Obituary: Remembering Javeed Alam

Javeed Alam was a close friend and intellectually combative interlocutor from the time I first met him, when both of us were Visiting Fellows at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, in the mid-to-late 1990s. What drew me to him was the unusual combination of strongly held political and intellectual views and the ability to listen with care to radically opposed opinions. In our case, I was supposedly the ‘postmodernist’ and he the ‘Marxist’, an opposition that in the late 1990s played out in the Indian intellectual scenario in some very unproductive ways. The key terms on which the bitterest differences arose were ‘secularism’ and ‘modernity’. And of course the debates were so bitter within the broad Left precisely because so much was at stake, and any critique of the older certainties was fearfully regarded as a slide towards the Hindu Right and as evidence of Hindutva’s capacity to normalise its ideology.