Poetry, Resistance & Humanity—IV When Free...

Summary

• Asghar Raza Burfat and Inam Ali Kubar, “Abdul Karim Gadai and His Poetic Work,” The Grassroots 48, no.
• Burfat and Kubar, “Abdul Karim Gadai and His Poetic Work,” pp.
• Burfat and Kubar, “Abdul Karim Gadai and His Poetic Work,” pp.

AI Generated Summary

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