by B. R. GOWANI
Today is the first death anniversary of Professor Aijaz Ahmad, one of the greater thinkers of our time. He was a Marxist, poet, historian, philosopher, literary theorist and critic, public intellectual, and political commentator. He had a profound influence on a great many people.
Personally, Aijaz Ahmad’s books, essays, interviews, and a few meetings (at mutual friends’ places) have been very enlightening, educational, and inspiring. I remember waiting eagerly for the Frontline magazines to arrive in mail so I could read Ahmad’s essays. <1> His passing away was very sad news; however, his essays, books, and interviews are there to guide and navigate all -isms that are cruel, violent, hateful, and in-egalitarian, including US imperialism.
This is a reflection on his work, especially his last book, Nothing Human is Alien to Me, based on a lengthy interview he gave Vijay Prashad, one of left’s dedicated ambassador at large.
I have divided this article into four sections.
- The first one introduces the reader to Ahmad’s writing through extracts from some of his books and essays on various subjects and personalities
- Some thoughts on Nothing Human is Alien to Me
- Eulogies paid to Dr. Aijaz by his friends and colleagues
- A list of books and links to some of his videos and essays.
The format of this piece echoes progressive South Asian poet Majrooh Sultanpuri’s <2> famous couplet:
meiN akelA hi chalA thA jAnib-e-manzil magar / log sAth Ate ga’e aur kArvAN bantA gayA
alone, I started towards the destined goal but / people kept on joining and it turned into a caravan
my initial idea was to review Nothing Human is Alien to Me, but / the ideas kept flowing and it grew into a mini project
Some extracts from Ahmad’s writing
Demolition of Babri Masjid or Mosque:
“If you look at the images of the Babri Masjid being destroyed, you ask about those who climbed up to the domes … They don’t come from the upper classes or upper castes; these are people who are the ultimate victims of capitalism and caste society.This kind of gratuitous violence gives a feeling of power–an illusory overcoming of their powerlessness. There’s no other way in which they have dignity, so this is the fiction of dignity for them <3>…. How is it that it is the Adivasis who participate quite prominently in the killings [of Muslims] in Gujarat or the Dalits in the 1984 killing of Sikhs?… The Sangh [Parivar} can call upon all this in the name of Hinduism, caste-less people being given the dignity of being called Hindus.”
Aijaz Ahmad in Conversation with Vijay Prashad in Nothing Human is Alien to Me (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2020, p. 126.
Coup against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto:
“… despite Mr Bhutto’s juggling with the command structure and his many rewards to [Pakistan] Army and Police, there will still be a coup … this type of regime is likely not to start in the tradition of [Indonesia’s] Suharto or [Chile’s Augusto] Pinochet; rather, it is likely to adopt a popular and puritanical stance … ‘In the name of an ‘Islamic way of life,’ it will impose a medieval labour code in the factories; will weed out all remnants of intellectual life in the universities; and will seek to reverse all the marginal gains the peasantry has made during struggles of the past five years … and terror under such a regime, if it comes about, is likely to reach a scale heretofore unknown and unimagined in our body politic.” <4>
Aijaz Ahmad, Pakistan Newsletter, 1 (March 1977), quoted in Ahmad, “Democracy and Dictatorship in Pakistan, 1971-80,” pp. 17-59, in Aijaz Ahmad, Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia (London & New York: Verso, 2000, , p. 17).
On reading standards set by the British colonialists:
“… the British [colonists began] dabbling with the native literary traditions … the first conspicuous translations [of Urdu and Persian poetry] were done by people who were not poets themselves, nor, with the exception of [Scott] Fitzgerald, even men of imagination. They … worked with a poetic ideal derived from a post-Romantic, Tennysonized jargon in which, as Pound once noted, the same adjectives were used for women and sunsets. … With the British take-over of the educational system, Indians were themselves alienated from their own language and were brought up on huge chunks of [Alfred, Lord] Tennyson, [Algernon Charles] Swinburne,
Aijaz Ahmad, ed., Ghazals of Ghalib: Versions from the Urdu by Aijaz Ahmad, W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, William Stafford, David Ray, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Mark Strand, and William Hunt. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991/1994).
[Thomas Babington] Macaulay, [Walter] Pater, and others. By the beginning of this [twentieth] century there were numerous Indians who considered [Mirza Asadullah] Ghalib both the greatest poet of Urdu that ever lived and a sort of native Tennyson. The complex, the apocalyptic, and the moral were carefully sifted out in favor of a post-Romantic grief that fed upon itself, a synthetic nostalgia that had nothing whatever to do with the concrete stresses of public and private history that Ghalib suffered. If he wasn’t already a Victorian Romanticist, he had to be made into one; if the tradition of Urdu poetry wasn’t already minor or trivial, the design of the Empire demanded that triviality be imposed upon it. For decades, major Urdu poets were being read according to standards set by minor English ones.”
On caste, class, and B. R. Ambedkar:
“I do believe that the question of class revolution in India passes through the caste question and that no socialist revolution is possible in India without the annihilation of caste. In this [B.R.] Ambedkar was right in his insistence on annihilation rather than reform. He was right in arguing that the CPI [Communist Party of India] had not really understood how much caste had been historically the key to class formation and the making of dominant ideologies in India, and he was right in his deep dislike of Gandhi’s cynicism and opportunism on this question.”
Jipson John & Jitheesh P. M., “In conversation with Aijaz Ahmad: Excerpts from an earlier interview,” Frontline, March 21, 2022 ( https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/in-conversation-with-aijaz-ahmad-excerpts-from-an-earlier-interview/article38458962.ece ).
On The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels:
One can also say without fear of refutation that the Manifesto has been more consequential in the actual making of the modern world than any other piece of political writing, be it Rousseau’s Social Contract, the American Contitution and the Bill of Rights, or the French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.” The first reason is of course the power of its political message which has reverberated throughout the world and determined the destinies of a large crosssection of humanity over the past one hundred and fifty years. Then there is the style itself: no call to arms has ever been phrased in a language of such zest, beauty and purity. Third, there is the stunning combination of diagnosis and prediction. Marx describes the capitalism of his own times and predicts its trajectories into the indefinite future with such force and accuracy that every susequent generation, in various parts of the world, has seen in the Manisfesto the image of its own times and premonition of the horrors yet to come. And, fourth, concealed in the direct simplicity of its prose, like the labour of the tailor that disappears into the coat, is the distillation of the multifaceted philosophical understanding that has arisen out of a series of confrontations with the thinkers most influental in the Germany of his times: Hegel, Feuerbach, Proudhon, Stirner, Bruno Bauer, Sismondi, the ‘True Socialists’ and the all the rest whom the authors of the Manifesto broadly describe as ‘would be universal reformers.'”
