OBITUARY: Imtiaz Ahmad – A Scholar and Teacher of All Seasons (1940–2023)

Imtiaz Ahmad passed away on 19 June 2023 at eighty-three, leaving a considerable loss and void in Indian academia. A legendary teacher and scholar par excellence, he taught at the Centre for Political Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, for three decades. Ahmad joined the Centre in the early 1970s when JNU was being set up as a new public university founded on principles of democratic secularism, inclusive educational policy, virtues of intellectual autonomy, and ethics of dedicated teaching as its cardinal principles. The scholarly ethos of teaching and research in the university valued the student–teacher symbiotic relationship and a kind of shared intellectual habitus among its stakeholders unparalleled and not experimented elsewhere in the country till then.