India: Traditional Past and Western Future:

...Yet the mass of Indian intellectuals is afflicted with a sense of disillusionment and political dissatisfaction...

...This sorrowing attitude toward the parties which accept the present framework of Indian democracy has not thus far redounded greatly to the benefit of the Communist party of India...

...At the same time, he lives in the midst of traditional institutions...

...Journalism, as a moral and political cause and as an occupation, had a considerable body of practitioners throughout India, and particularly in Bengal...

...Indian politicians, most of whom began their careers as intellectuals, like to charge those who have assimiliated so much of modern culture and who do not go about in dhotis with being "out of touch" with the life and culture of the Indian "people...

...The situation of the Indian intellectual is not conducive to the politics of civility...

...Indian intellectuals are Indians, but they are modern Indians—despite the fact that they shed their modern garments when they get home and in many parts of India do not even wear modern garments in public places, where they pursue their professions or seek their pleasures...

...This does not mean that all of them have gone into bitter, unrelenting opposition to the Government and all its works...

...But no one knows how this is to be accomplished...

...Literary men and artists work in many occupations, mainly in teaching, and they suffer the contumely and miseries of that profession in India...

...Their minds are full of the Indian proverbs and tales they took in with their mothers' milk...

...The whole regime of democratic politics, of parties, and of bureaucratic administration, though headed by that ideal of the intellectuals, and the personally designated heir of Gandhi, brought no solace to those who had experienced the exhilaration of the struggles for independence, or who had dreamed of it from abroad...

...Their Indian religiosity is very much alive...

...It is true that Indian intellectuals do love an "abroad," of which Britain is the center...

...Perhaps there is a little truth in it—but not a very great deal...

...This was the root of Gandhi's great ascendancy over his fellow countrymen...

...Something in the constitution of intellectuals everywhere makes them averse to everyday politics, but in India this intellectual disposition is furthered by specifically Indian orientations, which is the reason for the malaise descended on Indian intellectuals since independence...

...They undulate in response to Indian music and they do not "relish" beef, even when they bring themselves to eat it...

...They are rather the products of an oppositionalism unable to accept responsibility, of a socialism which has lost its capacity to persuade, and of the failure thus far to assimiliate the traditions of past and present to both of which they are so much attached...

...it ruled by remote control and gave office to those who sought it for its own sake...

...Now in the second decade of Indian independence, the intellectuals probably come to about 150,000 to 200,000 persons...

...British administrators and publicists, who preferred the Indian peasant to the Indian intellectual, were probably the originators of that accusation...

...They no longer believe in the inherited recipes of socialism and they have not yet succeeded in reformulating its essential mood into new, practicable programs...

...their attraction by charismatic, and their distrust of impersonal and remote, authority...

...Independence in India turned out to be a regime of politicians, of party organizers, of bosses, time-servers and placeholders, who delivered their votes in return for the benefits of a parliamentary seat...

...The mighty bureaucracy, before which Indian intellectuals had once stood in uncomfortable awe, now that it became entirely Indian and their own, remained awesome but less so, more resented, more criticized, charged with corruption and with lack of character—the latter charge being one of the most severe an Indian intellectual can utter against a public personality...

...it treated with big businessmen...

...Even the Swatantra party, which has the virtues of novelty and of the sparkle provided by sagacious and cranky old Rajaji and the scintillating intelligence and personality of Minoo Masani, gives rise to none but negative hopes...

...Embracing these specific professions in which persons of intellectual interests and obligations are usually found, but going beyond them, there are probably about 660,000 college and university graduates in India, of whom considerably more than 100,000 have taken advanced degrees...

...Many are admirers of modern literature and aspire to a freer personal life than the traditional Indian kinship system fosters...

...They are the products of traditions which have grown up and been nurtured elsewhere and have come to his country, primarily under foreign sponsorship, only in the past few centuries...

...For one thing, it did not transform India into a modern country: it temporized with the dhotiwallahs...

...This is a great obstacle to its progress among intellectuals who are otherwise so alienated from the ruling party and from the present state of affairs in their country...

