Hyder Bux Jatoi was a deeply ideological person. He was influenced by the teachings of Marx and remained in the struggle to give practical shape to the revolutionary philosophy of that thinker.
He agreed to a government job with great difficulty. He was employed in the Revenue Department as head munshi. Soon he was promoted to mukhtiarkar. Due to his hard work, honesty and dedication he reached the office of Deputy Collector, which was considered the highest office of the district in that time. In those days, he used to grow sad listening to the talk about the cruelty of the wadera upon the hari while arbitrating the disputes between them.
Jatoi visited Sobho Gianchandani’s village during his employment as head munshi. Sobho was seven years old at the time. Sobho’s paternal grandfather complained to Jatoi that his neighbour Noor Muhammad deliberately slaughters a cow on Eid day at the place where the Hindus and other people come to draw sweet water. Jatoi immediately called this neighbour, severely reprimanded him and warned him against any complaints being issued about him in future.
Sobho, in fact, also mentioned that government officials came to the village and confiscated the wealth and goods of peasants who could not pay the government tax. Once when a government official brought the confiscated oxen, cows and household utensils, Hyder Bux Jatoi said angrily: “Who had asked you to lift the utensils and even oxen from the house of the peasant who cannot pay tax? Go immediately and return these things to them.”
Comrade Hyder Bux Jatoi was a tehsildar. He was a very plain-hearted, popular and genial person. According to Sobho, “Once he came to visit our village, the landowners of the village had started preparations to welcome him three to four days prior. They had brought nice food, fruits, sweets, halwa, zarda, pulao and sherbet, etc. for him, but when on his arrival all these things were set before him to be consumed, he distributed all of them among the poor peasants and students and himself ate millet roti with milk along with the peasants.”
A sort of weight lay on Hyder Bux Jatoi’s mind for the right of haris against the oppression of the waderas. An element of rebellion against oppression had been added on his mind.
Eventually the day came when Hyder Bux Jatoi joined the Hari Committee after resigning from his government service in 1945 – the kind of move that Punjab’s Major Ishaque Muhammad was to make too, later. He remained the moving spirit of the Hari Tehreek of Sindh right from that very day. Under his leadership, the Sindh Hari Committee made the class contradiction of the peasants its basis and struggled against feudal oppression on the lines of a trade union.
The same year meaning 1945 he issued a weekly titled Hari Haqdar (Deserving Hari) for the protection of the rights of peasants and the awakening of their own rights and consciousness within the haris.
Jatoi was elected as the President of the Hari Committee at the Hari Conference held in 1947.
His first jail term was a result of British ire at the publication of his collection of poetry Tohfa-e-Sindh (The Gift of Sindh). This little book created an uproar in a society which was ripe for revolution. These poems seriously upset the feudals. The mullahs and pirs also came out in opposition. The One-Unit Pakistani regime of that time went after him. So the book was confiscated; but who can confiscate hearts. Indeed the hearts of the common people had been won in love for Jatoi. How could liberated hearts and spirits be confiscated.
In this collection titled “The Gift of Sindh”, there is a poem by comrade Hyder Bux Jatoi on the river Sindhu named “Shah Darya” (River King). In Punjab a special sacredness is given to the river Ravi and the Chinese to their Yellow River. Indeed the Hindus deem their Ganges the site of pilgrimage. The Sindhis give the river Indus almost the status of a pir, a saint. “Shah Darya” should indeed have been its name. Jatoi had himself translated this poem into English, as follows:
“O Soul of Sind, O grace of Sind
O beauty decoration and pomp of Hind
O pride of the world, O sight of God
The shelter of the rich and the poor
O cloud of kindness, O glamour of goodness
My love and zest, every moment says
Welcome to thee, O river king, a thousand welcomes”
This volume also consists of a poem titled “Shikwa” (The Complaint) similar indeed in manner to Iqbal’s eponymous poem. But since Iqbal was fighting a difficult opposition, so he had to write “Jawab-e-Shikwa” (An Answer to the Complaint). Sindhis are a comparatively tolerant lot, so they were not angry and even if they were, they stifled it. Since this was the poetry of their favourite Hyder Bux Jatoi.
This poem, too was translated by Jatoi himself:
“Thy infidels are rejoicing, show sense of honour
Thy seekers are suffering pains, show some love
Thy devotees are dying of thirst, show some mercy
Show some differentiation in Thy friendship and Thy enmity”
In addition, four of his collections of verses were published: Azad Qaum (Free Nation), Hari Geet (Hari Songs), Hari Inquilab (Peasant Revolution) and Sindh Pyara (Beloved Sindh). After “The Gift of Sindh”, his second collection titled “Free Nation” was published in 1947. This is actually based on the war of independence against the British.
