Intellectual community, culture, and social change

To put the case positively, though, Bangladesh has a proud tradition of intellectual activism, of well-read men and women leading the way in dismantling authoritarian structures erected in the way of national self-realization and in overthrowing hegemonic systems of thought. But perhaps the last time the intellectuals of the country have, as a class, shown the will and the vision needed to advance the nation past oppressive structures was in the movement against dictatorship in the last few years of the Ershad regime.

This is about our intellectual community, the role it has played in the past in shaping this nation, is playing at the moment in contemporary Bangladesh as we stumble past the first couple of years of the millennium, and can play in the future as we move more decisively into the twenty-first century. But before I go further into it, let me say that I would like to begin by dedicating this to my colleague, Professor Muntasir Mamun of the University of Dhaka's Department of History, who, as we all know, is at the moment in jail for vague, and surely trumped up charges of sedition, and has been denied even bail. But he is in prison for issues not irrelevant to my theme: he is the kind of intellectual we need now and for the future: a truly oppositional, critical intellectual who has also been contributing regularly to his chosen field of studies and has earned fame as a scholar of the history and culture of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century East Bengal and as a columnist who uses his considerable knowledge of recent history to critique certain atavistic tendencies in our society.

It seems to me that someone like Professor Mamun has been performing over the years the dual roles an intellectual should perform in a country like Bangladesh: for he has been diligent in the acquisition, production, and dissemination of specialised information, and he has applied his knowledge in his newspaper coloums to critique the world around him. Which brings me to the subject: intellectuals ideally deal with ideas and are involved in knowledge production; they can therefor devote themselves to intensive study of the fields of their specialisation. But they can also analyse the world around them, and apply their knowledge for the alleviation of the social, economic, and political problems of the world and for the material wellbeing of people. For almost a century we have evidence of a tradition of intellectual activism where men and women of learning have put their knowledge for the emancipation of people and national renaissance by opposing hegemonic systems and colonial and neo-colonial powers. But I also hope to show that it is our misfortune that from the 1990s onwards intellectuals of our country have become activists in another, uglier sense of the world, for now working in this university for example, I am daily confronted with the sad spectacle of colleagues who are active in the cause of a party and not for the sake of insurrectionary ideas gleaned from scholarship. In other words one sees in contemporary Bangladesh the distressing signs of decline in intellectual life where highly trained people have either become knowledge merchants or party hirelings. These are people who instead of studying change and working for transformations in knowledge and society campaign or work for political organisations. In my conclusion, I would like to hold up at least a few positive images of organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense, or true intellectual activists, people we can model ourselves on and who can propel us into the new millennium.

It is best though to get to my central argument by defining who or what an intellectual is. The very useful Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought has an excellent entry on the subject by Daniel Bell, the famous Harvard sociologist, where we are told that the world was first designated in the nineteenth century to denote either university educated men and women who became "critically thinking personalities" or people who examined received ideas "in the name of reason and progress". Whether of the right or the left, they are "the culture-bearers of their society"; it is equally important to see that they are custodians of "the traditions of creative and critical thinking."

As a preliminary observation, too, I should add that intellectuals can be of many kind and have been categorised variously. Thus they can be termed academic, which is to say, affiliated with an institution of higher learning, having been trained in one or many such centers of learning, and becoming specialists in some branch of learning. There also can be public intellectuals, that is to say, not professionals but nonacademic, men and women who have made learning their domain out of a genuine love of knowledge and a commitment to a humanistic vision of the world, quintessentially lovers of ideas who also believe that ideas can change the world and that the best that have been thought over the ages need to be transmitted to every age again and again.

In the nineteen-twenties the conservative French thinker Julien Benda wrote a book called La Trahison des Clercs, or the treason of intellectuals. In it, Benda (1867-1956) saw intellectuals as an elite group bent on upholding "eternal standards of truth and justice" or, in crucial ways, people who acted as conscience-keepers to the nation. Although Benda was Euro-centric, and even reactionary in his stance, his view of the role intellectuals should perform in civil society has been taken over by the Palestinian-American critic, Edward Said (1936). Linking Benda's idea to the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci's (1891-1937) views about organic intellectuals, that is to say, intellectuals who have dedicated themselves to transforming society through their activism to remove injustice and inequalities, Said argues that the men and women of learning in our time must be oppositional, progressive, secular, and independent. To Said, intellectuals, in the most positive and loaded sense of the term, are critical individuals. Or to put it somewhat differently, the intellectual must not sell her or his conscience to a party or for power; he or she must, essentially, be a truth-sayer, and must resist becoming inducted into the establishment.

So much then for definitions and perspectives on intellectuals, the roles they should perform, and the expectations surrounding them. How have they lived up to these expectations in our history as a nation?

There was a time not too long ago when most people would agree that many intellectuals in this part had distinguished themselves as standard bearers of our culture. Quite a few of them had truly committed themselves to knowledge production, and had chosen to be critical individuals committed to change and to forging our destiny as a nation. Looking at the intellectual history of this part of Bengal, one thus notices that as far back as the nineteenth century, our intellectuals were at the vanguard of many an attempt at raising the consciousness of the people. The conservative ones, for example, that is to say, the ones trained in theological seminaries such as madrasas went back to the history of Islam to give contemporary Muslims a sense of pride in their past so that they could stand up in the present not only against the colonial rulers but also against the zamindars and banias oppressing them locally. On the other hand, the intellectuals who had received a "modern" education steeped in enlightenment values also urged for reforms within their own society and stressed the need for scientific as well as humanistic education among the people of the region.

