Border-Crosser

ADITYA BAHL
29 APRIL 2022 — IDEAS

By the time Aijaz Ahmad published his now classic, In Theory:

Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992), he was 51 years old. He had
already drifted through Lahore, Harlem, Cairo, Beirut, Damascus,
Anatolia and the Palestinian camps in Jordan, before settling in New
Delhi. In the book, Ahmad dissected the antinomies of the new
theoretical turn in the Anglo-American academy – its schematic
conceptions of the third world, its distancing of culture from political
economy and activism, its reluctance to highlight its institutional
sites, as well as the class locations and practices of its practitioners. I
first encountered the book at the University of Delhi. An engineer at
the time, I was mesmerized by its feverish blend of a theorist’s
insight and a pamphleteer’s loose wit – equal parts revelatory
(‘Determination … means the givenness of a circumstance within
which individuals make their choices, their lives, their histories’) and
rancorous (‘Ranajit Guha … a typical upper-layer bourgeois’).
Enrolling in the English department, I soon discovered that this was
precisely the kind of writing that is known to sink your academic
career. Good thing Ahmad didn’t really have one when he wrote the
book.

A year after In Theory was published, the journal Public Culture

assembled a set of critical responses. Marjorie Levinson described it
as ‘an ugly book’, dismissing it as ‘harangue, jeremiad, flyting, ethnic
cleansing: not to make a mystery of it, jihad’. Peter van der Veer
started by declaring that the book reminded him of a visit to Calcutta
in 1973, where he was shocked to discover a photograph of Stalin in
the house of a communist cadre. References to ‘hardline Indian
communism’ and Ahmad’s ‘style of inquisition’ duly followed. Talal
Asad tersely suggested that the book was influenced by the European
teleology of progress. Partha Chatterjee questioned Ahmad’s grasp of
Indian Marxism. Nivedita Menon and the book’s commissioning
editor Michael Sprinker offered perceptive rejoinders (the only
courteous ones) to Ahmad’s portrayal of Edward Said. Andrew Parker
wrote that the book failed to achieve an integral unity; it was more a
blend of ‘oil and water than political history and literary theory’. And
like many other reviewers, Vivek Dhareshwar highlighted the curious
disjunction between Ahmad’s focus on the institutional locations of
specific scholars and his reluctance to discuss his own involvement
in the metropolitan academy. Invoking Ahmad’s criteria, Dhareshwar
countered: ‘Does the work/individual have or provide any links with
determinate emancipatory movements?’

Ahmad fled Pakistan for the first time in 1966, at the height of Ayub
Khan’s military dictatorship. He had recently finished a masters at
the Forman Christian College, Lahore. Two years later, he started
teaching at the SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and
Knowledge) Program at the City College of New York. His colleagues
there included Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, David
Hernandez and Adrienne Rich. Although the college was located in
Harlem, the cultural epicentre of the country’s Black community,
only 9 percent of its daytime students were Black or Puerto Rican.
SEEK was instituted to counteract the college’s racist admissions
policy and course design. But radicalized by the Vietnam War and
Black Liberation, the students wanted to open more than just the
gates to a public college. Screening radical cinema and publishing
political pamphlets, they swiftly turned the campus into a site for
revolutionary politics. In December 1968, addressing a multiracial
assembly of students and activists, Stokely Carmichael offered a
thunderous ‘blueprint for armed struggle against American racism
and capitalism’ that drew inspiration from the raging anticolonial
struggles in the Global South. A decade earlier, this same struggle
had thrust Ahmad into the fold of radical politics. When Israel, the
UK and France invaded Egypt in 1956, massive anticolonial
demonstrations erupted in Lahore. The 15-year-old Ahmad had joined
the demonstrators, and in a burst of youthful impudence, climbed
onto the veranda of a British consulate official’s house, picked up a
chair and smashed it to pieces.