Aijaz Ahmad, “The Communist Manisfesto: In its Own Times and in Ours,” pp. 14-47, in Prakash Karat, ed., A World to Win: Essays on The Comminsyt Manifesto (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 1999, p. 15).
On critics:
“Since you have referred to my book [“In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures”] I might add that I have of course not written a book in the Monthly Review tradition but some key sections of the book would be better understood in the United States if radicals in that country were better acquainted with this archive in their own national tradition. It interests me that my critics never engage with the two chapters, the introduction and the concluding chapter, which I take to be crucial in the very deliberate design of the book; they only go after the famous names-Said, Jameson, Rushdie- of the middle chapters. Now, the narrative of the postwar world that I provide there is of course not the narrative one would get from Monthly Review, but any one familiar with the Monthly Review narrative would be well equipped to make sense of the narrative I have assembled in summary. I think that readers who pay little attention to the actual struggles of the people around the world over the past fifty years or more but who know their Benedict Anderson and their [Ernest] Gellner and their Subalternists are very ill-equipped to understand my approach toward nationalism. For example, I view the question of nationalism historically. Consequently I may oppose many, many kinds of nationalism, but I also hold onto the importance of anti-imperialist nationalism in a world dominated by imperialism. Similarly, a good number of people can’t quite figure out what kind of Marxist I am; they seem to have some very fixed categories in their head-Stalinist, Trotskyist, Eurocommunist, Maoist, what have you- and I don’t fit any of those categories. This, then, is made worse by the fact that I write comprehensible prose, which probably means that I couldn’t possibly be doing theoretical work; some people have actually declared that I am anti-theory. If U.S. radicals knew more about the Monthly Review tradition they would immediately see that I have not written a book in that tradition but they would also have a way of handling some of the things in the book that confuse them.”
“Issues of Class and Culture: An Interview with Aijaz Ahmad” by Ellen Meiksins Wood, Monthly Review, October 1996, pp. 13-4) (https://monthlyreviewarchives.org/mr/article/view/MR-048-05-1996-09_2/3656).
On fascism:
“Every country gets the fascism that it deserves, i.e., the historical form of fascism always shifts according to the historical, economic, political, social, even religious and racial physiognomy of a given country, and it is useless always to seek an approximation with the German experience.”
Aijaz Ahmad, “On the Ruins of Ayodhya: Communalist Offensive and the Recovery of the Secular,” pp. 29-96, in Aijaz Ahmad, On Communalism and Globalization: Offensives of the Far Right (Gurgram, India: Three Essays, 2004, p. 31).
On Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s view of Muslims:
“His [Gandhi’s] pietistic view of the world, and surely of India, meant that he found it easier to deal with pious, or at least very traditional Muslims, especially the ones who formally accepted his status as the Mahatma [Great Soul]. Muslims were for him, first of all, Muslims; and that meant religion! With Muslims of a modern temper, such as [M. A.] Jinnah, he felt distinctly uncomfortable, more so, strangely, than with the likes of [Jawaharlal] Nehru, who were undoubtedly no less modern but were of Hindu origin. Aside from his own pietistic bias, it was perhaps the Khilafat movement, which broke out so soon after Gandhi’s own entry into Indian mass politics, that may have left an enduring impression on him that Muslims could be led only by men of the Quran. It is significant that while Gandhi gave eloquent support to the Muslim Ulema [Muslim scholars] who were leading the agitation for restoration of the Turkish Caliphate, Jinnah described that Caliphate as an ‘exploded bogey,’ refusing to endorse the unleashing of religious frenzy.”
Aijaz Ahmad, “Tryst with Destiny,” pp. 3-16, in Ahmad, Lineages pp. 11-12.
On Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things:
“… The anti-Communism of the novel’s political ideology is disconcerting but not surprising; in this too, Arundhati Roy appears to be representative of the social fraction whose particular kind of radicalism she represents. … About caste she writes with devastating precision; about class she seems not to be particularly concerned with those aspects which are not tied to caste. In this too, she is representative of these times. (‘Just forget mother-tongue and social class’, Salman Rushdie advises us in India Today of July 14, 1997.)”
Ahmad, “Reading Arundhati Roy politically,” Frontline, March 21, 2022 (first published on
August 8, 1997) ( https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/reading-arundhati-roy-politically-by-aijaz-ahmad/article38458826.ece ).
On Antonio Gramsci:
“The first thing to be said about Antonio Gramsci is that he was a communist militant and a leader of the largest proletarian uprising that occurred in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War [1914 – 1918] and the Bolshevik Revolution [or Russia’s October Revolution 1917]. He was not an Italian version of Mahatma Gandhi, as Bipan Chandra largely suggests; nor was he a cultural critic, on the model of Matthew Arnold, Julien Benda, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida — as poststructuralist appropriations of his thought pretend. Not a single piece of his writings between 1918 and 1936 — whether as editor of L’Ordine Nuovo or as leader of the Turin Factory Council Movement or as a key founder of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) or as prisoner of Fascism — makes any sense if we do not remember that his entire project had the single purpose of reconstituting a Leninism that would be appropriate to the conditions of a backward, largely peasant, indifferently industrialized society in — the face of Fascism. Even as we negotiate our way through the familiar Gramscian concepts of “hegemony,” “war of position,” “national popular,” “passive revolution,” and so on, it is best to recall that Gramsci wrote of these matters with the acute awareness of the isolation and defeat of the Turin working class and the subsequent Fascist victory.”
Aijaz Ahmad, “Fascism and National Culture: Reading Gramsci in the Days of Hindutva,” pp. 129-166, in Ahmad, Lineages p. 135.
