Eqbal Ahmad
My review of The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad has appeared in the Nation.
Among anticolonial intellectuals, Pakistani scholar and activist Eqbal Ahmad (1933-99), who toward the end of his life spent fifteen years teaching at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, holds a special place. He never published a classic text on the order of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth or Edward Said’s Orientalism, nor did he achieve anything like fame. (The closest he came was a passing notoriety during the Nixon era, when he was indicted on charges of conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger.) Yet everyone who was someone in the vast but–in the West–obscure world of Third World radicalism knew Ahmad, and even his adversaries had a grudging respect for him. As much as Said, he was a mentor to a generation of thinkers, mostly South Asian, who have been active in protest struggles in the West as well as on the subcontinent.
Within a few miles of Ahmad’s birthplace in the Indian state of Bihar stands the mausoleum of Sher Shah Suri, the sixteenth-century ruler who built the Grand Trunk Road across the giant spread of the subcontinent. In a BBC documentary called Stories My Country Told Me, Ahmad, traveling in a car across that great unifying marker in the region, cites Sher Shah’s remark that “roads are the carriers of civilization.” Ahmad’s work as a writer and activist might be said to have performed the same function. It is not only the power but also the wide range of his sympathies that astonish. He was a committed engineer of emancipation, building imaginative roads, linking issues across continents.
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