Living under the high noon of ’68 in Harlem, Ahmad translated the
Urdu ghazals of Mirza Ghalib, the last Mughal poet, whose career
was dramatically transformed by the failed anticolonial rebellion of
1857. In that apocalyptic summer, the Britishers had hanged around
27,000 people in Delhi alone. With his friends either dead or
deprived of their patronage and wealth, Ghalib rushed to publish
DastAmbooh, a pro-British diary of the revolt. In his private letters, he
bitterly censured the reign of colonial terror, and continued writing
poems of intense ‘moral loneliness’. Ahmad’s collaborative
translations with Adrienne Rich (a close friend), W.S. Merwin and
William Stafford first appeared in Mahfil, a mimeographed magazine
published at the University of Chicago. Their experiments created a
poetic montage, which valued the play of translating over literal
translations. Ahmad juxtaposed his ‘prose versions’ with ‘notes’
(explanation and general vocabulary) for each couplet, which were
followed by the poets’ own versions of the original ghazal. In this
newfound avant-garde collective, Ahmad listened for the echoes of an
insurgent humanism: ‘Poetry happens wherever men suffer and
posit their humanity against their suffering. Viet Nam, Harlem, the
Delhi of 1857. LeRoi and Ghalib. You hold out your hand and you tell
another person what you are going through: that is the final poem’.

At SEEK, Ahmad became the Interim Director, but was summarily

replaced by a hostile administration in the summer of 1969. He had
refused to support the Dean’s decision not to renew the tenures of
ten Black faculty members (the charges against one included writing
a pamphlet in support of Black workers at a Ford plant). In the fallout
of a campus takeover by students, Ahmad was blacklisted from
teaching in New York. He crossed the Hudson and started teaching at
Rutgers. His translation project, Ghazals of Ghalib, was published the
following year by Columbia University Press. By this time, however,
Ahmad was occupied by developments in Pakistan, where a militant
upsurge of students and urban workers had overthrown Khan’s
dictatorship. The Pakistani left was breathing again. A split in the
National Awami League had birthed the Mazdoor Kisan Party, a
Maoist organization that soon liberated 200 hectares of agrarian land
from feudal landlords in Hashtnagar (Northwest Frontier Province).
He took a leave of absence from Rutgers, abandoned his PhD at
Columbia and returned to Pakistan. In Nothing Human is Alien to Me
(2020), a book-length interview with Vijay Prashad (the best source
on his life and work), Ahmad reveals that in Pakistan he worked
closely with MKP’s leadership ‘at the underground level’. But details
of his political activity remain in short supply.

Recently, the anthropologist Shozab Raza told me that, during his

fieldwork, he picked up an elusive trace of Ahmad’s presence in
South Punjab. Ahmad makes an unexpected appearance in the
personal notebook of Sibghatullah Mazari, a poor tenant and
member of MKP. Around May 1972, Afzal Bangash, the party’s co-
founder, dispatched Ahmad to Bangla Icha, Sibghatullah’s village,
where he taught literary and political writing to young students. Raza
added that his clandestine presence in the village was ‘likely part of a
larger reconnaissance trip, which also included travelling to
Hashtnagar’. Ahmad was also a punctual presence in MKP’s official
organ, the Circular, where he translated Amílcar Cabral and Lê Duẩn,
among many others. Rejecting the stuffy Urdu translations produced
in Moscow, he re-translated Lenin in the diction and syntax found on
Pakistani streets. If in Harlem, Ahmad grappled with the politics of
poetic innovation, now he stressed the poetics of his political
interventions. This came naturally to him. During his college years
in Lahore, Ahmad had sharpened his convictions on the whetstone of
literary style. Novelist Intizar Hussain and the poet Nasir Kasmi had
been among his friends. One day he would study Proust, whose
‘sentences ran to five, ten, fifteen, even twenty clauses’, inconceivable
in Urdu; the next day, he would translate Joyce’s Dubliners with its
‘short, pithy sentences, hard as diamonds, impossible to cut’.
Youthful enthusiasms now bloomed into a desire for new dialectical
idioms.

