A life in resistance

Some lives are lived alongside history, others seem to absorb it. In Love, Life and the Left, Mahnaz Rahman tells the story of a life shaped by some of the defining upheavals of the subcontinent — Partition, migration, class inequality, political repression and the struggle for women’s rights. Overarchingly it also makes the case for something increasingly difficult to sustain in an age of political disillusionment: the possibility of resistance.

The memoir begins before Rahman’s own birth, with her mother Dilafroze, who was 17 when she was displaced from Amritsar during Partition. In Karachi, she rebuilt her life with her mother and sister and met Zain, a young migrant from Delhi. Their relationship eventually led to the birth of Mahnaz in 1949. From this beginning, the personal and the political are intertwined. The traumas of displacement, the complications of family and the inequalities of the new society into which Rahman was born become part of the circumstances that shaped her worldview.

The interweaving of private history and public events are at the heart of Love, Life and the Left. The story follows the evolution of an individual consciousness as Rahman becomes increasingly uncomfortable with privilege and capitalism, eventually rejecting what she describes as a comfortable bourgeois life. She elopes with a radical journalist, joins the Communist Party of Pakistan and begins a life in which political conviction is not an abstract intellectual position but something that determines where she lives, whom she associates with and how she understands the world around her.

That trajectory gives the memoir its unusual scope. Rahman writes of resistance to the Zia dictatorship, exile in China and campaigns for the rights of women and minorities in Pakistan. Her story consequently becomes a record of several generations of political idealism and disappointment, but also of the persistence of people who continued to believe that society could be transformed.

Farhatullah Babar describes the memoir as more than a personal account, pointing to its larger journey through Pakistan’s political history and what he sees as the decline of resistance in the country’s politics, media and society. Shah Mohammad Marri, meanwhile, emphasises the idea of human resilience, describing Rahman’s life as one in which Marxist conviction and a commitment to the oppressed become central to her identity.

Sheema Kermani places the emphasis somewhere slightly different. For her, Rahman’s story belongs not only to the author but to a generation that “lived and dreamt” of a revolution that would create equality and justice. That observation is important because it suggests that the memoir’s interest lies beyond the biography of one political activist. Rahman’s experiences offer a window into the aspirations of people who came of age believing that political organisation and collective action could fundamentally alter society.

There is also something poignant in the tension between that idealism and the political landscape the memoir describes. The book travels through decades in which the Pakistani Left faced repression, fragmentation and changing political circumstances. Yet Rahman’s story, as presented here, does not appear to be structured simply as an elegy for a failed political project. Its title itself suggests three strands that are inseparable: the intimate life of the individual, the experience of living through history, and the political commitments that give that life meaning.

Ammar Ali Jan’s endorsement draws attention to another revealing dimension of the memoir: Rahman’s continuing attachment to Mao Zedong’s dictum, “It is right to rebel”. Whether one shares that political tradition or not, the quotation helps illuminate the principle running through the life described in the book. Rebellion here is not presented merely as youthful defiance. It becomes an ethical position — a refusal to accept inequality, authoritarianism or injustice simply because they have become entrenched.

This makes the memoir valuable as a historical document as much as a personal one. The conventional political history of Pakistan is often told through governments, military regimes, political parties and major events. Memoirs can complicate that version of history by showing how those events were experienced by people outside the corridors of power. Through Rahman’s family, relationships, political commitments and activism, the large events of the country’s history acquire a human scale. The story of a family remaking itself after Partition becomes part of a longer history of belonging, alienation and the making of Pakistan.

There is also a striking irony in the fact that Rahman’s life begins in the aftermath of one enormous rupture and subsequently becomes entangled with so many others. The rise of authoritarianism, exile and the continuing struggle over women’s and minority rights all become stages in a life that refuses to separate personal experience from political responsibility.

That is perhaps why the book’s strongest appeal may not be limited to readers who share Rahman’s politics. Love, Life and the Left offers an opportunity to understand why someone might reject comfort in favour of activism, why political ideals can survive periods of defeat, and what it means to carry those ideals through an entire lifetime.

The memoir also raises questions that remain relevant. What happens to political idealism when the revolution does not arrive? How does a person sustain faith in collective action after witnessing repression and political failure? And what does resistance mean when the movements that once seemed capable of transforming society have themselves become part of history? Those questions give Love, Life and the Left a resonance beyond its specific political moment.

The memoir’s achievement, judging from its framing and the breadth of its subject, lies in bringing together the intimate and the historical. It begins with a young woman displaced by Partition and follows the life of the daughter born from the new relationships and circumstances created by that displacement. From there it moves into political activism, love, marriage, ideology, repression, exile and campaigns for social justice. The result is not merely a chronicle of the Left in Pakistan, but a portrait of one person’s attempt to live according to her political beliefs.

In an age when political idealism can easily appear naïve and resistance can seem futile, there is something worth examining in a life that persisted in both. Love, Life and the Left asks its readers to look at Pakistan not only through the history of those who governed it, but through the lives of those who challenged the structures around them. And ultimately, it seems to ask a more personal question: what does it mean to remain committed to an idea of justice when history repeatedly gives you reasons to give up?