“There is, then, the quest. For a long time now, this has been the issue facing me and many other friends of mine: at the level of social upheavals, Asia has experienced everything the West has without having had an intellectual upheaval, which even remotely resembles those that have occurred in the West.
We have had revolutions, palace coups, dictatorships, capitalisms, democracies and what-have-you. We have even had colonisations and independence movements.
But where are our renaissances or our enlightenments?
Why not a Vienna Circle or, at least, a Frankfurt School?
Surely, our culture has had its share of brilliant men and women.
Where, then, are our Marxes, or Webers or Freuds?
We could at least produce a Parsons or a Durkheim?
We can afford a Popper, surely, if not a Russell or a Wittgenstein?
Where are they?
In search of answers to these questions, I have explored every possible hypothesis: from the ‘most mechanical’ to the ‘sophisticated dialectical’; from the ‘sociological’ to the ‘spiritual’. All of them have led to so many cul-de-sacs.
In this paper, I am trying out another avenue of exploration: we could not produce the intellectual revolutions because the heuristics that produced social theories in the West do not make sense to us. If what should aid you in the creation of theories becomes just a meaningless set of statements, if using a productive and fertile heuristic is no different from chanting an incomprehensible mantra, how could you possibly build new and exciting theories on that basis? You could not! That is why Asia has not accomplished much at the level of social theories.”
In 2015, today, my teacher Balu is still alive and I continue to be a student of the programme he has built, viz. the comparative science of cultures. Though it is about culture, it is a rival research programme challenging cultural and social anthropology. We are both still studying Indian culture, in a scientific and philosophically responsible way and both of us continue to be bothered by the question raised above by Balu so-many-decades ago.
It is thus that I came across Ramachandra Guha’s article in the news magazine Caravan, titled ‘Where are India’s conservative intellectuals?’ dated March 1, 2015.
If one has read some of his other published pieces, then one could forgive me for thinking that Guha perhaps aspires to precisely be that conservative intellectual, whose absence he bemoans and thus distinguish himself from the many other figures that dot the intellectual landscape of India in the domains of human and social sciences.
Thus, as an intellectual, my question is very simple:
Has Guha solved the problem that he has set out?
My answer too is startlingly simple: in his puerile piece, he has failed even to formulate the problem. Perhaps, my earlier surmise was wrong: may be, he does not want to be the conservative intellectual whom he dreams about after all, but merely wants to join the bandwagon of those intellectual parasites in India who feed from the table crumbs thrown at them by thinkers from the West.
In this article, I want to reflect about the reasons and motives behind this harsh and damning indictment of Guha and ‘intellectuals’ from India, some of whose names Guha himself mentions in his article in the Caravan.
Let me begin with a thumb-nail sketch of his five-part article. He begins by reflecting about what ‘Liberal’ (socialist) and ‘Conservative’ thinking mean. Here, he repeats the ideas of Karl Mannheim, a German sociologist of knowledge (actually the founder of sociology of knowledge, a precursor to the modern social studies of science, which differs radically from Mannheim’s thought), discussing the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’. Then, he moves on to speak more in detail about a British philosopher with well-known leanings towards ‘conservatism’, Roger Scruton.
Guha discovers that ‘religion’ (in the form of ‘Hinduism’) dominates BJP’s idea of a nation and that, therefore, it does not jive with Scruton’s conservatism.
Armed with this weaponry, continuing with some en passant historical remarks about Nehru, Rajaji, two of the icons of the RSS, namely Golwalkar and Savarkar, and the obligatory reference to Samuel Huntington, he calls BJP ‘reactionary’ (thus not ‘conservative’ at all) and ends with a clarion call: “Rather than the liberals and leftists whom they currently target, self-aware and self-conscious conservatives should really be vigilant of the reactionaries who dominate the discourse on the right.”
‘Follow me’, said the Spider to the Fly, ‘welcome to my parlour and make yourself at home’. Thus, through the mouth of our maestro, two Europeans, Mannheim and Scruton, separated by a channel and a short distance of land-travel, ventriloquize: if Indians do not follow them (or two other Europeans, Mill and Marx, say), then they are doomed! In His Master’s voice, the prophecy rings thus: “Otherwise, India might go the way of the Italy of the 1920s or the Argentina of the 1950s—a polity ruled by a right-wing party, with a right-wing demagogue as its elected head, where public discourse is defined by thugs and bigots rather than by scholars and thinkers.” If they do not follow these European ‘gods’, proclaims the Prophet that Guha is, Indians are destined to buy a one-way ticket to hell; a set of ominous sounding words, but, alas, not equally impressive: unfortunately, Guha does not carry the charisma of a Moses or a Jesus or a Mohammed, even if he thinks otherwise, to make us believe him or want to follow him.
Guha’s piece is a sad reflection of the Indian intellectual landscape where intellectual pygmies are transformed into Giants and Geniuses.
It is also a sad commentary of the general intellectual climate in the human and social sciences the world over. Perhaps, it is more important to speak about this, and thus continue an oblique reflection about Guha and some Indian intellectuals, than focus on this worthless piece of a journalistic article.
Let me begin with Guha’s choice of Karl Mannheim.
