Aijaz Ahmed: A Marxist for our times

His erudition and talents were wide-ranging. He began his work as an Urdu writer and literary critic. He taught literary studies and cultural criticism at various universities in the West. He studied and wrote on philosophy, political economy and current world affairs.

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.

His book In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures was first published in 1992. This work became a classic as it provided an effective and devastating critique of the philosophical and ideological positions of various “post” ideologies from the Marxist standpoint. The introduction of the book is a tour de force that provides the global historical context for the present conjuncture and the contradictions which are still unfolding in the world. This is a book that equipped Left-oriented students and the younger generation amongst the intelligentsia to take on post-modernism and other similar so-called radical narratives.

In the mid-Eighties, Aijaz came to India, the land of his birth, and lived here for three decades. He had a long stint as a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum in Delhi. It is around this time that he wrote In Theory, and began thinking and writing about political and social developments in the country. Internationally, the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War had brought about US hegemonic influence in all spheres, including culture and ideology.

In India, the twin processes of liberalisation leading to neo-liberal policies and the rise of Hindutva forces had begun. Aijaz was deeply engaged in studying and analysing these features. His essays and lectures on the rise of Hindutva, situating it in the background of the rise of the far-right worldwide and his continuing brilliant analysis of the nature of the RSS project to recast the Indian state by a long march through its institutions, has contributed to a better understanding of the Indian Left about these forces and what they portend.

At the global level, Aijaz engaged himself in looking at imperialism in the post-Cold War era. The war in Iraq and other wars of aggression by the United States and NATO forces were analysed to show how they were part of the imperialist project of world hegemony. Here again, he effectively combated the views of many Western Marxist scholars who argued that imperialism is no more a relevant category in the globalised capitalist world.
Aijaz was not an armchair academic. He always connected with movements against imperialism, national oppression and racism. In his years in India, he spent a lot of time giving talks to students and activist groups to help them to understand revolutionary theory.

For Aijaz, Marxist theory was never static. It always had to be linked to praxis. As to his own method, he said: “Whether it is the complete text of Marx or the very complex projects of Hindutva, there is no such thing as a final understanding beyond which one needs to go. One must always return to take another look, to think anew, and to reach a deeper understanding.”

Aijaz had a warm and engaging personality. He had the sensibility of a poet along with a razor-sharp intellect. He was always keen to forge new friendships and learn new things about the varied culture of India. I was fortunate to have had him as a friend for over two decades. The regular conversations we had were intellectually stimulating and he opened the doors for me to new books and ideas.

His last years were poignant due to his unfulfilled desire to live and die in his homeland. After living precariously on visa after visa, when it became clear that he would never get Indian citizenship because of his stint in Pakistan as a young man, he departed to take up the Chair of Comparative of Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Despite the prestigious chair that he held, he longed to be back in India. The last eight years of his life were, according to him, the life of an “exile”.

For his numerous friends and comrades in India, his works and contributions to the intellectual resources of the Left movement will remain an enduring legacy.

The writer is former general secretary, CPM