The thinking Indian?

From the day the UPA government took office, Manmohan Singh has drawn praise and blame from different quarters, for the economic transformation of India that he initiated as finance minister some years ago, and continues to oversee now, as prime minister. Much is made of his education and of his status as an economist quite apart from his political career. But why just Manmohan Singh: ever since the hiatus in the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, almost all of our prime ministers and presidents have been educated men 8212; we might even go so far as to call them learned. Two and a half poets, a linguist, several PhDs, scientists, diplomats, and now an economist 8212; for the most part, in the last 15-odd years, the roster of India8217;s rulers at the highest level has included the kind of men that ordinary folks would perceive as intellectuals. Yet the question remains: have these men been thinking for India? Are they thinkers, in the proper sense of the term; does their leadership reflect originality, vision, the power of ideas?

We return, then, to a perennial search: the search for a philosopher-statesman. In the generations that struggled for India8217;s freedom, many such giants strode the earth, culminating in the trinity of Gandhi, Ambedkar and Nehru. These were men and women of ideas and learning; writers of journals, letters, speeches, pamphlets and books; visionaries, idealists, reformers, strategists and negotiators. These were leaders who first articulated the dream of a free India that would look very different from the British colony they were born into, and then roused millions into realising that dream 8212; or so we are taught to perceive the founders of the nation. What were these people doing, for almost a century, between 1857 and 1947? Abroad and at home, in law courts and universities, in libraries and prisons, in ashrams and palaces, in newspaper offices and party headquarters, they were thinking. Thinking about freedom and subservience, about democracy and imperialism, about equality and oppression; thinking so that India changed 8212; for the better, we are told 8212; as it passed from their hands into ours. The shape of our world bears the impress of their thought.

Who can blame Naipaul for lamenting the absence of such transformative thought in contemporary India? Who can say that our leaders stand head and shoulders above the tumult of the times, and look out into futurity? The ruling coalition may be populated by scholars of all stripes, and the work of government may be assisted by any number of experts in this or that field, but a clamorous cabal of squabbling schoolmen, shrill ideologues and paid consultants will not steer this ship out to the high seas of growth, stability and equity. India and China will dominate the 21st century, predicts Naipaul, and you don8217;t need a Nobel Prize to conclude that he8217;s probably right. But domination by sheer numbers, domination by sheer size 8212; these are not the indices of a truly resurgent, truly impressive, and dare we say it, a truly empowered society.

India8217;s sinking sun will rise again only if at least some of us can think creatively and constructively about the pressing concerns of the foreseeable future: climate change, the end of fossil fuels, nuclear war; jihad, terrorism, globalisation; space travel, nanotechnology, new media. We pride ourselves as a civilization of prophets, saints and seers. We8217;re supposed to be the land of religion and philosophy. Across sects and schools of thought, for at least 2,500 hundred years if not more, we have consistently produced and incorporated some of the world8217;s most influential ideas and ideologies. What has happened to us, that in times

of greater freedom and prosperity than ever before, we8217;ve run out of intellectual steam? Will one Amartya Sen, one Arundhati Roy, one Ashis Nandy, one Amitav Ghosh 8212; elite figures who, for all their brilliance and versatility cannot, except through occasional acts of translation, reach regional language audiences 8212; deliver us from the drought of ideas? William Dalrymple has an equally worrying pronouncement in his August 13 essay in The Guardian: that the best Indian writing in English is no longer produced by writers who are in any real sense Indian.

Almost all of the most successful and productive of the so-called 8220;Indian8221; writers, he claims, are foreign in some way or other: by birth, by citizenship, or by migration out of the subcontinent. No thinkers, no writers 8212; well then! Maybe we should just commit national suicide? Critics from the bhasha traditions will say that this is a false alarm. Just in the world of Hindi, for example, until a generation ago people could look up to men like Rammanohar Lohia, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, Rahul Sankrutyayana, Jayaprakash Narayan and many others, to provide dissent, description, prophecy and leadership to society at large.

But the fact is, whether in Hindi or in English or in any other major Indian language, we are patently not in the midst of a cultural renaissance, or on the brink of a revolution in ideas. It will not do to dismiss Naipaul and Dalrymple as 8220;outsiders8221; who cannot appreciate the thought or writing of at least a handful of people in a billion-strong nation. They are talented men who have spent their respective literary careers engaging India with a degree of seriousness that not many native intellectuals or creative writers can match. If they are both pointing to a paucity of quality intellection, a scarcity of creative self-expression, a lack of thinkers looking 50 years ahead and anticipating a changed world, then we need to take stock of the Indian mindscape.

Let8217;s ask with V.S. Naipaul, that cantankerous sage: Where are your thinkers, India? For India to redeem its reputation as the crucible of humanity and also to be truly empowered, it has to begin to think again.