"Get real, Prof!!"

"Get real, Prof!!"
(Renuka Narayan, columnist, to the historian Professor Shrimali, on We The People, NDTV)

"A book you wish you’d written?
David Lodge’s Small World. The last in a trilogy, it’s a scathing satire on academic hypocrisy. I wish I could write a similar one on our own jholawalas."
(Excerpt from an interview with Ira Pande, sometimes author, in Tehelka)

Last evening I was with friends and recounting the chain of statements on the latest episode of Barkha Dutt's slugfest show, and wondering aloud how and why a new attitude that can be characterised as dismissiveness at best and downright contempt at worst has begun to target the Indian social scientists in particular and academics in general. And when I chanced on Pande's statement whilst browsing this afternoon, at first it incensed me. What precisely was the ground Pande thought she was standing on from where she could just rattle off an attack of that nature? Or had I misread something?

Gradually the anger subsided I and instead I became more puzzled by this new target of venom and public ridicule. Many questions that we had thrown up collectively the precious evening rang ever more pertinent. For example, what could be the source of this new-found confidence and legitimacy to shout down a university professor, who was if nothing else just presenting his own (no doubt qua expert) opinion on the wretched Ram Setu issue, just like all the other experts on the show, including three politicians and Narayan as an journalist specialising in faith issues? I suspect that someone like Narayan would not easily allow themselves to be so utterly aggressive in full public glare to even the least respected and respectable politician, bureaucrat or any other kind that makes it to such televsion shows. I'm not concerned here about the content of her fracas with Shrimali - and I do not advocate for a second that consensus and politeness should dictate politics generally. Nor is it the fact that journalists and academics have been all lovved up. All the same, what the outbursts from Pande and Narayan signal is something new, and I think its roots do not lie in the mutual suspicion society that journalists and academics have run all along.

Consider Pande's light touch on these matters - what is she griping about? That the so-called jholawalas are hypocrites. For they practice not what they preach. The assumption is that the jholawalas are left-leaning in their sympathies, and write left-leaningly, but live otherwise. Pande's attack is not directed at the content and/or its merit of the jholawala's work (she would be hard-pressed to do that), but something other than that - i.e. their lifestyle. But she should perhaps consider the white khadi-wearing politicians, whose scale of hypocrisy is perhaps more worthy of analysis. Or even the hypocricy of our bureaucrats, who actually do not deliver on what they've signed up to. And what Narayanan is angry about is that the historian is out of touch and does not really understand what was going on at ground zero.

And I want to ask why Pande would not pose these questions to a whole raft of others, if at all personal lifestyle is to be made a measure of professional acumen, and Narayanan (and Barkha Dutt by extension) why she chose to shout that way not at even the CPI nominee who was giving a much more pogrammatic line on scieintific nationalism, but at Shrimali. MWhilst journalists and social scientists had much more in common in mission and status up until recently, the corporatisation of the media in India has shifted allegiances of the profession (in terms of salaries and mission) in sometimes unwitting opposition to those of the critical social scientist.y hunch is that the two instances of easy aggression have something to do with the lowered tolerance for criticism of India Shining. Unlike their scientist bretheren, social scientists in India are perceived by the chatterati as being irritants if not completely useless in the neoliberal food-chain.

Lack of criticism and an overbearing consensus is a recipe of disaster in any society. Fortunately, even though they are the most visible and pampered and locquacious, the middle classes in India are not all that make up India and the whole country does not dance to their favourite tune. Ask the BJP!