Noted Marxist thinker Aijaz Ahmad passed away on 9 March in Irvine, California. He leaves behind a rich intellectual tradition. An Urdu writer and literary critic, Aijaz Ahmad mounted a robust defence of the Marxist method against post-Marxist, postmodern and post-structuralist theories. His In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, first published in 1992, emerged as a Marxist classic, inspiring scholars across the globe and providing them with the intellectual framework to challenge the various “post” ideologies sweeping academia. His contributions were all the more significant given that some of his most influential works were written in the late 1980s and early 1990s, at a time when there was concerted intellectual and political attempt to debunk Marxist thought. It is a mark of the eloquence of his intellectual contributions that In Theory led to a full issue of the journal Public Culture, where researchers across the globe responded to his key arguments.

While he wrote on new forms of imperialism taking root in the post Cold War era, he also reminded us of crucial social and political processes unique to India. In the 1990s, two transformative processes – liberalisation and Hindutva’s communal politics – were rearing their ugly heads. Aijaz recognised the devastation that these processes could wreck on Indian society and politics.

Moreover, for him, ‘Marxism’, Marxist theory and therefore Marxist practice could never be static. Theory would have to evolve to explain new developments, new contradictions. He carried forward what he saw as limitations in Marx’s ideas. He pushed himself and urged others to use the Marxist method to build a more holistic understanding and criticism of colonialism, patriarchy, racism and ecological destruction caused by ‘development’.  Marxism had to engage with newer questions, he argued, and one had to address new realities such as serious ecological damage caused by contemporary models of development.  

Aijaz Ahmad new saw Marxism as a mere intellectual exercise. For him, the theorist’s job was to understand, explain and assist in the process of radical social transformation. He was deeply sceptical of academics who positioned themselves as apolitical, and who remained disinterested in engaging with raging questions of the day.

As we bid adieu to an influential Marxist theorist, let us revisit In Theory. Published below is an excerpt from the book, reflecting on what the iconic Marxist writer DD Kosambi can offer modern Indian scholarship.   

DD Kosambi As A Source Of Inspiration

It is only by submitting• the teaching of English Literature to the more crucial and comparatist discipline of Historical and Cultural Studies, and by connect- ing the knowledge of that literature with literatures of our own, that we can begin to break that colonial grid and to liberate the teacher of English from a colonially determined, subordinated and parasitic existence. In the process, we might learn a thing or two about 'Indian Literature' as well.

In all this, the source of inspiration and the very model of scholarly rectitude for me remains the figure of the late Professor Kosambi. As a polyglot scholar and a distinguished scientist who held the Chair of Mathematics at the Tara Institute of Fundamental Research for sixteen years, one whose very last book was on Prime Numbers, Kosambi's exacting and irreverent mind wandered over large areas of knowledge - Genetics, Statistics, Numismatics, Archaeology, Prehistory - but his main gift to those of us who do nor know much about the physical and mathematical sciences came in the shape of his textual criticism, editions and interpretation of some key classical texts, which is fully reflected in his English writing as well; his lucid, firm, delightfully polemical readings of crucial and hallowed texts, including the Bhagavad-Gita itself; and, above all, his revamping of the whole history of Ancient India, the study of which relies considerably- alongside other kinds of written documents, of course - upon what we loosely call 'literature', even though he himself held emphatically that no evidence about the ancient period drawn from writing could be taken entirely for granted unless it was corroborated with material evidence drawn from archaeology, numismatics, and so on.  

What one finds so liberating in Kosambi is definitely the combination: the solidity of scholarship on the one hand; the absolute determination, on the other, to ground all sorts of texts- whether books or coins or customs or stones - in the material history of our people and in the conflicts that history engendered, beyond all spirituality and all humbug. Equally liberating is the sense of the man as it saturates the very tone and texture of his writing: at once a physical scientist and a Sanskritist, crisscrossing between the scholarly derail and the political co-ordinates of that scholar-ship, thoughtful, intemperate, and so uncompromising both in his Marxism and in his other kinds of scholarship as to have rebuked S. A. Dange publicly, in those days, for the latter's much-too-widely-read inaccuracies about Ancient India.  And his advice, reflected fully in his scholarship: no usable knowledge of India is possible without actually looking at the people who inhabit this land and then working across the boundaries of the constituted academic disciplines. One does not always agree with Kosambi, either in his conclusions or in his points of departure; there are occasions, in fact, when one feels as quarrelsome towards him as he frequently does towards others. Bur he is to my mind, generically, what all literary critics, theorists, and so on, in India today should aspire to be.

I invoke the name of Kosambi here nor merely to make explicit my own debt, which is incalculable, nor simply to emphasize the obvious fact that the discipline of History in India is much more advanced than Literary Studies and can therefore teach us much, but also to point to a methodological achievement which belongs to him even more than to any other in the distinguished tradition of Marxist historiography in India. For Kosambi was able to produce in a single sweep both a narrative of the empirical facts of Ancient India and the theoretical position, the very organic principle of narrativization, from which that narrative was to be assembled. He knew just as thoroughly the coins and the crops and the stones which he studied as he knew his Marxism, and he gave us, without compromising the one or the other, a Marxism that was appropriate to those coins, those crops, those stones. So appropriate was the method to the evidence, so intimate the link between study and political purpose, that the products of his study were always seamless. He never ranted against Orientalism, for example, even acknowledged the debts that deserved acknowledgement, but the knowledge he himself produced was so radically different, so sufficient for part of the same terrain, that he simply displaced those Orientalist ways of knowing our own ancient past. As we engage in the study of 'Indian Literature', the insufficiencies we grapple with are of both the empirical and the theoretical kinds. Even more than the search for more texts and more coherent narratives of their production, we need far greater clarity about the theoretical methods and political purposes of our reading. We need not only to write but also to rewrite; nor only to discover bur also to displace, as Kosambi did, in a single sweep.