Since it is poetry of youth, therefore the style is the same as of Allama Iqbal and Sharif Kunjahi. We don’t know if someone while doing their PhD (on Jatoi) has observed the mutual relation between the poetry of Iqbal and Jatoi and their comparison.
“Jiye Sindh, Jiye Sindh
Jam-e-Mohabbat piye Sindh”
(Long live Sindh, long live Sindh
May the goblet of love be drunk by Sindh)
Some of his books were also published in Sindhi and English. In addition, he wrote several influential essays on political issues.
Hyder Bux Jatoi was a humanist poet. He felt the sorrows of the wretched of the Earth and then devoted his life to reducing their sorrows and pains. He left a higher office in the bureaucracy of the British period to jump into the field of struggle for the cause of the poor. He was put into jail many times for this crime of friendship with the oppressed.
And today, or in the future whenever you read about the struggle and sacrifices for the sake of public welfare, please do not consider it easy. As soon as you read the words “struggle” and “sacrifice” in the Third World, do become serious and intense in that these were never petty words. The famous landlord of Sindh Nawab Ghaibi Khan Chandio had a beloved popular leader like Hyder Bux Jatoi tied to a tree and told his men to bark at him like dogs while biting him like canines.
Jatoi remained the leader of the struggle of the peasants for a quarter-century. He kept struggling for the national, democratic, social, cultural and economic rights of the people.
From the period of studentship to his death in 1970, Jatoi continuously fought for the attainment of social justice and against every kind of economic, political and social oppression. Though he had a feeling of great sympathy for the working class, but he could not estimate the political abilities of this class and giving more importance to the organizational and political power of the peasants. Perhaps, he even carried an unrealistic image of the peasant class. He considered the distribution of the lands of landlords among the peasants as the solution to agricultural problems. Later he presented his idea about the need for creating agricultural cooperatives based on small agricultural units.
In the general elections of 1945-46, Comrade Hyder Bux Jatoi, Qazi Faiz Muhammad, Abdul Qadir M. Khan and Ramji Kohli contested with the top landlords of Sindh from the side of the Hari Committee. He was not successful in the election but this election campaign made clear the identity of the Hari Committee, the confidence within the peasants and class contradictions.
In 1947, the resolution for ‘Adhi Batai’ (half-share or half-division of crop) was unanimously approved at the Hari Conference; so peasants in the areas of Sanghar, Nawabshah and Tharparkar refused to give more than half-share to the landowners and at many places indeed the peasants divided the share in half by actually standing personally, because of which the landlords attacked the peasants at many places, due to which Mai Bakhtawar, Balach Khan and other peasants fell in the struggle.
It should be noted that the division of the ready crop is called “batai”. Before the success of the Batai Movement in Sindh, the crop was divided into three parts. Out of these, the landowner used to take away two parts and the hari received only the third part. Since this system had continued for centuries, so it was imposed in practice; though the principle of half-share was written down in the law of the land, according to which half of the ready crop was the right of the peasant, while the seeds and other expenditures had to be borne equally by the peasant and the landowner. Since this approved law was not being followed, so the Sindh Hari Committee initiated the movement for half-share. Jatoi’s participation was incredible and he led the movement.
In June 1960 he was arrested and taken to Quetta Jail. He got rigorous imprisonment and was moved to Machh Jail. He was released after two years in August 1962. During this movement, thousands of peasants participated in the protests and the movement assumed an organized shape, due to which once again the half-share of the hari in the ready crop was acknowledged in the decade of the 1960s.
And then, when One Unit was imposed, the struggle of Jatoi against it has been rarely exemplified in history. He wrote a book titled Land Taxation in Sindh, in which he rejected the establishment of one-unit with proofs. Captivity and confinement kept him company till the end. The struggle of the Hari Committee and its leader comrade Jatoi have a great role in the movement against one-unit. He continued the struggle for the break-up of one-unit and restoration of Sindh province through speeches, press conferences and pamphlets. One of his pamphlets was titled One Unit and Democracy.
As a result of this long and untiring struggle, he began to reside in the hearts of the people and the common people gave him the title of Baba-e-Sindh (Father of Sindh).
(to be continued)
All translations from the Urdu are by the writer’s, unless otherwise stated.
Raza Naeem is a Pakistani social scientist, book critic and award-winning translator and dramatic reader currently based in Lahore, where he is also the president of the Progressive Writers Association. He can be reached at: razanaeem@hotmail.com