Nothing Human is Alien to Me: Not a Book Review by Gayatri Balu

Certain books glide into you. It stays there, refusing to leave, and reorients you at least in bits. This is about one such reading experience. Books speak to the location of the reader. I read Nothing Human is Alien to Me at a stage in an academic’s life quite often termed as an ‘early career researcher’, called so purely from a careerist gaze. Decent employment is scarce. One is observing an intimidating chase for citations, indexes, and grants. And quite often thinks ‘is it late already?’ to arrive at a certain academic destiny. Then there is the reality of the real purpose of rooted intellectual work. These politically turbulent times are marked by a general lack of intellectual commitment from university-educated scholars toward transformative politics. One is already put off by the hollowness and self-indulgence of much of the academic world one has experienced. Quite often straying through reluctant paths of compulsions and necessities not being able to make a complete sense of what it means to read, think and write. Then a conversational book like Nothing Human is Alien to Me comes your way breaking down the doing of intellectual work, its meanings, and its urgency.

Nothing Human is Alien to Me is Aijaz Ahmed (AA) in conversation with Vijay Prashad. It traverses through the political and intellectual journeys of AA, from Ghalib to Gramsci, from leaving India to returning, from the post-isms to imperialism, from religion to fascism, the book travels braided paths to understand the here and now, all of these rooted in the Marxist Method. As AA puts it in the last part of the book (p 200), his ‘project’ was an attempt to engage with the history of the present in different ways at different levels.

As suggested in the title, this short write-up is not a book review. I pick only one aspect of the book which is in a way running theme in the conversations-on being a scholar, a thinker. I seek to explore the answers the book has for the vagaries of reluctant academics but politically passionate scholars.

If you are swimming in/against the tide to find that academic focus which already is not someone else’s focus, you have some lessons here. AA pursued a breadth of interest all throughout his life traversing many worlds of knowledge and aesthetics, questioning the sharp line of demarcation between the Humanities and the Social Sciences, calling for unity of ‘poetics and pragmatics – conceptual knowledge and practical knowledge.’ He says, ‘ I wanted to read what is important, not caring whether it was from one academic discipline or another’ (p.24).

Infact AA places the tryst of finding a narrow speciality and becoming an expert in that narrow speciality as something that decimates critical thinking. This search for an expert is cultured by the class network of academics based in universities, often following the US path. ‘I was never an academic in that sense. I have never published a single article in a refereed journal,’ (p.86) he says. AA makes a distinction between a university-educated expert and an intellectual, an academic specialist and a general thinker. The quest has to be a thinker and an intellectual.

Being a thinker demands thorough and thick engagement in a wide range of areas, particularly with ones with differences. A small part of the conversation that shows the depth of AA’s engagement is reproduced here:
‘I read a lot of people whose work I deeply dislike, whose politics I deeply dislike, the politics that generates that work I deeply dislike. But I nonetheless read them systematically. Not all that they are saying are wrong. And even if you are going to oppose someone you need to know in some detail what they think and why they think what they think. I also believe that there has been much in Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory that is of much value. I could name any number of their articles from which I have learned. My disagreement with them is not on this or that piece of writing but on the fundamentals. If I reject any of their writings it will always be on the fundamental standpoint that governs that piece of writing.’(p.96)

The respectful disagreement is seen in his discussions on engagements with Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Talal Asad and many others, whose works he has disagreed on at a fundamental level. However, again drawing on the US example AA highlights how the US ‘powerful star system of universities’ debating ‘iconic figures’ often leads to the trivialisation of one’s thought. There is an important lesson here which AA offers. Be fearless in debating, in criticising even if at the cost of attribution of trivialisation or in the Indian context a particular branding. However, the engagement should be real. Not ridiculing approaches different from you, a pattern that is rampant in the ‘just-enough-read’ lot of scholars. It is important to map and track where the difference lies. As scholars, one should do the hard work for that in-depth engagement.

Now the question of method. The writings of AA are varied, crossing boundaries of regionalities, across time. The Method, the historical analysis and engagement with the concrete conditions remain. There is a historical flow in narrations in the book, particularly when discussing the development of Post Colonialial studies, Subaltern Studies and Post Modernism. All of this is laid out in the material contexts of the emergence of these discourses, making these conversations so accessible to the reading public. Having someone explain these interconnections in such a simplistic manner like a story makes you miss a teacher you never had. Sudhanva Deshpande towards the end of the conversation forefront and anchors the point of how Aijaz Ahmad through his writings became a teacher demonstrating a method, the dialectical method.

How is this continuous, relentless work possible? For AA having a political home was important. One’s work is sharpened by the circumstances, by the conditions of that political home. For AA it has been a cycle of migrations and exiles. AA returned to India in 1985, ‘ I was looking for a political home because I no longer had one,’ the return which he says was also a major learning curve for him. The journey of the thinker AA is a reflection of this journey. He lived and wrote on the conditions available to him.

To conclude, again quoting from the book
‘…there is no such thing as the final understanding beyond which one need not go. One must always return to take another look, to think anew, reach a deeper understanding.’ (p 201)

So that is it. Let us learn to think.

Gayatri Balu completed her PhD from Centre for Womens Studies in JNU and currently working as a researcher at Society for Social and Economic Research (SSER), New Delhi.

This review originally appeared in Student Struggle.