Under the Bharatiya Janata Party government, anti-intellectualism in India has peaked. A revered Nobel laureate was forced to resign as a university chancellor, while a soft-porn actor took over the country’s top film institute. But the countervailing stars of Amartya Sen and Gajendra Chauhan are more than just about ‘saffronisation’ of education.
The main story — the overarching thesis that explains the Nalanda and Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) saga — is the right-wing disdain for artistic creativity and intellectuals. This disdain is not peculiarly Indian, nor is it a one-way disdain. This is a universal clash of two worldviews: liberal, academic-artistic utopia versus the conservative penchant to reduce every idea into an excel sheet of growth and nationalism.
Globally, artists, journalists, actors and academics — the majority of the ‘creative and intellectual’ classes — are known to revile the right wing, as much as the right reviles them. In the US, Hollywood is overwhelmingly Democrat; most elite American universities are hubs of the liberal intelligentsia; a survey last year showed only seven per cent of American journalists identified themselves as Republican, while 50 per cent said they were Democrats. In India, you would find roughly the same pattern.
In a 1949 paper titled ‘Intellectuals and Socialism’, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek explored why the intellectual classes were more likely to be socialist. “Newspapers in ‘capitalist’ ownership, universities presided over by ‘reactionary’ governing bodies, broadcasting systems owned by conservative governments, have all been known to influence public opinion in the direction of socialism, because this was the conviction of the personnel,” wrote Hayek.
Hayek was a free-market champion, and an advisor to right-wing political heroes Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. But even he admitted in his paper “that it is neither selfish interests nor evil intentions but mostly honest convictions and good intentions which determine the intellectual’s views.”
Hayek pointed out that the appeal of socialism amongst intellectuals lay in its “courage to be utopian”, something that the free-market proponents were unable to address. Intellectuals are, by and large, disdainful of capitalists and nationalists because in them they see enemies of their egalitarian utopia.
Now let’s look at the universal right-wing support base, the flag bearers of anti-intellectualism. They are generally business leaders, bankers, techies (free-market evangelists) and lower middle-income cheerleaders of ‘cultural nationalism’. They are women and men of action and bottom lines. They do not understand the utopian worldview of the intellectuals, the ‘sickular’ ‘potheads’ whose erudition and articulation gives them a cult following in the media and society.
What the right wing ignores is that prosperity and culture are intrinsically linked to the world of dissent and social reformation, a world that the intellectuals have mastered. Modern capitalism itself owes its birth to the Protestant social reformation of the mid-20th century, led by intellectuals who dissented against the Roman Catholic Church’s pervasive hold on ordinary lives. The Protestant reformation gave individuals greater freedom to go out in the secular world, set up their own enterprises, to create and accumulate wealth.
But this is not to say that it is only the right wing that gets it wrong every time. Because the utopian left is a natural ally of the academic, intellectual classes, the politicisation of education under left regimes is often greater.
“The Left Front government in West Bengal probably produced the single-most systematic assault on an established system of higher education, creating an unimaginable degree of party control,” observes Pratap Bhanu Mehta in The Indian Express . “The destruction of Calcutta University was a far more watershed event for higher education than the travails of Nalanda; West Bengal now has a gross enrolment ratio in higher education lower than that of UP.”
What Mehta leaves out, perhaps out of deference to Amartya Sen, is how the Left actually used Sen’s brand equity (and that of other intellectuals) to create this “unimaginable degree of party control” over the state’s higher education. And the likes of Sen kept quiet through it all, perhaps out of his ideological affinity and friendships with Marxist leaders.
So when Sen writes in The New York Review of Books that “the extent of intervention has become both unprecedented and often politically extreme under the present regime”, it is of course a cause for worry, but it is also fair to ask why he did not write the same about West Bengal. Sen’s case would have been stronger had he not been selective in his outrage.
Meanwhile in Pune, Gajendra Chauhan can rest easy. The versatility of his body of work — from Yudhishtira to Jungle Love — should certainly find more takers in this government than Sen’s philosophical musings. After all, this is a government of action-oriented men with outsized chests who believe that mythology is history. Intellectuals might as well leave for exile like the Pandavas.
Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi is the founder of The Political Indian. Follow/tweet to him @some_buddha