Asloob Ahmad Ansari (1925-2016), who breathed his last recently at the age of 91, was a man of many distinctions – prestigious awards, fellowships, books, editorship, lectures – but essentially he will be remembered for three important aspects of his work: his volume of work as a literary critic of Urdu and English and his contribution as an academic-administrator. He was lucky to work as the head of the English Department at Aligarh Muslim University for two decades. This was the time when the headship of a department was not based on a system of rotation and the head could have immense powers because he could continue till his retirement. All heads could afford to be authoritative, and they were, almost as a rule. A department head with unlimited powers and hardly any challenge to his authority could either ruin or build a department depending on his integrity and commitment. Ansari did the latter. He was responsible for appointing a number of competent people and building the nucleus of a good department.
As a team leader not only did he write and publish but inspired others to produce work of academic merit. As one of the few professors in the country he was also a regular at selection committees in different universities and he exerted his influence on almost all appointments. One can say that he contributed his mite in shaping the course of English studies in India.
This administrative-academic role must be seen together with his teaching and editorship of many literary journals. Though there were never any doubts about his learning and erudition, not all his students found his teaching as inspiring and lively as his writing and editorial acumen. In his class lectures he was almost inaudible beyond the first row of students but his comments on different poets and dramatists in his writing could reach everyone, students as well as established critics. His was an impersonal and formal style of lecturing in which his audience was as good as almost non-existent.
His initiatives in starting the “Aligarh Journal of English Studies” (AJES) in 1976, and “Aligarh Critical Miscellany” in 1988 after his retirement were certainly important landmarks in his career. One gets the feeling that the AJES worked almost like F. R. Leavis’s “Scrutiny” and Ansari did appear like I. A .Richards in the postgraduate group discussions in the department where copies of poems were often distributed withholding information about authorship and period of the poems.
The articles written in these journals by Ansari were later published in book form. The most striking feature of the two journals is that Ansari, because of his stature and perseverance, managed to get almost all important names in English criticism to write for the journals. Critics as important as F. R. Leavis, Wilson Knight, Laurence Lerner, Kenneth Muir, Kathleen Raine and Erika Gottlieb Robert, among others, were published in AJES.
Ansari also edited a quarterly Urdu publication “Naqd-o-Nazar” which included scholarly write-ups on Urdu literature. Always a votary of canon, Ghalib and Iqbal were Ansari’s favourite subjects. He made it a point that in each issue of “Naqd-o-Nazar” there was at least one piece on Iqbal. Abul Kalam Qasmi, a noted Urdu critic, says that one could disagree with him but not on the merit of Iqbal’s poetry. However, always a man of diverse interests, Ansari could also write with interest on Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and Rasheed Ahmad Siddiqui, known for his humour writings.
Ansari must be credited for introducing an element of rigour and analysis to Urdu criticism taking it beyond the popular biographical approach and impressionistic effusions of articulate Urdu critics. His discovery of parallels between Ghalib and Donne and his reading of many literary devices like synecdoche and conceit in Ghalib’s poetry is his important contribution to Urdu literary criticism.
What is the nature and orientation of Ansari’s vast body of critical writings? Only canonical poets and writers interested him. He has written mostly on William Blake and Shakespeare and his work on Blake titled “Arrows of Intellect” was praised, among others, by Northrop Frye and Kathleen Raine. In fact, he is one of the most cited writers on Blake. As for Shakespeare he has written on all plays of the dramatist, in fact, about 25 articles on Shakespeare in AJES alone. Occasionally, he also published on Donne, Milton, Wordsworth and his predecessor Sir Walter Raleigh.
Turning his back on the biographical method, Ansari never tried to establish a causal relationship between the work and the author. The historical method did not interest him either and despite the powerful presence of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in his time, he was not drawn to context-obsessive Marxist criticism. His favourite method of reading a text is the close reading of the language of a poet or novelist. The methodology of Leavisite, New Criticism and occasionally touches of archetypal criticism can be noticed in his work though his close reading does not sit comfortably with the hovercraft-like approach of archetypal criticism. The new critical focus on symbols and images draws Ansari. Thus in the line “Let Rome in Tiber melt” in “Antony and Cleopatra” the word ‘melt’ forces Ansari to offer an exhaustive and incisive analysis. Shakespeare’s wind and kinetic images in the play are also given the same incisive treatment. Apart from images and symbols, symbolic patterns also are his concern. In “Troilus and Cressida” Ansari discovered two divergent orders of experiences, namely Trojans and the Greeks.
A number of readers have discovered Ansari’s interest in existentialist philosophy. Ansari himself admitted the value of this approach though he adds a note of caution in this regard: “I am rather cautious in my procedure so as not to give the impression of employing a critical strategy as a symptom of my allegiance to a contemporary fashion. For me it is not a matter of imposing certain premises of existentialist thought on Shakespeare’s plays but merely an attempt to discover analogies for this thought wherever they are traceable in his work.” Ansari read “Merchant of Venice” as an existentialist comedy where both Antonia and Shylock display patterns of loneliness, “Hamlet” an existentialist tragedy where the meaning of the play develops in relation to Hamlet’s reaction to Dasein, “King Lear” an existentialist play in which man’s ‘sense of estrangement and precariousness’ define him and “Measure for Measure” all about the idea of loneliness, absence of communication and different attitudes to death.
A person well-versed in both the Western and the Eastern traditions of knowledge, Ansari’s writings show his familiarity with different philosophical and intellectual traditions: Christian, classical and Oriental.
In his 1983 book “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, Terry Eagleton remarked that with the coming of structuralism (it can be read theory in general) “the world of the great aestheticians and humanist literary scholars of twentieth century Europe — the world of Croce, Curtius, Auerbach, Spitzer and Wellek — seemed one whose hour had passed.” Ansari was also a scholar in that mould. However, like many of the scholars of his generation, Ansari was not able to take note of the later developments in criticism and theory and his work may appear dated now. His failing eyesight in the last two decades prevented him from familiarising himself with the latest trends in his subject. But Eagleton’s remark can be twisted to yield a different meaning also in Ansari’s case. With his passing away the world of great humanist scholars who could move effortlessly in different languages and worldviews has also passed. The world of polyglot scholars — who knew English, Urdu, Persian and Arabic — will gradually appear a distant dream.
But the virtues of rigour, hard work and painstaking scholarship that Asloob Ahmad Ansari represented are things whose hour can never pass. Rest in Peace, Sir.
(Mohammad Asim Siddiqui teaches English at Aligarh Muslim University.)
