On a friend’s recommendation, I traveled from Seattle to attend a session on Perry Anderson’s The Indian Ideology at Stanford. The real draw was that Perry Anderson himself was to be there and having not seen him speak before, I thought it was worth the time and money to join the session. Anderson, after all, is a prolific and sophisticated intellectual powerhouse and for a while was a doyenne of the New Left- certainly a person who I wanted to hear speak, especially since he was not only discussing his book but was also responding to both his critics and to the general state of opprobrium in which he’s currently held amongst the Indian Left.

Though I could not stay for the whole thing, what I did observe was illuminating. Illuminating and depressing.

At the outset, I’ll say that I do have a cross to bear and should in fact recuse myself from further comment (though I clearly don’t.) I am an academician-manqué and find little in common with the academic crowd, especially in the social sciences and humanities; is this due to my own failure to join their ranks? Perhaps. Only others can truly judge this though I can say with certainly that my failure turned out for the best. One must read the following comments as refracted through this prism.

Academics are an insular tribe; I’ve never seen a group of people who speak to themselves and only to themselves as much as academics. In fact, their behavior is downright rude.  In no other formation have I ever seen that a small group of people in a small room are NOT asked to introduce themselves at the commencement of the proceedings; in fact, academics don’t ever seem to care who is in the room as long as their “buddies” are there. In the case of this session, after Anderson spoke, and the Q&A session began, the panelists themselves chose to dominate the “discussion” until such time as the organizer asked them to hold their thoughts and give others a chance. Athiti dev bhavo does not apply here, clearly. What does apply is the “Academic Ideology”- a narcissistic and narrow view of the world that reduces grand ideas into narrow and politically correct pieties.

I was drawn to this particular session not only because I enjoyed reading Anderson’s book but, moreso because of the responses to the book, ranging from the idiotic to the vitriolic with some sense strewn around the corridors too. As one might guess, Anderson’s work strikes a nerve and the calumnious responses in fact prove his main point, namely that the typical Indian liberal intellectual has blind spots when it comes to their own country’s freedom struggle and their own country’s heroes.  People capable of enormous scholarship and erudition are also capable of employing “euphemism” and living true to a creed of exceptionalism when it comes to issues relating to the Indian freedom struggle, Indian democracy, caste, and the, inevitably, the dominant religion in India- Hinduism.

It’s not that I don’t take exception to much of what Anderson’s says. Perhaps I too am a votary of that very ideology that he cuts down, but I find that his condescension towards Gandhi and Nehru is uncalled for and, well, petty. But I can just imagine that his response would be some variant of “slaying sacred cows requires the shedding of blood.” Further, the obloquy directed at these two giants of Indian (and world) history has hardly found its most sinister or deep expression in Anderson. Like many, I too took a brief tour of the “Anderson is an old Brit taking India to task…how colonial” position. No doubt, Anderson is perhaps too dispassionate and in some ways naïve an observer to ever understand India deeply but then he admits that. He in fact opened the session at Stanford with just such a statement, that he was there to learn about India not just preach about it. And surely it does prickle when a non-Indian goes after Indians in this manner but after considerable thought, I decided to simply get over this and to deal with the work itself. I’m convinced however that several of the big thinkers in the room simply decided that Anderson couldn’t be right because, after, all, he is Perry Anderson, Orientalist to the core. One particular professor succumbed to this for sure and made that clear through a series of comments that were both ad hominem and risible (including calling herself and fellow panelists “monkeys” – implying that Anderson must believe they are since he’s European and they are all Indian). Anderson to his credit did not take the personal bait and simply responded to her concerns, though in some cases fairly trivially- especially around the nature of British dominion in India.

The main criticism I have however is what seems to be his own blindspot to the effect that Gandhi and Nehru had on others. Terribly far from perfect and in Nehru’s case no doubt always operating with a great amount of criticism from his own party, both men however were able to move people and to excite radical change in them as well. Gandhi’s “piety” and charisma and Nehru’s clear love of the idea of India combined with his eloquence and commitment were beacons for hundreds of millions of Indians.  As strange as it might sound to Anderson, reading Nehru helped me sustain my radicalism as it pertains to India, even if I was taken-in by his purple and romantic prose. Hard facts and cold analysis are indeed important as is truth-telling but they rarely inspire. Nehru inspired and inspires me.

