Our friend and comrade, Aijaz Ahmad, died a few days ago, on March 9. The passing of intellectuals often leaves behind a void in a world where we have received so much, so warmly and generously, from those whom we remember for their remarkable lifetime of service to the fields of politics and literature.
To lose him at this juncture, when the promised ‘new world order’ lies in fragments with Black people, Jews, Latinx, Asian-Americans and Muslims marginalised like never before, is to confront a scenario of hate crimes, unleashed ruthlessly in the wake of the toxic election season. The overwhelming crises over racism, hunger and plague across the world demands instant answers to the evils of oppression and poverty.
To support a non-discriminatory and inclusive policy was always Ahmad’s credo, though inherently provocative to the state.
I first met Ahmad in Oxford many years ago where he delivered the annual Radhakrishnan Memorial Lecture, sponsored by All Souls College. I remember the week we spent in a noticeable leftist environment of free spirit where our conversations often turned deeply heady and polemical.
Ahmed on the dilution of literary theory
Ahmad shot to fame when he questioned the accountability of literary theory, especially as taught in English departments all over the world. In the 1990s, when his book, In Theory, was published, most students of humanities had been sucked into a vortex of nihilism with the introduction of French theory into English departments. Ahmad, intrepidly and unambiguously, condemned poststructuralism and, especially postcolonialism, for displacing activism and political dissent which had been an important part of the academy during the 1960s and 70s.
Aijaz Ahmad
In Theory
Verso, 1994.
Ahmad himself was a product of those times which saw massive decolonisation and the formation of nation-states all over the world. He believed in identifying with class, gender, history, resistance, political struggle and, above all, human liberation and praxis.
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.
He had, indeed, ruffled the feathers of many jet-setting academics because he was not someone who cared to choose his words cautiously. He hauled up star philosophers openly, naming them as he denounced their politics of non-committal inactivity. Over and over again, Ahmad maintained that those who did not believe in absolute truth were not capable of being honest intellectuals with some degree of agency.
With that, Ahmad was also a trenchant critic of global capitalism which, no doubt, Left academics are, but with a difference. In his later writings, he began to believe that universities had become more like markets and malls; where theories were sold to unsuspecting students who were then turned into free-market consumers.
These theories (meaning, of course, postmodernism and poststructuralism) had a limited ‘shelf life’ – quite like global capitalism – and so, contemporary education was complicit with global capitalism when it spoke of constant erasure, diversity and diffusion. This, for Ahmad, marked the utter and complete breakdown of causes, citizenship and identities, which it was important for nations to maintain and for universities to promote in order to maintain the connect between ‘theory’ and real life.
‘De-glorifying’ the migrant experience
‘Fashionable’ philosophy, thus, was anathema which was promoted, more so by third-world scholars who had migrated to the West. ‘Migrancy’ and ‘exile’ had entered the vocabulary of contemporary university teaching and research in a new avatar; rather than being associated with trauma and heartbreak, ‘hybridity’ was the new buzz word destroying subjectivity and appropriating stability. It had become so fashionable to be ‘hybrid’; a ‘cultural amphibian’ as Said put it and as Ahmad lamented, “…we live not in three worlds but one”.
Real people living at the grassroots, Ahmad wrote, desired and longed for stability whereas universities in the West, as well as those in India aping them, advocated vagrancy and, unfortunately, created a great divide between lived reality and academia. He was one of those philosophers whose Marxist critiques would, in fact, help persecuted minorities who are denied citizenship or who are part of large human exodus. These painful episodes in the lives of the underprivileged have nothing in common with the ‘marginalisation’ and ‘diasporic studies’ taught in universities today.
‘Freedom from war’
Ahmad’s intention, apart from his Marxist analysis of globalisation and capitalism, was always to deliver the message of freedom from war, from political persecution, and from oppression. The troubled and exciting times that he lived through show up in his tireless enthusiasm, which has a deep connection with the activism of dissent against the establishment; of striving towards all that is just and equitable.
