The acclaimed artist-activist Jaishri Abichandani's glimpse into the history of South Asian-American feminist art and activism, particularly with the South Asian Women's Creative Collective, speaks to the labor and creative organizing of feminist artists starting in the 1990s. INTERACTIVE FLUX · Jaishri Abichandani's Guided Studio Tour Jaishri Abichandani The acclaimed artist-activist Jaishri Abichandani's glimpse into the history of South Asian-American feminist art and activism, particularly with the South Asian Women's Creative Collective, speaks to the labor and creative organizing of feminist artists starting in the 1990s. FLUX: An Evening in Dissent As part of Flux: An Evening in Dissent, Abeer Hoque took a guided tour with the acclaimed artist-activist Jaishri Abichandani who showed us her famous Feminist Wall, replete with its history of feminist activists and activism. She also gave us an exclusive look at the piece Kamala's Inheritance (2021 Sculpture Wire, foil, epoxy, MDF, stone and paint). Tarfia Faizullah: Poetry Reading Kshama Sawant & Nikil Saval: A panel on US left electoralism, COVID19, recent victories, & lasting problems. Natasha Noorani's Live Performance of "Choro" Bhavik Lathia & Jaya Sundaresh: A panel on the US Left & its relationship with media in the wake of Bernie Sanders' loss. Rajiv Mohabir: Poetry Reading SAAG, So Far: A Panel with the Editors DJ Kiran: A Celebratory Set ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the event in full on IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Live Brooklyn FLUX Art Practice Feminist Art Practice Sculpture Asia Pacific Arts Initiative Painting Swati Khurana South Asian Women's Creative Collective Ceramics Art Activism Art History Politics of Art Feminist Spaces Feminist Organizing Mimi Mondal Yashica Dutt Prachi Patankar Dalit Feminist Activists South Asia Solidarity Initiative SASI SAWCC Rage Kidvai Thanu Yakupitiyage Bad Brown Aunties Section 377 Menaka Guruswamy LGBTQ Movement Pramila Jayapal Nayomi Munaweera Personal History Portraits ACT UP Ismat Chughtai Mahasweta Devi Breast Stories The Quilt Lihaaf Abortion Goddess Abortion Speaking about Abortion Bodily Autonomy Indus Valley Artifacts JAISHRI ABICHANDANI has intertwined studio and social practice, art and activism in her career, founding the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) in New York (1997) and London (2004). Abichandani has exhibited internationally including at P.S.1/MoMA, the Queens Museum of Art, and Asia Society in New York, 798 Beijing Biennial and Guangzhou Triennial in China, IVAM in Valencia, Spain, and the House of World Cultures in Berlin. She served as the founding Director of Public Events and Projects from 2003-06 at the Queens Museum of Art, where she organized Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now, Queens International 2006: Everything All at Once , and curated Her Stories: Fifteen Years of SAWCC . In 2017, Abichandani engineered a collaboration between the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Asia Society and the Queens Museum to organize a three-day national convening of South Asian American artists, academics and curators; along with the exhibition Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions , in which she was a co-curator and a participating artist. In 2019, Abichandani organized a trilogy of exhibitions to inaugurate the Ford Foundation Gallery: Perilous Bodies, Radical Love, and Utopian Imagination centered the visions of BIPOC artists. Abichandani’s work is in the Burger Collection, Asia Art Archive Collection, and Saatchi Collection. She has been a resident of LMCC’s Process Space residency and an honoree of the Brooklyn Arts Council and ASHA for Women. She was awarded grants by the FST Studio Projects fund and the Foundation for Contemporary Art in 2021. Live Brooklyn 5th Dec 2020 On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

