Who is an intellectual?

Anupam Kher will play the bard of Bengal Rabindranath Tagore in a forthcoming film. This has faced much flak from those who don't share his politics.

Last week, a top Indian lawyer who appears regularly on news television posted a tweet which read: “The formally uneducated have provided very great leaders, but they honestly admitted to being uneducated. Emperor Akbar could not read or write, but he valued education and scholars. No nation progresses in an atmosphere of active anti-intellectualism egged on by academic frauds.” He was forwarding a tweet about the late K. Kamaraj, chief minister of Tamil Nadu and president of the Indian National Congress, who was, perhaps, the most powerful man in Indian politics in the mid-1960s. Kamaraj never finished high school.

While the gentleman appeared to be referring to the controversy about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s college degree, what caught my attention was the term “active anti-intellectualism”. I have no idea what the Modi government is doing, if anything, to suppress intellectuals, but that word — “intellectual” — has always fascinated me. Who or what exactly is this creature?

I am a Bengali, and apparently, Bengalis are seen as an “intellectual” race by some people from other parts of the country. Obviously, these people do not know that West Bengal has a record of political violence unmatched by any other state in independent India. The panchayat elections that concluded a few days ago have seen dozens of deaths. As far as I know, not a single Bengali “intellectual” has uttered a squeak about this.

Instead, they have taken to Twitter to express fury at Anupam Kher being cast as Rabindranath Tagore in a forthcoming film. They do not approve of Kher’s politics; so he should not be allowed to portray Tagore, “the great liberal mind”. This logic is, of course, idiotic. The late Utpal Dutt was a committed communist all his life, but played all sorts of characters on screen, from benevolent capitalist to evil crime lord. In fact, I can’t recall him ever playing a proletariat trade union activist. Maybe, he was too plump a man for that type of role.

The anger of Bengali intellectuals merely reflects how insecure they are and how much they now resemble the frog in the well from that old fable.

So what is an intellectual? The dictionary tells us that he or she is “a person possessing a highly developed intellect”. “Intellect” is defined as “the faculty of reasoning and understanding objectively, especially with regard to abstract matters”. The Oxford dictionary even offers a helpful example: “He was a man of action rather than of intellect”. If the lexicographers of Oxford are correct — that action and intellect are mutually exclusive to a large extent — then all politicians, statesmen and even spiritual leaders seem to be disbarred from the intellectual class. The implication is that intellectuals think and talk and leave others to do the heavy-lifting, in fact all lifting.

I need to make a disclosure here. I have an engineering degree and, to make things worse, even an MBA. That is the worst sort of CV to have for an entry into any club of intellectuals. Because, the first rule of intellectualism seems to be that you need to have a humanities or social science degree.

The term “social science” has always seemed to me to be somewhat dubious — an attempt to gain acceptance and respect by calling itself a “science”, while much of it is just jargon-laden storytelling. This is not an original thought. It was first articulated by the late great sociologist Neil Postman.

The second rule is felicity with language. If you can’t express a thought cleverly, you can’t be an intellectual. “Cleverly” is the key word here, and it has nothing to do with “clarity”. In fact, the less clear you are, the more the chances that you will be regarded as a person who has some new insight.

Consider some of the most famous quotes from the French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who have been much in vogue in the last few decades as the fathers of “post-modernism”. The very fact that the term “post-modernism” makes no logical sense is an indication of what this intellectualism is all about. If you are more than modern, have you then travelled back in time to 2023?

Here’s Derrida: “There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language — no syntax and no lexicon — which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.” I read that a few times to figure out what the man was trying to say and could only reach the conclusion that he was admitting that he should shut up because there was no way to say what he wanted to say.

But he doesn’t stop there. He complains about people who ask what he means: “Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?” Inaccessible to you, you fool. Science has its own language, which is logical and structured, and all theories can be derived from “first principles”, just as one can create a meaningful word from the letters of any alphabet.

One of the fundamental equations of life is this:

CO2 + 6H2O + energy → 6O2 + C6H12O6

This is photosynthesis, the process in which plants use carbon dioxide, water and the sun's energy to generate the oxygen we need to live and the glucose we need for the energy to carry on. How much easier can it get?

Michel Foucault, the object of much adoration among current intellectuals, was a real piece of work. When he was not writing stuff that was either incomprehensible or open to an infinite number of interpretations, he was lobbying for a lower age of consent for children to have sex.

“What desire can be contrary to nature, since it was given to man by nature itself?” he asked. This logic pardons everyone from a roadside pickpocket to Hitler. How could Hitler be blamed when the desire to kill all Jews everywhere was a desire that was given by nature itself?

After his death, many serious charges of child abuse against Foucault surfaced, on his regular jaunts to North Africa. But the intellectuals who don’t want Anupam Kher to play Tagore because he supports the BJP have no problem in admiringly quoting a man who was almost certainly a child-molester.

The third truth about “intellectualism” in India is that it’s totally upper class. “Upper class” here does not mean only family income. The rich and entitled allow entry to the useful. So, someone from a poor family in Bihar who gets an admission to a PhD programme in JNU in African studies, which is basically a free ticket to 10 years of leisure at taxpayer expense, is welcomed into the fold.

The real upper class consists of those who think that society owes them a livelihood, if not a good life.

Most of us who have done STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) seem to be out of it. Who cares about the thought and work that went into building that new flyover which halves your commute time or to prompt “Shah Rukh Khan” when you type “Shah” in a Google search?

The key issue is that of responsibility and accountability. “Intellectuals” occupy a space that is above the level where one can be proved wrong. They reside in the realm of pure opinion, untainted by rigorous logic or the sweat of labour. Intellectuals cannot be sacked, just like our babus.

Paradoxically, we Bengalis, who are supposed to be an intellectual race, have a term for them. “Aantel” is a shortened version of the way the French pronounce the word “intellectual” — aantellectchuwale. “Intellectualism” is “aantlami”, which embodies a disdain for empty theorising. So, we go about killing one another at election time while the aantels attend book fairs and discuss Derrida. I guess we are doing fine, and I guess I am an anti-intellectual.