On Israeli treatment of Palestinians:
“It is of course horrific and sinister that an officer of the Jewish state that legitimises all its crimes in the name of the Jewish victims of the Nazi crimes would hold up one of the cardinal Nazi crimes – their brutalising of the trapped and defenceless Jewish souls of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1944 – as the model of behaviour that should now be emulated by Jewish soldiery. And yet, the officer who said that does seem to possess a macabre kind of honesty – for, it is precisely on the model of the Warsaw Ghetto that the Israeli army has been treating the Palestinians in their camps and villages and townships, in Ramallah and Jenin, in the Dheheisha and Batala camps, in Bethlehem and now Nablus, and throughout the occupied territories.”
Aijaz Ahmad, “The Nazification of Israel,” Frontline , April 26, 2002 ( https://frontline.thehindu.com/editors-pick/the-nazification-of-israel/article30244551.ece ).
On Karl Marx’s views on the India:
“‘I share not the opinion of those who believe in a golden age of Hindustan.’ The idea of a golden age in the remote past which India now needed to reconstitute — one that sections of Orientalist scholarship had inherited from strands of High Brahminism — was to bequeath itself to a great many tendencies in Indian nationalism, as we shall soon see. But then Marx moves quickly to dissociate himself also from the opposite position — most famously enunciated by the anti-Orientalist Macaulay — which saw British colonialism as a benign civilizing mission. Against that Marx is equally unequivocal, in the very next paragraph: ‘the misery inflicted by the British on Hindustan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindustan had to suffer before.’ In short, the idea of “the double mission” was designed to carve out a position independent both of the Orientalist-Romantic and the colonial-modernist.”
Aijaz Ahmad, “Marx on India: A Clarification,” pp.221-242, in Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London & New York: Verso, 1992/2008, p. 235).
On Narendra Modi cult:
“Indian politics has been Americanised to an astonishing degree. The cult of the great leader [Prime Minister Narendra Modi]—the messiah, the saviour—on the one hand, and the systematic production of fear and hysteria on the other, have become quite the norm. Politics are now driven by 24×7 TV channels, opinion polls, and immense campaign extravaganzas staged with billions of [rupees of] corporate financing, much of it secret and untraceable. The escalating hysteria about citizens and non-citizens, which is likely to reach hysterical proportions with Amit Shah as Home Minister, is itself a carbon copy of [U.S. President Donald] Trump’s racist, virtually genocidal policies toward the South American economic refugees crossing into the U.S. All of this the Sangh [Parivar] conglomerate has imbibed from the U.S., with three differences: outright hysteria is much more the norm in virtually all the TV channels in India; sources of the money that went into the oiling of the BJP machinery in 2019 were more opaque while the amounts were even greater than in the U.S.; and the low-intensity but unremitting violence that the Sangh deploys so routinely, without fear of judicial reprisal, is far ahead of Trump’s savageries.”
Jipson John &Jitheesh P.M., “In conversation with Aijaz Ahmad: Excerpts from an earlier interview” Frontline March 21, 2022 ( https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/in-conversation-with-aijaz-ahmad-excerpts-from-an-earlier-interview/article38458962.ece ).
On Salman Rudhdie’s Shame:
“In General, moreover, what we find is a gallery of women who are frigid and desexualized (Arjumand, the ‘Virgin Ironpants’), demented and moronic (the twenty-odd years of Zinobia’s childhood), dulled into nullity (Farah), driven to despair (Rani, Bilquis) or suicide (Good News Hyder), or embody sheer surreal incoherence and loss of individual identity (the Shakeel sisters). Throughout, every woman, without exception, is represented through a system of imageries which is sexually overdetermined; the frustration of erotic need, which drives some to frenzy and others to nullity, appears in every case to be the central fact of a woman’s existence.”
Aijaz Ahmad, “Salman Rushdie’s Shame: Postmodern Migrancy and the Representation of Women,” pp. 123-158, in Ahmad, In Theory p. 144.
On Edward Said’s Orientalism:
“It is likely, in fact, that when the dust of current literary debates settles, Said’s most enduring contribution will be seen as residing neither in Orientalism, which is a deeply flawed book, nor in the literary essays which have followed in its wake, but in his work on the Palestine issue, for example his seminal essay ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,’ the superbly inflected prose which he contributed alongside Jean Mohr’s photographs in After the Last sky, and generally the role he has played, with unrivalled energy and much salutary effect, in redefining the issue of Palestinian national liberation for Western, especially American, intelligentsias.”
Aijaz Ahmad, “Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said,” pp. 159-219, in Ahmad, In Theory, pp. 160-61.
On secular justice:
“Suppose, then, that the consideration of Islam and Islamism starts not from primordial and ageless belongings but from the precariousness of a present so bereft of secular justice that one finds no meaningful way of belonging to it, or in it; the sheer multiplicity of malignant contexts within which all sorts of cancerous growths become possible. Another way of putting this is that when human beings took upon themselves the task of managing the affairs of the material world, they also made the claim that they were capable of dispensing justice, a justice more whole than what the various monopolists of the holy books offer. The secular world has to be just twice over: in terms of what it has defined for itself, and also to ward off the claim that God would have given better justice. That is to say, the secular world has to have enough justice in it for one not to have to constantly invoke God’s justice against the injustices of the profane. A politics of radical equalities, so to speak.”
Aijaz Ahmad, “Islam, Islamisms and the West,” Socialist Register, ( https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5873/2769 ).
On US imperialism:
“Marx once remarked that a ruling class is stable only to the extent that it presses the best minds of the subordinate classes into its service. A very underrated aspect of the global hegemony the US established after the Second World War was the role its knowledge industry came to play in training and nurturing large elements of the ruling strata in the Third World, directly in its own institutions on US soil and indirectly through ‘national’ institutions located in the Third World itself, through supply of teachers, syllabi, grants, research equipment, libraries and so forth. As it emerged as clear leader of the capitalist countries after the Second World War, at a moment when European empires were being dissolved in Asia and Africa, the US developed the largest, best funded, richest academic establishment ever known to humankind, and systematically set out to bring key intellectual strata from the newly decolonized countries into its own academic institutions, across the diverse fields of physical and technical sciences, social sciences and the humanities, arts, diplomacy, jurisprudence, and so on. Many stayed on and became part of the intellectual powerhouse of the United States itself; from the 1960s onwards, certainly, the stupendous ‘brain drain’ from the Third World (principally Asia) gained momentum as, by contrast, fewer European intellectuals were now inclined to migrate out of their increasingly prosperous and politically stable continent.”
Aijaz Ahmad, “The Imperialism of Our Time,” pp. 229-271, in Aijaz Ahmad, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Imperialism of Our Time (New Delhi: Left Word, 2004, pp. 254-255).
