Published date: For You, Nov 1976

Indians love being malapropistic . When they talk of intellectuals, they mean ‘intelligentsia’. Lawyers, doctors, and income-tax consultants are therefore wrongly, and frequently, tossed headlong into the intellectual’s ivory tower.

Indians are also easily awed. And it is very easy to be awed by an intellectual. This term, comprising a dozen letters has been used and misused in our conversation and writing for a long time now. The cynical observer would conclude that intellectuals are cheaper by the dozen. Moreover, intellectuals are often assumed to have something to do with the English language-they are either journalists. writers, poets, advertising agency employees, theatre people, or extremely brilliant B.A. Literature students. This misconception can be understood better when we remember that we were ruled over by the British for over two centuries, and so the English language automatically came to be associated with superiority, and with the ruling class. Even today. with regional intellectuals mushrooming in their respective mother tongues, the intellectual who utilizes English to express himself is much more respected. Indian intellectuals can be basically divided into two categories: the pre-Independence ones, and the post-Independence ones. The pre-Independence intellectuals were at a tremendous advantage, because they could hob-nob with Great Britons, White Hopes who sipped brandy after supper and discussed literature and world politics. The pre-1947 intellectual, therefore, did not have to exert himself unduly in his attempt to appear knowledgeable about a lot of things that were fodder for the intellectual’s stable.

The post-Independence intellectual, deprived of his British props, faced a much more difficult task. But Indians, apart from being (occasionally) intellectual, are (usually) ingenious. So there has quote from Dr Leo Rosten is highly appropriate: “The immature think they understand a problem if they discuss it in polysyllables. Jargon is not insight,” And so, one often encounters tea-table conversation that suddenly veers from a discussion of soap prices to obtuse dissertations on Sartre’s existentialism, or Andre Gide’s description of Russia as ‘an anthill Utopia’. R. D. Laing, who is a favourite in the Bombay reading fraternity today, begins his book “Knots” with a passage that sums up the pseudo-intellectual, and the dilemma his listeners find themselves in, brilliantly:

“They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.”

There are many writers, journalists and poets in Bombay. Most of them are either true intellectuals or false intellectuals. The writers are usually true intellectuals. They rarely descend from their Mount Olympuses, and most people never set eyes on them. A few, however, do descend to the street level, and end up shorn of their mystique. The writers usually converge at seminars or scholarly debates. They dislike exchanging rhetoric with anyone not on their own level.

The journalistic clique is also full of pseudo-intellectuals. They attempt to write on almost every high-brow topic they can lay their hands on. The older journalists, particularly, believe their seniority has endowed them with greater brilliance. Thus one finds many middle-aged journalists in the publishing companies that dot Bombay who walk around with their grey heads floating in mysterious regions.

The journalist-intellectual loves being nonconformist. He will eat his lunch at a seedy dhaba in some remote lane, drink his beer at obscure press conferences. He dabbles in everything from horse- racing to matka (when it was “legal”) to country-liquor dens. The purpose is not to get into the habit, but to gain insight into the workings of these rackets. If he is seen once too often in these surroundings, he will excuse himself by saying he is working on a sensational story, and ask you to watch out for it. And when it does not appear, ever, he will shrug it off by calling his editor an unenlightened lout, who cannot foresee the sensation his story would have created.

The Bombay intellectual usually teaches in some college. If he teaches English, all the better. He writes very involved articles in serious magazines on topics that do not interest the common man. He is highly concerned with the illiteracy in his country, yet he does not think the students he encounters now and then are intelligent in the least. He wears a kurta and corduroy trousers that have not been sent to the dhobi since the early 70’s. Bespectacled (due both to his voracious reading habits and his habitual short- sightedness) and with his hair uncombed, he wanders from calling to calling in a brown study, sunk in contemplation.

The Bombay intellectual is increasingly turning to poetry. He either attempts to write poetry, or reads it by the ream. He likes attending poetry sessions in smoke-filled little rooms, where the poets sprawl along the wall. smoking tobacco or reefers, and where the poetry-readers, one by one, proceed to a table-lamp in one corner of the room. They peer at their poems in that isolated light, and read them out in either. a nervous falsetto or a bored monotone. The poetry-lover also buys poetry books by the dozen. He is most happy when he gets hold of a Penguin poetry book which is not available in India.

The Bombay intellectual also never misses the Vibrations and the Reflections programmes on television. for that is when books and authors and other things literary are discussed (and systematically shredded) by eminent panels. The ladies amongst the Bombay intellectuals usually read a lot of Simone de Beauvoir. They never shred her. Or her books.

