Theory from the Trenches: Revolutionary Decolonization on Pakistan’s Landed Estates

Recently, we have seen renewed efforts to contest the afterlives of colonialism. Statues have been discarded; buildings and institutions renamed. One point of dispute is the role of the West in decolonization. Some argue that, historically, political actors in the global South, in confronting colonialism, were realizing Europe’s universalist Enlightenment ideals. Others maintain that various anti-colonialisms promoted “alternative universalisms” exterior to European Enlightenment, and that decolonization today even requires “delinking” from Western epistemologies entirely. Yet these debates often reproduce a binary between the West and the rest, obscuring the ideational linkages between the two. How can we move beyond this binary to consider the global articulation of ideas in projects of decolonization? My dissertation addresses this question by exploring how subaltern actors draw on various ideas, European and otherwise, to generate concepts to advance revolutionary decolonization. Through a historical ethnography of communist-led peasant insurgencies on Pakistan’s colonial-fortified landed “estates” (jagirs), I show how peasants crafted concepts to combat imperialism, landlordism, and even patriarchy. During the 1970s, landless peasants in the “Punjab Frontier” region began to occupy these estates, especially after enrolling in a communist party that argued these estates were illegitimate remnants of colonialism. The party also energized peasants to theorize, and to see the importance of theory for political practice. To further their political objectives, peasants creatively stretched the party’s communist theory for their specific contexts, while also taking inspiration from radical movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. I conceptualize their theory as “trench theory”, with the trench metaphor flagging a mode of subterranean theorizing for political combat. To track this “trench theory”, I conduct what I call a “theory-ography”, a thick description of people’s everyday theory-making practices. I specifically draw on 20 months of field research, oral histories, and various under-researched archives. In sum, my dissertation explores the historical, political, and intellectual inheritances that shape peasant theorizing, and shows how peasants can be cosmopolitan theoretical actors, whose insights speak to issues of global concern. Refuting their parochial designation, Pakistan’s peasant revolutionaries drew on multiple sources, vernacular and transnational, to theorize for a worldly, even other-worldly, liberation.

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