Anderson’s work has a variety of other areas of weakness, many of which have been alluded to in the debates that ensued. But he is hardly either unoriginal or Orientalist. And he’s spot on when he points out that Indians should no longer bask in the innocent nationalism of the oppressed since the Indian state is both oppressive and self-congratulatory to a fault. Of course, we all have opinions so I’d encourage interested people to read the book and form their own.

But this day, what I kept asking myself as I listened to both Anderson and his various commentators, fans, and detractors was the “so what?” More on that soon.

What struck me the most at the session, however, was its size. The room was indeed packed but this meant 35 people or so in attendance. For a session on a book that has stirred such rancorous debate and caused such furor, the size of the crowd seemed pitiful; of course upon reflection one realizes that the “debate” over Anderson’s book as heady as it is (or isn’t)is a closed one, restricted to the academy and its close counterparts. Such debates, as loud and protracted (and interesting) as they are by definition attract small crowds precisely because they are designed to do so. In this case, the book itself was a fulmination against academicians not against the teems of organic intellectuals like P. Sainath that India produces. The angry folks who found it necessary to attack Anderson’s work were also “of the academy;” activist intellectuals I spoke to were barely aware of the book or the ensuing hubbub. I realized that I had no real reason to be in the room, that in fact, I was dead weight occupying one of the few chairs.

Knowing all of this, I remained, however, depressed. Like him or not, Perry Anderson is after all, Perry Anderson! Prolific author, scholar of the New Left, and provocateur, Anderson’s shoes leave deep prints. How could he draw such a small crowd? The “So what?” question kept rearing its head.

We certainly live in anti-intellectual times.  Kardashian ranks higher than Kant. Now, this session was indeed held at Stanford, one of the greatest institutions of higher learning in the world. Then again, it appears that Stanford-types are much more interested in the lucre in their midst than in the expansion of knowledge. Moreover, great institutions of learning, in general, have become super-vocational, preparing young people for the “economy” versus preparing them for informed citizenship. Perhaps, an Anderson-equivalent would have commanded a larger audience decades ago. Perhaps, that is an idyllic view of what was as opposed to what is. Depressing either way.

Which brings us back to the “so what?” question. Asked simply, “What effects if any does Perry Anderson’s work have on the Indian polity?” Extrapolated further, “Does what goes on in academia, in the humanities and social sciences have any effect on the material world?”

Given this essay’s angle of incidence – a broadside against academics and therefore the academy- one might guess that my answer is “No, academia isn’t particularly relevant to the ‘real world!’” That is not my answer, however. Intellectual work and advancement (in the humanities and social sciences) in my view absolutely help create a new world. One could never argue sensibly that Marx, Keynes, or Friedman had no effect on the world nor could one suggest that Orwell, Friedan, Chomsky, Camus, Tagore didn’t either (and many others, of all races and both sexes).  Giant intellectual feats create a powerful societal wake; of that there is no doubt. What I’d argue however is that such feats rarely emanate purely from industrial academics. Instead they arise when the hermetic seal between academia and civil society is broken when the area of intersection between academics and real intellectual production increases. Many of the most intelligent and impressive people I know are in the academy, but all have their feet firmly outside.  The ones that move knowledge forward in any meaningful way do, in any case.

In the “negative” case of The Indian Ideology, the only discernible effects I have seen are 1. Furthering the attack on Nehru, Gandhi and the liberal Indian intelligentsia so common to the Hindu Right Wing in India; 2. Annoying a few hundred people enough to have them take up the pen in response. Has the book created a debate? Sure. But a particularly large or meaningful one? Absolutely not. And this despite the fact that Anderson writes both from within and without the academy, in yet another example of how the Academic Ideology subsumes and blunts everything it seizes and calls its own. This book, for all its merits and all its excesses should be discussed outside of the academic miasma.

But then how does this matter to a profession that judges itself in purely reflexive terms? This brings us to the other ideology in question; not the Indian Ideology but the Academic Ideology which like others is narcissistically exceptionalist, self-congratulatory, and priestly.

Much ado about nothing? No. In fact, much ado about something very important- the blunting of radical, meaningful work by the Academic Ideologues.