Documenting struggles both local and abroad, Fahmida Riaz’s Awaz sets a historical precedent for socialist-feminist work in Pakistan.
اردو میں پڑھیں
Fahmida Riaz was a leading Marxist feminist progressive writer whose work has left an indelible mark on feminist and resistance literature. This essay aims to introduce her socialist-feminist politics through an archival reading of Awaz, the political magazine co-founded by Riaz and her husband, Zafar Ali Ujan. By turning to the socialist-feminist politics of Riaz’s editorials and editorial practices in Awaz, this essay hopes to engage with the feminist archive and the plethora of possibilities our revolutionary pasts offer for us. Such engagement may help connect contemporary feminist projects with their historical counterparts.
Fahmida Riaz was born in 1945 in Meerut. She lost her father at the age of five, and her mother became the sole provider for the family. Riaz started writing at an early age and, during her college years in Hyderabad, contributed poetry to the literary journal Funun, edited by the renowned progressive writer Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi. Her political and literary pursuits evolved in parallel, as she joined the student union during her undergraduate years. While pursuing her post-graduate studies, Riaz became involved with the Communist Party, banned at the time, deepening her commitment to socialist politics. In 1967, however, Riaz entered an unhappy marriage because of which she moved to England.
It was those long, dreary days in London that led to the creation of Badan Darida, her famous and controversial poetry collection that delves into the complicacies of womanhood by inverting social taboos to comment on female desire, sex, pregnancy, menstruation, and religion, introducing new vocabulary in Urdu literature. By placing the female body at the center of her narrative and voicing her truth through verse, Riaz’s work disrupted patriarchal norms, earning the poetry provocative labels such as “whorish,” and “pornographic.”
Upon leaving her first marriage, Riaz returned to Karachi with her daughter and, in 1976, married the political activist Zafar Ali Ujjan. Together, they launched Awaz, a political magazine that quickly became a target of intense state scrutiny. The magazine’s fearless critique of the status quo resulted in sedition charges against both Riaz and Ujjan. With Ujjan imprisoned, Riaz sought refuge in India.
In India, she taught at Jamia Millia Islamia and Jawaharlal Nehru University.1 This period of her life, marked by exile, prompted her to reflect on her place at home from the margins—a tension evident in her works, particularly her prose titled Pakistan: Literature and Society and her writings on Bangladesh, such as Zinda Bahar Lane. These works highlighted overlooked literature in opposition to the yoke of nationalist ideology. For Riaz, borders were porous, and as a translator, she could transcend them by belonging to more than one culture at a time, an ethic that permeated her politics, especially in Awaz.
The Radical Bent of Awaz
Awaz was founded in the late 1970s to critique the Martial Law regime of the military dictator Zia-ul-Haq. It aimed to highlight marginalized groups and people in its effort to bring back the freedoms lost during the dictatorship. During this period, press censorship was on the rise, and many political magazines and newspapers had been banned. Awaz, especially in its later issues, collaborated with some of these magazines, such as Al Fatah and Meyar.
The first page from the June 1979 issue shows this collaboration, featuring the logos of both Awaz and Al Fatah positioned at the top. The rest of the page provides details about the editorial board and lists the main essays featured in the magazine. An interesting aspect to note is that Awaz not only had local correspondents, but also international correspondents, whose names are listed on the page. This page demonstrates the collective effort, extending the limits of what it meant to belong to a place from a range of different locations.
The magazine faced increasing backlash and state surveillance, culminating in the discontinuation of Awaz in the early 1980s when Riaz and Ujjan were charged with sedition. As the editor-in-chief, Riaz was deeply involved in the production process, overseeing the selection of translations, poetry, satire, columns, journalistic pieces, and interviews, as well as writing the idaariye (editorials) for all its issues. The selection of pieces and these introductions together highlight the intersection of Riaz’s progressive socialist-feminist and Third Worldist politics, thus emphasising the importance of inter-relational struggle. Achieving all this under a dictatorship deserves our attention and appreciation, as it opens pathways for us to learn from the courage embodied by Riaz and the magazine.
A Challenge to Military Dictatorship
Critiquing Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship was no easy task. Zia came to power in 1977 after orchestrating a military coup against Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He arrested Bhutto, dissolved the assemblies, suspended Pakistan’s Constitution, and imposed Martial Law. Under Zia’s rule, socialists and socialist ideas were systematically targeted, partially due to his support for the United States in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. He denationalized industries and banned trade and student unions. The political process of Islamization that is commonly thought to be a brainchild of Zia did not begin under him, yet his politics surely buttressed it. His Islamization policies particularly harmed religious and gender minorities, especially through blasphemy laws and the notorious Hudood Ordinances that blurred the distinction between rape and adultery. Zia promoted a singular vision of national identity, centered on religious piety, militarization, and centralized state control. As a result, socialism, and any ideology that deviated from this vision were severely punished, as many journalists, student leaders, and women activists were arrested, imprisoned, and publicly flogged. While there’s an absence of research on Riaz’s connections with feminist activists emerging at that time, there have been some recorded instances of her attending Women’s Action Forum (WAF) meetings, suggesting that she participated in some form of on-ground resistance against Zia’s regime as well.
