Poetry, Resistance & Humanity—IV When Freedom Changed Its Uniform

A clarification belongs before the journey continues. Aamir Riaz has rightly pointed out that his book Punjab Di Vel: 1799–2025 does not discuss Dr. Turab ul Hassan Sargana’s book. The criticism of the book considered in Part III came from Riaz’s subsequent essay posted on Punjab Punch, published after his book. The sentence should therefore be read as follows: in a later essay, Riaz directs this criticism towards Sargana’s work on Punjab in 1857. Precision is not a courtesy added to history; it is part of historical justice.¹

The correction also confirms the argument of Part III. Archive, song and later commentary must be separated before they can illuminate one another. Attribution matters because memory is injured when the right words are placed in the wrong book. With that distinction made, this series crosses the Indus—from the dhola of the Bar to a Sindhi voice that lived under British rule and then discovered that freedom could preserve the habits of empire.

Abdul Karim Lashari, remembered by his pen name Gadai, was born in 1901 in the Jacobabad region. “Gadai” means a beggar or one who stands without possessions before power. In his poetry the name became an ethical location. He did not write from the balcony of authority. He wrote from the hut, the field, the roadside meeting and the newspaper office—from wherever the poor were expected to suffer without becoming visible.²

The colonial state entered his life not as an abstraction but as news of blood. Gadai later recalled seeing thousands of Hindus and Muslims gather at Lakhi Dar, Shikarpur, in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The scene drew him towards organised politics. In 1932 he joined the Congress movement, served as secretary of its Thul committee for about a decade, and wrote against British rule for Sindhi newspapers and periodicals.³

This history is important because Gadai’s later disillusionment was not the complaint of a spectator. He had opposed foreign rule and expected its end to alter the terms of ordinary life. The flag changed in 1947; the peasant still surrendered produce, the labourer still sold strength cheaply, and the landlord retained the power to convert dependence into obedience. Gadai said that the true period of his poetry began after Partition because the people’s hopes remained unrealised and the feudal order of the British period continued.⁴

The broken promise did not send him into private sorrow. It pushed his verse towards labour:

اچو محنت ڪشو! ھن ملڪ کي گلزار ڪرڻو آ

نڪمن ۽ نڪارن جو جيئڻ دشوار ڪرڻو آ

Acho mehnat-kasho! hin mulk khe gulzar karno aa,

nikaman ain nakaran jo jeean dushwar karno aa.

Come, workers: this country must be made a garden;

life must be made difficult for the idle and unproductive.

The garden is reclaimed from patriotic decoration. It is neither inherited by rulers nor created through ceremony; workers must make it. The second line is deliberately combative. Its target is not the person unable to work, but the idle beneficiary who lives from another’s labour. Gadai brings a great political word before the evidence of the body: Is there food? Is illness treated? Can the cultivator keep enough of the crop to live? A hungry person knows whether power has changed by the weight of bread, not the colour of bunting.⁵

After Partition, Gadai joined the Sindh Hari Committee and became one of the voices of peasants and labourers. The committee’s demand—“the one who tills has the right to eat”—translated political liberty into a claim upon production. Land was no longer scenery in patriotic verse. It was the place where labour met ownership and where independence revealed whom it intended to serve.⁶

His titles announce this descent from abstraction to lived experience: Saanih Ja Soor evokes the pains of the homeland; Pakhara Ain Panhwar turns towards huts and herdsmen. The pastoral is not used to decorate deprivation. Gadai allows the poor to enter poetry as thinking subjects. Their hunger is political knowledge; their labour is an argument; their patience has a limit.⁷

This makes Gadai more than a nationalist poet. Nationalism can oppose a foreign ruler while protecting the landlord who speaks the national language. Gadai’s loyalty to Sindh did not require silence about Sindh’s own exploiters. He wrote against the wadera, the opportunist, the idle beneficiary and the institutions that carried colonial inequalities into a formally independent state. The homeland he loved was not soil separated from its people. It was the people’s right to live upon that soil without humiliation.

The One Unit scheme of 1955 gave this poetry another field of resistance. Sindh, Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province and Balochistan were merged into a single province of West Pakistan. Administrative uniformity was presented as national consolidation; many Sindhi writers experienced it as the loss of historical identity, provincial voice and linguistic space. Modern Sindhi poetry responded with one of its strongest movements of resistance.⁸

Gadai’s resistance crossed the convenient border between class and culture. A peasant needs land, but also a language in which his experience is not translated by someone above him. Provincial autonomy without economic justice can leave the field unchanged; economic slogans without cultural dignity can turn the cultivator into a statistic. His poetry held the two demands together.

