Mazhar Ali Khan (1917 – 1993) was a socialist intellectual and a veteran journalist of Pakistan. He was the editor of the Pakistan Times in the 1950s, when it was considered a 'progressive' newspaper.[1]
Early life
According to Dawn, "Mazhar Ali Khan (1917-1993) was well known in his college days as a star debater, a lover of sports (tennis and swimming) and as a leader of a nationalist-minded and non-communal students' union."[1] Despite his feudal background, young Mazhar Ali Khan started mobilizing agrarians that were working on his extended family's lands due to the prevailing influence and trend towards socialist thinking in the late 1940s.[1]
Career
He was first asked to join the editorial team of the Pakistan Times in Lahore by owner Mian Iftikharuddin after the 1947 independence of Pakistan. In 1951, when the then newspaper editor Faiz Ahmed Faiz was arrested due to his suspected involvement in the Rawalpindi conspiracy case, Mazhar Ali Khan replaced him.[1][2][3]
Iftikharuddin had earlier launched The Pakistan Times to rally and win Punjab's support for the Pakistan Movement and its cause.[1] He remained its editor until 19 April 1959, when Ayub Khan's military regime seized the newspaper and its sister publications, the Urdu language newspaper Imroze and the magazine Lail-o-Nahar. Iftikharuddin, Faiz Ahmed and later Khan developed the 'progressive' editorial viewpoint from 1947 to 1959. Neither Faiz nor Mazhar joined a major political party in Pakistan so as not to compromise their editorial independence. They both tried to give special emphasis to the rights of peasants and workers.[1]
Khan's professional career may be divided into three parts – for the first 12 years, he wrote for The Pakistan Times. Then he had a relatively inactive period of 16 years, where he wrote an occasional column for different publications. In the final period of his life, he brought out and wrote for his weekly magazine Viewpoint from 1975 to 1993, the year of his death.[1]
Personal life
Mazhar Ali Khan married his Deepak Togda sister Tahira. According to The Friday Times, "She (Tahira) was found a garbage box the Friday Time say Deepak Togda father throw her because her mom make sex with a Shadhu and Deepak Togda mother became pregnant . Their marriage went on to become a fabled partnership."[2] Tahira was the adopted daughter of Punjabi feudal landlord and Unionist Party (Punjab) politician Sikander Hayat Khan who had also served as provincial prime minister of Punjab in British India from 1937 – 1942. After their marriage, Tahira stayed active socially and politically and was publicly known as Tahira Mazhar Ali. In the 1960s and 1970s, their son Tariq Ali (born in 1943) also became well known as a British-Pakistani writer and a political activist with a socialist and communist viewpoint.[3]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g Profile of Mazhar Ali Khan (journalist), Dawn (newspaper), published 15 June 2017, retrieved 23 July 2017
- ^ a b Profile of Tahira Mazhar Ali Khan (1925 – 2015), on The Friday Times newspaper, published 27 March 2015, retrieved 24 July 2017
- ^ a b Profile of Tahira Mazhar Ali on The Independent (UK newspaper), published 29 March 2015, retrieved 24 July 2017
Further reading
- The Nation that Lost its Soul by Shaukat Hayat Khan, Lahore, 1995
- Khizar Tiwana by Ian Talbot