Masthead GRID LIST ASSOCIATE EDITORS Hira Azmat Miriyam Ilavenil Vrinda Jagota DESIGN DIRECTOR Anita Zehra SENIOR EDITORS Sabika Abbas Nazish Chunara Sarah Eleazar Abeer Hoque Nur Nasreen Ibrahim Naib Mian Mushfiq Mohamed Mehr Un Nisa Shubhanga Pandey Mahmud Rahman Zoya Rehman Vamika Sinha Zahra Yarali WEB DESIGNER Ammar Hassan Uppal LEAD ILLUSTRATOR Mahnoor Azeem ART EDITORS Soumya Dhulekar Shreyas R Krishnan Clare Patrick Priyanka Kumar DESIGNERS Hafsa Ashfaq Mukul Chakravarthi Prithi Khalique Neha Mathew Divya Nayar DESIGN EDITORS Ali Godil Mira Khandpur DRAMA EDITORS Neilesh Bose Esthappen S FICTION EDITORS Rita Banerjee Kartika Budhwar Ahsan Butt Jever Kohli-Mariwala Hananah Zaheer MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Zeeshaan Nabi POETRY EDITORS Zara Suhail Mannan Chandramohan S Palvashay Sethi ADVISORY EDITORS Senna Ahmad Vishakha Darbha Aditya Desai Aparna Gopalan Aruni Kashyap Aishwarya Kumar Sarah Thankam Mathews Tisya Mavuram Seyhr Qayum Sana Shah Zuneera Shah Hasanthika Sirisena FACT CHECKERS Sameen Aziz Uzair Rizvi Aliya Farrukh Shaikh NON-FICTION EDITORS Kaashif Hajee Miriyam Ilavenil Shahzaib Raja Jeevan Ravindran Aisha Tahir Zobia Haq BOARD OF DIRECTORS Manan Ahmed Asif Kamil Ahsan Tehani Ariyaratne Gaiutra Bahadur Aditya Desai Nur Nasreen Ibrahim NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati Meena Kandasamy Rajiv Mohabir Sumana Roy Tooba Syed Suchitra Vijayan Ather Zia Chief Editor Iman Iftikhar FOUNDER Kamil Ahsan Chief Editor Iman Iftikhar Associate Editor Hira Azmat Associate Editor Miriyam Ilavenil Associate Editor Vrinda Jagota Senior Editor Sabika Abbas SENIOR EDITOR Zoya Rehman Senior Editor Nazish Chunara SENIOR EDITOR Sarah Eleazar SENIOR EDITOR Abeer Hoque SENIOR EDITOR Nur Nasreen Ibrahim SENIOR EDITOR Naib Mian SENIOR EDITOR Mushfiq Mohamed SENIOR EDITOR Mehr Un Nisa SENIOR EDITOR Shubhanga Pandey SENIOR EDITOR Mahmud Rahman SENIOR EDITOR Vamika Sinha SENIOR EDITOR Zahra Yarali WEB DESIGNER Ammar Hassan Uppal DESIGN DIRECTOR Anita Zehra Art Editor Priyanka Kumar LEAD ILLUSTRATOR Mahnoor Azeem ART EDITOR Soumya Dhulekar ART EDITOR Shreyas R Krishnan ART EDITOR Clare Patrick DESIGNER Hafsa Ashfaq DESIGNER Mukul Chakravarthi DESIGNER Prithi Khalique DESIGNER Neha Mathew DESIGNER Divya Nayar DESIGN EDITOR Ali Godil DESIGN EDITOR Mira Khandpur DRAMA EDITOR Esthappen S DRAMA EDITOR Neilesh Bose FICTION EDITOR Rita Banerjee FICTION EDITOR Ahsan Butt FICTION EDITOR Kartika Budhwar FICTION EDITOR Jever Kohli-Mariwala FICTION EDITOR Hananah Zaheer MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Zeeshaan Nabi NON-FICTION EDITOR Kaashif Hajee NON-FICTION EDITOR Shahzaib Raja NON-FICTION EDITOR Jeevan Ravindran NON-FICTION EDITOR Aisha Tahir POETRY EDITOR Zara Suhail Mannan POETRY EDITOR Chandramohan S POETRY EDITOR Palvashay Sethi FACT CHECKER Sameen Aziz FACT CHECKER Uzair Rizvi FACT CHECKER Aliya Farrukh Shaikh ADVISORY EDITOR Senna Ahmad ADVISORY EDITOR Vishakha Darbha ADVISORY EDITOR Aditya Desai ADVISORY EDITOR Aparna Gopalan ADVISORY EDITOR Aruni Kashyap ADVISORY EDITOR Aishwarya Kumar ADVISORY EDITOR Sarah Thankam Mathews ADVISORY EDITOR Tisya Mavuram ADVISORY EDITOR Seyhr Qayum ADVISORY EDITOR Sana Shah ADVISORY EDITOR Zuneera Shah ADVISORY EDITOR Hasanthika Sirisena FOUNDER Kamil Ahsan BOARD MEMBER Tehani Ariyaratne BOARD MEMBER Manan Ahmed Asif BOARD MEMBER Gaiutra Bahadur BOARD MEMBER NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati BOARD MEMBER Meena Kandasamy BOARD MEMBER Rajiv Mohabir BOARD MEMBER Sumana Roy BOARD MEMBER Tooba Syed BOARD MEMBER Suchitra Vijayan BOARD MEMBER Ather Zia

SENIOR EDITOR Mushfiq Mohamed MUSHFIQ MOHAMED is a lawyer, writer, and activist based in London. SENIOR EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ART EDITOR Clare Patrick CLARE PATRICK is an independent curator and writer who hails from Cape Town. Formerly at NXTHVN , the Norval Foundation , and the Paris College of Art , she currently works at Atelier 11 Paris and No! Wahala Magazine . Her work has been featured in Art Throb , Contemporary And , Vogue , and The New York Times . ART EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Activist Ammar Ali Jan in conversation with Kamil Ahsan. COMMUNITY The Pakistani Left, Separatism & Student Movements Activist Ammar Ali Jan in conversation with Kamil Ahsan. VOL. 1 INTERVIEW AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Pakistan 14th Dec 2020 Interview Pakistan Student Movements Baloch Students Organization-Azad Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement Student Solidarity March Baloch Student Long March Pashtun Tahafuz Movement Shehri Tahafuz Movement Zaigham Abbas Universities State Repression Repression in Universities Partha Chatterjee Subaltern Studies Karl Polanyi People's Solidarity Forum Neofeudalism Neoliberalism Constitutionalism Pashtun Long March Trade Unions Electoral Politics Elections Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. We worry too much about divisions within the left. It can be very productive if people engage in a decent, intellectual conversation. Actual disagreements shouldn't be repressed for the sake of some mythical unity. Editor's Note: Throughout the Baloch student long march & the #PashtunLongMarch2Karachi , the Pakistani state cracked down on activists—including Ammar Ali Jan—and continues to. This conversation took place in September 2020. A detention order for Ammar Ali Jan was issued in late November 2020. It was far from the first time he had faced detention, intimidation, or threats from the state. Granted pre-arrest bail, the detention order was lifted in December by the Lahore High Court, with LHC Chief Justice Muhammad Qasim Khan saying: “In Pakistan, influential people will not let their rivals to move freely by misusing ‘detention orders’." More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

