Major (retd) Agha Humayun Amin passed away in Lahore on February 21st 2025 at the age of 64 (or so, I never learnt his exact date of birth). The son of an army officer (his late father Brigadier Amin was an Engineers officer who laid the famous triple minefield near Sialkot in 1971), Agha joined the army in 1981 in the 67th Long course. He was commissioned into a cavalry regiment (PAVO cavalry, a storied regiment of the British Indian Army, a fact of which Major Sahib was very proud).
Agha was very popular with his coursemates, but tended to run into trouble with his superiors because of his unconventional lifestyle and unwillingness to be a sycophant. He and the army therefore parted ways in the 90s and he spent a good part of his remaining life in Afghanistan, working as a free lancer and providing various services to companies operating there. But his main interest and the quality that made him famous was his interest in military history. He was Pakistan’s premier military historian and the author of multiple books and over 200 articles in various publications. He was a stickler for accuracy and had no time for people who were ready to bend the facts to fit a paticular narrative. For Major sahib, the truth was sacrosanct and errors of fact were unforgiveable. Interpretation is a different matter. His opinons tended to be salty and sometimes unconventional (but equally, sometimes they felt shocking because in a country where delusions and fantasies can rule, a very conventional assessment could sound shocking).
I personally met Major Amin online about 20 years ago and we remained in touch online till the day he passed away, but I only met him a few times in person on visits to Lahore (he also met my father a couple of times there), so I am not the best person to comment on his personal life, but agha sahib seems to have had a LOT of friends and was very much a “yaraan da yaar” (loyal to his friends, and down to earth and fun loving). But I can tell you that i have not met anyone in Pakistan who read more books than Agha sahib. Military history (especially the history of the British Indian army) was his forte and he seems to have read everything and had opinions about everything, but he also read a lot of psychology and had a fondness for Western art (where his favorites were 19th century and early 20th century realistic and impressionistic art). His own worldview was very old fashioned in some ways: he admired great men (of any party or ideology) and had no time for the kind of bureaucratic mediocrities who get promoted by being sycophants. He was also a believer in inherited qualities and generally dismissive of Democratic pieties, but his focus was on military excellence (or mediocrity, as the case may be).
We are lucky to have had someone like him in the subcontinent. Thanks to his efforts, a LOT of detailed (and accurately detailed) information about the recent military history of the Indian subcontinent has been preserved. He will be missed.
Writings and podcasts with Major Amin at Brownpundits can be found here.