The collected title Laat Barandi Rahay—let the flame keep burning—captures his method. A flame is smaller than a throne and more easily shared. It passes from hand to hand without becoming the property of one bearer. In Gadai, the poet does not command the people from a monument. He keeps a light near the ground, where those walking in darkness can see one another.⁹

This is where his verse joins the wider humanist inquiry of this series. Political freedom that leaves inherited hunger untouched is freedom from a flag, not freedom to develop a human life. The colonial order trained people to admire hierarchy, fear officials and accept extraction as administration.

Decolonisation remains unfinished when the same habits are performed by local elites in familiar clothes. The phrase “internal colonialism” is sometimes used for this afterlife. It should be handled carefully: an indigenous state is not identical to foreign occupation, and historical differences must not be erased.

The phrase becomes useful when it identifies structures rather than trading accusations—concentrated land, distant decision-making, suppression of language, unequal access to public goods and the conversion of peripheral regions into sources of wealth without equal power.¹⁰

Gadai’s test is simpler and harder to evade. Ask the field. Ask the worker. Ask the mother measuring grain against the days remaining in the month. If independence enlarges their capacity to live with dignity, it has acquired human meaning. If their condition remains unchanged, poetry must disturb the celebration until freedom answers.

The British departure did not end the poem of resistance; it changed its addressee. Gadai followed power from the colonial office into the feudal estate, the centralising state and the language of false completion. His enduring gift is not despair. It is the refusal to let an unfinished freedom declare itself complete. The flame keeps burning because the road still belongs to those who walk it.

Endnotes

1. For Part III, see Ikramul Haq, “Poetry, Resistance & Humanity—III: When Empire Entered Memory,” Minute Mirror, October 6, 2026. The criticism of Sargana appears in Aamir Riaz, “Kharals, British Loyalists, Sikh-Muslim Conflict and the Misleading Writings,” Punjab Punch, September 21, 2026; it is not attributed here to Punjab Di Vel.
2. Sindhi Adabi Board, “Abdul Karim Gadai,” biographical profile, January 30, 2023.
3. Asghar Raza Burfat and Inam Ali Kubar, “Abdul Karim Gadai and His Poetic Work,” The Grassroots 48, no. 2 (July–December 2014), pp. 67–76.
4. Burfat and Kubar, “Abdul Karim Gadai and His Poetic Work,” pp. 69–71; A.K. Azad Mughal, “Bebak Sahafi Abdul Karim Gadai,” Humsari.
5. Haseeb Nayab Mangi, “Abdul Karim Gadai: Sindhi Boli-a Jo Qaumi Ain Inquilabi Shair,” Humsari, including the quoted Sindhi couplet; English rendering appears in the text.
6. Sohail Sangi, “Sindh Hari Committee: Pakistan’s First Peasant Movement,” Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières, May 21, 2017; see also Anis Haroon and others, Peasant Land Rights Movement of Pakistan Sustainable Development Policy Institute, 2008.
7. Burfat and Kubar, “Abdul Karim Gadai and His Poetic Work,” pp. 70–76; Haseeb Nayab Mangi, “Gadai’s Poetry: The Voice of Labour,” reproduced with biographical material and selections from his poetry.
8. Goethe-Institut, “Down the Ages: An Introduction to Sindhi Poetry,” noting the resistance movement in Sindhi poetry after the imposition of One Unit; see also “A Portrayal of the Sindhi Peasant in Selected Poems, 1939–1975,” Kalich Research Journal 7 (2021).
9. Abdul Karim Gadai, Laat Barandi Rahay: Shayari Jo Kuliyat, eds. Niaz Sarki and Javed Saghar (Hyderabad: Roshni Publications, 2007).
10. Farukh Aziz and Asifa Abbas, “Voices from the Periphery: Sindh, Internal Colonialism, and Literary Resistance in Pakistan,” Advance Social Science Archive Journal 5, no. 1 (January–March 2026), pp. 3111–3124.

[To be continued]

Dr. Ikramul Haq, Advocate Supreme Court, Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Visiting Senior Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), holds an LLD in tax laws. He was full-time journalist from 1979 to 1984 with Viewpoint and Dawn. He also served Civil Services of Pakistan from 1984 to 1996.