Hardcover: 2 v.(793 p.)
Publisher: Pakistan Study Centre, University of Karachi (2007)
Language: English 

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Dada Amir Haider, for my generation, was a legendary figure. He was often mentioned in admiration by the elders that I looked up to and his name aroused much curiosity. But other than oral references and anecdotes no adequate account of the man and deeds were available in black and white.

All this has changed with the publication of his autobiography which has been painstakingly put together by Hasan N. Gardezi. When Dada Amir Haider was arrested for the second time in 1939 he started to write about himself, his struggles and his vision which was simple. The role of the progressive writer was to expose everything bad in society, no matter how ugly it might be and those who did not like it let them change it.

His writings were interrupted in 1942 by his release from Nasik Jail made possible by the Soviet Union joining the way to defeat Germany. After his release a jail inmate Senior Apte put together his prison writings and made six typed copies. Each typed copy comprised 952 pages. Of the six copies passed from hand to hand at least one was kept by Mrs. Indora Renu and Mr. Ladli Lal Renu who had gone over it with the author in Bombay and had inserted some corrections and subtitles. It was mailed to Dada in 1975 when he was in Pakistan, unable to leave the country due to official restriction on his travel abroad. It is from this weather-beaten Nasik Jail manuscript that the entire first volume has come except for the last portion of the manuscript which had been shifted to volume two as the first chapter.

This first volume then was published in India [in 1989] but the second volume which was also sent to India got lost and was not published. This is the first time that both the volumes have been published together. The credit for compiling and editing goes to Dr. Gardezi for it was his commitment that preserved these memoirs. The first volume covers the phase from 1922 to 1926 and the second volume covers the time period till 1936.

Broadly speaking there were four strands in the freedom struggle. Reformative organisations and societies like the one started by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan were established where even government support was accepted for it was perceived that the struggle they had started would last a long time and antagonising the government would be detrimental to the realisation of the objectives. Then certain organisations employed peaceful means to acquire gradual concessions for the Indians. Both the Muslim League and the Congress relied on these constitutional devices which were made available by the British rulers themselves. The third strand was represented by the ulemas who regarded British rule as objectionable from religious point of view and decreed the launch of jihad against foreign rule. The fourth strand comprised radical organisations operating in India which received their impetus from the socialist revolution in Russia. In subsequent years many Indians went to Soviet Russia to see for themselves the formative phase of the revolution the working classes were mobilised, organisations and unions were established and political work started. It operated through underground networks as the political rule of the game as delineated by the British Government seldom allowed dissent beyond a particular level.

Dada Amir Haider was born in a village in Gujjar Khan in difficult circumstances, made more difficult by the loss of his parents. He was forced into a bigger wider world prematurely and looking for better opportunity he travelled to cities far away from his native village where he learnt fast on the class rooms that were laid out on the roads, the dockyards and the storehouses. He became street-smart and quickly learnt to face up to the many challenges that life had thrown at him. He got employment on the merchant and military navies that afforded him the opportunity to travel all over the world, imbibing the affairs at the international level, the condition of the colonies and the plight of the working classes.

He returned to India in 1928 after his exposure to the world including the Soviet Union with some plans and priorities. He set to organise the workers of the textile industry in Bombay. The authorities sensing trouble clamped down on the incipient movement under trumped up changes commonly known as the ‘Meerut Conspiracy Case’ in 1929 and passed orders for his arrest. But Dada by now a shrewd and seasoned political worker, sensing trouble escaped on a forged passport by sea, a route that he knew too well and travelled the world mobilising international proletarian support against British rule in India. He was labelled as the most dangerous individual by the British authorities. He was finally arrested on his return in disguise in 1932. He was arrested again in 1939.

After his release from jail in 1942 he immersed himself in organisational work. After partition Dada was imprisoned repeatedly. This entire period took a heavy toll of his health but his old colleagues and comrades Dr. Adijkari, P.C. Joshi, S.S Mirajkar and Sohan Singh Josh encouraged him to follow up on his memoirs. He resumed updating his earlier work from 1926 to 1936.

Apart from being a political and historical document of personal nature the text of the memoirs puts real meaning into the Marxist dictum that the world ought to be changed for the better. The real emancipation of working class people lies through the socialist transformation of society, the primary value of the work as a guide to put that belief into practice.

Dada Amir Haider was not formally educated but his observations are very clear and concise. It encompasses a whole lot more than just political analysis. His book is about cultural and social history of the time that it covers rather than a strict political analysis. According to the editor, being uneducated he used the English language as a native would, and probably was a precursor to the usage of English now with much great deference to the local idiom. The published version it seems has been straightened out considerably by the translator [editor].

Sarwat Ali

Dada Amir Haider Khan: An Indian Che Guevara
Jamil Omar
While he lived, Dada Amir Haider Khan struggled to change the course of history, now in death he would have us change our view of it. Dada surfed the crest of change all over the globe during the first half of the twentieth century, which makes a simple account of his life read like contemporary world history.

Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America
Vivek Bald
More recently, scholar and filmmaker Vivek Bald looks to the example of Dada Amir Haider Khan in his book Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (2013). Known to many of his admirers as Dada Khan, his memoirs entitled Chains to Lose (republished in a two-volume set in Pakistan in 2007) represent a case study of a diaporic history of labor. Bald largely situates Dada Khan’s life in terms of the first volume of his memoirs in which he recounts his formative years in British India, his travels as a maritime worker, and his experiences as a railway worker and autoworker in the United States. Here we learn some important details of his coming to consciousness through the racism Dada Khan witnesses at sea and in the working class economy of U.S. industrial cities. While this moment in Khan’s life is exemplary of his early engagements with the injustices of race and class, demonstrating how South Asians traversed these worlds of social hierarchy in the early twentieth century, the second volume of his memoirs continue