"To Question or Not to Question? - that is the Question"
Romila Thapar is a renowned Indian historian with a number of excellent history and philosophy books to her credit. However, this book is different – it tries to examine the current status of the public intellectual in India. The origin of the book is a talk that she gave at the third Nikhil Chakravarty Memorial Lecture (yes, I had also not heard of him but checked up on Wikipedia - Nikhil was a respected journalist in India who founded the journal Mainstream) in Oct 2014. The lecture was titled “To Question or Not to Question, That is the Question”. That lecture has been revised and expanded in this book and five more essays added from other well known intellectuals – Sundar Sarukkai, Dhruv Raina, Peter deSouza, Neeladri Bhattacharya and Javed Naqvi, which were in response to Romila’s essay. The book concludes with a brief summary by Romila Thapar with her comments on the other responses.
In Romila Thapar’s lecture she laments the state of the
current Indian affairs, the declining role of the Public Intellectual in India,
the increasing communal polarization by religion, the rising Hinduvta extremism
and trend towards increasing authoritarian behavior by the Indian Government.
Surprisingly she downplays the economic development since the liberalization of
1992, and strangely believes that it has not made much impact. (I guess you
have to be really living in an intellectual cocoon not to see how the last
twenty years of development has brought millions of Indians out of poverty!).
Other than that her essay is great and it brings out a large number of issues and
points that all Indians need to think about, with her principal concern being
about the legacy of colonialism that still leaves a significant mark on all major
Indian policies.
Sundar Sarukkai’s essay focuses on nature of questioning and
whether Thapar’s call to question needs to take into account certain
fundamental characteristics of the act of questioning such as scientific
rationality, knowledge/ignorance level, intellectual honesty, and ethics. Dhruv
Raina’s essay focuses on Science and Democracy and argues that the
institutional transformation of science over the last couple of years (a
transformation in which the scope of criticism and skepticism is limited) has
altered the relation between science and the public as well as the critical
discourse on science and society. According to him the world of ‘Big Science’
and dependence on large funding has reduced the independence of scientific
thinking and thus reducing the effort to work for the good of society. Peter deSouza
in his essay focuses on the definition of the public intellectual and his or
hers different personas to examine the logic at work in the public
intellectual. His essay is in three parts, with the first part covering the stories of three individuals (Priya Pillai in India, Yeshayahu Leibowitz in
Israel and Avijit Roy in Bangladesh) which are tragic examples of what public
intellectuals can face in today’s world. The second part examines the factors
that prevent public intellectuals being more active and third part looks at how
these factors work in Indian politics today.
The fourth essay is by Neeladiri Bhattacharya and it
questions the framework of Thapar’s question and the type of public individual
that she is referring to. He is more optimistic than Thapar on the state of
Indian affairs and feels that the role of the public intellectual in India has
not diminished much. I found the final essay by Jawed Naqvi, the best of the
lot. Starting with a couple of examples where the Public Intellectuals have
played an important role in recent developments in India, he still highlights the major
challenges faced by questioning voices in the supposedly democratic fabric of
Indian society. Urging us to look beyond the much-hyped Hindu-Muslim divide in
India, he brings to open the caste consciousness still highly relevant in
India.
All the essays are of very high quality and I salute Romila
Thapar for this endeavor to bring them out in a single book format. This is a
must read for all Indians who are concerned with the future of our country.