What is the utility of global history? In recent years, new approaches of global history have emerged. Whether as a challenge or companion to area studies, and specific and local histories within academia, global history has often aimed to become more inclusive of histories of migration, diasporas, labor, legal regimes within colonial and postcolonial chronologies from Guyana to China to South Africa. INTERACTIVE Chats Ep. 8 · On Migrations in Global History What is the utility of global history? In recent years, new approaches of global history have emerged. Whether as a challenge or companion to area studies, and specific and local histories within academia, global history has often aimed to become more inclusive of histories of migration, diasporas, labor, legal regimes within colonial and postcolonial chronologies from Guyana to China to South Africa. VOL. 1 LIVE AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Live Global 4th May 2021 Live Global Global History The Nature of Global History Migrant Workers Temporality Imperial Labor Indigeneity Indigeneous Spaces Histories of Revolutionary Politics Politics of Indigeneity South Africa Canada Indian Migrants in Canada Settlement Guyana Assimilation Alienation Settler-Colonialism Narratives South Asian Studies Cultural Narratives of Immigration Public Space Epistemology Knowledge University of Victoria Intellectual History Himalayas Indian Ocean Ocean History Oceans as Historical Sites Gaiutra Bahadur Sunil Amrith Indo-Caribbean Research Methods Research Experimental Methods Historiography Indentured Labor Legacies of Slavery Slavery Transatlantic Slavery Diaspora Diasporas North American Diaspora Pluralism Popular Culture Histories of Migrations Nation-State Atlantic World Multimodal Archival Practice Boundary Formation Empire Nation The Local and Global Moving Beyond Boundaries Arabian Peninsula Sugar Colonies Coolies Renisa Mawani Devarakshanam Govinden Senthamani Govender Daniel Kent-Carrasco Pandurang Khankhoje Naturalizado Mexico Marina Martin Riyad Koya Ashutosh Kumar Andrea Wright Goolam Vahed Uma Dhupelia-Meshtrie Indian indenture in South Africa Legal Regimes Law International Law Internationalism Internationalist Solidarity Internationalist Perspective Legal Frameworks Capitalism Vivek Chibber Academia Affect Agrarian Economy Anti-Colonialism Apartheid Archives Archiving Big History Cartography China Class SAAG Chats Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Drama Editor Neilesh Bose, also the editor of the recent volume South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labour, Law, and Wayward Lives (Bloomsbury, 2020) discussed the genesis of the project & new ways of telling history with Kamil Ahsan on Instagram Live in May 2021. The edited volume began at a workshop at the University of Victoria. It explores how South Asian migrations in modern history have shaped key aspects of globalization since the 1830s, using global history to cast many contemporary dynamics and geographies into sharper relief. Including original research from colonial India, Fiji, Mexico, South Africa, North America and the Middle East, the essays explore indentured labour and its legacies, law as a site of regulation and historical biography. It includes recent scholarship on the legacy of issues such as consent, sovereignty and skilled/unskilled labour distinctions from the history of indentured labour migrations, and brings together a range of historical changes that can only be understood by studying South Asian migrants within a globalized world system. Here, Bose discussed the nature of global history, the approach taken at the workshop and beyond, and the many scholarly contributions to the volume. More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