On USSR and newly liberated countries:
“Whatever one might say of many negative aspects of the subsequent evolution of the Soviet Union, the one thing that remained constant was the concrete material Soviet support for virtually every national liberation movement in all parts of the Tricontinent. This support was provided also to those regimes of the national bourgeoisie in the Non-Aligned Movement, such as those of Jawaharlal Nehru’s India and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, which sought to stay free of imperialist domination in their pursuit of an independent path of development. This mutual empathy was itself grounded in the fact that imperialism has been as hostile to economic nationalism in countries of the Tricontinent as it was to communism itself.“
Aijaz Ahmad, “Red October in Retrospect” Frontline, December 6, 2017 ( https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/red-october-in-retrospect/article23596364.ece ).
Nothing Human is Alien to Me
Dr. Aijaz Ahmad’s command over a great array of subjects and his deeply thoughtful essays on various topics, and some of his life experiences have been discussed in the book. The title of the book Nothing Human is Alien to Me is quite appropriate and descriptive, as it contains a treasure trove of knowledge that Ahmad possessed, his clear-cut understanding of the subjects he studied, and his analysis of the topics presented in easily understandable language for the reader.
The first time the phrase “Nothing human is alien to me” was used, according to Wikipedia, was in a play by Publius Terentius Afer or Terence more than 2000 years ago. “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.” Terence was brought as a slave to Rome. Philosopher/economist Karl Marx used the term in 1865 during a family pasttime in a questionaire called “confessions.” (Marx’s list: Marxists.org ). (In 1916, a Gujarati monthly Vismi Sadi or Twentieth Century asked similar questions to M. A. Jinnah, probably this was common then.)
In 2019, Moloyashree Hashmi, Sudhanva Deshpande, and Vijay Prashad met Aijaz Ahmad for a few days to conduct an interview on his book, “Nothing Human is Alien to Me”. Vijay Prashad was the one who asked almost all questions. Over two hundred pages of the book covers his early years, his work with trade unions, socialists, and communists in Pakistan, his years in India where he was linked with the prestigious Jawaharlal University and his years in the US–where later he settled permanently.
Here I must add that Vijay Prashad was a commendable interviewer, he conducted the long interview covering many topics. Prashad’s opening sentence of 15 words of the book says it all: “It is impossible for me to think without thinking alongside the work of Aijaz Ahmad.” Now that is a great tribute from Prashad to his/our hero. Prashad himself is doing great work through his writing and activism, and in the process, trying to make this world a little better place. Another good thing about Prashad interviewing Ahmad is that he is associated with LeftWord Books which published Ahmad’s books. Ahmad was affiliated with India’s Communist Party (Marxist), the party to which Prashad has connections too. (His aunt Brinda Karat is a politburo member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).)
The book covers a vast number of subjects, including Fascism in the US, Postcolonialism, Early Politics, Islamism, China, Postmodernism, Gramsci and Hindutva, his most famous book In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures and reactions to In Theory.
The book, Nothing Human is Alien to Me, however, did not have a section on films. Ahmad’s brilliance extended to succintly analyzing classic movies, too. The Marxist economist Prabhat Patnaik pointed out Ahmad was fond of old Hindustani movies. Sudhanva Deshpande, a theatre director, an actor, and Managing Editor of LeftWord Books, at a memorial meeting said that he and Aijaz Ahmad went to see Devdas, the Shah Rukh Khan version. Deshpande liked the movie. Ahmad said the Dilip Kumar version was “social realism,” that was “Gorky” but this one is “opera.” Deshpande was amazed that “such a big argument” Ahmad “encapsulated” in just one word. I met Aijaz Ahmad a few times in Los Angeles, and we discussed films, too. Deshpande was present at Prashad’s interview but did not ask any questions on films. He should have.
Aijaz Ahmad (1941-2022) was born in British India. In the mid 1950s, during “the Hindu right becoming dominant in the politics of Uttar Pradesh,” his family moved to Pakistan leaving Ahmad in India to finish matriculation. Two years later he joined them, and attended the Forman Christian College in Lahore, for six years studying subjects such as economics, literature, history, and social sciences, and obtained a Masters degree in English.
In Pakistan, the communist scholar Sibte Hasan introduced Ahmad to communist texts. For Ahmad, The Communist Manifesto, “was the Bible” with a “prophetic quality.” He also knew Pakistani poet Habib Jalib who was with CPP (Communist Party of Pakistan). By the 1958 military takeover, communists had almost gone underground. Aijaz was connected with the MKP (Mazdoor Kisan Party) or Labor Farmer Party. During his years in Pakistan, Ahmad wrote prolific in Urdu. He also wrote poetry in Urdu but never published it.
In the late 1960s, like many other countries around the world, Pakistan was going through political turmoil: people were out on streets protesting the military regime that was supported by the US. Ahmad came to New York in 1969, almost broke but the Asia Society helped him. The Society was celebrating the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib’s centenary and employed him to translate Ghalib’s poems.
In 1971, he started a new version of Pakistan Forum with Eqbal Ahmad <5>, Saghir Ahmad (Eqbal’s younger brother), and Feroz Ahmed. A new version as in Canada, Feroz was already publishing a magazine with the same name for students in Canada and the US.
In the US, Aijaz got “politicized” by the Black nationalist movement and the anti-war movement against United States’ criminal war against Vietnam. He read voraciously on Marxism and anti-imperial material. His involvment in campus takeover got him blacklisted in New York state university system, so he got a teaching job at Rutgers in New Jersey (p. 34).
After a couple of years, Aijaz Ahmad and Feroz Ahmed were able to return back to Pakistan because the military rule ended after the December 1971 war which led to the dismembering of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. Aijaz “was shocked by the scale of the genocide in East Pakistan.” (P. 39.)
In Pakistan, he was connected with trade unions and he wrote mostly in Urdu. In the late 1970s, Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq removed Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhuto’s government.
After 1973, Ahmad visited Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey and noticed Islamic fervor everywhere. The shattering defeat of Egypt in the Arab-Israeli war, and with it Nasserism, saw the Saudi monarchy and its version of right wing Wahhabi Islam get strong. Ahmad calls it “Desert Islam” because it has “none of the civilizational grandeur and subtlety of what you might call Mediterranean Islam.” (P. 54.)