He was an interbellum figure, in the sense that his writings are to be situated between the two world wars, which tore Europe apart. He was also an interregnum figure, in the sense that he is to be situated with the changing nature of social science: that which was there in the period before the Second World War and that which came into existence thereafter. One can get a flavour of the first by reading the left-wing historian Russell Jacoby in his The Last Intellectuals; one can begin to sense the second by reading the Conservative thinker Allan Bloom is his The Closing of the American Mind. The points these two lovely and lively books make have recently emerged as the focus of a new sub-domain of research in the social sciences, namely as an investigation into ‘the Cold war Social Sciences’.
With the American domination of the world that followed the war-torn Europe – which is still suffering from the cultural amnesia imposed upon her by the 20th century developments – a new way of doing social science research opened up. This way of research was internally massively funded for the first time by the American State, wanting to fight an ideological battle with the Soviet Union as its basic focus. This ideological battle was fought in the name of science, of truth and of knowledge. It was, however, purely ideological: both the Soviet Union and the US described Russia, Eastern Europe and China (of then) as ‘communist’, a terminological decision that made any serious Marxist want to throw-up: from the very early period of the revolution of 1917, some serious Marxists, mostly Trotskyists, considered Soviet Union either as ‘a degenerate State’ or even as ‘state capitalist’.
Calling these countries communist showed nothing other than a massive ignorance of the history and theory of Marxism. You cannot found and justify theories as ‘science’, ‘truth’ or ‘knowledge’ on the basis of such an exhibition of illiteracy. Therefore, parasites sprung up in their millions, feeding upon the state subsidies for social science research, mouthing ideology surrounded by a jargon which was normative to the core: ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘progress’, ‘social justice’ etc. The theoretical poverty was masked by passionate pleas for ‘social equality’ and ‘individual freedom’, the intellectual bankruptcy was hidden behind impressive sounding propagandistic words: ‘Research University’, ‘Citation Index’ and ‘impact factors’ of journal articles.
This situation still prevails today: go, speak to any leftist, secular or ‘reactionary’ intellectual in any of the Universities in India, they spout the same jargon with passionate intensity.
Your only difficulty would be a decision problem, which is like finding a solution to a halting problem or prove an impossibility theorem: how to distinguish the best professor in an institution from its worst lowly paid clerk? I do not believe you can.
Be that as it may, the result has been catastrophic as far as growth of knowledge is concerned. America imposed this ‘intellectual environment’ upon the rest of the world and we all are still travelling that route. India suffered doubly, not only from this ill of the present but also from the misfortunes of the past, namely colonialism. Her intellectuals were natives, it is true, but breastfed by nurses of western culture. The ‘intellectuals’ that existed before the British were the ‘pundits’, a tribe of low-paid scribes who were created by the Muslims.
That the Indians themselves still sense this situation is evidenced by the contrast they draw between a ‘guru’ and a ‘pundit’.
Most of the latter became the Babus in the so-called ‘elite universities’ in India. If the old pundits chanted mantras from the shastras, Vedas and the Upanishads, the new Babus chanted even more loudly from Kant, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger and Derrida. They understood these western thinkers as much as the pundits knew what ‘atman’ was, namely, not at all!
Precisely because of that fact, they were welcome guests at international conferences, where they strutted around like proud peacocks, basking in the reflected sunlight of a Saussure, of a Levi-Strauss, of a William James interspaced with smatterings of a Jacques Lacan, an Eric Hobsbawm or whoever was the current darling intellectual in Paris, London and New York. Such intellectual parasites, who feed upon the indecipherable mantras of their western masters also wear dazzling ornaments, which are the western badges of recognition: of awards won or appointments at ‘prestigious’ and obligatory western universities.
Consider the by-line that identifies our own Ramchandra Guha, in one of the pieces that he wrote for the Indian Express, for example: ‘The writer, based in Bangalore, has taught at Yale, Stanford, the London School of Economics and the Indian Institute of Science.’ Wow!
If one wants to reflect upon the absence of intellectuals (of whatever brand) in India, one needs to begin reflecting about the resonance of the word ‘guru’ in Indian culture. (The use of the singular, i.e., ‘culture’ does not connote a monolithic entity any more the word ‘Homo Sapiens Sapiens’, a word used to designate the current human species in the singular, entails an absence of diversity.) Whether we like it or not, the Sangh Parivar is the only (family) or organization that is rooted in Indian culture, whatever the depth and extent of roots may be. It is from them that we should expect the emergence of ‘public intellectuals’ in India. The absence of this phenomenon should trouble us.
But such real-world problems do not trouble either Guha or the other Indian parasites. Unwittingly, they have coined a term that does express the problem: ‘Saffronisation’ appears to occur whenever the Sangh Parivar comes into power. Saffron is the colour of the Rishi’s, Sadhus and Guru’s in India. They are the ‘public’ intellectuals of India. They are despised by Europe, a disgust the Indian parasites share with their western masters. They could emerge only from within the folds of the Sangh Parivar.
Unfortunately, even this option is not open to the revered figure that Guha is. He says, that, as a student of the late U.R. Anantha Murthy he is loath to use the word ‘saffron’ to describe the Sangh Parivar’s forays into education.
In a sense, it stands to reason. If someone declares himself to be an ardent student of the intellectual ‘Guru’, whose only achievement in life lies in the writing of a third-rate Victorian pornographic novel called Samskara, what intellectual gems can you expect of such a man except intellectual flatulence?
Prof. Dr. Jakob De Roover, Universiteit Gent, Belgium.
Jakob De Roover on Ramachandra Guha’s Intellectualism