On March 9 two years ago, Aijaz Ahmad passed away in a place that he never considered home. Ahmad was one of the towering figures of what could be loosely called the ‘postcolonial left,’ – figures who were for the most part located in the Global South yet achieved international acclaim. However, for that reason Ahmad’s story may not be known to many outside a few highly selective international leftist circles and students of South Asia, though Ahmad had written and commented substantially on the history, politics and culture of SWANA as well. His story is one of exile, colonialism, and resistance that resonates in many parts of the Global South today.
Ahmad is most known for his 1994 book In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures which some on the left consider one of the most theoretically important Marxist responses to the rise of post-colonial theory in the Euro-American academy. In this book Ahmad notably targets foundational theorists such as Edward Said and Ranajit Guha, arguing that their theoretical positions arising from their vantage points of exile in the West do not adequately account for the social realities of the regions they supposedly represent, and that their eager reception in the West and in elite circles in the Global South align with an overall neoliberal attack on the Leftist social project of ‘radical equality’ more generally.
Ahmad’s vast oeuvre speaks for itself. However, what may be of interest to readers here are the social conditions that led to his critiques and gestures toward a postcolonial Leftist imagination in which the ‘West’ was not the point of reference for a comparative, social and cultural analysis between different regions of the world, including SWANA.
As we today are witnessing the continued suffering of Palestinians, as a result of one ‘partition’, and as genocidal bombs continue to drop over Gaza killing tens of thousands of innocents, the story of Ahmad’s own exile begins in the aftermath of another Partition which served as the bloody template for the current situation in Palestine, which is the partition of British India. We do not know exactly how many people perished in what is now recognized as the bloodiest population transfer the world had ever seen, but most estimates suggest that it was well over one million. The irony of the fact that two ‘secular’ states–both India and Pakistan were officially secular in their founding constitutions–were formed on the basis of a partition dividing communities on religious lines, India for ‘Hindus’ and Pakistan for ‘Muslims’ never escaped Ahmad, and likely informed his future work which complicated the idea of secularism and fascism in the postcolonial world.
Ahmad was born to a well off Muslim family in the state of Uttar Pradesh in what is now India. He moved with his family shortly after Partition to Pakistan where he completed his studies. Like many intellectuals, he went abroad, in this case to the United States, to complete his further studies. For many postcolonial intellectuals, this initial step of moving to the West for higher education, inaugurated their careers as academics in exile, and as Ahmad argues, has helped shape their theoretical and political trajectories.
Ahmad however chose a different route, deciding to return not to his ‘home’ country Pakistan, which had experienced a military dictatorship under General Zia-ul-Haq and was officially declared an Islamic Republic, but to India, the land from where he and his family had fled. Despite the various obstacles that he faced as a ‘foreigner’ in the land of his birth, the academic conditions nurtured by Nehruvian socialism in India allowed Ahmad to continue to work in and around New Delhi for most of his career, where he produced most of his major writings.
Yet in a story that many contemporary SWANA intellectuals would find familiar, the conditions in India worsened significantly, as Nehruvian socialism slowly gave way to the rise of Hindu ‘fascism’ and the right wing government started to tighten its grip over intellectual spaces. Ahmad was forced to flee again at the twilight of his career as his right to work was denied. In a tragic twist, he underwent a second, or perhaps even third exile, where he begrudgingly found refuge as a visiting professor at the University of California-Irvine, before passing away on 9 March 2022 in a place that he never considered home.
Exile, decolonization, secularism
This question of exile is important because it directly shaped Ahmad’s vision for a postcolonial Left. Most of the dominant visions of ‘postcoloniality’ that have gained global currency stem from the postcolonial intellectual’s position within the western academy, and therefore the question of what is the ‘West’ in relation to the ‘Third World,’ or what we now call the ‘Global South’, always looms large in such discussions. This is related to similar discussions, most of which are happening today in the academies of Europe and the US, on the ‘decolonization’ of certain disciplinary fields. In In Theory, Ahmad traces this tendency back to the publication of Said’s Orientalism and the rise of ‘Third World Literature’ in the western, particularly North American, academy. Said’s work and its aftermath, Ahmad writes in his book, stems from the “social self-consciousness and professional assertion of the middle-class immigrant and the ‘ethnic intellectual” which allows one to unproblematically assert the “imperial oppression” of all European knowledge and then declare the liberatory potential in any narrative either from the Third World or from its representatives in the West.
Marx, because he is European, therefore can become dismissed as an ‘Orientalist’ while Said, though he comes from an elite background and spent most of his time in the West, can be seen to be a liberator for not just Palestinians, but for all of the ‘Orient’. According to Ahmad, Said offers a racialized vision of a ‘decolonial’ thinking in which the Palestinian, qua Palestinian, or any Third World subject could be seen as naturally representing the oppressed in relation to the bogeyman of the ‘West.’
One can look at In Theory to gain a more complex understanding of Ahmad’s work and can agree or disagree with his criticisms of Said, who, as he mentions, as a supporter of the Palestinian cause for self-determination he had great respect for. However, Ahmad’s work points us up in another direction in which we can start to think about how we may ‘reframe’ the work of comparative, cultural, and political analysis beyond the framework that the ‘West’ offers us, which includes the heuristics of concepts like ‘Global South’, ‘Third World’, provincializing ‘Europe,’ etc. Ahmad experimented with this method in his various writings on fascism and secularism where he explored more deeply what these terms, inherited from the European political experience, could mean if we explain it in terms of contemporaneous developments in South Asia and SWANA.