...By the second decade of the 20th century, the sciences too came under cultivation, primarily in Bengal, but in other parts of India as well...

...It is also true that inside India, they take a special delight in reading Western journals and in being touch with Western intellectuals...

...Their conception of the good life...

...Moreover, many are also explicitly critical of the cultural and social traditions they have received...

...There are very few Indians with any advanced modern education who think that Indian society should become what it was once, or that it should remain as it is...

...Because of the exogenous origin of his modern culture, the Indian intellectual is very frequently accused of being rootless...

...The older generation looks back with disillusionment and nostalgia on the great days of the struggle for independence—toward the excitement of the great Civil Disobedience movements and the life of selfless consecration to a tremendous cause of transcendent worth...

...This malaise is not, of course, universal among Indian intellectuals...

...There is, on the one side, a very distinguished group of highly educated administrators, economists and statisticians within the Government who have the Indian Civil Servant's attitude that nothing can be done as well as when it is done by the Government...

...The mystique of Jayaprakash Narayan was intensified by his withdrawal from party politics and his consequent association with the more traditionally saintly Vinoba Bhave...

...As in other Communist parties, the Indian Communist party is run by hard-headed and intolerant bosses who have little patience with the softness and uncertainty of intellectuals...

...The modern medical profession, a field in which India is still undermanned, began early and today there are probably about 40,000 physicians and surgeons with full modern medical educations...

...Yet, when Jayaprakash circulated his draft memorandum on The Reconstruction of Indian Politics, there was a general disappointment because one more effort to Indianize modernity had failed to meet the requirements of analytical reason...

...Even in fields in which India is still considered underdeveloped, such as industrial and agricultural technology and medicine, an indigenous modern intellectual class had taken shape by the beginning of the 20th century...

...Universities and colleges, some of quite distinguished quality, were established and staffed largely by Indians, among whom there were men of considerable learning and outstanding moral and pedagogical gifts...

...At the other extreme are those who believe that if India were to become more like the Soviet Union or China, then it could make real progress instead of what they regard as the muddled inconsequential movements of the present regime...

...In a situation in which some intellectuals are now in positions of great power, the majority feels itself to be "outsiders...

...The Indian intellectuals are, by and large, socialists opposed to the administrative machinery which any socialism not entirely anarchistic would require...

...At the bottom is a feeling of being demeaned by a society which is not sufficiently advanced economically to find gratifying and useful employment by those whom it has trained—or at least qualified—and by a regime whose rulers, they believe, despise and distrust them...

...Unlike most of the intellectuals of Black Africa, he is the heir of a profound and well-elaborated religious and philosophical culture, which has been the concern of systematic theologians and philosophers over many centuries...

...The great mass of Indian intellectuals stands somewhere in between...

...their attitude toward work—all are very Indian, regardless of the avowed acceptance or rejection of Indian religious and social traditions...

...The opposition parties call forth more enthusiasm, or at least more sympathy...

...the traditions of the modern intellectual, which he received from Western scientism, radicalism and socialism, keep alive in him the alienated oppositional mentality which was the characteristic political outlook of the struggle for independence...

...Many of the most brilliant of each academic generation go into the Planning Commission or some other Government body...

...In the last years of the Raj, half of the Indian Civil Service—the most powerful and most awe-inspiring body in British India—consisted of Indians and the proportion of Indians increased very markedly as one descended in the hierarchy...

...their pattern of relationships with the aged, with men and women, and with subordinates...

...The Indian intellectual class, very much larger than that of any other new state of Asia and Africa and proportionally smaller than that of any of the advanced states, is thus rather too large for the absorptive powers of the Indian society and economy of the present day...

...There is a polity which corresponds to that culture and literature...

...There is, moreover, no major branch of intellectual activity, or of practical life requiring intellectual preparation, in which there is not a substantial representation...

...And his appreciation of English and American literature grows out of his discovery in them of that freer, more individual life...

...The routine, the compromises, and the small-scale patchwork which characterize party politics in any modern society are not to their taste...

