This is in reference to and in continuation with Mehboob Makhdoomi’s article Intellectuals: Who are they? ( GK, Feb 10). The theme of Intellectuals’ role in a society especially in a conflict zone like ours becomes all the more important. The crux of Mr Makhdoomi’s article is that the responsibility of an intellectual is “speaking truth to power”. Let me add some more insights from scholars to complete this picture of an intellectual. The above-mentioned article tends to emphasize only the anti-statist resistance to power but fails to emphasize how speaking “truth” to those who resist this power is equally important in case of politically contested narratives. An ‘intellectual’ who believes resistance is all about truth or that all truth is contained in resistance, is not an intellectual but a propagandist. This is not a case for “neutrality”, which is immoral in case of moral crises but an attempt to make resistance more enlightened. What’s important is to create a “culture of critical discourse”. Once you start writing or speaking on public issues, you enter this intellectual space. However, if you don’t observe the scruples of this space which are unique to it, you are factually within this space but morally outside of it.
An intellectual, according to Edward Said, is a representative figure who represents a standpoint and makes articulate representations despite barriers. This, he does, by talking, writing, teaching or appearing on TV involving both commitment and risk, boldness and vulnerability. According to a French philosopher, Julien Benda, the author of The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, ” Intellectuals are a tiny band of super-gifted and morally endowed philosopher kings who constitute the conscience of mankind. Real intellectuals constitute a clerisy , very rare creatures indeed, since what they uphold are eternal standards of truth and justice that’re precisely not of this world”. Today’s Intellectuals have ceded their moral authority to what he calls “the organisation of collective passions” like sectarianism, mass sentiment ( which can be even a movement for freedom like ours), nationalist belligerence or class interests. Intellectuals’ loyalty, as Edward Said noted, is not to be limited to “join a collective march”. He is unwilling to accept easy formulas and ready-made cliches. It’s the vocation of maintaining “constant alertness not to be steered along with half-truths or received ideas”. Besides, an intellectual must relate his people’s suffering with similar experience of others or at least not lose sight of the later. A Kashmiri Pundit intellectual mourning his community’s “exodus” while refusing to admit to state excesses on his Muslim Kashmiri compatriots is not an intellectual and the vice versa. Similarly, while ‘hailing’ Pakistan for providing ‘moral’, political’ and ‘diplomatic’ support to Kashmiris, due consideration should be taken of their apathy towards Baluchis, atrocities on Pashtuns or worse, the massacre of East Pakistanis. According to Benda, real Intellectuals risk being burned at the stake, ostracized and crucified. To use Edward Said’s metaphor, an intellectual is an “exile”- both actual as well as metaphorical; he lives on the margins of the mainstream like Arundhati Roy.
In his Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said castigates habits of mind that induce avoidance from a difficult but principled position which one knows to be right but decides not to take. May be, one doesn’t want to be ‘controversial’ or appear too political. e.g. Indian liberals-except-on-Kashmir. He/she wants be ‘balanced’, ‘moderate’ or to get an honorary degree or a prize like Kailash Satyarti. These habits are corrupting par excellence.
One of the Intellectual goals relevant with the theme at hand here is explained by Franz Fanon, a French post-colonial theorist, as “invention of new souls”. Fanon believed that loyalty to one’s struggle for freedom can’t narcoticize the critical sense. An intellectual has to go beyond replacing a “white policeman with his native counterpart”. He has to go beyond survival issues ( like fighting just to keep ‘resistance alive’) to critiques of leadership, to presenting alternatives that are too often marginalised or pushed aside as irrelevant to the main battle at hand. Fanon’s observations hold a lesson for our Kashmiri intellectuals, if there are any. How many of our intellectuals delve into issues beyond keeping resistance alive- ‘presenting alternatives’ like the role of “representational contention”, highlighting issues of governance ( dubbed as “irrelevant to the main battle at hand”) or trying to build public opinion on alternative solutions beyond Plebiscite, Independence or traditional autonomy within Indian Union? Human mind, coupled with experiences drawn from across the world, is infinitely capable of reducing human miseries. However, a ‘mentality of siege’ in Kashmir has kept this revolutionary potential at bay. An ‘intellectual’ who does not endeavor to break this “mentality of siege” is not an intellectual.
What kind of an intellectual is needed? For Edward Said, we don’t need a professional intellectual but an amateur. Pervez Hoodhboy of Qaid-e-Azam University despite being a Physicist is a prominent intellectual of Pakistan. The latter is neither moved by rewards nor fulfilment of a career but committed to engage with ideas and values in public sphere. A professional intellectual, on the other hand, claims detachment on professional basis pretending objectivity. An intellectual writing just for the sake of pure learning or abstract science is not an intellectual. In short, an intellectual is the one who makes his presence felt in public sphere and the one who remains “private” is not an intellectual.
Syed Shafiq Ahmad is a teacher at Govt High School Wani Doursa( Lolab)
shafiqsyed27@gmail.com