WASHINGTON: “Not all, but only a few, are revealed in the rose and the tulip. What face those must have been that have gone under the dust,” writes Aijaz Ahmad, while translating one of Ghalib’s ghazals.

Prof Ahmad, a South Asian scholar who influenced liberal minds across South Asia and beyond, died at his home in California on March 9. He was 81.

Mr Ahmad was born in Muzaffarnagar, India, in 1941. He migrated to Pakistan with his parents after partition.

He completed his education in Pakistan and after doing Masters in English Literature in Lahore, came to the United States for further studies.

After completing his education, Mr Ahmad taught comparative literature at various universities across the world, including the University of California, Irvine, where he was working at the time of his death, and Jawaharlal University, New Delhi.

“He was one of three Ahmads attached with the Pakistan Forum,” a left-leaning political journal,” said Dr Manzur Ejaz, a Virginia-based Pakistani scholar and writer. The other two were Dr Eqbal Ahmad and Dr Feroze Ahmad.

The three Ahmads were leading Marxist intellectuals from Pakistan who made a great contribution to spreading liberal views in South Asia and beyond. Now all have passed away.

“Prof Ahmad was basically a man of literature like other leftist intellectuals from South Asia who came to Marxism through literature,” said Dr Ejaz, who included another South Asian intellectual Sajjad Zaheer among such scholars.

Dr Ejaz recalled that to mark his attachment to Lahore, Mr Ahmad had named one of his daughters after the river Ravi.

In an obituary he wrote this week, one of Prof Ahmad’s admirers, Vijay Prashad, also noted that much of his studies took place “in the cafés and in the cells of political organisations in Lahore”. In these cafés, “Aijaz met the finest minds of Urdu literature, who schooled him in both lyric and politics”. He also learned Marxism in these informal institutions “that gripped him for the rest of his life”, Mr Prashad added.

Prof Ahmad authored numerous books on Marxist philosophy, imperialism and on current affairs. His most popular works include: In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literature (1992), Ghazals of Ghalib (1995), Lineages of the present: Ideological and Political Genealogies of Contemporary South Asia (2001), and Iraq, Afghanistan and the Imperialism of our time (2004).”

A collection of his interviews, Nothing Human is Alien to Me, was published last year.

In one of his interviews on the rise of majoritarianism, Prof Ahmad argued that “the idea of secularism is very important” but “you have to have a genuinely socialist society before this idea can be realised materially”.

“In present-day India, any true realisation of this idea is impossible. We know how poisonous majoritarianism is, but we often forget that liberalism has always betrayed secularism and it always will,” he added.

Published in Dawn, March 12th, 2022