...Afro-Asia's Intellectuals—V INDIA: TRADITIONAL PAST AND WESTERN FUTURE By Edward Shils This is the last in a series of articles on the role and nature of the intellectuals in the new countries of Asia and Africa...

...Moreover, they see that what they have accepted from the West has not provided their political salvation, or that of other Asian countries, which is why, as so many of them say, they want it adapted to their "specifically Indian conditions and traditions...

...Indeed, fellow traveling in India is perhaps on a vaster scale than in any of the Western countries, where Khrushchev's exposure of Stalin and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 have greatly reduced the radius of the Communist party's influence among intellectuals...

...Indian intellectuals have taken it up and it has become the most common coin of their criticism of themselves and of each other...

...These too, however, are "parties" and run by "machines," and their faults are not compensated by strength and majesty...

...The traditions of the independence struggle reinforce in him his admiration for spiritual heroism...

...This is why Jayaprakash Narayan's vague ideas of a party-less democracy found so much general sympathy...

...Their Indian qualities are genuine and their attachment to Indian things is genuine too...

...All this does not add up to rootlessness or being "un-Indian...

...The aspiration of Indian intellectuals remains what it has been for a long time, an aspiration toward an Indian modernity which has assimilated Indian traditions...

...The obstacles are not the root-lessness and ineffectiveness of a group pulled in opposing directions by attachments to the Indian past and a Westernized future...

...Independence, initiated in the midst of grievous chaos, brought disappointment...

...Indian intellectuals want politics to be pure, free from calculation and from compromise with ideals...

...Academic and scientific institutions, privately and governmentally sustained, grew up in India earlier than in any other of the then colonial countries...

...Indian chemists, physicists, engineers, agronomists, and mathematicians were already active in academic and Government service 50 years ago, though their employment by industrial enterprise was negligible then, and is even now slight compared to more advanced countries...

...No other country which has acquired sovereignty since 1945 has created a modern culture, literary as well as political, anywhere as rich as that which Bengal produced in the 19th and early 20th centuries...

...Their numbers have mutiplied so that, at present, there are about 35,000 teachers in colleges, universities and higher technological institutions...

...Not that anyone has ever wanted restoration of British rule, but Indian self-government left those who had dreamed of it unhappy...

...The Communist party of India has established a reputation as a party of devious methods and hypocritical allegations of idealism...

...They are mortified by their country's squalor and feel some compassion for their poor fellow countrymen...

...His modern culture—scientific, literary, technological, scholarly and political, and the institutions, universities, laboratories, reviews, the daily press, research institutes, etc., which sustain that culture—have not, however, grown out of their traditional matrix...

...There is widespread belief that improvements should be socialist in nature, and an almost equally widespread belief that the socialism should not be oligarchical, that the people should be alive and active in it...

...The conception of the rootless, ineffectual Indian intellectual is a myth inherited from British administrators, who wished to derogate restless and dissatisfied educated Indians, and from the great Indian nationalist agitators, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi above all others, who from the opposite extreme made the same accusation...

...The conduct of Soviet China in Tibet and on the Sino-Indian frontier, and the stand taken by the Indian Communist party, have more pronouncedly alienated many hitherto vaguely sympathetic intellectuals from the party than any event since 1941-45, when the Indian Communist party supported the war effort of the British Raj...

...THE MODERN Indian intellectual, like the intellectuals of all underdeveloped countries, performs intellectual activities which have not grown out of his own indigenous traditions and which are not integral to the traditional social structure of his country...

...THE DEPTH of the Indian intellectual's permeation by Indian traditions is nowhere more visible than in his political orientations...

...This deeper response to the charismatic qualities of those who aspire to lead the country accounts also for the political dissatisfaction so widespread nowadays among Indian intellectuals...

...They love to go abroad for their studies and to prolong their sojourns as much as they can...

...In contemporary India there must be at least 15,000 scientists now working in Government departments, in industrial, governmental and private laboratories, and at least as many again engaged in teaching scientific subjects...

...it is a liberal polity and it is attractive to Indian intellectuals...

