Saghir Ahmad (1936 – 1971)

Saghir Ahmad with his brother Eqbal and an unidentified woman. Via SAADA.

I cherish a poignant memory of Rashid’s responses to death. In 1971, my younger brother, a personal friend and political comrade, was killed in an accident. At the funeral in Vancouver, I was surprised by a Palestinian delegation bearing flowers and condolences from the PLO. Rashid had a hand in this thoughtful gesture. Months later, when I saw him in New York, Rashid said: "Tell me about Saghir Ahmad. I want to learn from him."

— Eqbal Ahmad, remembering Rashid Hussein.¹ 

Saghir Ahmad was born in Bihar eighty-five years ago and died, too young, fifty years ago, in British Columbia. Pakistan Forum, a journal Saghir was closely involved with, concluded in their obituary that “in many ways, Saghir’s life symbolizes the struggle of the members of colonized intelligentsia who constantly strive for the decolonization of their minds.” In a recent interview, Mohammad Qadeer, formerly an associate editor of the journal, comments that Saghir’s transformation into a socialist was occasioned by his move to the United States, “with his brother’s influence and after coming to America, he became more political.”³

In the obituary I reproduce below, the anti-imperialist anthropologist Kathleen Gough summarized Ahmad’s work and traced his intellectual itinerary as he moved from the Anglo-American social anthropology he was trained in at Michigan State, to the more critical Marxism that charaecterizes his later work. Gough was Ahmad’s colleague at Simon Fraser University’s Political Science, Sociology, and Anthropology (PSA) department. As Gough recounts briefly, Ahmad arrived on campus amid a serious struggle over the university that his department was deeply enmeshed in. 

The faculty and students of the PSA had resolved in 1969, like those involved with Lumumba-Zapata College at UCSD at around the same time, to develop a radically different way of organizing research and teaching in the university. The department was restructured around three key principles: first, the task of democratizing the university, wherein staff, faculty, and students all had a say in the goings on of the department, including decisions over tenure; second, a commitment to a critical social scientific practice, attuned to a “humane social order” not the needs of governments and corporations; and third, an obligation to integrate their research with the political efforts of oppressed communities beyond the university in British Columbia. Simon Fraser’s administration, however, was not keen on these radical ideas, refusing to acknowledge, among other things, the department’s tenure decisions. Eight faculty members, including Saghir Ahmad, were suspended and later dismissed in the upheaval. In May 1971, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), censured Simon Fraser for its actions, a censure which would last until 1977.⁴    

The department was an important site for Ahmad’s transformation as a scholar. Mordecia Benjamin, the dismissed chair of the PSA, wrote in 1970 that the department aimed to abandon the disciplines and “inter-disciplines,” seeking instead to focus their intellectual efforts at understanding “the process of capitalism, imperialism and revolution.”⁵ Lectures and seminars were convened to consider how the world functioned under capitalism and how it might be changed. Among those invited were Harry Magdoff, Ernest Mandel, Eric Wolf, William Hinton, Mary Oppenheimer, Robert Fitch, Grace Lee and James Boggs, Herbert Marcuse, and Marvin Harris.

Beyond the PSA, Simon Fraser was a site of radical political activity in general, “Berkeley North,” in one scholar’s phrase.⁶ Saghir’s partner at the time of his untimely death, Anne Roberts, describes her involvement in the Women’s Caucus on campus: “These weren’t armchair Marxists: By the time I joined, they were already running illegal abortion clinics, organizing workshops on working women, and setting up child care co-ops. It seemed as if the revolution had begun.”⁷ Although Ahmad’s time at Simon Fraser was cut short, first by the actions of the administration and then by his tragic death, he seemed to have left an important mark on those with whom he studied and thought. Simon Fraser’s student newspaper The Peak, ran an obituary of Ahmad by Paul Mier, who recounted his teacher’s profound impact on his life and lamented his loss. “The world is a darker place for a lot of us and a harder place for all of us. A man who did our fighting and took on our common burden is gone… But the struggle that he lived for is still going on.”⁸ 

In addition to Gough’s obituary, I have also posted a bibliography of Ahmad’s work below, including PDFs when possible.

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¹Kamal Boullata and Mirene Ghossein, eds., The World of Rashid Hussein, a Palestinian Poet in Exile (Detroit: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1979), 59.

²“Obituary: Saghir Ahmad,” Pakistan Forum 2:1 (October, 1971), 2.

