Remembering Dr Aijaz Ahmad

There was a time in the second half of the 20th century when the communist ideology was in ascendance and Marxism was a favourite staple of thought for college and university students and teachers. By the turn of the century, the tide had reversed, and many former Marxists searched for other tools to understand society.

Dr Aijaz Ahmed was a Marxist who produced some of his best analyses based on Marxism after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was born in Muzaffarnagar India in 1941 and died on March 9, 2022 in California, USA. After Partition he migrated with his parents to Lahore from where he did his MA in English literature and then left for the US for higher education. But before that he had imbibed progressive literature and thought so well that his studies and writing always revolved around Marxist orientation.

In the 1980s, he moved to India where he became a fellow at the Centre of Contemporary Studies and professor at the Centre for Political Studies of the JNU. Beginning with literature, he expanded his horizon of thinking to nearly all areas of social sciences and taught at various times at universities in Canada and the US. Over two decades ago, I had just one chance meeting with him in India at the home of N Ram, the editor and owner of ‘The Hindu’ and ‘Frontline’. Dr Aijaz Ahmad penned his analysis in such lucid prose for ‘Frontline’ and the ‘Newsclick’ that readers absorbed them easily.

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.

As an aside, I can recall some of my discussions in Karachi with Dr Muhammad Ali Siddiqui – a renowned Marxist literary critic – who went so far as to claim that all these ‘post-isms’ were actually conspiracies hatched by western writers at the best of the American CIA. Dr Aijaz Ahmed was a different kind of critic and scholar who sometimes used polemical critique, but most of his writings did not invoke any conspiracy theories. For example, his critique of Fredric Jameson is pretty polemical in that Ahmad thinks Jameson’s arguments about third-world literature is ‘insufficiently theorised’.

For the uninitiated, let me clarify that Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic of Western Marxist leanings, who has analysed contemporary cultural trends which he calls ‘postmodern culture’ of depthlessness. His essay ‘Third World Literature in the era of multinational capitalism’ drew the ire of Dr Aijaz Ahmed for using terms like Third World which Jameson had used mostly with reference to colonialism. Aijaz thought that Jameson had made hasty and untenable generalisations about third-world literature and its potential to work as resistance to a system of global postmodernism.

Dr Aijaz Ahmed often pointed out how other scholars’ works were not rigorous enough. Another of his targets was Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ – a book of considerable merit that in 1978 shook the academic world by storm. Said had criticised the contemptuous depiction and portrayal of Eastern societies by Western writers. Ahmed was not particularly fond of Said’s ‘liberal humanist tradition’ and as a Marxist highlighted its faultiness. In ‘Orientalism’, Said had used his selection of Western texts to build his argument and Aijaz disagreed with the way the book makes some generalisations.

Aijaz Ahmad himself was an avid reader of third-world literature – a category that emerged after the Second World War and especially with nationalism that turbocharged the fight against colonial powers who were reluctant to withdraw from their colonies. This category of literature spawned a new stream of critical studies and scholarly work in the West. And then the third world itself became a hotbed of such ideas. Ahmed plunged into this discussion fully equipped and made tremendous theoretical contributions. He produced a Marxist critique of colonial and postcolonial discourses and dismantled many of the foundations of this stream.

His approach was consistently Marxist, and his perspective never deviated from it even at the cost of other possible interpretations that did not strictly fall under the Marxist domain. He believed that much of the new academic postcolonial theory was one-sided. To him most of the Western academia made serious errors in understanding societies that had remained under the colonial yoke for long and only recently had won their independence. He was convinced that some ‘bad faith’ was at the core of the postcolonial enterprise in Western academia.

Aijaz Ahmad’s main contention was that there was no ‘unity’ in the third-world literature that the Western scholarship considers as a monolith. He contended that there was great differentiation in class and culture in third-world literature; as there was diversity in politics and religion. There were divergent peculiarities in the third world, which according to him the West ignored. Similarly, he had an issue with the term ‘third-world writers’ because according to him there were many third-world writers who were conservative and elitists.

He also did not like the division of the world as first, second and third. According to this categorization, the first world was capitalist, the second was socialist, and the third consisted of developing and newly independent countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Aijaz Ahmed was of the view that the third is as capitalist as the rest but with a more backward capitalism that produces multiple levels of literature. That means you can’t read one ‘third-world literature’ of nationalism as these nations have varied texts with diverse economic and political cultures and positions that the Western academia fails to comprehend. He did not like Edward Said’s inclusion of Marx into the fold of orientalists.

Throughout his life, Aijaz Ahmed defended Marx and his ideology and did not appreciate an all too easy reading of his works. Following in the footsteps of Marx, Ahmad dedicated his life to the historical project of emancipation by providing intellectual inspiration to thousands of his students and millions of his readers. Nearly a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of the socialist bloc, he wrote an essay ‘The Communist Manifesto: In its own Time and in Ours.

When I went to India in 2001 to attend a conference, I remember having a discussion with some friends from the Communist Party of India (CPI). Dr Aijaz Ahmad was closer to the Communist Party of India Marxist (CPI-M) and some of my CPI friends were not especially fond of Dr Aijaz Ahmed. The CPI-M had split from the CPI in the 1960s when the Sino-Soviet ideological conflict was at its peak. Dr Aijaz held Mao in great esteem and was also critical of the Soviet Union, something CPI friends did not like. Though the Soviet Union was no more, and Mao had been dead for 25 years, such disagreements persisted.

Aijaz’s essay on the Manifesto still provides an interesting reading. He calls the manifesto a ‘text in transition’ that ties together the major elements of what would later encompass Marx’s corpus. In the end, I would like to recommend three of his very good essays ‘Imperialism of our time’ (2009), ‘Islam, Islamicisms, and the West’ (2009), and ‘India: Liberal democracy and the extreme right’ (2016) – all available online.

The writer holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK and works in Islamabad.

He can be reached at: mnazir1964@yahoo.co.uk