 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today, we are joined by Dr. Taimur Rahman, the General Secretary of the Pakistan-Majdur Kisan Party, and one of the key people in the band Lal, and we're going to talk about the importance of cultural resistance. Taimur, so you've been with the band Lal has had a huge impact, both in South Asia and across the world. And it's also introduced, if I can maybe call it a different style of leftist cultural activity. So we've had, of course, various kinds of music in the past, but Lal has brought in a mix of musical genres. It has tried something new. So, how do you see your experience in music as part of political activity to make it a very blunt quest? Well, that's a tough question. Let me start by sort of explaining to you that in the context of Pakistan, since the Communist Party of Pakistan was banned in 1954 after the Pindi conspiracy case, a huge articulation of, you know, the major articulation of what the left stood for in the context of Pakistan always occurred through art and culture. It occurred through music, it occurred through poetry, it occurred through painting, street theatre and so on. So there's a long precedent to what I'm doing. I'm not the first, certainly I won't be the last either. There was Ajoka before me, there was Dastak, they were doing street theatre. There was, you know, Nayira Singh's fairs, and Iqbal Banu Singh's fairs, and this had a massive impact on Pakistan. There's, you know, of course, the progressive writer's movement itself, people like Fez Ahmed Fez, and Ahmed Faraz, and Habib Jaleb, etc., all of whom had a really massive impact on the cultural landscape of Pakistan. So all of this was already present in Pakistan, and I grew up with a big chunk of it. I think the only thing that you could probably credit me with was, number one, moving the cultural work of the left on the internet, which a lot of people were not doing because they were much more focused on performing for the street and performing in schools, colleges and other places. So I moved it to the internet, that was the first thing. And the second thing is, perhaps in terms of musical style, the transformation, because the original style was that we did it in the Ghazal style. The Ghazal style dominated over progressive music, partly because progressive poetry was written very much in the Ghazal mold. It was, they were basically Ghazals, except that they were revolutionary, and Fez sort of turned the love poem into a revolutionary poem. So therefore, it sort of made sense for people to take the form of the Ghazal, the rag of the Ghazal, the instrumentation of the Ghazal, and then to sing the Ghazal, but it was a revolutionary Ghazal. So I guess the transformation that I brought about was utilizing guitars and drums and Western instruments, and while staying within Eastern Ghaz, etc., I blended the two, so fused the two. I don't think I can take too much musical credit for that, to be honest, because that's all I knew how to do. If somebody asked me to write, okay, maybe I'm being unfair on myself. But the point was, I think we grew up with music that was partly inspired certainly by Ghazal, but partly also inspired by Western music, by contemporary popular and rock music, which was very much part of the Pakistani scene as well, right? So we had Janoon before us and we had Vital Signs and all of that sort of stuff. So we had already become very much acquainted with sounds that were fused Western and Eastern influences. That was something that was already there. And so again, so the only credit that can be given to me is that I moved progressive music into that domain, a domain that already existed musically. So mainly the credit is that I could sort of synthesize combined elements that already existed and put them in this sort of new form. I'm very pleased with the result that, you know, what we were able to accomplish with that, because frankly we thought this was going to be just something that we would do and a few hundred people would sort of listen and that would be the end of that. You know, we never, I never really thought that it could have the level of popularity that it did. It hit us all by complete surprise and I think, you know, politically I had been struggling for a decade, at least before that. So that was quite different, but from a musical perspective we weren't really expecting it, but it was a wonderful transformation. But one thing that I wanted to sort of, I've been emphasizing for a while now in the context of Pakistan is that people who have been doing politics through the domain of culture and people who have been doing politics in the traditional political way have moved apart from each other. The people doing cultural politics don't want to get involved with political parties. And the people involved with political parties say, well, these are some nice people who do some nice work, but I'm not really sure what it has to do with us. You know, those two domains have to be brought back together. And I feel that it's not so much the political parties in Pakistan that are reluctant to allow the domains to come together. It's more the cultural activists that have sadly developed a strong antipathy towards party politics, which makes them say this, because there's a whole assault within the cultural domain also that art cannot be commissioned art. And there was commissioned art in the socialist movement, Soviet Union, also Nazi Germany, but also commissioned art by the capitalist corporations, except all of that stuff. So artists feel a strong sense of independence, and they should. They ought to an autonomy. And so they feel that the way to manifest that autonomy is to stay away from political parties. But my view is different from that. My view is that parties can give you wide political autonomy as an artist. And yet you can be politically not just committed ideologically, but politically committed organizationally. And that's where the real power begins. Brecht was not just a great, I mean, Brecht was part of a political party. Faiz was part of a political party. We've got to emphasize that the great Pablo Neruda was part of a political party. We've got to emphasize that great art was produced in the struggle, not separate from the political party. Of course, there will be tensions and conflicts as there are in life, in all domains, between what the political party desires to do in this particular party time, what you think is an individual. That exists not just as a contradiction between art and politics. That exists as a contradiction within politics, between people and people. You may say, well, Temur, I think we should do this campaign. And I may say, no, we've got to put more emphasis on this other campaign, etc. So we've got to recognize that's part of politics. That's not even just part of politics. That's part of life. Which cultural group do you know that has not fought on what to do first and last and debated on those issues? It's the same debates within political parties. So the thing that I've been emphasizing is that alternative cultural narratives have got to become part of a left, organized left effort. And we've got to stop staying away from that. I myself, look, I would present myself as an example of that, right? So I did my art, never has my political party said to me, now I'm general secretary. But even before when I started right from the grassroots, never has my party said to me, oh, don't sing this, don't sing that, don't talk about this, don't talk about that, you know, and so on. It's been always something that they've understood. This is an artistic venture. This is something in which Temur should have wide autonomy, right? And it's the same, I think, I hope that other people have had the same experience. It is only in the left also, I would say, that you have a situation where you have somebody who sings and dances on stage. And I make no bones about the fact that I sing and I dance on stage. And yet I am general secretary of one of the largest left political parties of Pakistan. And has anybody ever said in any of our elections, well, we don't think Temur Ahmad ought to be elected to this position because, well, you know, he sings and dances, never. It's not even something, it's the reverse, in fact. They said, oh, thank God there's somebody who, you know, can bring a bit of color and joy and so on. So it's only in the left of that, in my view, that that can happen. And last but not least, think about what the right is doing. Imran Khan had Salman Ahmad and he had, what's his name? Ali Azmat and he had, you know, a whole host of musicians get on top of his container and sing and perform for them from that container and get people out to vote for the PTI. All across we saw, in the recent election, we saw the Muslim League come out with an album of their party songs. We saw the PTI come out with an album. We saw the People's Party come out. We are the ones who started this, not individually, but the left. The left is the one that started this. So for artists who are committed to a left narrative, for them now to move away from political parties when rightist artists are copying what we did. You know, the model that we created would be very, very foolish. You have to find the space and the space is available. And, you know, so I would encourage artists both in India, Pakistan and internationally, cultural activists, let's call them cultural activists, to continue doing the cultural activism, but to join it with the political party on the left of their choosing, whatever that may be. That is amazing. Thank you very much. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.