³Shozab Raza, “Theorizing Pakistan in Diaspora: The Pakistan Forum,” Jamhoor (July 1, 2019). https://www.jamhoor.org/read/2019/7/1/theorizing-pakistan-in-diaspora-the-pakistan-forum The interview offers rich insights into the political and intellectual debates that animated the journal.

⁴John Cleavland, “SIXTIES STUDENTS: Simon Fraser (6): The PSA Strike,” leftactivist.com (September 6, 2019), https://leftactivist.com/blog/sixties-students-simon-fraser-6-the-psa-strike

⁵ Mordecia Benjamin, “A Taste of Better Things,” The Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology 1:3 (1970), 37-54. See also Kathleen Gough's account, “The Struggle at Simon Fraser University,” Monthly Review 22:1 (1970), 31-45.

⁶ John Cleavland, “‘Berkeley North’: Why Simon Fraser Had the Strongest 1960s Student Power Movement,” in M. Athena Palaeologue, ed., The Sixties in Canada: A Turbulent and Creative Decade (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2009), 193-232. Undoubtedly, the most significant mobilization of radical students was the 1969 "Sir George Williams Affair" in Montreal. See chapter 7 of David Austin, Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex and Security in Sixties Montreal (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2013).  

⁷ Anne Roberts, “Vancouver Women's Caucus: A Women's Liberation History Project,” https://www.vancouverwomenscaucus.ca/herstory/personal-memories/anne-roberts/

⁸ Paul Meir, “Saghir Ahmad,” The Peak 18:11 (July 14, 1971), 12.

 

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Kathleen Gough, “Saghir Ahmad,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 4:1 (Winter 1971), 72-76. 

 

Following Yahya Khan's invasion of East Pakistan on March 25th of this year, a small number of West Pakistani intellectuals living in North America publicly condemned the brutal massacres. Prominent among them were Saghir and Eqbal Ahmad (brothers), Feroz Ahmed, and Aijaz Ahmed, all university teachers and writers. These men wrote open letters to their government and articles on BangIa Desh, demonstrated, and gave media interviews, braving possible reprisals. Together with friends from East Bengal, they tried to inform North Americans about the conditions of the people and the character of the contending forces in BangIa Desh, and to oppose the U.S. contribution to that slaughter. 

Saghir Ahmad's accidental death by drowning in North Vancouver, British Columbia on July 7th is a serious loss to radical social science, to the Pakistani and Canadian socialist movements, and to the anti-war movement in North America. At 35, he was nearing the height of his intellectual powers and his capacity for political work. A sociologist and anthropologist, he wrote on class structure and class struggle in West Pakistan, on the Thuggee guerrilla movement in Northern India in the nineteenth century, on imperialism and revolutionary struggle in South and Southeast Asia, and on the roles of radical social scientists. At the time of his death he was a new editor of Pakistan Forum and was about to visit refugee camps in India and to co-author a book on BangIa Desh. 

Saghir was born into an arena of suffering and struggle and struggled all his life. A few weeks after his birth, his father, a landowner of an aristocratic Malik family in Bihar, India, was assassinated in reprisal for his support of land reform. When he was ten, the impending partition of India and Pakistan made Saghir witness to bloody attacks on the Muslim community of Bihar in which many of his friends and half his kinsfolk were killed. Shortly afterwards, he followed his elder brothers to Lahore in West Pakistan. At Forman Christian College in Lahore and later at the University of the Punjab, where he obtained his M.A. degree in 1958, he took part in the radical student movement and read the Marxist classics. He moved to America in 1961, received his doctorate from Michigan State University in 1967, and was subsequently employed at Oakland University in Michigan and at the University of Alberta and Simon Fraser University in Canada. In 1965 Saghir returned to Pakistan to study a village in Sarghoda District of the Punjab, where he became deeply immersed in the lives of the peasantry. 

Saghir's intellectual work is the work of a man at war with a part of himself and with his colonial environment, yet a man who, kindly, tolerant and truthful, tries to distort nothing and to give each fellow human his due. 

In the opening editorial of Pakistan Forum (October-November 1970), Eqbal Ahamd wrote: With few exceptions, we have failed in our primary intellectual responsibility of carrying out a meaningful debate on the opportunities for social and economic transformation, definition of national goals, and requisites for creating a just balanced and democratic society. Our minds and our souls, like our economic, political and social institutions await decolonization. Saghir Ahmad's life and work over the past decade offer a striking instance of this process of decolonization of the mind and soul. 

