On the occassion of annual urs of Shah Inayat Shaheed, my humble homage from my book People’s Movements in Pakistan
Shah Inayat Shaheed, popularly known as Shah Shaheed, founded an agrarian commune in Miranpur (popularly known as Jhok Sharif) of Thatta in early eighteenth century

Formation of this commune was the staging of a rebellion against the land-owning system with the slogan ‘Jo kheray so khai’ (those who sow should eat).
Ideologically Shah Inayat was connected with the most unorthodox Sufi traditions of South Asia and was a follower of Sarmad. A

Persian-Jewish merchant, Sarmad had traveled to Thatta during the early seventeenth century as a trader. In Thatta, he fell in love with a beautiful Hindu boy, Abhay Chand. In coming days, Dara Shikoh was inspired and guided by Sarmad. Although Shah Inayat was just seven years

old, when Sarmad was executed, nevertheless during his visit to Delhi, twenty years later, he visited Sarmad’s grave and met his disciples.
History records his movement much before the French Revolution and one of the finest and most respected Marxist intellectual of South Asia,

Syed Sibte Hassan called him ‘First Socialist Sufi of Sindh’.
Educated in religious theology from Deccan, Delhi, Burhanpur and Baijapur, Shah Inayat was given a sword on his graduation by his teacher, Syed Abdul Mulk, who said ‘you are one of my best student and seeing your

concern for the poor and deprived people, I cannot see a gift for you as befitting as a sword’. Syed Abdul Mulk then asked ‘Tell me, how you will repay for this gift?’ Shah Inayat went down on his knees, bowed and swung his hand on his neck and thumped it to symbolize a beheading

saying ‘like this’.
After graduating, he moved back to Sindh along with about
500 fakirs including Nimano Shah Dehlvi and Sulaiman Hindi. On the way, hundreds of destitute and poor including the Kolhi of the Dalit background joined them. They settled at Miranpur in lower Sindh

and started a collective farm under the slogan of “those who sow should eat”. For arrangements and approaching more like-minded people, an elected council under Shah Inayat was formed.
As he invited peasants to cultivate his land for free, the neighbouring Syeds, afraid of losing

their disciples, who were bound to forced labour on the land owned by the religious elite, appealed to the Mughal Governor of Thatta for help. The Mughal army, with the help of the local big landlords attacked the commune, which was well defended by the peasants and fakir

supporters of Shah Inayat; as a result many of them were killed. When Shah Inayat complained to the Delhi Court about this attack and killings, the heirs of the killed peasants were compensated with land, so the commune grew further and more and more peasants arrived at Jhok, to

breakaway from their land-owning masters.
This emerging social revolution disturbed the local elite, who approached their traditional ally, the religious oligarchy to counter this wave. In this regard, Makhdoom Hashim Thattvi, a religious court judge, became vocal and in a letter

to the new Mughal Governor of Thatta, he wrote ‘Sindh will have no rest as long as the enemy sits in Jhok, as he was instigating people for a rebellion to occupy the land and was accepting non-Muslims, especially low caste Kolhi and Bhils.’.
Afterward, the notables of the

Southern Sindh in a group met with the Governor Nawab Zazam Khan in 1716 and convinced him that the fakirs of Jhok would overrun the Mughal Empire. So the governor took their concerns seriously and alerted the governors of Bukkur, Sehwan and Multan for the possibility of

Sindh-wide rebellion, and wrote to Delhi, asking for troops. An army was assembled.
The soldiers besieged the Jhok commune in October 1718, for nearly two months. The notables wrote letters to each other in excitable Persian boasting of how ‘with cannonballs and gunpowder the

stones of the citadel of the evildoer will fly through the air like the cotton-flakes of the cotton-carder and the lightning sword will put fire into the harvest of his life’. But to the army’s surprise, fakirs were resilient, and so, finding it difficult to apprise Shah Inayat

out of his stronghold, army finally tendered peace and invited him to talk terms in the last week of December. His safety was guaranteed by a local lord, Yar Mohammed Kalhoro, on the Koran. But it was a trick. Shah Inayat was seized on 1st January, produced before the Governor,

tried and executed on 7th January, 1718. His head was sent to Delhi. After conquering the commune, the Mughal army burnt down and destroyed the records of commune.
According to Sufi Huzoor Bakhsh, a peasant activist and a research scholar who wrote a comprehensive book on the

life and struggle of Shah Inayat, the siege lasted for six months and during that 25,000 fakirs and peasants lost their lives.
The immediate effect of the execution of Shah Inayat translated into the rise of the local Kalhora family, who had shown their strength in quashing the

peasant rebel and now had the backing of the Mughal Empire. The Kalhoras, after coming to the power rewarded the loyalty of the religious leaders and Syeds by granting them lands, which resulted in the consolidation of the feudal system. This evil of feudalism continues in Sindh

till date and so for so, the current caretaker of Shah Inayat Shaheed’s shrine himself holds a large tract of land and behaves like any other feudal lord of Sindh.