Awaz emerged during this time, a testament to the potential for resistance even amidst the darkest hours of state repression. Riaz’s editorial from the May 1979 issue exemplifies Awaz’s fearless critique of the military regime and its oppressive rule.
“Picture a dog biting off humans in trying to save the herds of goats and wolves from them.” This image serves as a fitting analogy for the establishment targeting activists, workers, educators, students, or anyone critiquing the status quo under the guise of ensuring public safety. Riaz critiques the absurd logic of Zia’s dictatorship, where repression was framed as necessary protection. Her critique not only exposes the regime’s flawed reasoning but also reflects an effort to navigate the dangerous landscape of Zia’s rule without directly incurring its wrath. It is also worth noticing how the use of metaphor conveys meaning more clearly than the straightforward language as it taps into multiple levels of meaning in her critique of orthodoxy, a quality of Riaz’s writing as Maryam Wasif Khan points out.2
The same passage quotes the famous Irish playwright and activist, George Bernard Shaw’s criticism of the army, making a sharp use of intertextuality (alluding to other texts) that enabled Riaz to convey her critique of the absurdity of military rule, while remaining broad enough to shield the magazine from backlash.
In the same passage, she exposes the double standards and contradictions of the dictatorship that punished students and workers for protesting while allowing other groups, particularly the religious right, to hold their demonstrations without consequence.
It was overt attacks like these that motivated Riaz to center the struggle of the people against brutality, subverting the narrative of Zia’s dictatorship. This style of writing pays homage to the polyvalence of Urdu language, through an evocation of different times and different contexts – a reminder for the people living in dictatorship that there is a possibility outside the fixity of Zia’s myopic version of Urdu and by way of that there is a possibility outside the dictatorial regime.
Socialist-Feminism in Practice
Riaz’s editorials serve as lessons in socialist-feminism. Take the example of her editorial from the June 1979 issue that begins with a positive note by mentioning the release of political prisoners, especially Begum Nusrat Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto. However, in bringing to light the contradictory nature of the martial law regime, she points to other groups that continue to face persecution for demanding their basic rights. This included the flogging of textile mill workers, arresting journalists, and punishing political workers such as Afrasiab Khattak and his supporters, whose situation was expected to deteriorate as they would be tried by the Army Act. For Riaz, the release of Begum Nusrat Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto is not enough. Indeed, this political act of releasing elite women hides the oppression of the common people whom she focuses on in this editorial note.
The editorial discusses the plight of students and workers who have been attacked on all fronts. She warns the government that this rising anger can lead to uncontrollable and dangerous outcomes if their rights are not restored. She then calls for the restoration of democratic values and freedoms, withdrawal of martial law and emergency laws, release of all political prisoners, and closure of army courts. Here, she creates a solidarity of oppressed groups through her writing. Only by recognizing similar logics in different forms of oppression can the people demonstrate their collective power, an ethic Riaz ushers in through her writing.
The rest of the magazine also bears marks of this ethic that Riaz set down. Take, for example, the article titled Charsada Mazdoor Convention that was published in the May 1979 issue. It sheds light on the All Pakistan Mazdoor Conference that took place in Charsada Sugarmills rest house. It was organized by Gul Rehman and Arif Sarhadi and joined by numerous leaders from the working class.
This article details the plight of workers and rebukes not just Zia’s imperial rule, but also criticizes the capitalists of the country for sustaining it. The socio-economic aspect remains central throughout its criticism of the regime, as the article recalls the conference. The conference produced seven main demands that included:
- End martial law, and unban trade unions,
- Introduce a vision for a more collective ownership of industries,
- Reduce prices, introduce unemployment allowance, increase wages,
- Release workers, farmers, students, trade union leaders, and take back their arrest warrants,
- Bring about freedom of the press and speech, and end censorship,
- Restore the rights of farmers,
- Grant space to katchi abadis.
This piece is crucial as it highlights the language of workers who are often assumed to have limited knowledge, deemed as “pre-political”, as they do not speak the language of the privileged. This is not to say their language would be perfect. But their language is heard, adopted, and given a possibility to create a world of its own that aims to be less oppressive than the world created by dictatorship and sustained by capitalists.