As a doctoral student in America in the early 1960’s, Saghir necessarily became steeped in structural-functional and other liberal social science approaches. His early work uses the best of such approaches to good advantage, yet from the first he is dissatisfied and looks for something beyond them. In his doctoral thesis, Class and Power in a Punjab Village (1967) the authorities he quotes and whose theories he utilizes include, for example, Weber, the Indianist scholars Mangalam, Barth, Marriott, Mayer, Bailey and Nicholas -- and Marx. Saghir went to the Punjabi village in order to examine the diffusion of power and wealth which had supposedly been brought about by Pakistan's laws of 1959 regarding land reform and Basic Democracies. He found such diffusion virtually non-existent and says so flatly at the beginning of his thesis, contradicting the received wisdom of that date. Instead of permitting a diffusion of power through elections, landlords had put up their managers and front-men as candidates. In order to by-pass the land reforms, they had converted some land from tenant farms to farming of cash crops with wage labor, thus impoverishing sections of the peasants and artisans. Saghir took as his central theme the relation between the village’s economic and political systems, making use of insights from British social anthropology into factional competition in village politics. His main argument is, however, the Marxist one that political structure and social stratification are fundamentally determined by modes and relations of production, and he shows this convincingly, although in places a trifle mechanically. This work is especially valuable in providing an early analysis of the real impact of land reform legislation in Pakistan, along with a rare explication of the processes and relations of village production. 

In later articles Saghir deepens his understanding of the Punjabi village, gradually abandoning functionalist approaches in favor of his own adaptations of Marxist analysis and attacking head-on the more pernicious doctrines coming out of Western research in Third World countries. In "Should Pakistan Seek Modernization?", written in 1967, he shows that Western concepts of modernization are a euphemism for the spread of capitalist relations and, more recently, of American dominance, which in Pakistan he found were perpetuating and indeed deepening the poverty of villagers. He shows that Punjabi village society is already "modern" in that social stratification is a matter of economic class more than of caste or kinship groups, political behavior is largely motivated by economic considerations, and the baneful influence of bureaucracy is pervasive. The peasants, moreover, are fully "rational" in Weber's sense. Their disinclination for economic changes introduced by the landlords arises not from superstition or blind custom but from prudent collective and individual self-interest, since it is the landlords and not the peasants who reap the profits from these changes. Thus in spite (or indeed, in part, because) of their "modernization", the peasants remain poor, illiterate and largely apathetic. These evils are in fact, Saghir argues, "a creation of the elites of the society", and "categorization of the villagers as traditional provides a rationale for their continued exploitation." His critique of "modernization" in this paper and in "The Economics of Agricultural Production" (1968) independently takes a similar course to that in the seminal work by Andre Gunder Frank in 1967. Together, these articles explode much of the mythology of American "economic development and cultural change" studies of the preceding decade. 

In 1968-69 Saghir moved from debunking current theories of development, and from an earlier tendency toward economic determinism, into concern with the contradictions inherent in social relations and with the sources of various kinds of revolt or revolution and their effects on social change. He read Marx, and also Mao Tse-tung, more extensively that year. His interest in the historical roots of revolt in South Asia became focused in research on the nineteenth century Thuggees. Examining the social composition, modes of recruitment and operations of these multi-caste, egalitarian rebel communities, Saghir concluded that they were not outcaste criminal elements, as they had been depicted in the British literature, but religiously sanctioned guerrilla movements, armed against the rulers and profiteers of an unjust social order and working with the support of large sections of the common people. 

 

"Islam and Pakistani Peasants", written in 1970, returns to the Punjabi village, but with a new perspective. Influenced by Eric Wolf's work on peasants as well as by Mao, Saghir now probes the conflicts of interest, obligation and emotional experience imposed on peasants by their relations to their kinsfolk and the local community, to landlords and bureaucrats, and to the literate urban society. He shows how, with the help of local religious leaders, the peasants try to handle and live with these contradictions through beliefs and practices specific to village Islam. The “Little Tradition” of Redfield and his associates comes to life in terms of particular conflicts, obligations, and privations suffered by the peasantry. For while examining major differences between the “Great Tradition” of the wealthy and the intellectuals and the Little Tradition of the peasants, Saghir sees that "the roots of such differences are to be found in their historical and material conditions of life." Islam as practised and believed by the peasants is thus not merely a product of parochialization or a less systematized and less reflective filtering down of elements of the Great Tradition, nor is it solely an opiate of the masses or a prop for landlordism. It includes, on the one hand, a concept of the need to submit to a hard fate – a fate which is in fact imposed on the peasants by landlords and bureaucrats. On the other hand, however, the peasants believe that it is acceptable to fail in formal religious duties or to cheat or steal from the upper classes, provided that one is just and compassionate within the village community. Such a religious tradition which combines the contradictory demands of the State and the landlords with those of the peasant household community, cannot be reconciled with the Islam prevalent among the upper classes or the intellectuals who promulgate the Great Tradition. For these classes, whether consciously or unconsciously, are exploiters. Their beliefs and practices therefore focus around other kinds of contradictions, such as the need to combine exploitation with charity. In West Pakistani villages in 1965., Saghir found that Islam was above all a vision to which the peasant aspired but which exploitation prevented him from attaining: a vision “of human dignity and pride, of social and economic justice, of a community of men based on honesty and love for one another.” 

