Vanishing public intellectuals

The Public Intellectual In India by Romila Thapar aleph book company in association with the book review literary trust; Price: Rs.889; Pages: 284 In his obituary to Benedict Anderson, historian Ramchandra Guha recollects a letter from him in which he asked, “How many public intellectuals are there in India? In Southeast Asia they are dying, replaced by professors and bureaucrats to whom not many ordinary people pay any attention… I guess your Gandhi was a public intellectual, but probably Nehru not???” The worry about disappearance of the institution of the public intellectual is widespread. Romila Thapar expressed her anxiety about this decreasing tribe in the annual Nikhil Chakravartty Memorial Lecture in 2014 titled To Question or Not to Question: That is The Question. Later, five brilliant minds from the fields of philosophy, science, political science, history and media got together to respond to the concern raised by Thapar in her lecture. This discussion developed into the book under review, which contains an introduction and afterword by Thapar apart from her original lecture, and the responses of Sundar Surrukkai, Dhruv Raina, Peter DeSouza, Neeladri Bhattacharya and Jawed Naqvi respectively.      Who is an intellectual and what is her role in society? Being merely a scholar or an abstract thinker does not make one an intellectual. In his essay The Role of the Intelligentsia, Isaiah Berlin says that excellence in one’s own field of expertise, be it science or arts, “does not qualify you to be a member of the intelligentsia as such”. Nor does “sheer opposition to the establishment” earn one a place in the assembly of the intelligentsia. “A combination of belief in reason and progress with a profound moral concern for society” is needed for inclusion in the thinning assembly of public intellectuals, says Berlin. In Romila Thapar’s view, a questioning spirit is essential for an intellectual. Questioning in itself is a subversive act as it destabilises establishments of all types. She draws from the past of India and Europe to explain that questioning is not a ‘modern’ phenomenon. “In earlier times the questions emerged from rational argument and logical thinking, but were tempered by the recognition of the human condition,” she writes. To discover new ways of structuring a fair society, one has to challenge all kinds of power. To be able to do so, intellectuals have to be autonomous of power structures. “An acknowledged professional status” makes it easy to be autonomous but this alone does not make one a public intellectual. According to Thapar, what differentiates the public intellectuals of today from intellectuals of the past is an acute awareness of and concern for the rights of citizens, particularly on issues of social justice. In earlier times if it was religious orthodoxy intellectuals had to fight; in our days the name of the new orthodoxy is nationalism. For independent thinking to flourish, nationalism has to be questioned and challenged. But in another context, talking about the role of public intellectuals, Terry Eagleton wondered whether they are true to…