To celebrate the birthday of a communist, old comrades resurface with memories

Marxist social scientist Sobho Gianchandani 91st birthday was celebrated with fanfare at the Karachi Press Club.

KARACHI:

The 91st birthday of eminent Marxist social scientist Sobho Gianchandani was celebrated with fanfare at the Karachi Press Club on Tuesday evening.

The giant of a man in Leftist politics, who today is a shadow of himself, literally with no teeth to show or energy to even stand up at the podium to deliver a fiery speech, nonetheless, had the steely nerves to recall his many days of incarceration in jails.

Many septuagenarian comrades from the old days, some limping, some grumbling, sweated it out for Sobho under the marquee in the sweltering heat and patiently waited for the cake to be cut.

Gianchandani, who hails from Larkana, has had a long life of struggle for his socialist and communist ideals. He joined the Communist Party of India before partition at age 21 and for the next 60 years spearheaded the Left movement almost all by himself in Pakistan. He also had a long association with Rabindranath Tagore, who offered him a place at his school in Shantiniketan. Later on in his life, he began his career as a lawyer and fought cases for poor landless famers.

He has also written a number of stories that advanced his socialist ideas, including Pardesi Pretam, Rahima and the well known Inqilaab ki Maut [The Death of the Revolution].

B.M. Kutty, a renowned name in Leftist politics himself, paid tribute to Gianchandani’s unrelenting resolve. He recalled that during the 70s, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto urged Gianchandani to join the Pakistan Peoples Party, but despite repeated offers, he refused.

Gianchandani told the gathered audience that the first revolution he brought was against purdah and he began that inside his own home. “Even today our women don’t do the purdah as was the custom back then,” he said as his many children and grandchildren at the venue beamed. He implied that the best veil was in one’s eyes without which no layers of clothing could hide anything.

He recalled how after Pakistan came into being, he was thrown into jail for 45 days and was asked to sign a paper by which he would have been thrown into India. “I said no. I was born in Sindh. This is my country,” he said.

Even during his time in jails, he never sat idle and read everything from Marx and Lenin to every book on religion he could get hold of. He recalled how he even sold his books to the Shahnawaz Bhutto Library when during one of the darkest hour in his life he needed money to treat his severely ill son. Unfortunately, the son died and he had to buy his books back from other places.

He became emotional as he repeated his love for the land of his birth. “There’s nothing dearer than one’s country not even one’s religion or anything.”

His days of harassment in Pakistan, however, were many. Dacoits sent him messages that if he didn’t stop spreading his ideas of socialism in villages, he would be kidnapped. He had to tell his brother to sell the little land he had and leave. But despite that he and his brother managed to build three schools in the area, which exist even today.

He remembered Sajjad Zaheer, who was sent to Pakistan to form the ill-fated Communist Party of Pakistan.

In the end, he urged everyone to make their children communists, which he said meant ingraining love for others, especially the poor.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 4^th, 2011.