Saghir's last paper on the peasants, published in this issue, wrestles again with problems stemming from the changing character of their class structure. The strengths of this article include his effort to integrate the large numbers of artisans and other service groups of the Punjab's canal colony region into a unitary class structure with the peasants. Second, he recognizes the growth of landless labor, unemployment, and impoverishment resulting from land reforms, new techniques of production, and cash crop farming. Third, he perceives the varying cultural and psychological attributes of the rural classes and the signs of emerging class solidarity between poor peasants and impoverished artisans. Fourth, he explores further the contradictions inherent in modern relations among the classes, instanced by the insecurity of the middle peasant, who in good times seeks identification with the rich peasants, but in bad times tends to rebel. Finally, in this paper Saghir's own decolonization and increasingly revolutionary awareness appear in the meaning that “modernization” has acquired for him. It is now no longer the spread of western economy and culture; rather, in Barrington Moore’s words, “the process of modernization ... culminates ...with peasant revolutions that succeed.” Consequently, whereas in his doctoral thesis Saghir still thought that the village influential (chiefly middle peasants) "could be more fully utilized in local development programs," now he looks to the poor peasants and the landless laborers as forces for revolutionary change. While he was writing this paper the massive carnage in BangIa Desh and the resistance being organized against it increased Saghir's sense of urgency and his hopes for peasant revolutionary struggle. 

Over the past year, the political persecution to which Saghir was subjected at Simon Fraser University, followed by the crisis in Pakistan, prevented him from returning to research in his own country. Instead, he turned part of his energy to broader Third World problems and to Canadian society, in a spate of journal and newspaper articles. Two are most noteworthy. One is a brilliant demolition of western theories of Third World overpopulation, which demonstrates (to me, conclusively) that "population is not the cause of poverty, rather it is poverty and the irrational structuring of society which cause the problem of population.” The other article is an assault on racism, poverty, and imperialism in Canada and on the failure of Canadain social scientists to attack these conditions.⁹ In these papers Saghir is angry yet incisive. His style gathers speed and color; powered by indignation against his own and others' suffering from racism and political persecution, he writes from both head and heart. 

The values that Saghir found among the peasants of West Pakistan, and received from his own family, guided him in the many settings through which he moved or into which he was driven. Wherever he lived Saghir moved people by his passionate humanity. When happy among friends or engaged in collective struggle, he shed a joyous radiance; when provoked, a fiery anger. Although his main loyalty was perhaps always to Pakistan, he was an internationalist who rooted himself in each local situation, making the sufferings of the people his suffering, and their struggles for justice his own. 

 

Two recent examples illustrate conflicts induced in Saghir by struggles going on in his environment, and the honor with which he surmounted them. In September 1969, after being denied a renewal of his visa in the United States and after researching for a year in Canada without a teaching appointment, Saghir came to teach at Simon Fraser University. On the way, he heard that a second elder brother had died suddenly in Pakistan, leaving to Saghir and Eqbal the maintenance of a number of relatives. When he reached Simon Fraser, Saghir found a majority of students and faculty in his department about to go on strike against a purge of radical teachers and the abolition of a democratic department concerned with critical and experimental teaching. Some of his acquaintances were on both sides of the conflict and "compromise paths” were being talked of. After a brief inner struggle and consultation with his brother, Saghir chose to strike, risking his salary, and the chance to teach that he so much wanted. During the strike, he was suspended from teaching along with seven other colleagues, and went through two years of harassment and delayed dismissal proceedings. Finally, on June 23, 1971 he was arbitrarily fired, without any due process, and looked forward to a new appointment at Trent University in Peterborough. 

