Human Actions
»I Believe that I Can Travel to the Stars«: Reflections on the Emerging Organic Intellectual in India
Nancy Adajania
Nearly seven decades after independence, India has borne witness to the recent emergence of a vocal and articulate »organic intellectual,« in Gramsci’s sense, who is committed to resisting the authoritarianism of a resurgent casteist and patriarchal politics closely aligned with neoliberal economics. Student leaders like Kanhaiya Kumar in Delhi and the late Rohith Vemula in Hyderabad embody this »organic intellectual.« In this lecture, Nancy Adajania will reflect on the contexts from which they have emerged, and the dilemmas they must confront.
Kumar and Vemula draw on a genealogy of resistance that goes back to Jyotiba and Savitribai Phule, and Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, intellectuals from the subaltern castes who claimed discursive space and agency for themselves against all odds. They also reach out to a robust vernacular of political expression, available within the circle of the caste-group or the community. They bring these genealogies to bear on their location in the university, the locus classicus of the »traditional intellectual.« The dilemma that such figures will face is implicit in the contradiction between their »organic« self-definition and the »traditional« nature of the institutions they inhabit. How will they remain organic, and to what? What is the price of affiliation – to a momentary movement, an established political party, or an academic institution? Between a »traditional intellectual« who is seen to be compromised as a spokesperson for the status quo, and an »organic intellectual« who represents the aspirations of a revolutionary formation, what are the places, roles, and possibilities of the »public intellectual« in India today?