In Search of a Public Intellectual

In 1993, Edward Said delivering the BBC Reith Lectures expressed the classic dilemma faced by intellectuals: how do we balance creativity with commitment to the vulnerable sections of society? There was never any doubt in Said’s mind, a passionate advocate of the Palestine cause, about the vocation of the intellectual. “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.” These qualities make a public intellectual.

The notion of the public intellectual emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century in France, in the context of what came to be known as the Dreyfuss affair in December 1894. An army captain Alfred Dreyfuss was accused of treason. It was alleged that he sold military secrets to the Germans. The French public was bitterly divided on the issue. A number of anti-Semitic organisations, for example, the newspaper La Libre Parole edited by Edouard Drumont, began to tom-tom the disloyalty of French Jews. Some efforts were made to defend Dreyfuss. The evidence against Dreyfuss was scanty and increasingly the scale began to tilt towards another French officer Fredinand Walsin Esterhazy. He was however acquitted of treason 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 their respective ivory-towers. The distinguished novelist Emile Zola wrote a letter titled J’Accuse published in Clemenceau’s newspaper L’Aurore. He attacked the army for covering up the mistaken conviction of Dreyfuss. This set off another storm with the anti-Dreyfussards, who were against the reopening of the case, viewing support for Zola as an attempt to discredit the army and weaken the nation. The pro-Dreyfussards saw the issue in wider terms of justice: the defence of individual freedom against the combustible rhetoric of national security.

In August 1898 the document incriminating Dreyfuss was found to be a forgery. But the damage had been done. The rabid right had come into the political limelight. The philosopher Hannah Arendt believed that the anti-semitic movement began with the Dreyfuss affair. Interestingly, however, the affair generated the acclaimed French tradition of ‘intellectual engage’. The right-wing used the term ‘intellectual’ with contempt; for them intellectuals were anti-national. They continue to be so in today’s India.

Despite attacks, French society continued to believe that the intellectual had to engage with injustice, arbitrary state power, threats to individual liberty, and racism. When the philosopher and writer Jean Paul Sartre, admired and loved as a public intellectual, died in 1980, reportedly 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. S/he had to abandon self-reflection in the environs of the university, and 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.

In 1935, French intellectuals organised an International Writers Assosciation for the Defense of Culture in Paris. The conference launched 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, Bertold Brecht and Henreich Mann. The controversies that erupted during the proceedings spilled over into the streets of Paris.

Socialist realism held the day. Ilya Ehrenburg, the 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 attacked by Andre Breton, the French surrealist writer and poet. Ultimately the Congress could not create a coalition of anti-fascists despite individual commitment to the cause. Shades of the Soviet Union experiment in conceptualising culture instrumentally hung heavily over the heads of the participants. All of them hated fascism, but they could not agree on the desirability of the Soviet model. Reportedly the surrealist Rene Crevel tried to mediate between the Surrealists and Communists but failed. In despair, he returned to his apartment and commited suicide by turning the gas on. He left a note pinned onto 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 in 1936. The PWA notably 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. Though the organisation was a product of, and embedded in the national movement and particularly the politics of the Communist Party of India, it prised open the binary opposition between colonialism and imperialism, and brought in another dimension, inequality, oppression, and patriarchy.

At the first meeting in 1936, Sajjad Zaheer reiterated that it is the duty of the writer to struggle against reaction and ignorance in whatever form they manifest themselves in society. Mulk Raj Anand reiterated that the goal of the PWA was to liberate Indian society from maligning imperialist archeology and from its misuse by reactionary elements in our society-narrow nationalist revivalists, the priest-craft and orthodoxy.

The social function of poetry was ably summed up by India’s leading poet Sahir Ludhianvi. The job of the poet is incomplete if it does not reach the poor-‘Phan jo naadar tak nahin pahuncha/apne meyaar tak nahin pahuncha’. For this we need a different gaze, not one that is obsessed with our pains and pleasures but one that connects with our fellow beings, with suffering, and which creates empathy through solidarity.

The manifesto read: “Radical changes are taking place in Indian society…We believe that the new literature of India must deal with the basic problems of existence today –the problem of hunger and poverty, social backwardness, and political subjection. All that drags us down to passivity, inaction, and un-reason we reject as reactionary. All that arouses in us the critical spirit, which examines institutions and customs in the light of reason, which helps us to act, to organise ourselves, to transform, we accept as progressive”. Social realism replaced romanticism, as well as the idea that the poet/writer was above politics.