“I think of works like Shona N. Jackson's Creole Indigeneity, and fleshing out the narrative of brown movement. And, importantly, doing it in a way that decenters the United States, because, with indentureship we're talking about the movement from South Asia largely to the Caribbean.” COMMUNITY Romantic Literature and Colonialism “I think of works like Shona N. Jackson's Creole Indigeneity, and fleshing out the narrative of brown movement. And, importantly, doing it in a way that decenters the United States, because, with indentureship we're talking about the movement from South Asia largely to the Caribbean.” VOL. 1 INTERVIEW AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Romanticism 13th Nov 2020 Interview Romanticism English Postcolonialism Gayatri Spivak Postcolonial Poetry Romantic Literature & the Colonized World Colonialism Race Post-George Floyd Moment Black Solidarities Indigeneity Creole Indigenous Space Vijay Prashad Ruhel Islam Hufsa Islam Browntology Brown Left Kinship The Undercommons Diaspora Guyana Australia Subaltern Studies Intellectual History Internationalist Perspective Indigeneous Spaces Egbert Martin Henry Derozio Immigration Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. I couldn't imagine devoting any more time to Keats and Wordsworth and Shelley and Byron. So I turned to Brown Romantics where I looked at how Romantic ideas, philosophies, politics, and techniques were mobilized ends towards nationalist ends by 19th century writers in India, Australia and British Guyana. RECOMMENDED: Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell University Press, 2017), by Manu Samriti Chander. More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

The Delhi-based Kashmiri musician & Ramooz frontman on how growing up in occupied Kashmir shaped his soundscapes through violence, and how genre experimentation and fluidity serve to address grief and trauma. COMMUNITY Kashmiri ProgRock and Experimentation as Privilege The Delhi-based Kashmiri musician & Ramooz frontman on how growing up in occupied Kashmir shaped his soundscapes through violence, and how genre experimentation and fluidity serve to address grief and trauma. VOL. 1 INTERVIEW AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Progressive Rock 21st Dec 2020 Interview Progressive Rock Kashmir Music Music Criticism Kashmiri Folk Music Contemporary Music Ramooz Dream Theater John Cage Ahmer Javed Experimental Methods Experimental Music Experimental Electronica Literature & Liberation Literary Solidarity Depictions of Grief Sound Occupation Genre Fluidity Genre Tropes Genre Intentional Audio Community Building New Artists Delhi Indian Fascism Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Living in Kashmir, in an atmosphere so accustomed to murder, rape, disappearances—it's directly affected the way I perceive and interact with sound. A loud thud might be an interesting sound for many. It's traumatizing for me. RECOMMENDED: Imtihan by Zeeshaan Nabi, Qassam Hussain ft. Denis Thomas ( Meerakii Sessions, Season 1, Episode 1, October 2022) More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

PHOTOGRAPHER Ruvin De Silva RUVIN DE SILVA is an acclaimed actor, director, and award-winning photographer from Colombo, Sri Lanka. PHOTOGRAPHER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

“The most central aspect of what we call literary modernity is that it's centered around humans: Western humans. It's not just that it excludes other kinds of beings, it also excludes most of the species we now call humanity. This doesn't change with post-1945 Western avant-gardism. If anything, that experimentalism resulted into the absolute withdrawal of the human into abstractions.” COMMUNITY Returning to the Sundarbans AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “The most central aspect of what we call literary modernity is that it's centered around humans: Western humans. It's not just that it excludes other kinds of beings, it also excludes most of the species we now call humanity. This doesn't change with post-1945 Western avant-gardism. If anything, that experimentalism resulted into the absolute withdrawal of the human into abstractions.” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Interview Sundarbans Commonwealth Literature Climate Change and Literature Cyclone Amphan Evictions Migrant Workers Energy Crisis Geography Mythology Working-Class Stories Humanitarian Crisis Language Epistemology Gopinath Mohanty Failure of the Avant-Garde Debjani Bhattacharyya Modernism Bay of Bengal Climate Change Climate Anxiety Histories of Migrations Avant-Garde Origins Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Interview Sundarbans 28th Oct 2020 Amitav Ghosh speaks to Kartika Budhwar about the Sundarbans & climate change and its relationship with literature, literary modernity, and the Western avant-garde. During COVID lockdowns, nobody seems to have considered the fate of migrant workers who were stranded in cities. Many were so desperate they started walking home. And right then, Cyclone Amphan started in the Bay of Bengal. All these catastrophes intersect disastrously. RECOMMENDED: The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (Penguin Allen Lane, 2021) by Amitav Ghosh. Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up:

