Jagirdari or samraj

About The Author

Hamza Alavi

Hamza Alavi (10 April 1921 – 1 December 2003) was a Marxist academic sociologist and activist. He was born in the Bohra community in Karachi, in the then British India which now constitutes Pakistan and migrated in adulthood to the UK. 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. He believed that a “salary-dependent class of Muslim government servants, called the ‘salariat’ led the movement of independent state for Muslims in subcontinent as they saw a decrease in their share of jobs in pre-partition India. which finally resulted in creation of Pakistan.