Ahmad was prolific throughout the 1970s, publishing poems,

translations, literary criticism and political analyses in various Urdu
magazines – not just in Lahore and Karachi, but also across the
border, in Allahabad and Hyderabad. His phenomenal critique of
Baloch separatism appeared in Pakistan Forum in 1973. The
complementary essays, ‘The Agrarian Question of Baluchistan’ and
‘The National Question of Baluchistan’, offered a sweeping account
of the tensions between Balochistan’s linguistic and ethnic history,
and the contradictions afflicting its severely impoverished economy
(founded on inward and outward flows of migrant labour). Though
an uncompromising advocate of the liberation of Bangladesh,
Ahmad rejected calls for an ethnolinguistic revision of Pakistan’s
national borders. A secession, he emphasized, could not resolve the
class contradictions of Baloch society. Instead, it would further
empower elite landowning Sardars, who would readily become neo-
colonial clients of the US or the Soviet Union. As expected, Ahmad’s
contentions enraged Baloch nationalists and their sympathizers,
including the journal’s editor Feroz Ahmed, who rushed to rebut his
friend in a new book. Cracks also developed in Ahmad’s relationship
with MKP. The party saluted the Naxalite insurgency smouldering
across the border. But Ahmad became increasingly critical of this
Maoist adventure, eventually drawing the ire of the party. Writing to
the political theorist Noaman G. Ali, Ahmad revealed that ‘a whole
session of MKP, with perhaps 60 or 70 members present, was once
called in Faisalabad for (him) to be held answerable for this heresy’.

During this period, Ahmad also travelled widely in the Arab world.
Defeat by Israel in the Six Day War and the subsequent decline of
Nasserism had spurred a wave of Islamist reaction. In Egypt, Anwar
Sadat declared Islam the state religion and Shar’ia ‘the main source
of state legislation’. Crisscrossing the peri-urban townships
surrounding Cairo and the small-town interiors of Anatolia, Ahmad
closely studied the unexpected rise of an Islamist bourgeoisie. In
Jordan, he discovered that ‘the (Palestinian) camps were just full of
Quranic recitations, full of Islamic cassettes of various sorts’. In
Lebanon, his comrades in Palestinian liberation organizations
painted similar pictures of Birzeit. Ahmad’s analyses were regularly
translated and published in Rose Al-Yusef, the Egyptian political
weekly, and As-Safir, the leading daily newspaper in Lebanon. He had
already experienced similar tensions in Pakistan, where the MKP had
tried to meld Marxism and Islam into a revolutionary program. Tariq
Ali memorably described it as ‘the party which begins its private and
public meetings with recitations from the Koran and whose
manifesto is liberally spiced with quotations from the same!’ But this
new shift shared little with revolutionary politics. In 1977, Pakistan
also fell to the Islamists. General Zia-ul-Haq implemented martial
law, disbanded Parliament and ordered the Islamization of the entire
country.

Ahmad fled back to the US. A 90-page essay, ‘Political Islam: A

Critique,’ soon appeared in three parts in Pakistan Progressive, as well
as a ‘balance sheet’ of the rebellion against General Zia’s coup in
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Struggling to find a political foothold, by the mid-1980s Ahmad
resolved to move to India, the country of his birth and home to a still
robust national communist movement. But since laws forbade
Pakistani citizens to work in India, he gave up his citizenship and
acquired a US passport. It was against the backdrop of these
transitions that Ahmad wrote the essay which famously rebutted
Fredric Jameson’s claim that ‘all third-world literatures are … national
allegories’. Rejecting ‘Jameson’s haste in totalizing historical
phenomena in terms of binary oppositions’, Ahmad asserted that
capitalism imposed an economic unity on the entire world and that
national cultures evolved on a shared, but uneven, political terrain.
When Ahmad arrived as a fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum
and Library, a new generation of scholars was starting to scrutinize
the explosion of theory in the West. In 1990, Suvir Kaul published
‘The Indian Academic and Resistance to Theory’, a moving essay
about his return to the University of Delhi after finishing PhD at
Cornell, in which he astutely noted how theorists like Paul De Man
and Homi Bhabha ‘co-opt(ed) … the language of resistance into … a
purely linguistic, tropological activity,’ and neglected that theories of
différance are subject to the “invisible hand” that scripts the global
equation of knowledge/power’. Composing In Theory
simultaneously, Ahmad explained that this new theoretical turn
(which took Marxism as just one critical framework among many)
was mediated by the successive eclipse of anticolonial struggles, the
New Left and the socialist bloc. Driven by his own itinerant political
life, Ahmad decreed that theory must be rigorously held ‘accountable’
by the ‘non-academic political field’.

