight of rural subjects. He gave relaxations to people who could not pay taxes on time, a practice that set the tone for a stauncher form of advocacy later on.

A collection of writings by one of the foremost Marxist peasant activists shows how, for him, the struggle of Sindh’s rural peasantry against the feudal lord was reflected in the broader political frictions against a centralised state

In the 1930s, he was introduced to Marxist and socialist literature, which further shaped his writings and his practice. Thus, he had an early exposure to money, capital flows, affordances, taxes and the contemporaneous financial system as a whole, which operated not only under the colonial administration, but also within the peculiarities of local and regional systems of labour exploitation and the creation and manipulation of rural value.

However, Jatoi resigned from government service in 1945 and joined the SHC. He was disillusioned with a social structure reinforced by an administrative system that enabled the unbridled acts of aggression that feudal landlords continually afflicted on their serfs and land workers.

In 1947, Jatoi was elected president of the SHC, where he continued his struggles for the legal, administrative and financial rights of the haris. He repeatedly called for the abolition of the zamindari [landlord-tenant] system and exploitative practices around agricultural production, and for replacing the conventional batai [grain distribution] systems with cash equivalents, to enable more robust financial opportunities for the hari.

Jatoi also called for the state to accelerate mechanisation and technical innovation around agricultural practices, particularly as these furthered the cause of the emancipation of haris from entrenched systems of agricultural exploitation.

He vocalised the extension of land tenure rights to the haris, through equitable distribution and control of commons lands. He also proposed setting limits on the maximum acreage of land holdings per capita. He expressed his ideas through various media: by writing them in his pamphlets, by enshrining them in the resolutions passed by the SHC in its annual councils, and by leading protests around these or through sit-ins where this became necessary.

While highly cognisant of social injustices, Jatoi was also politically and economically quite well-versed. He could foresee successive governments’ delaying tactics when it came to abolishing the jagirdari [feudal] system. Some of his writings contain complex details of legislative processes, of deliberations and long discussions, descriptions of protests, meetings, manifestos, declarations and resolutions.

He wrote pragmatically, but also radically. He asserted that “every political movement has behind it some economic self-interest” (page 359), and employed calculations on land acreage, yields, valuations and taxation rates in his writings to argue against the One Unit [merging of all West Pakistan provinces into one province in 1954] and its fiscal policies.

He believed that Sindh, in particular, was being exploited by these policies: that the “excessive taxation of the Sindhis is being justified for balancing the One Unit budget” (page 364), and that “balancing the budget of West Pakistan is not the responsibility of Sindhis only” (page 365), especially when Sindh had already “made a gift of Karachi to the centre, worth several crores” (page 365).

In this regard, he also discussed the tensions between the local populations of Sindh and the migrants arriving from India into the province. He tried to deconstruct the various arguments for the One Unit scheme as personally or commercially motivated, or stemming from individual gains rather than the communal fight for the perseverance of democracy and regional autonomy.

However, he paid for his vehement opposition to the One Unit in the form of arrests and imprisonments. In time, Jatoi realised that he might be able to make pragmatic changes through greater political engagement, and he attempted to contest elections several times. However, he could not win a seat, and he eventually took to protests and sit-ins to advance his struggle for the haris.

But he also realised that his struggle was not unique to the haris only: it was a struggle which called for horizontal solidarities and alliances and so, in 1969, he founded the Hari-Mazdoor-Shagird [Peasant-Worker-Student] Coordination Committee. Jatoi also encouraged and enabled the haris’ own stories to be disseminated to the outside world, through the publication of anthologies such as the Hari Kahaneyoon [Peasants’ Stories]. The aim was to provide a voice to the everyday experiences of exploitation and violation, where previously unheard voices could become collectively amplified.

Although the 29 pieces included here can be read as standalone essays, the compilation of Jatoi’s various works in chronological order helps the reader gauge how his views evolved over time, and how ongoing political events might have contributed to this transformation in his opinions.

However, several of his most strongly held core beliefs are reiterated throughout his writings over the years, even as contemporaneous social and political conditions might have made it difficult to express those views. This indicates his commitment to the values he held dearest: the emancipation of the peasant and, perhaps by extension, a dignified financial and administrative position for Sindh province vis à vis the centre.

Jatoi believed in a strong federation, and that the country could successfully emulate the examples of the USSR and India, upholding provincial identities and the specificities of local administration while aligned with the central state on pertinent issues of national significance.

The book also contains three useful annexures. Annexure I defines the Sindhi words used throughout the text, as a handy reference. Annexure II describes the foreign vocabulary that was used by Jatoi in composing his writings. And Annexure III contains a list of all his writings included here, with dates, key themes and publication details.

Jatoi was “at once a Marxist thinker, an author, a political activist and a son of the soil”, as per Syed Jaffar Ahmed, the director of the Institute of Historical and Social Research. This was embodied in his struggle for peasant rights, land reforms and a just rural society. Jatoi called for radically transforming the colonial and feudal modes of social and spatial reproduction within the rural system.

His writing is uninhibited and courageous; through his words and his activism, he worked to disrupt the various forms of cognitive, political and material bondage that had come to characterise Sindh’s interior. Throughout his very outspoken political-social career, Jatoi was arrested and jailed multiple times for his voice and his writings.

For him, the struggle of the rural peasantry against the feudal lord was a struggle reflected in the broader political frictions between the provinces’ struggle for autonomy and the state’s will to centralise.

He saw the feudal system as a mere microcosm of the broader relationships of the centralised state to its own national subjects, and hence saw in the emancipation of Sindh’s haris the emancipation of Pakistan’s populace itself.

The reviewer is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts, IBA Karachi, and Associate Director of the Karachi Urban Lab

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 24, 2023