AUTHOR Zara Chowdhary ZARA CHOWDHARY is a writer and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin. She has an MFA in creative writing and environment from Iowa State University and a master’s in writing for performance from the University of Leeds. She has previously written for documentary television, advertising, and film. She lives in Madison, WI, with her partner, child, and two cats. AUTHOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Facing a crushing electoral loss and the suffocating grip of Pakistan’s military state, the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party remains committed to Chungi—reclaiming revolutionary traditions, rebuilding popular power, and planting the seeds of a socialist alternative in the country’s most forsaken neighborhoods. THE VERTICAL To Posterity Facing a crushing electoral loss and the suffocating grip of Pakistan’s military state, the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party remains committed to Chungi—reclaiming revolutionary traditions, rebuilding popular power, and planting the seeds of a socialist alternative in the country’s most forsaken neighborhoods. VOL. 2 PROFILE AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Noormah Jamal I will never leave you (2022) Acrylic on linen ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Noormah Jamal I will never leave you (2022) Acrylic on linen SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Profile Lahore 30th Apr 2025 Profile Lahore Haqooq-e-Khalq Party Elections Chungi Revolution Socialism Military Crackdown Community Discourse Discourses of War Storytelling News National Assembly Chiragh Ghar Campaign Ammar Ali Jan Pakistan Poverty Defence Housing Authority DHA districts Real Estate Militarism Armed Checkpoints Peri-urban settlements Village History Memory Dysentery Healthcare Inequality Aasim Sajjad Akhtar Working Class Capitalism Feudal Neo-Colonial Ethnic Division Popular Power Land Reform Subsidies Elitist Humanitarianism IMF International Monetary Fund Nationalism Repression Activism Cuba China Revolutionary Karl Marx Dehumanization Disempowerment Khalq Clinic Medical Internationalism Vocational Training Isolation Mobilization Chawla Factory Chenab River Kissan Conference Farming Farmers Agricultural Labor Solidarity Palestine Lebanon Zionism Economic Security Imran Khan Tehreek-e-Insaf Bertold Brecht Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. In moments of quiet, comrade Sikander sang. The melody—a touch above a whisper—meandered softly, as if probing for an answer to an unasked question. Our faces were lit only by the faint fire we had made in the ceramic bowl, using styrofoam boxes as kindling. The heavy rains of the previous week had cleared the smog, and the Big Dipper now crept up over the water tank on the bare concrete rooftop. The phone signal was down. The internet was choked off. The military had imposed a total blackout. So we lit a fire—and we talked. We talked about Gilgit-Baltistan’s bustling border with Xinjiang. We talked about Fidel Castro , who had sent a medical brigade to Pakistan and, on a call before dawn, instructed his lead doctor on the strain of basmati to be fed to the cadres. We talked about the feudal lords’ grip on the people. We talked, and we reflected. In moments of quiet, comrade Sikander sang his soft, piercing song. News of the election trickled in with each teary-eyed arrival from the polling stations. Sixty-five votes at the City District High School. Seventy-four at the Government Boys High School. Twelve at the Qazi Grammar School. Seven at the Modern Public High School. By the end of the day, the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (HKP) gathered only 2,174 votes. The two candidates were contesting for seats in the National Assembly and the Provincial Assembly from Chungi, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Lahore. Dejection swept through the Chiragh Ghar community center, transformed in recent weeks into a bustling campaign headquarters. The night before, hopes were high and predictions were jubilant. 