KARACHI, Dec 1: Hamza Alavi, who died on Monday, aged 82, led a very active intellectual life.

He became famous in the academia when he wrote an article in the newly-founded The Socialist Register in which he propounded the thesis that middle peasants were initially most militant elements of the peasantry and could therefore be a powerful ally of the proletariat movement in the countryside. Through this hypothesis he reversed the sequence suggested in the Marxist text.

His thesis labelled as Alavi-Wolf thesis (since it was reiterated by Eric Wolf four years later) is still alive and refuses to die, as through it he had made a distinction between the Marxist theory and the practical Mao.

His strength lay in going to the practicalities of things, and when he got interested in peasantry as a youngman, he left a coveted State Bank job to take up farming in Tanzania where he lived among peasants. Later, a serious illness took him to London where he had time for reflection and changed his career.

That is how a social scientist-cum-political activist was born. For 10 years he remained involved in political activism in London: writing, lecturing and holding seminars in universities.

For five years he edited Pakistan Today in which various issues were analyzed from the Left’s perspective and obviously it was anathema to the Pakistani establishment. The journal was circulated secretively in the country.

His curriculum vitae makes an impressive reading: from the post of research officer in the Reserve Bank of India in 1945 to readership in the University of Manchester and the post-retirement life in Karachi since 1997.

What is most significant about Mr Alavi is that his research is not the kind that is conducted in the air-conditioned seminar rooms and libraries. Accompanied by his wife, he went and lived for 15 months in a Sahiwal (Punjab) village in 1968-69 to do an anthropological field study. In 1981, he returned to the same village to do a follow-up on the changes that had taken place over the years.

His field-oriented research, to which he applied his theoretical knowledge of anthropology and sociology, made his papers full of insightful knowledge and information on Pakistani society.

It seems intriguing that while abroad he was acknowledged as a distinguished anthropologist whose ideas had influenced a large number of social scientists, and he was acclaimed as a foremost theoretical thinker in South Asia; back home, his views were anathema to the establishment which found it difficult to swallow ideas that criticized foreign aid, spoke of the emergence of military-bureaucratic oligarchy which tries to mediate between the imperial powers and landlords and the native bourgeoisie.

He had been studying the Holy Quran to understand the rise of fundamentalism which concerned him deeply. He thought rational intervention was necessary as there was a pluralist view of Islam as had been advocated by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan who had said that religion should remain a private matter.

He had founded a number of organizations in his early life like the Pakistan Youth League, which was a broad liberal social forum, the Pakistan Socialist Society and after Ayub Khan’s coup, he set up a committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Pakistan. He also formed The Forum, Pakistan Welfare Association, etc.

Mr Alavi wrote a large number of research papers.

His writings are so diverse that it is difficult to identify his area of specialization. Some of the subjects of his papers were the class structure; nature of colonial and post-colonial economies; relations between colonial, post-colonial and metropolitan elites; role of military and bureaucracy; changing production relations and mode of production and kinship in the political economy, etc.