Ordinary intellectuals

Amit Chaudhuri's book explores the role of organic intellectuals in shaping India's contemporary narrative of resistance and reason

On Being Indian

Author: Amit Chaudhuri

Publisher: Westland Books, Literary Activism series

Pages: 71

Price: Rs 399

It is almost impossible to conduct a conversation today where the word “intellectual” is not used as an abusive interjection or as a term of derision. Intellectuals are seen as troublemakers and naysayers, forever raining on the country’s growth parade.

In times like these, it is interesting to find a book like this one that gently nudges readers to rethink the idea of the intellectual and thereby understand the true value of reason and rationality in society. It also sets a global intellectual tradition within the emotionally-charged contours of contemporary Indian nationalism.

On Being Indian originated as a lecture delivered to students at the Jamia Millia Islamia University, in New Delhi. The talk was turned into an essay before finding its way into a book. The journey of the book, from the spoken to the written word, drives urgency into the narrative and infuses the book with a sense of contemporaneity and directness that such forms of address require. It also lets the author, Amit Chaudhuri, weave in the personal with the political, without having to explain anything to the reader.

The book and the talk were structured around key moments of protest that have defined the culture of resistance in India over the past three years. To fully draw out the impact of these protests and their long-term influence (if any) on the Indian people, Mr Chaudhuri is keen to locate the emergence of the Indian “organic intellectual,” a term coined by Italian social scientist and thinker Antonio Gramsci.

Gramsci believed it necessary to expand the concept of intellectualism. Instead of confining himself to traditional classifications that included the academic and artistic class, Gramsci sought to include ordinary people. He defined organic intellectuals as those whose social function was to communicate with, and educate, non-specialists. But are there such individuals within the country today? And how does one define organic intellectualism in the Indian context?

Mr Chaudhuri wades through a range of ideas — complex and abstruse — to build an understanding of the idea and turn the light on organic intellectuals in the country. He looks at the protests around the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and how different parts of the political class, the academia and ordinary people engaged with the issues. He tracks the rhetoric that was used by the ruling party and the impact that it has had on ordinary people. In his accounts of the events around him, he also turns the gaze inward and lets readers read his reactions to the events and discover, with him, the nature of the intellectual in public protests.

Mr Chaudhuri writes that he was surprised to find an easy coexistence between the rationalising power of protestors and religious sentimentalism. At protests across the country, women in burkas, children, the elderly and the poor, who were all part of the protests, used poetry and song to demonstrate their brand of nationalism.

One woman, he writes, took the stage at one of the protests and spoke about her personal evolution with the idea of dissent. Mahatma Gandhi, who had become an important symbol of the resistance, she said, had never been one of the greats on her list of freedom fighters in India. She had never quite bought into the idea of ahimsa that he had propagated. But the anti-CAA protests had changed her mind because she now understood the difficulty of holding on to a non-violent way of resistance. Mr Chaudhuri urges readers to focus on her ability to articulate the shift in her intellectual engagement with Gandhi, which he finds interesting and evocative.

Mr Chaudhuri writes about Saket Gokhale, who had filed a Right to Information (RTI) application with the government asking for details about the members of the tukde-tukde  gang. He said that the term had become shorthand for traitors who wanted to break up the country and was being routinely weaponised by senior ministers of the government to troll and attack everyone — from students to academics and public figures.

Mr Gokhale’s question forced the government to respond that it had no information about any members of any such gang. Mr Gokhale, who is currently a political activist and a member of the Trinamool Congress, was just a regular journalist at the time. His work to bring a contentious issue to focus and then deal with it in the manner that he did, Mr Chaudhuri writes, reveals the nature of the organic intellectual.

He identifies others such as people who used the authority vested in them by their chosen professions to question the popular narrative — a startup founder who spoke up against religious bigotry, a pilot who questioned the ban imposed on Kunal Kamra, a bureaucrat who resigned over the government’s handling of the Kashmir issue. They are all organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense. Their emergence in the country marks a new turn in the long history of Indian intellectual traditions.