The Possibilities of Third World Internationalism
This conference’s vision, as the article reminds us, was not bound by geography as it drew inspiration from the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan. Here, it is interesting to note that the workers and their leaders discussed not just the change of power and regimes, but also went on to understand what this change really meant for its people. The conference discussed anti-capitalist and anti-feudal contours of this revolution, values that are echoed in the conference’s demands as well, as shown earlier. They also talked about what this revolution meant for Afghan women as they celebrated the revolution’s strict dismissal of the notion of selling brides and giving dowries.
The term Third World emerged in the context of the Cold War to describe countries that remained unaligned to the Western or the Eastern bloc, attempting to forge a third way for themselves. Internationalism is a recurrent theme in Awaz as it makes references to Vietnam, Palestine, Iran, Indonesia and other countries.
This internationalism does not question what must come first or what must be at the top. The magazine’s language uncovers the interconnected nature of struggles hidden away by nationalist, statist, and patriarchal logics that not only plague our land but supersede it, providing us with opportunities to learn from one another. There is a sense that our differences do not pull us apart, but in fact join us together. This was significant at a time when censorship and restrictions at home limited speech. The internationalist perspective of the magazine allowed it to say what it could not from the local contexts. Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Shuhadaaye Falasteen kay Naam poem, published for the first time in the September 1981 issue of Awaz, echoes a deeper mourning, reflecting the shared loss of his own people as well:
This internationalist bent of the magazine liberated local writers and readers, to an extent, by giving space to, and creating, a community of people who could imagine other possibilities and learn from others under the suffocating Zia regime. This was crucial, particularly to counter the dominance of Zia’s politics, in the face of which Riaz’s politics of decolonial solidarity building sought to define itself with the help of others. This is also why translations were a major part of the magazine’s appeal. One act of translation in the past has been that of Orientalists such as William Jones, whose translations fixed Indians and the Urdu language to fit the colonial imperial intents. Awaz’s version of translation shows us the potential it holds to create unities that have been disrupted by the Empire and its casted shadows in the post-colonial countries. Riaz’s work as a translator also allowed her to communicate with her readers through the voice and work of other writers, a feature that perhaps let the magazine survive for as long as it did during such repressive times.
As Haider Shahbaz points out in his essay Fahmida Riaz’s Awaz,3 Riaz imbued the Urdu language with the power to connect miles of distance by pointing to similar logics across the border in her calls to solidarity, evoking another realm of meaning for the language. Urdu becomes a medium of connection with other faraway worlds where struggles are brought together by the wisdom and talent of Riaz. Hence, the monopoly of Zia’s myopic Urdu breaks as the Urdu language in this magazine writes against the homogenizing force that shackled the language in the religio-nationalist dictatorship regime, a monopolization that was used against Bengalis previously and that only intensified under Zia’s rule.
Observing the feminist labour of Riaz and other editors working alongside her in the production of Awaz serves as a crucial and urgent reminder to form solidarities in our attempt to articulate a feminist politics, a politics whose core values call for centering the margins through struggle. Seeking guidance from Riaz’s brave language, we must also be brave. It is a testament to Riaz’s resilience that, despite facing violent threats, her language permeated out of the holds of nation-state logic, pointing to other possibilities of creation.
During these trying times, one struggle that demands our attention is the women-led Baloch movement, demanding their rights and protesting against enforced disappearances in Balochistan, challenging the structures of injustice. Their struggle has been marginalized historically, and if we are to begin building solidarities from anywhere, it is with the Baloch people amongst others, many of whom have been termed as “traitors,” placed outside the “national” body when they very much belong to it. Our struggle for a feminist world is incomplete without standing with those at the margins. Our struggle, as Riaz reminds us, attains greater value when it combines with other similar struggles as we seek communal liberation, as we imagine and inhabit freer worlds, from Balochistan to Gaza.
Solidarity can become a hollow word if we do not ground it in real work, action and struggle. Solidarity, perhaps, is a collective ethic that can mean limitless things, one of which, as Riaz reminds us, is the way we can use language to uncover the constellation of meanings that connect us. Staying rooted in our locality does not limit us to it. Indeed, rootedness develops as it sees the connections it shares with others of similar socio-economic and historical conditions. Perhaps, our identity is better realized when we understand its connectivity with the collective whole, like roots of the same tree, anchored in our own places in the soil, yet connected together to give rise to a blossoming tree, providing shade to all…
- Amina Yaqin, “Fahmida Riaz: A Woman Impure” in Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing. Anthem Press, 2022. ↩︎
- Maryam W. Khan, “Epilogue: Us, People / People Like Us: Fehmida Riaz and a Secular Subjectivity in Urdu” in Who is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms. Fordham University Press, 2021. ↩︎
- Haider Shahbaz, “Fahmida Riaz’s Āwāz: Translation and Solidarities in the Global South” in Translation and Decolonisation, ed. Claire Chambers, Ipek Demir. Routledge, 2024. ↩︎
Musfira Khurshid is a researcher and feminist political worker based in Lahore, Pakistan.