Just three months after the publication of In Theory, a right-wing

Hindu mob demolished the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh,
sparking a blaze of anti-Muslim pogroms across India. In the early
1950s, the growing threat of the Hindu right had forced Ahmad’s
family of farmers to migrate from the present-day Uttar Pradesh to
Pakistan (his earliest memories included his uncle hoisting the
Indian flag on the morning of independence and imbibing
progressive Urdu fiction and poetry in a village that lacked electricity
and a school). Four decades later, its rise was complete. As In Theory
occasioned fiery debates in the Anglo-American academy, Ahmad’s
own career now took a sharp turn. In a series of critical essays, later
collected in The Lineages of the Present and On Communalism and
Globalization, Ahmad dissected the precipitous decline of Indian
democracy. Never afraid of challenging popular consensus, Ahmad
resolved that there was no contradiction between liberal institutions
and the Hindu right. The BJP had no need to suspend liberal
democracy because it had already captured its institutions from the
inside – judiciary, universities, media, bureaucracy and military.
Legitimized by these same institutions, it could freely orchestrate
‘perpetual low-intensity violence’ against Dalits and Muslims. But the
left, Ahmad suggested, could not replicate this strategy. The ‘liberal-
democratic state apparatus’ is designed to stabilize the capitalist
order. It might allow for limited welfare reforms in individual states
like Kerala, but it ‘will never permit the communist Left to
implement its programme’ on a national level. ‘Every country gets the
fascism it deserves,’ was his grim forecast.

Ahmad’s arrival in India also radically transformed his role as an

intellectual. While in Pakistan he had lived underground with MKP
and published in small Arabic and Urdu magazines (many of them
lost to us), now he became a fellow traveller of the Communist Party
of India (Marxist), taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jamia
Milia Islamia, and wrote for India’s prominent Anglophone
magazines. In Frontline, Ahmad published over 80 essays, including
celebrated long-form coverage of the US invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq (collected in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Imperialism of our
Times). In Newsclick, he tracked the geopolitical crises of late
capitalism: the French bombardment of northern Mali, the fallout of
the Crimean referendum, among others. When the BJP came to
power in 2014, Ahmad’s visa was not renewed. Aged 75, he was again
forced to relocate to the US – now as the Chancellor’s Professor of
Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, ironically a wellspring of the
same theoretical turn that Ahmad had publicly censured.

When In Theory was first published, Partha Chatterjee had charged

Ahmad with ‘dissembling’, querying why the book ‘should conceal so
strenuously, in its jacket, preliminary pages and text, the fact that the
author has spent the overwhelming part of his career studying and
teaching in the ‘metropolitan academy’”. But looking back, what is
bothersome is not the alleged suppression of Ahmad’s academic
career, but rather that of his career outside the academy. Why do we
know so little about the political ebbs and flows of Ahmad’s life? Or
more broadly, why do we know so little about the lives of those
countless organizers and activists, autodidacts and litterateurs, who
live and write in the postcolonial periphery? Why does their work
rarely travel to the shores of the metropolitan academy? And who is
responsible for this ‘concealing’?

Read on: Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Reconciling Derrida’, NLR I/208.