Ahmad lived in the US during military dictatorship in Pakistan. He loved teaching and so while in the US he would teach, but he always kept trying to go back to Pakistan. Bhutto was hanged in April 1979 on trumped-up charges. Zia proved to be an Islamist who made life miserable for most Pakistanis. Pakistan and surrounding countries experienced a “political crisis” between 1975 and 1979. Ahmad himself was passing through a “political crisis” too; he felt a need to understand the world he inhabited. (p. 45.)
With Zia in power, Ahmad was back in the US and hoped in vain for things to improve so finally he decided to move back to India wishing to “find a new political home.” (P. 86.) Another reason was Ahmad’s mind was engrossed in “actual problems” of South Asia and surrounding regions, and Tricontinent. Living in India was possible but not on a Pakistani passport. Subsequently, he went to New York to get the US citizenship in order to be able to live in India, Ahmad’s birthplace, but now had to first renounce his Pakistani citizenship because the Indian government demanded this. At that time the Congress Party was in power not the BJP.
In an interview with author/activist/filmamker Tariq Ali, Ahmad said that Indian Congress Party passed a law that anyone born in India or had parents born in India can “reclaim their citizenship” except those holding Pakistani passports. He also said the BJP is not a political party in a real sense, it is a front for the RSS, a fascist group. (Watch the two part interview here & here.)
Although by this time Ahmad had lived almost the same amount of time in India, Pakistan, and the US. He couldn’t go back to Pakistan because it was dangerous due to Zia being in power. In the US, he felt “a very alienating experience.” (P. 87.) In 1985, Ahmad returned to India and in Delhi he became a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. He taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University and at Jamia Millia Islamia, he occupied the Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan Chair. When he encountered India’s “intellectual culture, he realized that he needed to do some catch up” because it was much too advanced compared to Pakistan’s (p. 88). Another thing he noticed which “shocked” him was “subservience of the oppressed classes” which he “immediately connected with caste.” (P. 91.) Living with left-wing Delhi intelligentsia he noticed people would greet from a distance whereas in Pakistan, the same gender people would hug irrespective of religion, class, or caste.
In 1998 when Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the BJP formed a government at the center, Ahmad was advised to avoid writing in publications which had more visibility.
With the rising power of the RSS, Ahmad moved back to the US and became a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine in the school of Humanities’ Department of Comparative Literature.
One could say Ahmad was a refugee/migrant/exile who shuffled between India, Pakistan, and the United States that cost him dearly: mentally, physically, and financially. Ahmad’s email to Modhumita Roy: “Various dismantlings have surely had ravaging effects. I have had to buy the same books over and over again.”
Such an exceptional intellectual whom India could not accept back as citizen, even though it would have enhanced India’s image as a “secular, enlightened country.” (P. 208.) He was one of the few remaining people who held Indian and Pakistani citizenship, of course, not at the same time. Countries everywhere are turning into an estate for the ruling thugs. Nationalism/patriotism are easily evoked at a slight hurt. There are also celebrity nationalism, Twitter nationalism, social media nationalism on the increase.
India has changed drastically as far as communalism is concerned that is often unstoppable unless it runs its course and can end in great disaster. Ahmad had described his home state of India in the following words:
“The countless millions who come out to adore the likes of [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi and Yogi Adityanath are an index of that coarsening. The population of Uttar Pradesh is roughly equal to the combined population of Germany, France and the United Kingdom. That the Yogi—in reality a Bajrang Dal activist in saffron robes—can become the Chief Minister of so large a State without provoking a major backlash speaks volumes about the point at which we have now arrived. Let it be remembered that he is a star campaigner for the BJP in many States far beyond Uttar Pradesh and is often mentioned as a possible future Prime Minister.”
“Post Democratic State,” Frontline, January 16, 2020.
The last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar (1775 – 1862) in Delhi whom the British colonialists sent in exile to Burma (Myanmar), was also a poet yearning to return to his country-India. Here are the first and the last couplets of his ghazal.
- “my heart wanders ill at ease / in this ravaged reign
- who has found fruition / in transient terrain
- …
- say how ill-starred is ‘zafar’, that he could not obtain
- e’en two yards, to be interred, in his beloved’s lane”
(Translation by Rekhta.org)
A selection of Ahmad’s writing in the book:
Ali Shariati:
“Ali Shariati [Iranian sociologist], in my view, is intellectually a schizophrenic.”
P. 57.
Brahmanism:
“In the Brahminic system, there is not even a principle of universal social equality; the hierarchical structure of the caste system negates any such principle.”
Pp. 127-8.
Communalism: Ahmad differentiates the communalism of India’s then ruling party BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) to whom belongs the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi <6>, and that of the opposition parties. The BJP’s is the “programmatic” communalism and the oppositions’ is the “pragmatic” communalism. That is, the BJP’s goal is to turn India into a Hindu state, where as the opposition parties have no such plan but nevertheless do use the religious card for political purposes when needed. (P. 141)
Fascism:
“Every country gets the fascism it desreves.”
P. 180.
What he means is the kind of fascism a country gets is determined by the factors such as political, historical, and social. The fascism Francisco Franco’s Spain had was different than Benito Mussolini’s Italy which was dissimilar to Adolf Hitler’s Germany.
After German unification, Ahmad visited a musuem for the struggle against fascism in West Berlin. He noted:
“Fascism comes to power where liberals and social democrats fail to fight against it, and the Left gets blamed for being dogmatic, sectarian, etc.
P. 145.
God:
“The defeat of Nasserism in 1967 [Arab Israel war], the defeat of secular nationalism, the trauma of that defeat is exorcized through creation of this hysterical form of belief in God–hysterical in the technical Freudian sense of the word. God will give us what these Godless people could not win for us.”
P. 179.
Imperialism:
“The United States actually achieved what the Nazis had set out to achieve. That’s something very important to understand, that the struggle between liberalism and fascism was certainely won by lieralism but essentially with the same object of obtaining a global empire.”
p. 165.
Iranian Revolution:
“The largest political uprising in the history of the greater Middle East leads to the creation of an Islamic Republic that unleashes the most horrific repression against communists and all other left tendencies in the country.”
Pp. 45-6.
Left’s defeat:
“… jihadism, Trumpism, European neo-fascisms, Great Expansion of Hindutva–is ultimately a result of the defeat of the Left.”
