Mazhar Ali Khan (journalist)

Early life and career

According to the Dawn (newspaper), "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." Despite his feudal background, young Mazhar Ali Khan started mobilizing peasants working on his extended family's lands due to the prevailing influence and trend towards socialist thinking at that time in the late 1940s.

He was first asked to join the editorial team of the Pakistan Times newspaper in Lahore by the newspaper 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 as editor.

Mian Iftikharuddin had earlier launched the newspaper The Pakistan Times to rally and win Punjab's support for the Pakistan Movement and its cause. He remained the above newspaper's editor until 19 April 1959, when Ayub Khan's military regime seized this newspaper and its sister publications, the Urdu language newspaper Imroze and the magazine Lail-o-Nahar. The 'progressive' editorial viewpoint had been developed by the newspaper owner Mian Iftikharuddin, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and later by Mazhar Ali Khan from 1947 to 1959. Neither Faiz nor Mazhar joined any 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.

Mazhar Ali Khan's professional career may be divided into three parts – for the first 12 years, he wrote for The Pakistan Times newspaper. Then 'the relatively inactive journalist' period of 16 years, where he wrote an occasional column for different publications. Then the final period of his life, when he brought out and wrote in his weekly magazine Viewpoint from 1975 to 1993, the year of his death.

Personal life

Mazhar Ali Khan married his cousin Tahira after a mutual romantic relationship between them developed. According to The Friday Times (newspaper), "She (Tahira) eloped with her charismatic, student leader cousin Mazhar when she was 17. Their marriage went on to become a fabled partnership." Tahira was the daughter of his uncle, then famous 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 herself 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 known as a British-Pakistani writer and a political activist with a socialist and communist viewpoint.