Like all radical movements, the PWA was internationalist in its vision. Two of the organisers Sajjad Zaheer and Mulk Raj Anand had been associated with the Bloombury group in London. The writer Leonard Wolfe along with his wife Virginia, Virginia’s sister Vanessa Bell and a group of friends from Cambridge, established the Bloomsbury group as the centre of a new aesthetic and intellectual culture. The idea was to break with old social mores, discover new modes of defying borders of art and culture, and invent new notions of personal intimacy. The group inspired a new aesthetic.

Mulk Raj Anand (1905), eminent novelist, essayist, and critic, attended the meetings of the group to which he was invited by Leonard Wolfe and E.M Forster. Forster wrote the preface to Untouchable. Anand’s Letters on India carried a foreword by Leonard Woolf. And his other works were well reviewed by Bonamy Dovree, Stephen Spender, and George Orwell.

Anand returned to India in 1945, and in 1981, he wrote Conversations in Bloomsbury. He was attracted by learned discussions but the group dissatisfied him. In the preface to the second edition of the book published in 1995, Anand wrote that most of the intellectuals who gathered for informal evenings at Virginia Woolf’s residence in Tavistock Place almost deliberately avoided talking about politics. This made him nervous. “The writers of the Bloomsbury Group, and their affiliates in the Universities of Oxford and Cambride were, of course, humane people, but like the exalted Mayfair-Kensington-Bayswater-Wimbledon-Kew Gardens middle sections, they remained enclosed in their precious worlds, without guilts about their status as aristocrats having been achieved by the labour of generations of industrial workers in Midlands and the colonies.”

He was upset by their refusal to participate in politics, even as Hitler and Mussolini’s ignoble politics confronted them in newspapers. When Mussolini wantonly attacked and occupied Ethiopia, wrote Anand, they saw it as a tragic joke that this Italian was reviving Ceasarism. Hitler’s occupation of Austria brought frowns. When Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact and conceded Sudentanland to Hitler, they seemed to be taken in by the promise of peace in our time. When the young sons of big houses Stephen Spender, W.H Auden, Cecil Day, Edward Upward, Louis Macniece began to march in anti-Fascist protest processions in the streets, Virigina Woolf dubbed them as the ‘Leaning Tower’ School of Poets. A number of critics including Raymond Williams characterised the group as upper-class and generally dismissive of the working class, of people who upheld imperialism, and who had no time for the freedom movement.

Anand was fascinated by the exciting ideas voiced in Bloomsbury, but uncomfortable about the unspoken ban on political stands. Indians, he wrote, had seen the ugly face of fascism before the Europeans saw it. He wanted to create an intellectual space which had the intellectual exuberance of Bloomsbury, but which was political and anti-imperialist. What he did learn from the group was the significance of culture as a political intervention. The public intellectual could not be above politics or part of the ruling elite. S/he had to create a new vision that would inspire an India caught up in the pettiness of religious politics, and heedless of the misery which befell millions of its countrymen. This is our crying need even today.

This is not to suggest that the PWA was not marked by profound tensions between members of the Communist Party and those who preferred heterogeneity, between defenders of style and those of substance, and on the issue of the relationship between a new ethics and literature. The members knew that the term progressive was neither a given nor self-explanatory. It was a matter for debate. What they shared was the conviction that literature had to socially revitalise a society, raise questions about who we are and what we want to be, and indicate the road from what is, to what can be. This was emphasised by Munshi Premchand in his inaugural address at the first meeting. Literature must engage with our sense of beauty, and on the other face the grim realities of life with determination.

Most of progressive poetry is concerned with arousing indignation and anger at the sheer desolation of life lived by millions, and is concerned with taking us beyond the realm of our personal lives to the lives of others. This is the tradition of the Progressive Writers Association and social realism. Sajjad Zaheer remarked that though the ghazal was still attractive, fervor was created in a mushaira only when the poet attacked the oppressor, exposed hypocrisy, described the real condition of the masses, delivered a message of unity, action, and struggle and predicted a future of freedom and justice.