There are also the Editor-intellectuals. These men (and lately women) edit various publications. They strive to write brilliant editorials. They prefer to be dressed very simply, even though they are paid twice or thrice the amount their reporters are. They have some favourite cause or the other-either the Palestinian problem, or the socio-economic ramifications of Bombay’s annual wrestling tournament, or the red bottoms of certain monkeys. The Editor- intellectuals are getting more and more sophisticated every month. They like, in addition, to write controversial pieces on other editors every once in while. These pieces are read only by the other editors, and are followed by a nary exchange of articles on the demerits of the first piece. The editor who started all this sits back. smug in the knowledge that. he will be assured of regular contributions from the affronted par- ties in future issues, Bombay’s theatre people also contain many intellectuals, both genuine and pseudo. The assumption is that, as life is a stage, and we are the actors acting out our been no dearth of intellectuals in modern India. The urban Indian intellectual has grown in stature and importance with each academic year.

An intellectual need never really advertise himself. But it is an economic law that when there is too much of supply, and too little of demand, advertising steps in to help separate the grain from the chaff. The sad thing is that all this self-publicity ends up by spot- lighting the chaff. The grain is content to sulk in its ivory tower.

I was speaking to an intellectual last week, and for an hour he ex- tolled the virtues of canoeing on the Colorado. From time to time, almost as though he were bestowing a favour on the language by doing so, he would sprinkle his polished English with some colorful Hindustani. His accent was an intriguing mixture of Cambridge and Harvard and Oxford and Massachusetts. His pipe expelled clouds of Amphora smoke, and his gold-rimmed spectacles flashed as he turned his elegant cranium this way and that. He obviously thought I was the biggest ignoramus he had ever met. His bonhomie was as false as the plywood ceiling over our heads. I emerged from this chat consoling myself with the thought that something at least of his brilliance had rubhed off on me. I am referring to the strong reek of Brut parfum that clung to my kurta lapels for hours afterwards.

Another intellectual I know is a member of every library in town. His weekends he spends browsing through 19th Century tomes at the Asiatic Society. He regularly mounts various podia, addressing luncheon meetings convened by Lions, or Rotarians, or Giants. This gentleman brought off a coup de grace when he lectured to no less than ten audiences composed entirely of women on Equality during the International Women’s Year. When last heard of, he was busy compiling a series of speeches on The Child’s Place in Society, to be delivered during the International Children’s Year (which the UNO has decreed will fall in 1979.

If you feel I have exaggerated these men’s idiosyncrasies, then bear with me while I describe a certain lady I know rather well. She dresses, always, in faded blue denim and coral beads. Her lipstick is of an outlandish colour. She smokes Virginia Slims, and subscribes to Ms. She made it a point to meet Gloria Steinem when she visited India last year. Mv lady friend insists on her husband putting the children to bed every night while she catches up on Syl- via Plath, or Erica Jong, or Germaine Greer. She is currently working on an ambitious book on the women’s movement in India. She has told me her work will out- Jong Jong. Last month she was busy organising the Bombay Avahs Union. She telephoned to tell me that she hopes to headquarter the Union at the Raj Bhavan servants’ quarters.

There are also the rural peasant intellectuals. I was in Calcutta at the height of the Naxalite movement and I met many of these 24-Parganas thinkers. Al- most without exception, they used to tog themselves up in khadi jibbas, cotton dhotis, and leather sandals crafted in Krishnagar. These intellectuals were talkative and loved addressing rallies. Like their Southern cousins, the Telenganites, they could be called the field mice of the tribe, for they were hardly refined. They were successful in their vocations (the majority of them landed up in prison cells), and most of them were hardly refined. There were, of course, more sophisticated Marxist intellectuals like E.M.S. Namboodripad who, apart from leading a political party and Chief Ministering Kerala state, wrote dialectical books. These genuine intellectuals abhorred mouthing revolutionary abuse from the insides of police vans.

Today, people like Norman Mailer and Andy Warhol have introduced the “compact, urbanised and rhetoricised” concept of intellectualism (some people call such intellectuals CURS). This type of intellectual is profound while being shallow, wealthy while looking beggarish. bedraggled while inwardly beautiful. and publicly spartan while being privately orgiastic. T. S. Elliot would call them the Hollow Men, I prefer calling them Daffodils, for (with apologies to Wordsworth ) : … for oft when on my couch I lie they flash upon that inward eye.