P. 179.
National language:
“In India, we don’t have a national language. I find this state of affairs quite satisfactory.”
P. 104.
Rushdie: Ahmad points out Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame has “misogyny” <7>. (P. 102)
Said: Ahmad ctitiqued Edward Said’s book Orientalism <8>,
“Could it not be the case, though, that the book that came out of the answering anger was itself tinged with a shade of reverse racism?”
P. 97.
Secular/classless society:
“… the alternative to right-wing religiousity, political Islam, etc., is not secularism as such, in the world of ideas, but to build a secular but also classless society.”
P. 178.
Subalternists:
“The problem with the subalternists is that they think that European colonialism brought Enlightenment to India. I wish it did, but colonialism was too retrograde to do any such thing.”
P. 111.
Last word
The book is an easy read, a “comprehensible prose” (Monthly Review, p. 14.), a phrase he used to answer his critics in an interview he gave to Ellen Meiksins. The critics had proclaimed him to be “anti-theory.” The beauty of any writing is that the author is able to convey her/his idea/s in a way that a lay person could also grasp the meaning of what she/he is trying to convey. Some authors are difficult not only to understand but also to read. Ahmad has conveyed his thoughts in very simple, clear, and interesting manner that leaves the reader wishing the book had more pages.
I highly recommend the book to all those who want to know who Aijaz Ahmad was or if they are familiar with his name but want to know more about his ideas than this is the book. In simple language he explains how systems function all over the globe, whether its Capitalist, Islamist, Hindutva, or Authoritarian. In similar fashion, he explaines so many other issues too in a way that activates thinking cells not imagined otherwise. Ahmad didn’t restrict himself to any particular sphere, he described himself thus:
“That is what I have strived to do as a Marxist intellectual: work across many boundaries. I have tried to be not a narrow academic specialist but what Gramsci called a general intellect, reading and writing in many fields of human inquiry with no regard for the boundary between Humanities and the Social Sciences.
”Nothing Human, pp. 200-201.
I would end with Aijaz Ahmad’s advice to the Left.
Aijaz Ahmad: “A person of the Left must always ask:
- what is the social base?
- who is doing the organizing?
- who is doing the funding?
- how is this politics benefitting the working classes?
- who is producing the images?
- where does my knowlege of it comes from?”
Notes
<1> The then editor of Frontline N. Ram had permitted Ahmad to write 4,000-5,000 word essays on any subject he wanted to; the essays were not edited at all. In the non-internet era, 5,000 words for magazine was a big thing.
<2 > Born Asrar ul Hasan Khan, Majrooh Sultanpuri (1919 – 2000) ended in jail in early 1950s for reciting a poem at a labor union meeting for workers’ right to strike in Bombay. The poem was critical of Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in which he accused “snake-skinned” Nehru of being a “slave” of the British Commonwealth. Majrooh, while on the run from police, was asked by filmmaker Raj Kapoor to write a song and he paid Majrooh four times the amount, his indirect way to help Majrooh whose wife was expecting a child. The then governor of Bombay Morarji Desai asked Majrooh to tender an apology; his refusal earned him two years in prison but was released a year later.
<3> The Ram Mandir being built to replace the demolished Babri Masjid will use the descendants or their kin who were involved in the demolition as cheap labor. The powerless, will once again feel empowered. Some may even claim that their fathers or grandfathers were involved in destruction of a Muslim mosque and we descendents are working to construct a Hindu temple.
<4> In four months, on 5th July, 1977, Bhutto’s General Zia-ul-Haq overthrew him and eventually hanged him on April 4, 1979, on false charges. Zia was an Islamic menace for Pakistan; he tried and succeeded to a great extent in Islamizing Pakistani society and doing it great harm. He also introduced flogging, and women on TV were required to cover their head. Torturing of political opponents was rampant. To an extent Pakistan has recovered from the over-Islamization but has still a long way to go. Aijaz predicted the coup and its nature very accurately. Also, Zia’s joining the Afghan war with the US and Saudi Arabia against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan created three major problems for Pakistan: refugees, drugs, and weapons. Prior to 1977, Pakistan was almost drug free.
<5> Prior to meeting Aijaz Ahmad, Eqbal Ahmad had been arrested with five other people on charges of a plot to kidnap Henry Kissinger, an assistant for national security affairs to President Richard Nixon.
<6> Writer Pankaj Mishra points out how “Modi’s glossy makeover seems to have seduced many in the west” such as Sheryl Sandberg (former COO of Facebook) and Rupert Murdoch (news media magnate). Many would get seduced by the image created by Modi but I’m sure not Murdoch and Sandberg — both are very cunning and know what kind of a person Modi is but economic reasons lure them to Modi. Many more embrace Modi the way he is, such as Bill Gates, who awarded Modi the Gates Foundation Award, depite being advised by Nobel laureates not to do so. While I am writing this, Gates is again visiting India and is driving an electric auto rickshaw made by an Indian company.
<7> In his 1992 book, In Theory, Ahmad, in his essay on Rushdie’s Shame, dufferentiates between Rushdie’s misogyny and Orwell’s misogyny: “Rushdie is not, in the way [George] Orwell always was, a misogynist plain and simple” (In Theory, p. 143).
<8> Ahmed points out Professor Said was the most prominent Palestinian in the United States who not only never disowned his roots and remained, despite adversarial situation, absolutely loyal to his roots. He fearlessly and fiercely presented the Palestinian despair and Israeli atrocities in an uncompromising manner despite receiving death threats. He exposed Israeli terror and brutalities to the people and the politicians in the US through writing, debating, and speaking — despite death threats and the US news media and the Israel Lobby’s efforts to ignore and to malign him.
“… every woman, without exception, is represented through a system of imageries which is sexually overdetermined; the frustration of erotic need, which drives some to frenzy and others to nullity, appears in every case to be the central fact of a woman’s existence.”
In Theory, p. 144.
To critique Edward Said’s most famous work Orientalism was not an easy endeavor for Ahmad, he was reluctant because of Said’s “beleaguered location in the midst of imperial America” and his Palestinian origins. He went through a great deal of thinking before writing the essay “Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said” (Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London & New York: Verso, 1992/2008, pp. 159-219))
Ahmad was in total “solidarity” with Said on the rights of the Palestinians. Repressing “criticism,” however, Ahmad believed, was not how you show “solidarity.”
