The elusive public intellectual in our times

Neera Chandhoke

Political scientist

In 1993, while delivering the BBC Reith Lecture, Edward Said asked: “How do we balance creativity with commitment to the vulnerable?” He added: “Real intellectuals are never more themselves than when, moved by metaphysical passion and disinterested principles of justice and truth, they denounce corruption, defend the weak, defy imperfect or oppressive authority.”

The notion of the public intellectual emerged in December 1894 in France. An army Captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was accused of treason. Allegedly, he had sold military secrets to the Germans. Anti-Semitic organisations, for example newspaper La Libre Parole edited by Edouard Drumont, tom-tommed the disloyalty of French Jews. Some defended Dreyfus. The evidence against him was scanty and another officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, was accused of treason. Esterhazy was acquitted in a court-martial.

The injustice was so palpable, the racism so stark, and public prejudice so unmistakeable, that intellectuals could no longer confine themselves to the ivory tower. Distinguished novelist Emile Zola wrote an open letter titled J’Accuse published in Clemenceau's newspaper L’Aurore. He attacked the army for covering up the mistaken conviction of Dreyfus. This set off another storm with the right wing accusing Zola’s supporters of discrediting the army and weakening the nation. The liberal left spoke of defences of individual freedom against the combustible rhetoric of national security. The right wing used the term ‘intellectual’ with contempt; for them, intellectuals were anti-national. They continue to be so in today’s India.

But intellectuals have always dismissed these attacks as irrelevant to their task — engaging with injustice, arbitrary power, individual liberty, and religious conflict. When philosopher and writer Jean Paul Sartre died in 1980, around 50,000 people attended his funeral. Sartre had argued that the intellectual had no right to be at a distance from controversy. S/he simply did not have the privilege of being detached. Abandoning self-reflection, the public intellectual had to take hold of the era to change society. There could be no private life of the mind in abstraction from social and political issues and struggles.

Earlier, in 1935, French intellectuals had organised an International Writers Association for the Defence of Culture in Paris. The conference witnessed the largest mobilisation against the rise of fascism — the harbinger of brutal regimes in the world. Held in June at the Palais de Mutualite, the conference was attended by hundreds of writers. Sajjad Zaheer and Mulk Raj Anand, who were to play a major role in turning the course of literature and Urdu poetry in India, participated in the conference, along with Aldous Huxley, EM Forster, Boris Pasternak, Bertolt Brecht and others. The controversies that erupted during the proceedings spilled over into the streets of Paris.

Ilya Ehrenburg, Soviet historian, journalist and writer, declared that any form of art which was not a weapon against the exploiter was nothing but a useless knick-knack. He was publicly attacked by Andre Breton, French surrealist writer and poet. Ultimately, the conference could not create a coalition of anti-fascists. All participants hated fascism, but they could not agree on the desirability of the Soviet model of instrumentalist culture. Reportedly, surrealist Rene Crevel tried to mediate between the surrealists and communists but failed. In despair, he returned to his apartment and committed suicide by turning the gas on. He left a note pinned on to his lapel that read: ‘disgust’.

Some great debates on the social responsibilities of writers and poets were taking place in India at that very time. The belief that poets and writers have to take poetry beyond the realm of their personal pleasures, desires, passions and frustration in order to connect with others led to the formation of the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) in 1936. It shifted the political discourse of the 1930s away from competitive religious nationalism to poverty, discrimination, class and the responsibility of the poet in a crisis-ridden society. The members could not have read Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebook was published in English only in the 1970s, but they also believed in what he, jailed in Mussolini’s infamous prison system, had written. The intellectual has to create an environment for social, economic and political transformation. Progressives have to intervene in political life.

KA Abbas, a member of the PWA and the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), wrote in his autobiography, I am Not An Island, about the Bombay of 1946. Bombay was a city divided between Hindus and Muslims. At that time, the PWA and IPTA organised a peace march in which 52 cultural organisations, including Prithvi Theatres, took part. The Kapoors (Prithviraj, Raj and Shammi), Dev Anand, Balraj Sahni, progressive Urdu writers and poets — Sajjad Zaheer, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, Sahir Ludhianvi — as well as Marathi and Gujarati writers marched in a procession from Bori Bunder to Bandra. They sang songs of love, harmony and peace, all to heal the wounds of communal hatred in the city.

Today, our actors are forced to sing praises of the ruling class. Writers fear imprisonment, radical theatre has vanished, poets write, but in isolation, academics dread vengeful vice-chancellors. Our public sphere has been silenced and our public intellectuals are put in chains, howsoever metaphorical these may be.

We wish the decades when energies were pooled into forging anti-fascist fronts could revisit us. They will remind us that a society without public intellectuals will wither, slowly but surely.

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