Hamza Alavi, the renowned Pakistani scholar and political activist passed away on 1 December 2003 in his native Karachi unremarked by too many. He belonged to the first generation of independent Pakistan's professionals. As an employee of the Reserve Bank of India, he moved on after Partition to help set up the State Bank of Pakistan before embarking on a career of political activism and academic study. He was one of the pioneers of South Asian social science, particularly the study of agrarian society. Here we reproduce in three segments extracts from an autobiographical sketch by Hamza Alavi titled 'Fragment of a Life', all of this before he began his academic career.
Political activism Before I moved into an academic career in 1966, I spent ten years in London in political activism, writing, lecturing and giving seminars at universities. When I first came to London, I joined the London School of Economics (LSE) for a PhD on banking in Pakistan, which given my years of first-hand involvement in building it up, I could have written blindfolded. But I was sick of that subject. And I was disenchanted by empty academicism. I found myself attending sociology, social anthropology and political science seminars. I devoured a vast amount of literature. I was full of questions. What had happened to my country? I studied and wrote. In those days there was nothing much to read about Pakistan, to discover what had gone wrong. So one had to study, analyze and write! I founded and edited Pakistan Today (1957-62), a quarterly journal. Each issue would have an article that I wrote. We would bring out an issue as soon as there was a major development in Pakistan. After the Ayub coup we came out six times a year. Pakistan Today had a circulation of several hundred. The peak was about 1500 for our final issue which was wholly devoted to an article entitled The Burden of US Aid. The journal was sent to East and West Pakistan and clandestinely reproduced there or placed in libraries. The US Aid issue was reprinted as a booklet by Faiz Ahmad Faiz. It was also reprinted in the United States by a new left journal called New University Thought and as a booklet by the Detroit Radical Education Project (who also reprinted some of my later articles in booklet form). Tariq Ali acknowledged it as a source in his first book. We got letters from sympathisers in Europe and North America. When there was total silence in Pakistan itself, it was a worthwhile thing to do. A lot of my time was invested in it.
I became a political activist. My wife and I joined one or two like-minded friends, notably Tassaduq Ahmad from Dacca and his wife. We worked amongst Pakistani students and workers very successfully from 1955 to 1966. We founded a number of organisations designed for activity at different levels. The Pakistan Youth League was a broad liberal to socialist forum. We met fortnightly and about 150 to 200 would turn up. Besides ourselves, speakers included scholars on the left, like Stuart Hall, Tony Benn and Eric Hobsbawm. The Pakistani Socialist Society was a smaller group. At a broader political level, soon after the Ayub coup, we set up a Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Pakistan. At an international level we ran a group called The Forum which brought together socialists from Asia, Africa and Latin America for a dialogue. It fell apart when Khruschev intervened in the Belgian Congo and our common ground of free and open, nonsectarian, debate with mutual respect was gone. We were also active organising Pakistani workers through two Pakistan welfare associations, one based in the East End of London (mainly Bengali) and the other in Slough (Punjabi).
I was a founding member of the Campaign against Racial Discrimination (CARD), a UK-based wide multiracial organisation of Pakistanis, Indians, West Indians and White British, to fight the rising tide of racism. Some of us, so-called 'leaders' of black communities in Britain, had been invited by Martin Luther King at his London hotel to talk about racism in Britain, when he was on his way to receive his Nobel Prize. We met not only Martin Luther King. We also met each other. We realised that there was much to be gained from joining forces against racism in Britain. So we met again and launched CARD. David Pitt, a West Indian member of the Greater London Council, who was an 'establishment' figure in the Labour Party, was elected chairman. An Indian Maoist and a white American Trotskyite (both women) were elected joint secretaries. At CARD's first national convention I was elected vice-chairman. With David, I was a member of the National Council of the British Overseas Socialist Fellowship (our chairman was Fenner Brockway).