Ahmad is correct. Solidarity is good but not always; where necessary one should differ because otherwise stagnancy will creep in as it is happening right now in the US where more than 100 members of the Progressive Caucus lacked guts to face Pelosi, when she was the House speaker, to introduce any meaningful change.
The surveilling eyes of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) were on Said too. Under the Freedom of Information Act, anthropology professor David Price had filed a request of behalf of Counterpunch. FBI released a 238 page FBI file. FBI keeps files on intellectuals whom they suspect of having any sympathy with the poor or with the national movements or communists whom the US doesn’t approve. Said’s wife, Mariam was not astonished to know that FBI had files on her husband. She said:
“We always knew that any political activity concerning the Palestinian issue is monitored and when talking on the phone we would say ‘let the tappers hear this’. We believed that our phones were tapped for a long time, but it never bothered us because we knew we were hiding nothing.”)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/01/13/how-the-fbi-spied-on-edward-said/
Ahmad’s argument was that we could denounce colonialism for the destruction it carried out but not for the ills of our own society, those we have to own ourselves. Ahmed also felt Said was wrong in how he understood Dante’s depiction of Muhammad (Prophet of Islam) in his poem Inferno. Italian poet Dante showed Socrates, Plato, and Homer (all of them Greek who belonged to pre-Christian era) in the first of the nine circles of Hell — a very light punishment due to the fact that all three came before Christ and thus remained ignorant of his wisdom. Muhammad was shown in the eighth circle in a state of constant torture. Said was critical of Dante which Ahmad sympathized with, and he himself believed Dante’s placing of Muhammad in the eighth circle was “indefensible.” But then Ahmad points out that Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Salah ad-Din (Saladin), and Ibn -e Sina (Avicenna) (all Muslims) are shown in the first circle, despite the fact that they all came after Jesus and so had the chance to leave Islam and embrace Christianity. (See In Theory, pp. 187-190)
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com
Tributes & reminiscences by friends and colleagues
“Aijaz Ahmad: A robust public intellectual”
by AKEEL BILGRAMI
“No such argument, as Aijaz had made in those essays, can be made in purely impersonal terms. He could not just speak of post-modernism or post-structuralism and describe these doctrines in blandly abstract terms. He had to name particular literary theorists and writers who appealed to those abstract terms to construct their claims to a radicalism and expose them as false. In successive chapters, he named the most celebrated theorists and writers in his field (Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and Salman Rushdie), and much of the notoriety of his book came because their legions reacted with high indignation since they too saw themselves as accused of being in, some rarefied sense, impostors. It was a bruising battle and the debris was not a pretty sight. There were hurt feelings on all sides. But it did reveal something attractive—that intellectuals in the academic study of literature still cared for ideas and saw in them an uncloistered significance that must be given passionate political expression. That is to say, literature cannot be said to offer merely self-standing pleasures.”
Frontline for more
“Aijaz Ahmad: A Marxist for our times“
by PRAKASH KARAT
“Aijaz’s Marxism rose out of the tradition of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist movements for national liberation. This was enriched and synthesised with the Marxist thought emanating from the world’s metropolitan centres in the Sixties and Seventies. Thus, Aijaz was uniquely positioned to defend and nurture Marxist theory when many Western intellectuals abandoned Marxism in the post-Soviet era. He took on the series of post-Marxist, post-modern and post-colonial theories which pervaded academia in the West and which soon became influential in society.”
The Indian Express for more
Remembering Dr Aijaz Ahmad
by Dr. NAAZIR MAHMOOD
Essentially, he was a Marxist theorist whose scope was vast and wide-ranging. Arguably, his best book was ‘In Theory: Class, Nation, and Literature’, which attracted academics and drew their appreciation. The essential thrust in the book was about the role of theory and theorists in the movement against colonialism and imperialism. He dissected these ideas by arguing against those who were promoting postmodernist and poststructuralist conceptions of history. To him, various ‘post…isms’ such as post-colonialism, postmodernism, and post structuralism, were simply new brands of inquiry that managed to accomplish fairly little.
The News for more
“An obituary for Aijaz Ahmad”
by AYYAZ MALLICK
“Aijaz Ahmad has left us, one of the great political essayists of our time and one of the final representatives of that last truly subcontinental generation of Indo-Pak intellectual-revolutionaries — one whose affiliations and sensibilities took shape, in a strong sense, before that parting gift of Empire, the Radcliffe Line, had solidified into the accursed wall of separation and mourning it is today.”
Verso for more
“‘He Thought of Both India & Pak as Home’: Remembering Marxist Icon Aijaz Ahmad”
by RAZA NAEEM
“Aijaz Ahmad was one of a dying breed of subcontinental intellectuals who claimed both India and Pakistan as their home over and above the din of divided loyalties. His love for Lahore can be gauged by the fact that he had named his daughter after that quintessential symbol of Punjab, the river Ravi. Yet, the literary festival in Lahore ironically made no effort to ever invite its prodigal son as a keynote speaker from just across the border, while falling head-over-heels to invite younger successors like Pankaj Mishra all the way from London.”
The Quint for more
“Memorial Meeting: Remembering Aijaz Ahmad”
NEWS CLCIK
“Prof. Aijaz Ahmed | A true Marxist intellectual with a wide scholarship”
by PRABHAT PATNAIK
“Professor Aijaz Ahmad, who passed away on March 9, 2022, was a truly outstanding Marxist thinker of our time. He was what can only be described as a classical Marxist who strongly resisted efforts to import what he considered to be alien and incompatible concepts into Marxism, in the name of making it more realistic, thereby creating eclectic admixtures. His celebrated work In Theory: Classes, Nations and Literatures contained a critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism that sought above all to establish the primacy of the classical Marxist tradition. As a true Marxist intellectual, he had his scholarship encompassing several disciplines: literature, literary criticism, history, philosophy, politics and political economy; and in his political commentaries, he brought to bear on every particular quotidian incident, his understanding of the totality of our times.”
The Hindu for more
“Leading Marxist philosopher and activist Aijaz Ahmad dies at 81”
PEOPLES DISPATCH
“Ahmad’s critical take on the works of Edward Said and Fredric Jameson, in particular, are considered authoritative Marxist positions on some of the most significant theoretical works of the late twentieth century. His extensive commentaries in Frontline during the US-led invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan helped shape the understanding of imperialism in the present times.”
