G. M. Syed

Ghulam Murtaza Syed, known throughout his life by the initials G. M. Syed, was born on January 17, 1904, in Sann, a small town on the right bank of the Indus in what is now the Jamshoro district of Sindh ^[1]. His family were Sayeds, hereditary custodians of religious shrines, and claimed descent from a respected line of Sufi pirs settled in the region for centuries. His father, Syed Mohammad Shah Kazmi, was murdered in a family dispute when the boy was not yet two years old, leaving him to be raised by his mother and the extended household ^[1].

Because he inherited the family's spiritual position as a child, formal schooling was limited. He was taught at home in Sindhi, Persian, and later English, and he read widely on his own for the rest of his life, a habit that shaped the philosophical bent of his later writing ^[2]. The shrine culture of rural Sindh, with its tolerant Sufi ethos and its veneration of the poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, left a permanent mark on his thinking. Decades later he would argue that this mystical, accommodating tradition defined Sindhi identity itself ^[2].

His entry into public life came remarkably early. In 1919, still in his mid teens, he organized a gathering connected with the Khilafat agitation at Sann, and in 1920 he attended the Khilafat conference in Larkana, where he encountered the leading political figures of the day ^[1]. By his early twenties he was involved in local self government, serving on the Karachi district local board, where he pressed for schools and rural improvement in his home area ^[3].

The question that dominated Sindhi politics in the 1920s and 1930s was the separation of Sindh from the Bombay Presidency, to which the British had attached it after annexation in 1843. Syed threw himself into this campaign, arguing that Sindh was a distinct historical and cultural unit that deserved its own administration ^[3]. The demand succeeded: under the Government of India Act of 1935, Sindh became a separate province in 1936, and the achievement gave Syed provincial standing while confirming his lifelong conviction that Sindh was a nation in its own right ^[3].

He helped found the Sindh United Party in 1936 and won election to the new Sindh Legislative Assembly in 1937 from his home constituency ^[1]. In 1938 he joined the All India Muslim League, and he rose quickly within its provincial organization, serving as president of the Sindh Muslim League and briefly holding ministerial office in the provincial government ^[4]. Anyone asking who was G. M. Syed at that moment would have received a simple answer: one of Muhammad Ali Jinnah's most energetic lieutenants in Sindh.

His most consequential act in that role came on March 3, 1943, when he moved the resolution in the Sindh Legislative Assembly endorsing the Lahore Resolution's demand for independent Muslim states. The motion passed, making Sindh's the first provincial assembly in British India to formally back the demand that became Pakistan ^[4]. Yet the alliance with the League did not last. Syed clashed with the central leadership over the awarding of party tickets for the 1946 elections, which he believed favored large landlords over committed workers, and over what he saw as the League's disregard for provincial autonomy. He was expelled from the Muslim League in 1946, ran his own slate of candidates, and never again belonged to an all Pakistan party in any settled way ^[4].

Independence in August 1947 quickly deepened the estrangement. Syed watched the arrival of large numbers of Urdu speaking migrants in Karachi and Hyderabad, the detachment of Karachi from Sindh to serve as the federal capital in 1948, and the centralizing policies of the new state, and he concluded that Sindhis had exchanged one form of subordination for another ^[5]. The One Unit scheme of 1955, which dissolved Sindh and the other western provinces into a single unit of West Pakistan, confirmed his fears and became the target of years of agitation in which he took a leading part ^[5].

Through the 1950s he worked within opposition politics, helping to organize the Sindh Awami Mahaz in 1953 and cooperating with other regional and left leaning forces against the central government ^[1]. The state answered with detention. Beginning in the late 1940s Syed was arrested or confined again and again under successive governments, civilian and military alike, and by his own reckoning and that of his biographers he spent close to three decades of his life in jail or under house arrest, much of it without trial ^[6].

