His ancestors hailed from Kathula village in Allahabad, but he remained a city-dweller all his life. His father was a superintendent of prisons in the British administration, and he would often quip wryly that he was born in a jail, enjoying the scandalised reaction of those present. Much of his childhood was spent in Lucknow where he completed his school and college education. Trained primarily as a social anthropologist, first at the University of Lucknow, then at the Delhi School of Economics, and later, at the University of Chicago, Ahmad soon began to chafe at the descriptive cognitive framework of the discipline, finding it restrictive in comprehending macro structures and processes of change in modern societies. A new approach helped him cast his net wide, and what followed was an enviable repertoire of subjects studied.

During more than 50 years of a tirelessly agile academic life, his interests were varied—social structure and Islam, patterns of kinship, marriage and divorce, fundamentalism and nationalist upsurges, tradition and reform, middle-class formation and its values, social movements, elections and the crisis of democracy, minorities, their accommodation and development and so on. Apparently diverse and disjointed, at the core were three underlying threads of enquiry that defined his intellectual and political quest.

First, was his study of social stratification, which served to dispel the scriptural and textual inference of egalitarianism among Muslims and Islam. Despite the prior existence of literature on the incidence of caste among Muslims, Ahmad’s study of Siddiqui Sheikhs of Uttar Pradesh was pioneering as it extrapolated from field data. It underscored how the practice of endogamy was abetted by the notion of the purity of blood and thus mirrored the structure and ideology of caste among Hindus. Subsequently, his work on Muslim castes would overshadow all his other contributions. To date, it remains an irreplaceable reference for researchers, jurists, activists, and policy-makers alike. It also defined his politics, wherein he readily extended his intellectual support to the emerging Dalit and Pasmanda Muslim politics. In personal conversations, he would recount how the observance of caste-based segregation in his family and surroundings developed his interest in the phenomenon of caste among Muslims.

Second, his work can be seen as engaging in a new methodological approach to the study of Islam in India. He was uncomfortable both with the theological insistence on the immutability of scriptures and tradition which presented an ossified idea of religion, and with the anthropologist who relied on the singularity of experience and accorded fixity to concepts. The concept of Sharia was a case in point. Originally associated with rules determining the tribal way of life, it acquired divinity, thereby a notional eternity, with the advent of Islam. However, what constitutes sharia, Ahmad argued, varied significantly among adherents belonging to different nationalities, sects, and schools of jurisprudence. Unlike the anthropologist who relied on the polarity between the ideal and the divergent, or scriptural and the folk, Ahmad insisted on appreciating the plurality of religious experiences in their own right. The cognitive lens of “lived Islam” that he embraced was inventive, inviting researchers to revisit their formulations. It also allowed him to lend strength to the demands of reforms from within.

Consequently, he remained at loggerheads with the orthodoxy throughout his life.

Retrospectively, Ahmad’s intellectual enterprise was oriented towards indigenising Islam locating it firmly within local cultural forms and philosophical traditions. Taking aid of Peter Gottschalk’s usage of the two terms, routes and roots, he contended that, in history, while Muslims may have travelled many routes, “the roots that Islam established in South Asia had a far greater impact on it than those from the Arabic region.”

Alongside, he vehemently contested tendencies to exclude non-Sanskritic traditions such as Islam and Christianity from consideration in studies on Indian Sociology.

His third persistent engagement was an examination of the cultural and historical edifice that undergirded the imaginaries of a tolerant and secular society. The 1960s was the turning point in Independent India’s political history. The memories of partition and the legitimacy of anti-colonial nationalism proved insufficient in curbing communal flare-ups. Jabalpur (1961), Ranchi (1968), Ahmedabad (1969) and later, Bhiwandi (1970) were the sites where “old demons raised their ugly heads again”.

In a 1969 essay, he emphatically discounted arguments that rested on a tolerant Hindu past to make the case for secularism in India. The adoption of a secular framework by the Indian Constitution with its ensemble of equal rights to individuals and groups, was in his opinion, a radical and unprecedented departure. Accordingly, neither history nor the domain of culture, but conscious and committed efforts on the part of the state were obligatory for fashioning a secular society. He returned to this theme recurrently, often dissatisfied with the existing formulations.

He resisted the effort to relegate communalism to the domain of irrationality thus highlighting the wilful, calculated and goal-oriented nature of mobilisations in 1984. Decades later, following the Gujarat riots in 2002, he lamented how the state had abandoned the promise of secularisation.

Until his last days, he remained steadfastly secular, his razor-sharp tongue sparing none. In an interview published in 1994, he spelt out his conviction in distilling reality from distortions: “My faith prompts me to spread and promote the realistic understanding of things as they are in the midst of those who tend to see it in confused, distorted or prejudiced manner”.

For generations of students whom he taught and inspired, Imtiaz Ahmad would remain a stellar figure—a man of unflinching moral makeup and intellectual integrity.

Tanweer Fazal is a professor of sociology at Hyderabad University

Acquaint yourself with Imtiaz Ahmad’s works:

Caste and Social Stratification Among Muslims of India, Delhi: Manohar (1978)

Modernisation and Social Change Among Muslims in India, Delhi: Manohar (1983), edited by Ahmad

Divorce and Re-marriage Among Muslims in India, Delhi: Manohar (2003), edited by Ahmad

Lived Islam in South Asia: Adaptation, Accommodation and Conflict, Oxon: Routledge (2018), edited by Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld

Middle Class Values in India and Western Europe (2017), Routledge, edited by Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld