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Blood on the Path of Love: Faisalabad, Pakistan
- University of Minnesota Press
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135 BloodonthePathofLove Faisalabad,Pakistan qalandar bux memon at about 3:00 in the morning on the day I left for Faisalabad in 2010, where I was to investigate a strike of 250,000 workers demanding a 17 percent wage increase, I picked up a poetry book from the side table in my bedroom and soon landed on a poem by the progressive writerAli Sardar J’afri, “Robe of Sparks”: Who is that standing in a robe of sparks? Body broken, blood spilling from his brains. Farhad and Qais passed away some times ago; who then is he whom people stone to death? There is no beautiful Shireen here, no Laila of spring seasons. In whose name, then, is this scarlet bed of wounds flavoring? It is some madman stubbornly upholding Truth, unbending to the winds of lies and cunning. 136 Qalandar Bux Memon It is clear, his punishment must be death by stoning! [Qais/Majnoon and Laila, Farhad/Kohkun and Shireen are personae in Urdu poetry martyred on the path of love.] J’afri was born in 1912 in Uttar Pradesh and helped to found the Progressive Writers Movement (PWM) in the 1930s. The goals of PWM were clear, even dogmatic. The writers fought against British imperialism in India and argued against all imperialisms globally: J’afri himself faced jail for writing antiwar poetry during the Second World War. When the Progressives investigated British India and later postcolonial India and Pakistan, they found that the core problem lay in the power—and abuse of power—by the local bourgeois elite, who were supported by the international bourgeoisie. Development and modernity, they argued, would not be possible unless the workers stood up and fought a class war—in today’s liberalspeak ,wecanpolitelytermthisa“fightforrights.”Theroletheyassigned themselvesaswritersandpoetswastochampionthecauseoftheworkers and create beauty in society, not just in escapist literature. Toward this end, J’afri joined the Communist Party of India and edited its literary magazines Naya Adab (New Literature) and Indian Literature. He went around the country supporting workers in their struggles and saw firsthand the brutality that bosses meted out to workers seeking sustenance. Born of these experiences, his poetry abounds with celebratory references to the martyrs of working-class struggle. For J’afri, it is they who are the modern-day lovers; they are the modern-day Majnoons and Lailas, Farhads and Shireens. Their struggle isn’t for an embrace of the beloved or the intoxication of individual pleasures. It is the struggle of a group that is disenfranchised; nay, severely exploited, a struggle of lovers for the right to live, for a chance to see their children eat healthy and full meals, to pack them off to school in the hope that these young ones may not be held to the sweating iron of machines as their parents have been. It is the struggle to humanize themselves and escape from the clutches ofasystemtowhichwearealltooindifferent—andalltoocompromised. Mian Qayyum, Bawa Lalif Ansari, and Muhammad Rana are three such lovers. [18.206.12.31] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:16 GMT) blood on the path of love 137 The Majnoon of Spring Seasons It was early 2002, in the industrial city of Faisalabad, province of Punjab. Mian Qayyum, after taking his lunch break at the tea shop of his friend Malik Nazir, was walking back to his power loom station. Suddenly, he heard noises from the neighboring factory and hurried over. There, three policemen were beating up a middle-aged worker. The worker, already fallen to the ground, was taking fists and kicks from the three police officers. Enraged, Mian ran over, threw the police off the worker, and started fighting one of the policemen. Seeing this, other workers joined in.The police officers, outnumbered, ran off. Mian then returned to work. Mian was then twenty-eight and had fathered four children. He recalled, “I was worried and sweating, thinking what is going to happen now? I was worried for my family. Will I have a job? Are they going to arrest me? My clothes were covered in sweat, and that night at home I did not sleep. I was worried; each knock or noise alarmed me. What will happen now?” The next day came and brought nothing but the drudgery of a usual day. Soon, word got around that another Majnoon had awakened with the hunger for Laila’s love. Workers began to seek out Mian Qayyum at his lunch break at the tea shop for help. He helped. Offering advice to...