The decisive ideological turn came after the secession of Bangladesh. In 1972 he founded the Jeay Sindh Mahaz (the name means Long Live Sindh Front) and openly advanced the demand for Sindhudesh, an independent country for the Sindhi people ^[2]. He set out the case in his book Sindhudesh: A Study in its Separate Identity Through the Ages, arguing from archaeology, language, and history, from Mohenjo daro to the Sufi poets, that Sindh possessed a continuous national identity older than and separate from the idea of Pakistan ^[2]. He insisted that the movement should remain nonviolent, a position that distinguished him from some of the armed splinter groups that later invoked his name ^[6].

Politics was only half of Syed's output. He wrote more than sixty books and pamphlets in Sindhi, along with several works in English, covering history, religion, biography, travel, and verse ^[2]. His prose helped shape modern Sindhi as a language of political argument, and his study of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai presented the eighteenth century poet as the voice of the Sindhi nation, a reading that has influenced Sindhi cultural politics ever since ^[2].

His religious thought was deliberately provocative. In Religion and Reality, first published in Sindhi in the 1960s and later translated into English, he argued for a universal, humanist spirituality rooted in Sufi thought and criticized the use of orthodox religion as an instrument of state power ^[7]. The book was banned in Pakistan and drew accusations of heresy, but it circulated widely among Sindhi readers and cemented his reputation as a freethinker in a country moving toward official religiosity ^[7].

Among the more striking G. M. Syed facts is his sustained argument against the two nation theory, the founding doctrine of Pakistan that he had once championed. In works such as A Nation in Chains he contended that religion alone could not make a nation, and that the peoples of the Indus valley formed nationalities defined by land, language, and shared history rather than by faith ^[2]. Whether readers found this a betrayal or a recantation, it made him the most systematic internal critic of Pakistan's founding idea.

The last two decades of Syed's life were spent largely in confinement at his ancestral home in Sann or in Karachi hospitals under guard. The government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto kept him under restriction in the 1970s, and the military regime of General Zia ul Haq continued the practice through the 1980s, wary of his following among Sindhi students and peasants ^[6]. Even in detention he received a stream of visitors, held court on his veranda in Sann, and continued to write and issue statements ^[1].

His relations with mainstream Sindhi politics remained tense. He dismissed the Pakistan Peoples Party, the dominant force among Sindhi voters, as a party that channeled Sindhi grievances into a federation he considered beyond repair, and he stood aloof from the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy in the 1980s even as it convulsed rural Sindh ^[5]. His own Jeay Sindh movement, meanwhile, fractured into rival factions during his lifetime, a splintering he could not prevent as his health declined ^[6].

In January 1992, after he publicly reaffirmed the demand for Sindhudesh, he was placed under house arrest once more, and he spent his final three years in detention. Amnesty International took up his case, naming the elderly leader a prisoner of conscience and pressing for his release on medical grounds ^[8]. He died on April 25, 1995, at the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre in Karachi, still formally under arrest, at the age of 91. He was buried at Sann beside the Indus, and his funeral drew large crowds of mourners from across Sindh ^[8].

Any G. M. Syed biography has to hold two facts in tension: the man who moved the Pakistan resolution in a provincial assembly in 1943 became, within a decade, the state's most persistent dissenter. In Pakistan's official narrative he remains a separatist and, to some, a traitor. In much of Sindh he is Saeen G. M. Syed, the teacher of the nation, whose birth and death anniversaries bring thousands of followers to Sann every year ^[8].

His concrete political project failed. Sindhudesh never came close to realization, the Jeay Sindh factions remained marginal in electoral terms, and Sindhi politics stayed anchored in federal parties. Yet the vocabulary he created endures. Debates in Pakistan over provincial autonomy, water distribution on the Indus, control of Karachi, and the status of the Sindhi language are still conducted in terms he did much to define, and scholars of Pakistani federalism treat his writings as a primary source for understanding ethnic politics in the country ^[5].

Among G. M. Syed achievements, the earliest may prove the most lasting: the campaign that restored Sindh as a distinct province in 1936, and the insistence, maintained across sixty years of writing and long imprisonment, that Sindh's history, language, and Sufi culture amounted to a national inheritance worth defending. His library and home at Sann are preserved by his followers, and his books remain in print in Sindhi and English, read by admirers and critics alike ^[2].