10,000 votes. 15,000. 30,000. On the campaign trail, where passersby met Ammar Ali Jan , the lead candidate, with song and wreath after wreath of roses, a breakthrough seemed inexorable. Now, the dim hallways and winding staircases filled with whispers of disbelief and consolation. What did we do wrong? What if our critics were right? A few of us gathered on the roof. There, by the open flame, in thickening cigarette smoke, we talked late into the night about the military state and the dizzying structures of patronage that, time and again, condemn Pakistan’s people to the deathly embrace of the past. The Poverty of Chungi Few buildings in Lahore are taller than two or three stories, so the streets and neighborhoods stretch out in all directions across the flat landscape. In Lahore’s vast Defence Housing Authority (DHA) districts, the rows of homes—or, more accurately, walled compounds, often fronted by lush tropical gardens—feel endless. The DHA is the military-run real-estate developer that operates “defense” neighborhoods across the country. Pakistan’s aspiring professional class calls them home, as does the military and political top brass. Each DHA district is bookended by armed checkpoints. How many people who live in DHA cross the stark threshold into Chungi? In this peri-urban settlement that was once a village, paved streets make way for muddied and torn-up roads. The serene, airy alleys of DHA transition to a stifling cacophony of images, smells, and sounds. Cows, goats, and stray dogs mingle with the traffic, where cars and rickshaws buzz past each other from all sides at dizzying speeds. An open canal clogged with sewage and refuse from the food markets bubbles alongside one of the neighborhood’s main roads. The water is so filthy that some seventy percent of children in Chungi suffer from dysentery. These are the material imprints of a political system in which working people have had no meaningful shot at contending power for the better part of half a century. If the Pakistani left of the 1960s had put forward ambitious proposals for pulling the country towards greater equality, by the 1980s, “the socialist alternative which once seemed imminent had become a distant memory,” the politician and intellectual Aasim Sajjad Akhtar wrote . In its place, a series of increasingly entrenched regimes adopted, he wrote, “complex and sophisticated strategies of cooptation,” removing the workers and peasants from the equations of popular power and constructing a vast “patronage machine” to take their place. Then, the Soviet Union collapsed and the left entered a long era of retreat. The Pakistani state came to reflect a complex web of competing class interests—the capitalist, the feudal, the neo-colonial—that existed in permanent contradiction. Officeholders changed often. Little changed for the Pakistani people. At the top, a powerful military bureaucratic state apparatus—an inheritance of the colonial order—operated as kingmaker. This political structure seeped into every aspect of Pakistani society, threading its way through class and ethnic divides. At the scale of their lives, the people of Chungi, too, became beholden to the same contradictions that gripped the nation: above the sewage-filled canal that runs through the district, an opulent residence houses the local kingmaker. His loyalty buys the consent of the salesmen and the elders. The salesmen will secure the consent of their markets, and the elders of their neighbors. Allegedly, ten dollars buys a vote. Here, an electoral campaign resembles a suitcase of cash. What is the strategy for building popular power in Pakistan at this juncture? “None of the mainstream parties are interested in making the working class a subject of its politics,” Ammar Ali Jan told me after the election. “None of them are willing to speak of land reforms or ending subsidies for the elites. None of them are willing to confront the IMF. None of them are willing to give genuine and consistent solidarity to oppressed nationalities against state repression.” As a student, Ali Jan went to Chungi and found it to be a microcosm of the condition of millions of people around the country. Chungi revealed the futility of mere humanitarianism—a fixed road, new water filter, or food handouts—amid the tragedy that is produced and reproduced daily by the very architecture of the state. It revealed the inability of the existing order, so