The late Aijaz Ahmad was a voice that could not be ignored. He was a literary critic, poet, and translator, a representative of the last truly Indo-Pak generation of revolutionary intellectuals, and a figure steeped in the revolutionary and aesthetic traditions of Marxism (both “Eastern” and “Western”). He was also one of the great political essayists of our time.
Ahmad’s interventions spanned the great faultlines of our epoch: liberalism and fascism, imperialism and nationalism, Hindutva and Islamism, postcolonialism and poststructuralism, “world” literature and Urdu literature, and down to Indo-Pak and US politics. His restless intellect and unmatched erudition made Ahmad an essential cornerstone for the great theoretico-political debates of our time.
Coming of age in the immediate aftermath of independence in India and Pakistan and inspired by the great prestige of anticolonial revolutions in China, Cuba, Vietnam, and beyond, Aijaz Ahmad was one of a group of subcontinental intellectuals who took their public and political vocations very seriously. These intellectuals, including figures such as Eqbal Ahmad, Feroz Ahmed, and Romila Thapar, were eminently conscious of their role in shaping the nebulous entity-in-making called “the nation.”
Aijaz Ahmad was one of a group of subcontinental intellectuals who took their public and political vocations very seriously.
It is this political and public responsibility that powered Ahmad’s restless energy in shaping, as he put in an autobiographical interview, “ideological struggles in the upper reaches of High Culture [i.e., the academe],” while also taking “very seriously the more important task of helping sustain a broader culture of progressive ideas.” This attunement to the multilevel organization of modern life shaped Ahmad’s prolific range of publications. He composed at least five books in Urdu as well as numerous translations of classical Marxist texts, not to mention dozens of…
Auteur: Ayyaz Mallick
