1969 was a climactic year for global anti-imperialist uprisings, with one of the few successful mobilisations occurring in Pakistan. A crucial figure in these uprisings was Maulana Bhashani (1880-1990), popularly known during this period as the ‘Mao-Lana’. This paper examines Bhashani’s articulation of Islamic Socialism in the 1960s – the springboard for the militant and disruptive mobilisations in 1969 and thereafter. This paper traces Maulana Bhashani’s encounters with black Maoists, Muslim Communists and militant Afro-Asian comrades in his travels to China and Cuba in the 1960s and its influence on his domestic politics. I focus on his creative reconceptualization of ideas of authority, solidarity and community to forge a powerful relationship between the local and the international. I argue for a different understanding of decolonisation in the 1960s in contrast to Bandung politics, and the development of a subaltern Islamic Socialism in South Asia.

Dr Layli Uddin is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations of South Asia, SPIR and Co-Director, The Centre for the Study of Race, Class Empire (RCE) at Queen Mary University of London. Layli Uddin is a political and social historian of modern South Asia, bringing together interdisciplinary questions on religion, class and mass politics. Her research reconstructs subaltern political thought and movements in the context of decolonisation, state-formation and the Cold War. Her broader interests are in liberation theologies and subaltern geopolitics in the Global South. Layli Uddin is currently working on her first book ‘Land of Eternal Eid: Making and Unmaking Pakistan, 1930s-1971’.