Too passive to resist

As a starting point, let me statethe obvious. Over the last many centuries, we have had an unbroken record of celebrated and energetic dissenters 8212; from Gautam Buddha to the eclectic bhakti saints, the nonconformist sufis, and scores of writers and poets. Nineteenth-century reform movements and the rise of nationalism sustained this long-standing tradition.

Its main carriers were, again, the intellectuals, quot;the fathers and mothers of movements, and of course sons and daughters, even nephews and nieces.quot; Starting with Raja Rammohun Roy and the Brahmo Samaj, the reformist landscape bore the imprint of many ideas that flowed from diverse traditions and perspectives. Quite often the reformers neither spoke nor acted in unison; yet they were one in critiquing their own society and its values so as to construct a social order that would harmonise with their own world view and with the currents of change and enlightenment.

They indicted, moreover, many aspects of colonialism and highlighted its exploitative character. The dawn of freedomprecipitated the fragmentation of the intellectual elites. The most creative and vocal group amongst them, the Marxists, found it increasingly difficult to reconcile their ideology with what they thought was a bourgeois and oppressive post-colonial state.

Some remained dogged in their opposition, while many others, moved by Jawaharlal Nehru8217;s socialist rhetoric, provided legitimacy to his authority and his nation-building enterprises.

The same process was at work, nearly a decade later, during Indira Gandhi8217;s tenure as prime minister. More and more liberal-left intellectuals, overwhelmed by her populist measures, including the abolition of privy purses, joined the Congress bandwagon. I feel they did so more for ideological rather than personal reasons. Nonetheless, it was an ill-advised and ill-fated decision. This they discovered the hard way.

Having pressed them into service to bolster her personal authority in the faction-ridden Congress, Mrs. Gandhi discarded them when it was politically expedientto do so. I do not wish to convey the impression that the majority of our liberalleft intellectuals made their peace with the establishment.

It was not the case; it still isn8217;t. All said and done, we still have our share of Jean Paul Sartres, Noam Chomskys, Gore Vidals and Edward Saids. So many of them have stepped into the public arena to debate some of the contentious issues over the last decade or so, the nuclear explosion being the latest.

In my own discipline, a number of historians, Professors R.S. Sharma, Irfan Habib and Romila Thapar included, have intervened in civil society at considerable personal risk. Sadly, though, their relentless erudition is the cause of derision in certain circles. Their secular credo is assailed; so also their vision of a pluralist and multi-cultural society. Now that the balance of power has shifted from the centre to the right, a well-orchestrated campaign is underway to damn the liberal-left intellectuals. Some have been removed from centres of learning, andreplaced, without any consideration for merit, by a fresh breed of intellectual managers-cum-ideologues.

No doubt, one locates pockets of resistance to the attempted ideological homogenisation of our intellectual life. But, in general, there is much greater acquiescence in, and acceptance, of certain ominous authoritarian trends in civil society. Our premier universities, once the focal point of feverish political activity, have become the bastions of political conservatism. If somebody wants to breach the citadel of orthodoxy in educational institutions, he or she must be prepared to pay a heavy price.

Today, as the radical currents have been swept aside by the winds of right-wing discourses, at least momentarily, not many would pay heed to the Saidian dictum that quot;nothing disfigures the intellectuals8217; public performance as much as trimming, careful silence, patriotic bluster, and retrospective and self-dramatising prophecyquot;.

The print media, too, has lost its independent spirit, and is often hand inglove with the political establishment. New generations of enterprising journalists travel far and wide to install new icons to gain favours from them. A slot in Doordarshan, an overseas trip with the prime ministerial entourage and free housing, are all that matter. This does not augur well for democracy. Any kind of allegiance to the state is itself problematic, more so when it invariably leads to distorted perspectives.

Where do we go from here? I am not presumptuous enough to suggest a course of action for the intellectuals. I simply want to share my disquiet over their passive role in recent years, and bemoan the lack of initiative and drive in raising issues of social and economic empowerment for the rural poor, dalits, tribals and women.

More generally, I want to underline that an intellectual cannot enjoy credibility without raising embarrassing questions, without confronting orthodoxy and dogma, rather than producing them, and without representing all those people and issues that are routinelyforgotten or swept under the rug. Edward Said, whose views I have just quoted, should know better. He is my idea of an intellectual par excellence.