Ahmad famously said that “every country gets the fascism they deserve.” The groups currently labeled as ‘Islamist’ and ‘fascist,’ that is non-liberal, Ahmad argues, are historically a product of the ‘weak’ liberalism in which a political ‘majority’ was developed through violent religious-cultural hegemony. In many cases, such as in India and Turkey, these organizations took advantage of the liberal (i.e. colonial) mechanisms of governance to embed themselves in the state structure and state institutions, even under regimes that are nominally secular. In other cases, such as in the case of Syria and Egypt, the state could not assert itself over these groups through liberal mechanisms, therefore suspending the liberal structure of governance entirely and perpetuating extended states of emergencies.
These multifaceted notions of fascism, present in both SWANA and in South Asia, require an in-depth study of the conditions of post-colonial liberalism and a comparative outlook that does not intuitively take Europe as a frame of reference. “All the studies of Nazism,” Ahmad says in an interview, “will not tell you much about the RSS brand of fascism if you do not accord primacy to the political, religious, and social conditions specific to Hindu India”, referring to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right wing Hindu majoritarian organization whose political wing, the Bharatiya Janta Party, currently rules India. In fact, if one wants to know about the RSS in India, Ahmad writes, it would be better to study Rashid Rida and the ideologies leading to Salafism, Ikhwan-al-Muslimun (Muslim Brotherhood) of Al-Banna, al-Nahda, and Hamas.
The other interesting concept Ahmad discussed at some length is the idea of ‘secularism’ as it appeared in concrete instances of deployment in South Asia and SWANA. Scholars such as Talal Asad or Saba Mahmood have discussed religious alternatives to the idea of the secular, but Ahmad is not interested in secularism in relation to the ‘religious,’ again seeing this as a debate emerging from a primarily European debates. He is rather more concerned with why, at the point of decolonisation, the idea of ‘secular’ was so important for nationalist movements at the time. Both in British India and in what he calls the ‘cosmopolitan’ areas of SWANA, that is the states located around the Mediterranean and along the Tigris and Euphrates, secularism was more of a compromise ideology to wed diverse groups to a national project.
Ahmad wrote extensively about how this idea of ‘secularism’ was wielded both by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and Jawaharlal Nehru in India in similar ways, and explains how the ideological contradictions in their respective ‘secular projects’, wedded as it was to the British colonial inheritance, could not withstand, in the case of the former, the Zionist defeat, and in the case of the latter, the phenomenal rise of Hindu right.
While in both Egypt and India many young scholars are critiquing the legacies of Nasser and Nehru, and exploring how their ideas of ‘secularism’ have created the conditions for dictatorship and the ascendancy of the right wing, there is very little awareness of the shared political and social dynamics in both regions, the legacy of over a millennia of shared history. Leftist thought from the region continues to be mired in predominantly local concerns, Ahmad noted, whereas ‘cosmopolitan’ thought by necessity has been wedded to the European experience.
Radical equality and its controversies
Ahmad wore many hats, he was a poet himself in the Urdu language and a translator of the poet Ghalib’s works, a literary theorist, journalist, political commentator, and cultural critic. However, one hat he never took off was his commitment to Marxism and his belief that “radical equality” in the postcolonial world could never come through a politics of secular liberalism, which did not, he argued, “have enough justice in it not to invoke God’s justice against the injustices of the profane”. In the end, radical equality could only emerge through class struggle, and for the establishment of a regionally attuned idea of communism that does not dispense with so-called ‘European’ thought, but that does not base itself on Europe as a frame of reference. Sometimes this unwavering commitment could run him into controversy, for instance his qualified support of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, which he describes as one of the secular and quasi-socialist Arab nationalist bulwarks against Islamist takeover, something readers may find particularly problematic.
Here is also the question of what is the value of the Left right now, as the Left orthodoxy in South Asia and SWANA seems out of step with dominant trends in progressive social justice mobilization, and often is seen to oppose the assertion of feminist, queer, anti-caste, and other forms of social movements. Ahmad, as one of the last representatives of mostly male postcolonial left intellectuals could be seen as representing this orthodox tendency. Yet the questions his life and work raise are still important even though what we may expect or imagine out of politics may have changed.
Many of us continue to work from positions of exile as the conditions in our countries of origin become even much more suffocating than it was during Ahmad’s time. Leftist thought becomes stranded in between the twin poles of an unbending orthodoxy on the one hand and the abyss of identity politics on the other, unable to adequately counter the rising authoritarianism and ‘God’s justice.’ Revisiting Ahmad’s work may help us try to productively use our condition of exile to think anew the project of a non-liberal ‘radical equality’ that is cosmopolitan and internationalist in outlook and at the same time rooted in the concrete social conditions of our lands.
Other selected books by Aijaz Ahmad:
Ahmad, Aijaz. Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia. New York: Verso, 2002.
Ahmad, Aijaz. Iraq, Afghanistan and the Imperialism of our times. New Delhi: LeftWord. 2004.
Ahmad, Aijaz. On Communalism and Globalization: Offensives of the Far Right. New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2016.
Ahmad, Aijaz. India: Liberal Democracy and the Extreme Right. Hyderabad: Navatelengana Publishing House.
Prashad Vijay and Aijaz Ahmad. The Political Marx: Aijaz Ahmad in conversation with Vijay Prashad. New Delhi: LeftWord. 2023.
