Change Through Music

A Con­ver­sa­tion with Dr. Taimur Rah­man of LAAL Band
Taimur Rah­man is an aca­d­e­m­ic, polit­i­cal activist and a musi­cian. He is the band leader and spokesper­son for the music group named Laal. He grad­u­at­ed from Grin­nell Col­lege, obtained a Mas­ters from Sus­sex Uni­ver­si­ty and holds a Ph.D in Class Struc­ture of Pak­istan from the School of Ori­en­tal and African Stud­ies. He has been teach­ing at The Lahore School of Eco­nom­ics and Lahore Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­age­ment Sci­ences.

Laal­tain: What has been your moti­va­tion for pur­su­ing music?
Taimur: First­ly, I love music. It has always been an inte­gral part of my life. I began to play the gui­tar in my teenage years and I minored in music per­for­mance dur­ing my under­grad­u­ate degree. Sec­ond, my moti­va­tion in per­form­ing pro­gres­sive music was that through this instru­ment I could begin to address some of the issues that soci­ety faces at a much broad­er and mass lev­el. Music videos are a pop­u­lar form through which even unpop­u­lar issues can be tak­en up, espe­cial­ly with the youth.

Laal­tain: Teach­ing, research, rev­o­lu­tion­ary pol­i­tics and music: how do you man­age it all?
Taimur: Basi­cal­ly, I am a worka­holic and have no social life. But all this is a labour of love for me. It nev­er tires me to do this work because all of it comes from the heart. If I was doing some­thing I did not enjoy, I would not be able to put in one-tenth of this ener­gy. That’s why it does­n’t feel like work at all; it feels like just being myself.

Laal­tain: Could you tell us a bit about the cause that Laal band stands for?
Taimur: Laal — which means the colour red — sym­bol­is­es a social­ist rev­o­lu­tion. Red has been the colour of the inter­na­tion­al labour move­ment since the mar­tyr­dom of Chica­go work­ers on 1 May 1898. We named our­selves Laal because it sym­bol­ised, both in terms of colour and in its name, what we stand for. Faiz, Jal­ib and Faraz were all social­ists. Social­ism is a sys­tem where the resources of a soci­ety are used for the wel­fare of the peo­ple.

Laal­tain: But not every­one agrees with this cause. What gives you hope that this sit­u­a­tion will change?
Taimur: Nat­u­ral­ly, there are many peo­ple in favour of the sta­tus quo. They ben­e­fit from the cur­rent sys­tem. Then there are those who have been duped by the ide­ol­o­gy of the pow­ers that be. But the vast major­i­ty recog­nis­es that the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem, espe­cial­ly in the form that we see in Pak­istan, is both exploita­tive and unsus­tain­able. It can and must be replaced by a sys­tem of pro­duc­tion that puts wel­fare above all oth­er imper­a­tives.

Laal­tain: Why should music, or art & cul­ture in a broad­er sense, be an essen­tial part of any move­ment?
Taimur: The­o­ry is the grey mat­ter of pol­i­tics. Art brings colour to every­thing. With­out art, the­o­ry would be as live­ly as a corpse. Karl Marx once said that “art is the secret con­fes­sion of every soci­ety”. Laal is our open secret con­fes­sion of the desire for a social­ist soci­ety.

Laal­tain: One might argue that music has its own artis­tic mer­its. It should not be made sub­servient to a social cause, or to any­thing else for that mat­ter. How would you respond?
Taimur: I do not con­sid­er work­ing for social change through artis­tic expres­sion a man­i­fes­ta­tion of sub­servience of any sort. On the con­trary, to me it is the only true expres­sion of being free from the fetishism of class soci­ety. Pur­po­sive art only feels oppres­sive to those who have no pur­pose in their lives beyond their own egos. Their art is an expres­sion of the indi­vid­ual dis­con­nect­ed from soci­ety; our art is the expres­sion of an indi­vid­ual who open­ly asso­ciates in an overt­ly par­tial way with the con­tra­dic­tions of soci­ety. That is, we take the side of the oppressed.

Laal­tain: How would you rec­on­cile the rev­o­lu­tion­ary slo­gans of com­mu­nism with a broad­er con­text of diverse socio-polit­i­cal inter­est groups?
Taimur: Com­mu­nism is the strug­gle for a class­less soci­ety. As such it can only devel­op out of an advanced cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety. In Pak­istan, how­ev­er, we still have many stages to cross because we con­tin­ue to har­bor many rem­nants of pre-cap­i­tal­ist soci­eties. Reli­gious extrem­ism is one exam­ple. Hence, in our con­text, we must make an objec­tive appraisal of all the forces in our soci­ety and pro­ceed from that point. That is why I wrote my Phd dis­ser­ta­tion on the class struc­ture of Pak­istan.

Laal­tain: You have been a vocal crit­ic of reli­gious extrem­ism. Which course of action, accord­ing to you, should the state and we the peo­ple fol­low to tack­le it?
Taimur: First, we have to clar­i­fy to the mass­es that reli­gious extrem­ism is the most dan­ger­ous ene­my that Pak­istan faces today. This threat exists as a result of decades of state sup­port to jiha­di organ­i­sa­tions that are today out of con­trol. Sec­ond, we must sup­port the demo­c­ra­t­ic dis­pen­sa­tion in the coun­try against the forces of reli­gious extrem­ism, espe­cial­ly those forces that are fight­ing a life and death strug­gle; for instance the Awa­mi Nation­al Par­ty. Last but not least, we must make this a peo­ple’s resis­tance. That means that all peo­ple must under­stand that we can only win this war through uni­ty against these forces of dark­ness and igno­rance. As the famous slo­gan goes, the peo­ple unit­ed shall nev­er be defeat­ed.