Learning Against The Grain: Perspectives from Khan’s Former Students

Students of Professor Khan’s Banish the Poets class penned a beautiful letter attesting to the deep impact he has had on them. For these students to feel that he has enabled them to answer questions through lenses of care, respect, and growth demonstrates Professor Khan’s abilities to produce a form of learning that makes knowledge itself a more empathetic tool. This rings true to our experiences as well. 

As Professor Ali Khan’s wrongful detention continues, we, two of his former students, would like to provide a portrait of his lasting influence as a teacher and stand in solidarity with him and his family at this time. 

Ava: Prof. Khan is, shall we say, an acquired taste? His readings went into hundreds of pages. He picked early morning slots frequently, and sometimes, we feared being in his smaller classes of 12-15 undisciplined Political Science majors, where the pressure of answering a question without doing all the reading and getting it wrong was a bit like playing Minesweeper. 

I joke, but I do look back very fondly at these experiences as part of being at Ashoka, because to me, they are clear indications of how Prof. Khan really cares about teaching the right way. Because he would be genuinely frustrated if you didn’t participate, papers and grades be damned. Professor, if you ever read this, being a little scary was so valuable, and taught me to be accountable to a course beyond deadlines and submissions. Some professors carve boundaries around how much they’re willing to intervene in your learning. After all, it’s your future, not theirs. Prof. Khan’s investments in relating to his students and producing spaces for original thought go far and beyond. 

His Social and Political Formations was one of my first Foundation Courses, and not only was it a deal-maker for my change to a Political Science major, it also set the tone for how I approached critical thinking. On Day one, I remember our classroom of nearly a hundred settling in, and we saw Katy Perry on the projector screen. Prof. Khan showed us a video about the rhythms of power and how it repeats itself, through Katy Perry’s use of a chord progression that borrows from another song, which inevitably borrows from another, and so on. 

Three years later, I did my thesis on hip-hop in social transformations, looking at artists ‘sampling practices as a callback to their inspirations, their history of artistry. Is this serendipity, or the persisting influence of his frameworks in our academic lives? 

I like to think it was both, but certainly, I see it as Prof. Khan’s gift of critical thinking to his students. I imagined, and still imagine, the art of analysis as the building of concentric circles that repeat and rely on a history of human behaviour, thanks to his occasional probes. Even comments he would make in passing about his curiosity became strong levers of critique in his classroom. “I wonder how this changes when we consider social media…”, he said something to this effect in his class on Nationalism, and since then, it’s part of why I am always concerned about the effect of culture on technology, technology on culture. 

Moreover, the very irony of ‘social media nationalism’ in India is what we see today, right now, with the snatching of his fundamental rights based on his Facebook comments. Does it matter to the misinformed and hateful that this is a man who taught Savarkar and Golwalkar with the same respect and integrity that he did Gandhi and Ambedkar?

I am angry, for the real irony in this is how delicately Prof. Khan approached conflicts of opinion. He believed that it was important to “reason within the logic of those whom you have the argument with.” Normative horizons and the frameworks of your opponent are your starting point. Prof. Khan is an educator who makes you unlearn your bias and create empathy in your intellect, actively encouraging openness towards ideas that don’t sit well with you. And if you are a student reading this, I implore you, do not miss the chance to experience his pedagogy of goodwill and grace. 

Zainab:

I first crossed paths with Professor Ali as a somewhat-clueless and under confident eighteen year old. Having been fed the staple diet of Indian high schools — maths, physics, and chemistry — I dreaded what his class on history and political thought might have had in store for me. Nearly nine years on, it is not an exaggeration to say the class changed my life irrevocably. 

Studying ‘non-western’ political thought with Ali altered my sense of self: I began to understand each individual as a fundamentally political being in a fundamentally political world. His pedagogy drew me into the world of, to name a few, Confucius, Ambedkar, the Bhagavad Gita, Franz Fanon, Islamic jurists, and Gandhi. I attended each lecture eagerly, ultimately deciding to switch majors from economics to politics since with each passing class we unlocked a new world of philosophy, history, and politics. From thereon, every class I took and every book I read was stamped by the critical thinking abilities he had helped me access. 

Now a graduate student in political theory with teaching responsibilities myself, I often use the pedagogical tools he deployed in class. One of them involved starting each semester by asking students to provide their first impressions of a concept which we then unravel together in the weeks to come — ultimately comparing those preliminary impressions to more nuanced and well-informed descriptions sourced at the end of term. 

Another such tool was asking students to bring relevant news articles they’d read outside of class and to relate them to the reading material at hand. Being mentored by Ali made me both a better student and teacher, and this isn’t even to mention the substantive issues we covered in class.

Studying non-western political thought, South Asian history, and Middle Eastern politics under Ali, I confronted knotty writings on globalisation, decolonisation, imperialism, universalism, self-determination, personhood, and belonging. I can’t claim to have retained it all, nor do I have answers to the many questions he posed to us, but it’s indisputably true that Ali’s immense knowledge of global history, politics, and poetry made each of his students sharper thinkers and writers. I’m certain our overlapping interests played a subliminal role in my research pursuits into legal pluralism and the varying legitimacies of democratic institutions. And it was his remarkable linguistic repertoire that compelled me to study Arabic and Urdu. These are the hallmarks of an excellent teacher — he takes students as they are, and equips them with tools to reimagine and refashion themselves. 

I would be remiss to not mention Ali’s impact outside of the classroom. The Rev. Dr. King’s words, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” echo in my mind. Though I’d state with caution that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice only if you compel it to do so — an approach that Ali has embodied well in his role as a public intellectual. We may be of different political persuasions, but his commentaries, across three different languages, have nonetheless been an important perspective with which to understand contemporary Indian politics and society. 

Being a Muslim in India can be easily reduced to a name, an aesthetic, a language, or even food, yet none of these markers can fully capture the sense of difference one might feel. My intellectual encounters with him helped me develop an appreciation for our shared and complex Indian Muslim heritage, a position he has consistently stated as being both Indian and Muslim seamlessly — without contradiction — and that, perhaps, is why he sought out a “poetry of belonging”.

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As former students of Professor Khan, we are appalled by his detention. And as students of the humanities who are often derisively branded “liberal”, “privileged,” and “divisive,” we want to restate the stakes of the issue at hand: as we see it, Professor Khan decried the politics of jingoism and polarisation, and maintained a consistent demand for peace. Through his teachings, we learnt that hate is an instrument to be taken apart and examined, and not a permanent feature of relationships within society.

Ashoka University’s cowardice in their lack of support for Professor Khan lies in heavy contrast with the outpouring of solidarity from his peers, students, friends, and interlocutors, a phenomenon with which we are now all too familiar. While our statements above are meant to serve as a window into Professor Khan’s commitments, and to dispel the accusations of harm, it must be clear that even if he were not a learned academic, with expertise on the issues he writes about, his confinement would be equally egregious. We hope and pray for his immediate release. 

Both Ava Haidar & Zainab Firdausi studied Political Science and were members of Ashoka University's Class of 2019.

Zainab was the Edict's Editor-in-Chief for AY 2018-2019. Ava was the Managing Editor of the Edict for AY 2018-2019.