...It would deny their claim to self-respect to accept the teaching of the West without qualifications...

...Before independence, except for a small circle of liberal constitutionalists, Indian intellectuals on politics were fervently nationalistic...

...The press, English and vernacular, was already flourishing by the turn of the century...

...Their motives are composite—they wish to see their country important and respected in the world, and they feel it cannot be so if it is materially and culturally poverty-stricken...

...India was the first colonial country where the highest levels of the Civil Service were accessible to persons of native ethnic origin...

...Almost all of them are against the caste system in its recent form and a sizeable proportion knowingly rejects the principles of caste in any form...

...Most view with favor the industrialization of India, the development of its technology, and the technological and scientific research necessary to do both...

...Indian religious beliefs are capable of indefinite reinterpretation and the legitimation of very diverse aspirations...

...The Communist party of India has never succeeded in living down this calculating betrayal of the "national" cause on behalf of the interests of the Soviet Union, and recent events have only underscored its bad name...

...One can be Indian and attached to Indian traditions while being profoundly convinced of the desirability of improving Indian agricultural techniques, or raising the standard of living of the poor, making India more literate and democratic, and of maintaining the rule of law and intellectual freedom which India already possesses...

...The vast administrative machinery of the British Raj provided berths for many of the graduates of the colleges and universities and employment in it became the most desired of the various occupations accessible to those with a modern higher education...

...The legal profession today must have no less than 50,000 members...

...Part of the Indian intellectual's malaise in politics today is a function of the malaise of liberal socialists everywhere...

...And finally they think that being modern is a good thing in itself...

...Yet this alone does not satisfy Indian intellectuals...

...Except for the small number of high-ranking Civil Servants, a few brilliant and skillful parliamentarians, a score or more of outstanding and courageous journalists and a few handfuls of distinguished scientists and scholars with world-wide reputations and connections, the Indian intellectual today is not a happy man...

...He is an intellectual whose hold on other Indian intellectuals has come from his devotion to the ideals of nationalism and socialism...

...Of course, the modern Indian intellectual does not require that his political leader be a holy man in the literal sense, but he does demand that his leader should embody an ideal, live in accordance with it and strive to realize it...

...The legal profession swelled beyond a size which could be adequately maintained even by a very large population like India's...

...They are eager to be in intellectual and personal contact with what goes on there...

...It differs from the intellectual classes of the Western countries in the distribution of its members— the scientific and technological sectors are disproportionately low, the administrative and teaching sectors are disproportionately high, and there are relatively few literary men, artists and free-lance journalists who can earn a livelihood through the sale of their work...

...In summary, the modern Indian intellectual class formed a large aggregate at the height of foreign rule...

...Jawa-harlal Nehru, although an agnostic and no devotee of the traditional Indian religious cult, is such a man...

...Some of the best of the young generation enter the Indian Administrative Service as the best of their ancestors entered the Indian Civil Service...

...IS IT ANY wonder that the Congress party has, after the brief rally to its banners which followed the resolution on the "socialist pattern of society" in 1955, declined steadily in the affections of the Indian intellectual...

...THIS ALIENATION from existing parties does not, however, bespeak an apolitical orientation...

...Sometimes they were terrorists, as in Bengal and Mahrashtra in the first part of this century, and then after the entry of Gandhi, they were largely, but not always, exaltedly pacifist...

...Here Edward Shils, Professor of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, presents a special detailed examination of the intellectual class of India, for in no country have great intellectuals played—and continue to play—such a crucial role in politics and administration as in that country...

...It is too drab, too "political," too compromised by the burden of power...

...The college and university teachers, underpaid and overworked, are generally demoralized, without intellectual passions or the sober application to a task which holds their affections and their energies day in and day out...

...It is, in fact, testimony to the crudity of the Communist party's tactics and its patent attachment to the interests of the Soviet Union and of Communist China that it is viewed with so much distrust by such a large majority of India's intellectuals...

...He is ill at ease in society...

...They are extremely conscious of the fact that they are Indians, even that minority which blames itself for not being "really Indian," and their fundamental sensibility is Indian...

