Farewell Imtiaz Saab. In your passing away I have lost a dear friend and mentor. I have also lost the opportunity to host you in Goa. The thought of having you as my guest gave me immense pleasure over the years and I am sad that fate decided otherwise. Our calendars could never be aligned. In the next life, Sir, you will start with a credit.
It is inadequate to describe Professor Imtiaz Ahmad, as many have sincerely done, as an insightful sociologist, a secular academic, a pioneering scholar of Indian Islam, and a caring teacher. These are all correct descriptions, but they do not say enough. They do not reveal the mind of the man and his life force. It is the combination of mind and spirit which made him special, a man of the times who, in seminars and classes, would describe, with a calm tone and an enigmatic smile, the transformative processes of power in Indian society and the internal dynamics of its communities. There would be no zealousness of the idealogue. It is hence wrong to see him primarily as a scholar of Islam in India or as a sociologist studying caste among the Muslims because of his seminal work Caste and Social Stratification Among Muslims in India. He was first and foremost a scholar interested in the play of power in society and what it was doing to communities, institutions, and democratic processes in India and South Asia.
Secularism and communalism
Imtiaz Saab had an interdisciplinary temperament. The conventional categories of political sociologist, sociologist of religion, democratic theorist, and contemporary historian do him no justice for he was, most of all, a perceptive mind who understood the times. India and its dynamics fascinated him. This helped him formulate research questions in a way that was ahead of his times. Here are four examples.
In an essay long forgotten, he described Indian democracy as a “secular state in a communal society”. The description was pithy, and while I liked its elegance, it took me years to fully understand its depth. You could read into it the post-colonial project of a secular state trying to transform a communal society into a secular society. In the process, it encountered massive hurdles, but it remains still a necessary exercise since secularism is the only way for a plural nation, like India, to become a modern state. You could also see the reverse of a communal society winning the battle and instead transforming a secular state, which superficially has the structure of modernity, into a communal one, as we have now sadly discovered. Imtiaz Saab was ahead of his times.
The second insightful formulation was his emphasis on “lived Islam”. Understanding Indian Islam, he argued, would not come by looking at scriptures, and the interpretations and fatwas of the Ulema, but by studying its everyday practices, the adjustments and compromises that practising Muslims make. Their phenomenological world was the place to look. In this formulation, Imtiaz Saab shifted the gaze to the lived world of Islam in India, and by extension, to that of any religious community. Communities are diverse. They adjust to the demands of context and location. Caste intrudes, as does discrimination and regional differences. His work set the baseline for empirical research on Indian Islam.
The third example comes from the classroom. I was fortunate to have been his student. He taught us a course in Political Sociology. Being a sociologist among political scientists, he was more attracted to Max Weber than to Karl Marx, in a department dominated by Marxists. He introduced us to issues of caste in Indian politics and to analysts such as Rajni Kothari and D.L. Sheth. This was a measure of his openness, to present in the 1970s, when it was near heresy, Weber against Marx. He asked me to review Kothari’s Politics in India a few years after it was published. I did not know then that it would grow into a path-breaking text. The orthodoxy that ruled the department saw it as ‘Behaviouralist’ or, at best, one that drew on ‘Systems Analyses’. Both approaches were considered no-no. They were regarded as apologies for capitalism. I struggled through my review, too fearful to appreciate it fully and too fearful to criticise it. I submitted a rather shoddy review. He, however, gave me a decent grade not for the substance of what I had said but for the intellectual struggle that he saw congealed in my text.
Studying democracy
The last illustration comes from the method he adopted to study Indian democracy. Imtiaz Saab was aptly described as an empiricist, given his proclivity to emphasise lived Islam, but that would be telling only half the story. He moved between the higher abstractions of theory and the messy terrain of the empirical world, finding in the latter confirmation of the abstractions of the former. This was for him a continual process. He did not impose theory; he presented it with evidence. He got theory and empirical data to converse. That is what made him a brilliant social scientist. India needs more such critical scholars who rise above their ideological fixations.
But more than what he taught me, I am indebted to him for his generosity. I was awarded a Government of India scholarship to study abroad. I needed two guarantors to sign the undertaking that was required. Being from Goa I knew no one in Delhi who would be willing to sign the bond which required the guarantor to confirm, in the event I did not return to India, that they would pay back to the government what was spent. I asked him what to do. He asked for the form and signed.