Although forbidden to teach, Saghir spent his last two years guiding and befriending students, researching on Pakistan, and busying himself with the struggles of British Columbian workers, unemployed people, Quebecois, the antiwar movement in Canada, and, most recently BangIa Desh. His last 'research' trip was to Quesnel, a small town in British Columbia, where a race-fight occurred between white and Sikh workers. Saghir investigated the dispute for the Georgia Straight, a Vancouver underground newspaper, together with friends including Anne Roberts, his beloved companion and co-worker over the past five years. Yet "investigate" is not the word, for Saghir entered at once into the joys and fears of the Sikh community, revelled in their affection, and with difficulty tore himself away. In every city where he lived, he is mourned by dozens who loved him. 

A second and graver test of Saghir's integrity was BangIa Desh. Saghir was a West Pakistani who had grown up in a period of intense nationalism, and he was living precariously in North America. Many of his kin had moved from Bihar to East Bengal. As Urdu speakers of high status, they served the government in Islamabad'. Saghir knew some of them to have been killed in disturbances that followed Yahya Khan's refusal to implement the election results in East Pakistan. Saghir also deeply admired the government of China, which, however, was continuing its support of Yahya Khan. Yet when the invasion came he immediately disregarded these complications, recognized fascism, and opposed it. Instead of abdicating into passive observation from a distance, he exerted himself in the midst of his own troubles, leafleting, speaking, writing, fund raising, and traveling, for the people of Bangla Desh. 

 

Saghir's life was closely linked with that of his elder brother Eqbal, who, with seven other defendants in the Harrisburg Conspiracy Case, faces trial on inane charges of conspiracy against the government of the United States, It· is obvious to those who know him that these charges are persecution for Eqbal's legitimate and forthright opposition to the war in Indochina and his brilliant analyses of American imperialism. From their corrupting, co-optative situations in North American universities, both these brothers came forward and fulfilled the responsibilities of revolutionary intellectuals. Now Saghir has departed. Hard and bitter though his death is to many of us, we must carry on the struggles in which he was engaged.

 

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Select Bibliography of Saghir Ahmad

 

Review of Emerging Patterns of Rural Leadership in Southern Asia: A Report on an International Round Table Conference. Journal of Asian Studies 26:`1 (November 1966), 155-156. [PDF] 

“Economics of Agricultural Production.” Alberta Anthropologist 2:3 (December 1968), 8-16.  [PDF]

“Islam and Pakistani Peasants.” In Aziz Ahmad, ed., Contributions to Asian Studies 11 (1971), 105-125. [PDF] 

“Social Stratification in a Punjabi Village.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 4:1 (1971), 105-125. [PDF] 

“Should We Seek Modernization?" Pakistan Forum, 1 3 (February-March, 1971). Reprinted in Race & Class 19:1 (1977). [PDF] 

“Imperialism and Underdevelopment.” Review of Robert I. Rhodes, ed., Imperialism and Underdevelopment: a Reader. Pakistan Forum (June- July, 1971), 3-5, 9.  [PDF] 

“Laos: the Unforgettable War.” Georgia Straight (Vancouver, BC: February 17-24, 1971) 

“Indochina, Revolution and Counterrevolution.” Georgia Straight (Vancouver, BC: March 17-24). 

“Pakistan. Another Vietnam or Quebec.” Georgia Straight (Vancouver, BC: March 17-24) 

“Crisis in Pakistan.” Review of Tariq Ali, Pakistan: Military Rule or People's Power. Monthly Review 23:4 (September 1971), 51-62. [PDF]  

"On Population. Pakistan Forum 2:1 (October 1971), 3-7. [PDF]

“Peasant Classes in Pakistan.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 4:1 (Winter 1971), 60-71. Reprinted in Kathleen Gough and Hari P. Sharma, eds. Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973. [PDF] 

“The Role of Radical Social Scientists.” Paper prepared for Canadian Sociology and Anthropology meetings, June 1971 (unpublished) 

“A Village in Pakistani Panjab: Jalpana.” With selections by Hamza Alavi. In Clarence Maloney, ed., South Asia: Seven Community Profiles. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1974. [PDF] 

Class and Power in a Punjabi Village. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977. 

This bibliography draws on one appended to Richard Fraught’s obituary of Ahmad, “Saghir Ahmad (1936–1971),” The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 8:4 (November 1971), 273-274 and the notes from Gough’s obituary cited above. Citations have been updated or corrected where necessary. Links to PDFs have been added when available.