...Nonetheless, there are many fellow travelers...

...They neither live for a cause nor do they prosper in a "causeless" business...

...Many Indian intellectuals believe it of themselves...

...Through European initiative and an Indian initiative inspired by the literary, scientific, political and moral accomplishments of the West, Bengal, in the 19th century, trained and maintained a relatively highly sophisticated literary and scholarly intelligentsia...

...It was unjust and untrue when the British asserted it...

...It is too critical of socialism to draw many Indian intellectuals to its side so that those who wish it well do so mainly because they think that it might compel the Congress party to overcome its moral slackness...

...The aspiration is inarticulate and the intellectual has not yet succeeded in giving it either formulation or procedure, but it is not a reflex of his xenophilia...

...it was no less so when Gandhi repeated the argument for different ends...

...To experience this multiple attachment does not necessarily constitute ambivalence or indicate the "schizophrenia" which many hostile critics attribute to Indian intellectuals...

...Fellow traveling in India is a different affair from its Western counterpart...

...The attraction of the large fortunes gained by a few eminent lawyers, the relative cheapness of legal training and the apparent value of a legal qualification as a second line of defense against failure to find footing in other occupations drew multitudes of young Indians into the legal profession in which only a few prospered...

...The students are "rebels without a cause," undisciplined, explosively touchy and troubled by a future which offers so little prospect...

...THE MODERN intellectuals of India are unique among those of the new states in their long history, their large numbers, their professional diversity and the high quality of their best achievements...

...Today, journalism provides employment for at least 2,000 persons, the majority of whom work for the English-language press...

...Actually, his xenophilia probably derives from his yearning towards a freer, more individual existence and from his admiration for the advanced countries of the West, especially for Britain...

...It is remarkable in view of the general atmosphere in which the Indian intellectual lives that the Communist party, which, in the South and in Bengal, has so many followers among intellectuals, does not have very many more...

...Around all but the small groups at the peaks of Government, science, journalism and scholarship hangs the ubiquitous pall of the unemployed, the neglected, the insulted and injured...

...Another major feature of the dimensions of the Indian intellectual class is that, at any one time, more than 10 per cent of those who graduate from a college or university are unemployed...

...In India, the most esteemed person is the saint, the "pure" person who has transcended the demands of his lower self and who lives in the possession of Brahma...

...In a country in which nearly all educated persons are vaguely "socialist," estranged from large-scale private enterprise and from private businessmen, in which the pursuit of wealth is derogated and life for a "cause" is prized, and where, finally, the Soviet Union is admired as a country which became rich and strong by throwing off the burden of its old ruling class and by defying the capitalist powers of the West, there is a "natural fellow traveler" mentality quite independent of the schemes of the Communist party and its para-party apparatus...

...They were, in any case, always intense, passionate and uncompromising in their refusal to become involved in the responsibilities of the civil order: They were irreconciliably in opposition...

...It is the cliche by which foreign observers write off the Indian intellectual...

...It is true, too, that many Indian intellectuals have lived all their lives in the large cities and have little more contact with the rural populations than their counterparts in the more advanced countries...

...Likewise, Indian traditions of social and moral judgment and practice are also capable of reinterpretation and accommodation to new situations...

...But politically, the ruling party arouses few hopes and attracts few talents among Indian intellectuals, old and young...

...The Indian intellectual is in a sense anti-political, alienated from the order of civil government on the grand scale, alienated because his Indian traditions lead him to be distrustful of impersonal authority which rules by law rather than by charismatic emanation...

...Being a Christian or a Jew in the West and being sensibly devoted to the traditions of one's inherited community of belief does not entail the refusal to appreciate the validity of scientific research, or of rational discourse in public life, or the desirability of the economic use of resources, or the need for efficient and honest administration...

...Today, in the upper levels of the Civil Service there are probably 30,000, who by education, task and interest could be designated as intellectuals...

...Most of the journalists are poor, lacking in self-confidence and incurious...

...a literary, technical and general periodical press was also developing...