Which is the bane of solitude. The Indian intellectual has flowered in profusion all over the Bombay meadow. This is not surprising if we stop to consider the fact that Bombay, as another young intellectual-aspirant I know likes repeating, is India’s urbs prima. The Bombay intellectual is characterised by an astonishing range of subjects of which he is very aware of, ranging from. say. the relative levels of operatic appreciation in Middle European countries, to an analysis of the Bombay intellectual also succeeds in sounding learned and authoritative. Little matter whether he is understood or not.

This is not to imply that there are no genuine intellectuals in Bombay. There are many, but they are elbowed into the shadows by an overwhelmingly large number of pseudo-intellectuals. For these pretenders, intellectualism is synonymous with being polysyllabic. Using a lot of ‘mod terms in their conversation, they feel, is ‘in’. Being unflowery in their talk is square. In this context, a lives on it, so too the modern stage is a fascinating place, on which great plays are played out. The theatre intellectual makes it a point to see every play that comes to town and when he talks about Off Broadway and the Left Bank, and about Brecht, Ionesco, Miller, and Tendulkar, Deshpande, and Dubey, he appears truly intellectual. He leads a colorful life, moving as he does in very creative circles. His talk is sprinkled with theatre terminology and he imagines his driveway is lined by footlights.

Then there are the advertizing intellectuals. These are very clever, very insidious. They will rebut every sane argument against advertising, and defend to the death the capitalistic concept of planting needs in people who cannot afford them. More polished than other intellectuals, these people wear heeled shoes, finely-pressed trousers, and jazzy neckties. es. Their hair is combed back from creaseless foreheads, and they gesture elegantly while explaining their competitor’s crassness, a Dunhill cigarette between their eloquent lips.

Many young people, recently graduated from Bombay’s col leges, seem to be bent on gaining recognition as intellectuals in the not too distant future. They are, of course, much more intelligent and perceptive than the previous generation, and one would not like to criticise them overmuch, because young intellectuals have a lot of time in which to mature in- to true intellectuals.

A description of the urban intellectual cannot be complete with- out a mention of the film intellectual. This person is either a film- maker, or an actor, or the Flim and Television Institute of India (FTII) graduate. The film-makers, most of whom are New Wave directors, all make very intriguing films that are fast forgotten. The film-makers themselves narrowly avoid being forgotten by writing learned articles on film-making in film journals and by participating in public discussions of film-making. They uniformly exhibit involvement and intensity, but are largely unsuccessful in mass ap peal. When analysing the work of other film-makers, the film-maker intellectual succeeds in sounding very supercilious and condescending.

The actor-intellectuals are a vanishing breed and only their evergreen seniors continue to spout philosophy in interviews that they grant to film magazines. Their other favourite pastime is compering variety entertainment programmes at which they have learnt to pause after each dramatic announcement for the roar of applause.

The FTII graduates are all young, steeped in cinematic awareness and all uniformly unimaginative. They sometimes write articles in magazines when they are unemployed for long periods. If it comes to talking about cinema, they are very good, drop ping names with ease; Godard, Chabrol, Truffaut, Pasolini, Antonioni, Fellini. Wadja. Zanussi, Eisentein, et al. They like leading shocking lives too, ‘shacking up with their current flames, discussing Zen Buddhism and the Hash Culture in the same breath.

Finally, one ought to mention the columnist-intellectuals, These people are at a great advantage because they can write on almost anything in their columns. They therefore take great pleasure in dissecting rival columnists, or airing personal feuds, or dashing off cocky little pieces on fellow young editors.

The intellectual , therefore, tries to be a composite of many facets. He has to be fluent in quite a few languages. He has to know how to use a fork and knife, and how to open doors for lady dates. He has to have read a range of authors that, coupled with the people he knows (usually other intellectuals), would qualify him. for a Doctorate in Name Dropping. He wants to do a lot of things, but rarely gets around to doing them. He ends up wearing faded jeans and a kurta, spectacles and a cloth shoulder bag in which he carries everything from Charminar cigarettes to MeinKampf. He is capable of discussing Proust and Nietzsche over black coffee laced with cognac. He visits Samovar regularly, there to indulge in bent-head mutterings on dialectic dichotomy. In between arguments he wanders through the art exhibitions at the Jehangir Art Gallery.

Some intellectuals like Bulbul Singh decide to go and grow apples in the Kulu Valley. Every true intellectual, perhaps, harbours this craving for a return to the soil. He usually does, on his burial day.

So the Indian intellectual stands a pathetically inadequate figure. He has degenerated from his past glory to being just a face in a crowd. Swamped by hundreds of pseudo-intellectuals. he tries to stand out by resorting to gimmickry and ‘wav-out’ idiosyncrasies. Perhaps he has not evolved fully. Perhaps he does not exist at all.