The essays collected in this slim volume titled The Public Intellectual in India, by Romila Thapar, give the right call at the right time. There is little doubt that the world is going through one of the worst phases of retrogression in its history. Everywhere the gains made by humankind in areas of culture, humanism, democracy, rule of law, and equity are under threat from extremists ostensibly out to defend religious/ideological puritanism or the sanctity of the nation-state. In many lands, people are waiting for what Thapar defines as “public intellectuals”, who will call a halt to the drift towards self-annihilation.

The idea of the discourse contained in this publication began taking shape when Thapar, the South Asian icon in the international community of historians and historiographers, was invited to give a lecture in memory of Nikhil Chakravarty, the founding editor of the weekly Mainstream, in his days the doyen of Indian editors and the pride of the country’s journalism. A leading Marxist and a keeper of his people’s conscience, he divided his public interest interventions over a vast area; ranging from people’s right to democracy, equality and justice, non-alignment, the citizen’s right to know, and peace in the subcontinent and among the nations of the world, from becoming controversial by his fierce defence of his independence and integrity, that included refusal to accept any award or reward from the state.

In her memorial lecture Thapar traced the role of philosophers in promoting public interest, the rise of the public intellectual in Europe in the 19th century, movements for social reform in India and the distortions made in public understanding of history caused by colonial constructs, and noted that the role public intellectuals used to play in India had declined since the 1990s. The liberal space had shrunk. Thapar also discussed the reasons for the decline of the public intellectual. This was proved by the lack of protest over deterioration of public services and bids to exclude secularism from the concept of democracy. India still had public intellectuals who could challenge the state for its aberrations, but they tended to be silent in areas where they were once highly vocal.

An exploration of the role of the public intellectual in society through a volume of essays compiled by Romila Thapar

Five scholars were invited to discuss the issues raised by Thapar in her lecture. Surprisingly these intellectuals chose to present their own appreciation of the role of the public intellectual, and Thapar’s complaint about the erosion of the public intellectual’s role remained largely unanswered.

Sundar Sarukkai restricts himself to a philosophical exposition of the difference between asking questions about concepts/phenomena and the act of questioning the premises underlying those concepts. He dwells at length on the importance of doubt and scepticism and goes on to discuss the clash of foundational beliefs between different groups. Finally he would like the questioning to be done by the public and wanted public intellectuals’ role to be limited to the creation of this public habit.

Dhruv Raina focuses on the institutional transformation of science that has altered the relation between science and the public. He argues that the implicit connection between the norms of science and democratic process cannot be taken for granted. He is disturbed by the use of science in war and the rise of militarism and wonders whether a science that depends on state funding can develop a corrective voice from within its ranks.

Peter Ronald Desouza stays quite close to Thapar’s viewpoint about the decline of the public intellectual in India. He begins by narrating the struggle of three public intellectuals resisting efforts to smother their voices and raises the question as to why their courage does not inspire others. After taking note of co-option and the various forms of censorship he declares “a public intellectual in India today cannot speak on behalf of the existing order. There is too much dishonesty, falsehood and injustice which is part of the existing order and so a public intellectual has to find those issues on which to critique the existing order.” Since the national order is linked with the global order “the public intellectual has to be a critic of the global order and its local supporters.”

The idea of the discourse contained in this publication began taking shape when Thapar, the South Asian icon in the international community of historians and historiographers, was invited to give a lecture in memory of Nikhil Chakravarty, the founding-editor of the weekly Mainstream, in his days the doyen of Indian editors and the pride of the country’s journalism. A leading Marxist and a keeper of his people’s conscience, he divided his public interest interventions over a vast area; ranging from people’s right to democracy, equality and justice, non-alignment, the citizen’s right to know, and peace in the sub-continent and among the nations of the world, from becoming controversial by his fierce defence of his independence and integrity, that included refusal to accept any award or reward from the state.

Finally he identifies six vantage points from which the public intellectual in India must speak — cultural criticism of the reality, questions about development and ecological policies, contradictions in the academic field, the impact of science/technology on social processes, the attempts to move from a world of superstition to a world of reason, and finally the crop of young interventionists whose means — satire, ridicule, rebellion — prevent them from being recognised as public intellectuals.

Neeladri Bhattacharya agrees with Thapar that India needs public intellectuals to create and encourage a critical public that could sustain “a democratic society in which justice, equality and tolerance become constitutive values, moral goods.” But he disagrees with Thapar about the voices of public good having been silenced. He argues against the idea of reviving the glorious past — the Socratic method of questioning or the Enlightenment. The consensus of the Nehru era also might be seen in relative terms. According to him, the Indian situation is not as bleak as Thapar finds it. “Not all is lost. The communal authoritarian forces are not as strong as they think they are.”

Jawed Naqvi takes a broad view of the efforts to deal with denial of justice and cites several instances when ordinary citizens refused to be provoked by promoters of hate and revenge. At the same time he has no patience with hypocrites parading themselves as public intellectuals. What incenses him the most is that in their obsession with the Hindu-Muslim divide and its manifestations the huge injustice done to the dalits is shamelessly ignored. “For this, our public intellectuals must take their share of the blame,” he declares.

Thapar has added to these essays an introduction, in which she has reinforced her arguments for an active role by public intellectuals, and a conclusion, in which she explains the motivation for the whole debate generated by her. “The ultimate aim is to engage the public in thinking about the present and the kind of society in which people want to live, and ultimately and inevitably, what this will mean for those who will of course come after us as citizens,” she concludes.

Taken as a whole, this publication offers welcome evidence of the Indian intellectuals’ ability to sustain a scintillating debate on what they find wrong in their society and what can or should be done by public intellectuals to stem the rot. The participants in the discussion have maintained, within a social democratic paradigm, a high standard of objectivity, though complete freedom from subjective inclinations can nowhere be expected. One wonders what contribution to an appreciation of Thapar’s complaint about the growing silence of public intellectuals a Marxist scholar might have made.

This discussion is relevant to other countries of South Asia too, as almost all of them are drifting from failed experiments with pluralist democracy towards faith/ethnicity based exclusivism that has caused horrible disasters in the past in many parts of the world. The Muslims should never forget that a rise in religious intolerance was one of the main reasons for their ouster from Spain. Likewise, Germany paid heavily for silencing its public intellectuals in the 1930s — first through street terrorism by the Nazi youth and later on after the Reichstag fire. Or can we afford to forget the horrors of ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia or the genocide in Rwanda, both caused by the virus of exclusivist politics that we find ravaging South Asia these days? Pakistan does not seem to possess even the wherewithal for a frank debate on the closure of space for its public intellectuals, even if the breed has not become extinct.

The reviewer is a senior columnist and Secretary General of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

The Public Intellectual in India
(ESSAYS)
By Romila Thapar with Sundar Sarukkai, Dhruv Raina, Peter Ronald Desouza,
Neeladri Bhattacharya, Jawed Naqvi
Aleph Book Company, New Delhi.
ISBN: 978-9384067380
204pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 19th, 2016