mired in its class interests, to bring dignity to the deprived. The situation of the people of Chungi pointed to a singular, piercing conclusion: the need to resurrect the revolutionary socialist alternative. Chungi Stirs At the start of 2023, Ammar Ali Jan and three activists of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement (HKM)—as it was then known—began their daily walk through the streets of Chungi . They talked with the butchers, stationery salesmen, and tailors at the bazaar. They talked with the textile weavers in the workshops and factories. They talked with the unionists whose struggles traced back decades—memories that they would soon seek to resurrect through public commemorations of forgotten martyrs. They talked with the mothers who cleaned the houses of Lahore’s middle and upper classes in a nearby DHA neighborhood. The HKM had organized in the community for some time before it embarked on the path of party-building. Pakistan’s complex structures of power were on their minds. How do you dislodge a system that dominates all the political offices, all centers of decision-making power, all structures within the judiciary? How do you politicize a dormant student body, and bring it into dialogue with the peasantry and the country’s disenfranchised women? How do you activate the workers in a neighborhood like Chungi? But they also thought about Pakistan’s old left, which had become fragmented and defeated, much of it confined to a series of old comrades’ clubs. How do you bring vitality back into a movement that has lost it? “The revolutions in Cuba and China—these were the most important things that we kept in our mind when we were writing our manifesto,” Dr. Alia Haider, an organizer with the HKP, told me. In Cuba, as in China, mass movements brought together coalitions of peasants, intellectuals, women, workers, and youth, establishing political bases that could overturn the feudal, colonial, and imperialist structures that gripped both nations. It was there, among the most oppressed, that revolutionary energies stirred. “We had read Marx, we had read Mao, we had read Fidel,” Dr. Haider said. “But when we arrived in Chungi, we saw that people who had never heard these names knew Marx. They lived Marx.” For the people of Chungi, the contradictions of class were blinding. They were visible in the sewage flowing through their streets; in the oil that the street food vendors could only afford to change monthly; in summary, uncompensated dismissals from the factories. But, like the broader left, they remained disorganized, disempowered, and dejected. “The Pakistani working class does not exist as an independent political subject,” Ammar told me. It exists in a “state of non-being, unable to assert its interests.” Its subordination has become entrenched. The politics of patronage that have seeped into every crevice and pore of Pakistan’s governing order have denied political agency to those most affected by it. It became clear that simply being voted into office by them would be insufficient. External representation on its own cannot awaken working class subjectivity—it cannot reassert its protagonism in the movement of history. What is needed, Ammar told me, is the reconstruction “of the subjective factor of the revolution—the party—with all the patience, consistency and courage that this requires.” The revolutionary party occupies a central space in the socialist tradition. Karl Marx showed that class analysis provides the fundamental starting point in understanding political parties, whose configuration reflects the stages of development and respective power of different classes. The ability of working people to represent themselves depends on the existence of a party created in their image, and carrying their subjectivity. Without such a vehicle, the working class is forced to align politically with the subjectivity of its oppressors. It becomes divided. Its political horizon becomes truncated. The revolutionary party is necessary to contain, develop, and advance the aspirations of the working masses. Years ago, the HKM first mobilized the community to sweep the streets and clean the canals, seeking to address the sanitation crisis. In 2022 , the movement organized weekly health camps around Chungi, an initiative led by Dr. Alia. With time, the imperative to institutionalize became clear. “As we began to organize the first of our free medical camps, we saw that the devastation facing the working classes was beyond our capacity to help them as a movement,” Dr. Alia told me. “So we had