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| June 5, 2000 | ||
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FreeThinker The pleasures of reading a lucid, old-fashioned essayist By Swapan Dasgupta CHRONICLES OF The reason isn't the middle class inability to imbibe abstractions and complexities but a lamentable failure of academics to address concerns in a popular idiom. Cult figures Ashis Nandy and Sudhir Kakkar apart, there are few academics who are also household names in the same vein as, say, Noam Chomsky, A.J.P. Taylor, Roger Scruton and Norman Stone. This may be doing some injustice to sociologist Andr B teille, who has for nearly 25 years successfully combined scholastic rigour with popular interventions on the editorial pages of The Times of India. But if B teille's appeal is confined to discerning readers, it is on account of two basic strengths that, in the warped public life of India, appear as monumental shortcomings. First, B teille has never tailored his writings to suit prevailing ideological fashions. His pronouncements have invariably been out of sync with the left orthodoxy that once ruled the roost. An old-fashioned conservative with a touch of the liberal, he has been at the same time ill at ease with the resurgent right whose nationalism he sees as "less humane, less compassionate and more intransigent than those of 50 years ago". Yet, he couldn't but chuckle at the delicious irony of the left getting a taste of its own medicine after Ayodhya. "It appears to me," he wrote in 1993, "that some of those who were most enthusiastic about the idea of empowerment are now terrified in the face of its close cousin, populism. Perhaps, they had reckoned that they would have a creative role to play in the process of empowerment, but now find that the people whose energies they had hoped to mobilise may not need them for the time being." Indeed, the recurrent theme of B teille's writings is that institutions have to be strengthened and insulated against political manipulation. It's too sensible and stodgy a vision to earn him pop fame or notoriety. Conservatism isn't B teille's only handicap. Once complimented by Edward Shils for writing in "English and not academic slang", he uses understatement, sarcasm, irony and irreverence to devastating effect. "I was startled to discover," he writes, "that the prose style of our judges is not better than our professors and that is saying a great deal." Or take his wry indictment of Indian economists, the practitioners of the "imperial science" of the 1950s and '60s: "They also overestimated their own capacities as brilliant intellectuals sometimes do when they are gripped by a social mission. Some of the best among them became victims of their own fantasies about the transformative powers of econometric models." Riveting stuff, completely lost on an audience living under the delusion that good writing is staccato sentences beginning with "And". NEW RELEASES Khushwant Singh's Big Fat Joke Book Water & Air Pollution Love Unlimited Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee: India Today Book of Cartoons Different Strokes Without a City Wall |
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India
is one of the few flourishing democracies that does not depend on its
academia for routine intellectual sustenance. The institutions of higher
learning do provide numerous experts -- mainly economists and scientists
-- who influence public policy but wider dissemination of ideas depends
largely on politicians and journalists.