We met sometimes later in life and disagreed passionately, especially on inspiring subjects like the meaning of war and strategy. Referring to an unforgettable lecture by Professor Hew Strachan, Chichele Professor for the History of War on ‘The Meaning of strategy: Historical reflections’, Ahmad elaborated the view that whereas strategy was a military term, could fighting for freedom be a strategy? Strategy, for instance in the Cold War, referred to peace as much as war and was often about fulfilling the intent of the foreign policy rather than being compliant with it. One of the reasons we are unsure about war is that we are unsure of what strategy is.
It is a meaningful objective in the fight of the New Left to enable movements at the grassroots level to gear up against elitist forces of opposition, however vicious they might become in the hands of the apologists of neoliberalism. Ahmad makes a case for this “new politics” which is visibly in the making in the Western world, in spite of the retrogressive leadership in many countries.
To diverge a little, the work done on the deep transformation of the Labour Party in England into a significant social movement would serve as an impetus for the socialist reawakening in India, especially through the public intellectuals who have castigated the backward-looking conservative leadership by underscoring the efforts of the Left to generate a correlation between the buoyant resourcefulness of grassroots politics and the conditions necessary to shape genuinely democratic societies.
The task before the public intellectual, therefore, would be to examine and question the formulation of public policies, according foremost attention to their relevance to the masses as opposed to the scourge of neoliberalism and elitist forms of knowledge. Ahmad remained committed to the examination of official interpretations of policy, giving precedence to the “whole way of life”, to use Raymond Williams’s expression. Culture, belief and public opinion were not to be brushed aside by any political leadership. ‘New politics’, therefore, was not merely some remonstration; it was a sincere response to the conception of a movement for a just, unbiased society launched at the grassroots and working its way upwards.
On the limitations of Marx
Ahmad was, at all times, mindful of what Marx lacked and highlighted the same by drawing attention to some pressing social and cultural issues of our times. For instance, despite his critique of soil depletion due to capitalist agriculture, Marx did not underscore the innumerable ways in which capital defiles the earth. He believed that socialism would profit from the “progress” of capitalism; a view reversed by the eco-disasters of our times.
Marx did not censure colonialism enough and had little awareness of the implications of racism; although, to be fair, he vehemently condemned it. On feminism, he wrote almost nothing and took domestic chores for granted.
Ahmad tried his utmost to remedy these shortcomings, arguing always in favour of a new progressive movement, underpinned by a valuable resource for an open and participatory form of socialism. A leading Marxist thinker, he espoused a tenacious resolve to reinvent a people’s government that seeks to redress not only the pressing issues of feminist politics and ecological disaster, but also envisaged a civil society built on the principle of egalitarianism and a political system that supported views inconsistent with customary assumptions.
He had the ability to relate with the problem at hand through the critical practice of coalescing theoretical analysis with practical observation, always validating his conclusions with references to history and everyday life.
A man of personal kindness, he had strong views but his gracious demeanour made those views hard to resist. He brought a mood of candidness to the deeply fervent and engaging conversations, often accepting different points of view, thereby perpetuating the belief in free thinking. I am reminded of the Greek poet Callimachus who advised his contemporaries, and later, Roman poets like Ovid, Catullus and Propertius, to stop aping Homer and instead practice “walking where wagons don’t travel.” “Drive your chariot not in the tracks of others but on an unworn road,” he advised.
Ahmad’s progressive activism in a world turning fascist was, indeed, an inspiration, especially to learn from the past as we confront the present and hope to shape the future. Whereas right-wing populists and leftist purists have been self-righteously contravening the very notion of liberalism, Ahmad succeeded in giving a rousing defence of the liberal tradition. For him, liberalism was a fundamental element of his very being.
Shelley Walia, Professor Emeritus, has taught cultural theory at the Panjab University.