to not only develop the infrastructure to support these people, but also cultivate a politics of solidarity.” By August 2023, the HKP opened the Khalq Clinic , a permanent site providing free testing, consultations, and medicines to people in Chungi. The Cuban Ambassador attended the opening, recalling Cuba’s own missions of medical internationalism to Pakistan. By the end of the year, the Party had five vocational schools with courses on English, computer literacy, and financial management. Students from universities came to volunteer in droves. At first, Dr. Alia told me, they struggled to connect the problems of others with their own. But the people of Chungi transformed them and opened in them a much more expansive vision of political possibility. “Until we know what the water in the sea is like, we could not know how to navigate the waves,” Dr. Alia said. By the time the election arrived in February 2024, the HKP had mobilized seven hundred people to work on its campaign. Among them were two seventeen-year-old alumni of the vocational schools, who now managed a complex voter registration process at HKP’s campaign headquarters. They checked the voter lists against records from the polling stations. They identified and corrected missing data in the voter lists. For each entry on the lists, they prepared a folder with three sheets of paper, two pens, a ruler, and two pieces of candy to help voters navigate the labyrinthine process on the day of the election. They checked the folders against numbered spreadsheets for each of the polling stations. Within months after the election, further breakthroughs arrived. When, early in 2024 , workers from the Chawla factory learned of planned closures—and proposed dismissals with minimal compensation—they organized. Led by factory worker and HKP member Maulana Shahbaz, they won what Ammar described as the “largest golden handshake since the 1970s.” The workers’ severance package increased from roughly eighty US dollars to as much as three thousand. In October, HKP members traveled to the lush countryside of Jhang, a city on the east bank of the Chenab River, to bring together thousands of peasants for a Kissan Conference. The farmers sang, chanted, and vowed to take on the state that has long subjugated them. All along, the HKP worked to ground its local organizing in an internationalist vision, protesting regularly in solidarity with Palestine and Lebanon as they faced a merciless bombardment by Western-backed Zionist forces, and mobilizing in friendship with Cuba, itself suffocated by economic warfare. If building the revolution means preparing the masses for the task of governance, then the HKP’s small first steps hold immense significance. Carried toward their logical conclusion, their political strategy aims at activating a powerful dormant force that holds singular capacity to resolve the dilemmas of Pakistan’s oppressed—substituting the landlords, capitalists, and compradors for the masses in the equations of political power. In this context, the campaign in the February election had achieved its goals, even if it failed to secure electoral gains. Many described the vote as a referendum on Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf—a rejection of foreign meddling and the brazen denial of even the most basic democratic rights. As a local party, the HKP was not part of the national calculus. As is their wont, the other parties that had come to Chungi on the day of the election—never opening the tinted windows of their jeeps—soon left. They will return for the next election, whenever it may come: in two years, or three, or five. But the HKP has established a permanent presence in Chungi. Its organizational capacities were magnified by the electoral campaign. Now, it is aiming to move further afield: to open branches in other cities across the country, building clinics, building schools, cleaning the water, and everywhere reasserting the idea that working people are the subject of history and not the object of their oppressors. In the days after the February election, the HKP put out a statement. It began with a passage from the poem To Posterity by the German communist Bertold Brecht. The poem says everything there is to say about the permanent task that lies ahead: To the cities I came in a time of disorder That was ruled by hunger. I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar And then I joined in their rebellion. That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Eart h. ∎ More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5