Poets – Majaz, Kaifi Azmi, Sahir, Faiz, Makhdoon Moinuddin, Amrita Pritam, Rajendra Singh Bedi, and Ali Sardar Jafri began – to write of gham-e-dauran or the material world instead of gham-e-jaana. Most poets did both. Kaifi Azmi who wrote one of the most acclaimed love sonnets for Chetan Anand’s Heer Ranjha-‘meri duniya mein tum aaye kya kya apne saath liye’, also famously wrote ‘Uth Meri Jaan. Mere Saath Hi Chalna Hai Tujeh’.  Sahir could write a bhangra number for Kabhi Kabhi, but also write ‘kahan hai, kahan hai muhafiz khudi ke’. Majrooh Sultanpuri wrote beautiful lyrics, but also used the ghazal to transform the idea of beauty. Beauty was in the body of the toiler, the mehnat-kash insaan –‘surkh inquilab aaya, daur-e-aftaab aaya/Muntazir thi yeh aakehn jis ki ek zamane se/Ab zameen gayagi, hal ke saaz pe nagme….Ab sanwar ke niklega, husn kaarkhane se’.

After independence, the PWA declined for a variety of reasons, but a number of poets continued to suggest, against prevailing sentiments, that India and Pakistan should live in harmony. Going against the rabid nationalism which marked the 1965 war with Pakistan, Ali Sardar Jafri wrote ‘Voh din aaye ke aansoo ho ke nafrat dil se beh jaaye/Voh din aaye ye sarhad bosa-e-lab ban kar reh jaaye’. And his famous verse from ‘Kaun dushman hain?’ in the same period resounded with these words ‘Tum aao gulshan-e-Lahore se chaman bar-dosh se/Hum aayen subh-e-Banaras ki raushni lekar/Himaalaya ki havaaon ki taazagi lekar/Phir us ke baad yeh poochenge, kaun dushman hai.’ And above all, there is Gulzar who wrote with some poignancy: “Tumhe aziz hai apna watan/main jaanta hoon/mujhe bhi us se mohabbat hai/tum yakeen kar lo/zara sa pharak hai gar tum samajh sako isko/ki tum wahin ke ho aur main wahin se hoon”. As a voice that suggests alternatives to dominant ideologies, the poet invokes imaginations of what could be. We do not have to live with hate.

Significantly poets despaired of the inability of the post-independence government to resolve issues of poverty and class, inequality and oppression. Sahir’s was direct about the need to mobilise people against oppression and subordination. ‘Chaalo ki aak sabhi paymaal roohon se/ Kahen ke apne hare k zakhm ko zubaan kar de/ Hamara raaz hamara nahin, sabhi ka hai/Chalon ke sare zamane ko raazdan kar de’ Kaifi Azmi was direct in his call for revolution: ‘Kahaan tak ye bil-jabr mar mar ke jeena/ Badalne laga hai amal ka qareena. Lahu mein hai khaulan, jabeen par paseena, Dhadakti hai nasben, sulagta hai seena/Garaj ai baghavat ke tayyaar hoon main.’’

Sahir was the conscience of our society; forthright about the need to resist injustice. After independence when right winger systematically set about suppressing Urdu as the language of the minority, the celebrations of Ghalib’s birth centenary prompted Sahir to write in an ironic vein: ‘Jin shahro mein goonji thi Ghalib ki nava barson/Un shahron mein aaj Urdu be-naam-o-nishan thahri/Aazadi-e-kaamil ka ailaan hua jis din/Ma’atob zabaan thahri, ghaddar zabaan thahri/ Jis ahd-e-siyasat ne ye zinda zuban kuchli/Us ahd-e-siyasat ko marhoomofi ka gham kyu hai/Ghalib jise kehte hain Urdu hi ka shayar tha/Urdu pe sitam dha kar, Ghalib pe karam kyu hain’.

The progressive poet is the conscience of humankind, the quintessential public intellectual. We need them even more today, to awaken the consciousness of a supine middle class which has ceased to care about the vulnerable and the exploited. The public intellectual does not have to be a poet, but there is something special about poets, they touch our souls. They might even touch the soul of an India indifferent to the finer aspects of culture, an India caught up once again in the pettiness of religious politics.

Neera Chandhoke was a professor of political science at Delhi University.