Pakistani Marxist academic sociologist and activist
Hamza Alavi (10 April 1921 – 1 December 2003) was a Pakistani Marxist academic sociologist and activist.[1]
Biography
Alavi was born in the Bohra community in Karachi, then in British India (the area is now in Pakistan) and migrated in adulthood to the UK.[1] The focus of his academic work was nationality, gender, fundamentalism and the peasantry. His most noted work was perhaps his 1965 essay Peasant And Revolution in the Socialist Register which stressed the militant role of the middle peasantry. These middle peasants were then viewed as the class in the rural areas which were most naturally the allies of the urban working class. In the 1960s he was one of the co-founders of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination.[1][2][3]
He believed that a “salary-dependent class of Muslim government servants, called the ‘salariat’ led the movement of an independent state for Muslims in the subcontinent as they saw a decrease in their share of jobs in pre-partition India.[4] which finally resulted in the creation of Pakistan. He used the concept of "Colonial Mode of Production" in Indian agriculture, which is different from feudal and capitalist mode.[5]
^"The White Paper: A Spur to Racialism". CARD. 1965.
^R S Pannu (1985) Review of Introduction to the Sociology of 'Developing Societies' by Hamza Alavi; Teodor Shanin, Third World Quarterly, Jan., vol. 7, no. 1, p. 162-164