Peoples Dispatch for more
“The Life of a Great Marxist: Aijaz Ahmad, 1941-2022”
by VIJAY PRASHAD
“The two passions of Aijaz Ahmad – poetry and politics – flowered in New York. He took his immense love for Urdu poetry to the most renowned poets of his time (such as Adrienne Rich, William Stafford and W.S. Merwin), reciting Ghalib to them, feeding them wine, watching them recover from Ghalib’s language and Aijaz’s explanation, the meaning of the poems. This innovative work resulted in Aijaz’s first book, Ghazals of Ghalib (1971). At the same time, Aijaz got involved with Feroz Ahmed to produce Pakistan Forum, a hard-hitting journal that documented the atrocities in South Asia, with a special focus on the military dictatorship of Yahya Khan (1969-1971) as well as on the civilian possibilities of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (1971-1977); on Pakistan, Aijaz mainly wrote about the insurgencies in East Pakistan (which became Bangladesh in 1972) and in Balochistan. It was in this period that Aijaz began to write about South Asian politics for such socialist journals as Monthly Review, with whom he had a close collaboration for the next several decades.”
Communist Party of Maine for more
“For Bhaisa’ab— “taskeen ko hum na royen“ <m S>
by MODHUMITA ROY
“His was a distinctive voice with a complex yet precise use of language and memorable turns of phrase (“Every country gets the fascism it deserves”). In his writing and his speeches, he displayed an extraordinary mastery of facts, histories, theoretical frameworks, a superb fluency with Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Gramsci, and the Marxist archive. Whether one agrees –as I do—or have disagreements with particular formulations or emphases, it would be hard to deny the conceptual clarity of his analysis and the lucidity of his prose. Beyond the incisiveness of the analysis, the encyclopedic knowledge, the ability to synthesize vastly different bodies of work, what I also have admired is his language– that is to say, the sentences themselves: the spectacular use of what he described as the ability of the compound sentence to “express a multi-dimensional perception within a single grammatical construction.” The long, compound sentences, with the build-up of clauses, straining to encompass the sedimented complexity of history, culture, events, analysis are instructive not only as style but as a method: to express complex phenomena complexly without losing the clarity and accessibility of prose; that theoretical and analytical writing need not be lifeless, dry, turgid. In reminding readers of the US anti-war movement’s utter failure to address the question of justice for Vietnam, he wrote, “Vietnam was simply left with little more than hunger and horror to redistribute, and with no power, not even remotely, to seek as much as an iota of reparations.” Whenever I teach In Theory, I ask students to reflect on the simmering rage which the full stop at the end of the sentence is barely able to contain.”
Verso for more
*< M R> “taskiñ ko ham na ro.eñ jo zauq-e-nazar mile / huran-e-Khuld meñ tiri surat magar mile
“I would not cry for comfort if pleasured be these eyes / By semblance of your face amidst, virgins of paradise”
The couplet and the translation is from Rekhta.org. a very valuable site for Urdu literature.)
“Remembering Aijaz Ahmad”
by GABRIELE SCHWAB
“In addition to Aijaz Ahmad’s distinguished career in literary studies, critical and literary theory, and global Marxism, he also established himself as a distinguished poet and novelist in his native Urdu with several books of poetry and a novel. His essays on the history of Urdu as a literary language as well as on the multi-lingual and multi-vocal character of Indian literature are a testimony of his commitment to lend a voice to literary works beyond the monolingual hegemony of English. His capacity to span different cultures and historical epochs is unparalleled in critical theory and literary studies. The same is true for his capacity to make his work speak across the boundaries of departments and schools. He not only established his unique distinction in the fields of critical theory, discourse analysis and literary studies; he also earned distinction as a philosopher, a social scientist, and a political theorist and activist. Finally, he also had a distinguished career as a translator. Translations of Urdu Poems, including a substantial introduction, have appeared in The Hudson Review and in Poetry, and he has also collaborated on translations with distinguished poets, including Adrienne Rich, Mark Strand, W. S. Mervin, and William Stafford.”
UCI School of Humanities for more
“How Dr. Aijaz Ahmad (1941-2022) Inspired A Generation Of Activists”
by RAS H. SIDDIQUI
“In the late 1970s, a small group of left-wing activists amongst the Pakistani Diaspora here in the US and in Canada were actively fighting the Zia dictatorship in Pakistan. There was no social media then but there was a magazine called The Pakistan Progressive (an offshoot of The Pakistan Forum) which was being published regularly. Leading the intellectual charge in the Progressive at the time were three “A’s” or Ahmads/Ahmeds. Dr. Aijaz Ahmad, Dr. Eqbal Ahmed and Dr. Feroz Ahmed took the fight against the then dictatorship very seriously and inspired the progressive element within our community here through that magazine. Of the three A’s, Dr. Feroz died at a young age (57, died in 1997) and Dr. Eqbal (66, died in 1999). Dr. Aijaz was the last one from the group to pass away at the age of 81. There were other contributors to the magazine too, but it would be difficult to list all in this one article.”
The Friday Times for more
In memory of Aijaz Ahmad
by HARSH THAKOR
“Since the early days of the Progressive Writers’ Association, the vivacity of discussion on literary theory, culture and aesthetics in the country had greatly diminished. No doubt, Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra were pockets where such discussion continued, but over much of north India it had received a jolt. This discussion had been instigated by the progressive, notably the communist, movement, and the subsiding of that movement, in the face initially of the “social justice” movement and later of the communal-fascist onslaught, was a major cause of it’s stagnation.. Aijaz’s coming revived this discussion; interested audiences could now witness a knowledgeable person and re-probe issues that had been eclipsed for a considerable time. He was much in demand as a speaker. The lucidity with which he projected his insights into complex problems was much appreciated by audiences everywhere.”
Counter Currents for more
Remembering Aijaz Ahmad, a Marxist Rebel Without Pause
by SHELLEY WALIA
“In his numerous essays, he held French philosophy responsible for destroying activism with excessive textualism, and Marxism with postmodernism. Ahmad was so provocative in his condemnation of the lack of commitment shown even by academics like Edward Said and his fellow-Marxist Frederic Jameson, that it set in motion the publications of a number of books as well as a full issue of the distinguished journal, Public Culture, in response to the arguments outlined in In Theory.”
The Wire for more
Some of the books, articles, and videos by Aijaz Ahmad
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com