By the turn of the century, and especially with the establishment of the University of Dhaka, intellectuals of East Bengal began participating more and more vigorously not only against the anti-colonial movement but also for reforms in their society. Thus in 1925 The Muslim Sahitya Samaj was established in this university to liberate "the intellect from the shackles of the past and the pursuit of rationality and social progress" (Islam & Islam, 165). Eventually, many of the university educated Muslim intellectuals of the region became involved in the formation of Pakistan. But no soon was Pakistan created, and Urdu declared its national language by Jinnah in a public meeting in Dhaka, the intellectuals of the province of East Pakistan, along with student groups, organized themselves to thwart the move. As we all know, the 21st February, when a number of people were killed protesting the imposition of Urdu as the only "official" language of Pakistan, became a rallying point for East Pakistani intellectuals. The liberal-radical tradition that was heralded by the Muslim Sahitya Samaj in the 1920s now gathered strength and ultimately gained ascendancy in the mind and hearts of people, in the process displacing the older conservative, religo-ethnic tradition that had led to the birth of Pakistan.

But whether they espoused a religious activism or a secular-humanist-language-based flowering of the culture of the region, the intellectuals of the region managed to retain a consciousness independent of the dominant state-controlled political system till the fifties. Similarly, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and its dissemination, the cultivation of a critical consciousness, and the pursuit of academic goals went on, largely untouched by the state's administrative and ideological apparatuses. This situation, ideal for the cultivation of the intellect, was disrupted by the Martial Law of 1958, when for the first time in the post-colonial state a systematic attempt was made to bring intellectuals within the fold of the "official" ideology through control of the universities, institutions such as the Pakistan Writers' Guild, President's Awards for excellence, censorship of the media, draconian laws, and a system of patronage. In other words, the carrot as well as the stick now became equally visible as ways of controlling intellectual life, shaping culture, and monitoring change, and restricting any tendency opposed to the dominant ideology. 1961, for instance, witnessed two major attempts by the government to curb free thought and direct intellectual life along official channels. Thus in this year of Tagore's birth centenary the official line was to discourage celebrations organized for him. This was also the year when a repressive law was introduced to regulate the public universities. In both cases, however, the government efforts managed to arouse considerable dissent, although predictably some intellectuals, particularly those of the religious bent, rallied behind the government.

In retrospect, it can be seen that the liberal-radical-linguistically nationalistic tradition became stronger and stronger while the pro-government proponents of a state ideology that had no place for free thought or Bengali culture lost ground among educated East Pakistanis throughout the sixties. When social scientists as well as the Bengali bureaucracy began to analyse the Pakistani economy in this decade to uncover the piling evidence of economic disparity, the liberal intellectual position became even more formidable. The Mass Movement of 1969 thus saw intellectuals from all spheres of professional life -- university teachers, lawyers, physicians and bureaucrats joining students and politicians in a bid to oust Ayub Khan. This was, of course, also true in the subsequent protest movement against Yahya Khan's attempt to reverse the mandate given to the Awami League for full regional autonomy. In the War of Liberation itself the same alliance proved to be a formidable force against the Pakistani forces. No wonder that the Pakistani Army and their collaborators targeted this university and our intellectuals during the military crackdown that began on 26 March 1971 and continued to do so till Bangladesh achieved independence on December 16 that year.

For a time after Liberation, it seemed that intellectuals in Bangladesh had finally got a world where they could pursue knowledge vigorously and without fetters and critique the prevailing woes of society fearlessly. The Autonomy Act of 1974 that gave the public universities the right to govern themselves with what at that time seemed to be a minimum of government interference became the ultimate symbol of the intellectual's right to critique and of the free play of ideas in universities. Unfortunately, the very government which gave us the autonomy threatened it the next year by planning to implement a one-party state where intellectuals would be brought within the folds of officialdom once again. In the next fifteen years or so, as successive military figures ruled the country one way or the other and made at least a few attempts to control thought and coopt thinkers to fulfil their agendas, autonomy of thought prevailed to a remarkable degree, allowing scholars and academics to mostly go their own ways and to critique the repressive measures being undertaken and to apply ideas for social transformation in their writings.

Whether in British India, when thousands went to jail and refused the baits offered by the colonial power, or in undivided Pakistan, when writers, artists, and teachers of the east wing of the country regularly risked their lives against the neo-colonial leaders of West Pakistan, or during the rule of successive authoritarian regimes in the first few decades of Bangladesh's history, quite a few Bengali intellectuals kept resisting the lures of power till the nineteen eighties. There were, of course, exceptions all the time, for not everyone can resist the trappings of bureaucracy or can ignore the blandishments of authoritarian figures. Not everyone, it must also be said, can afford to ignore the threats and intimidation of either official musclemen or the goons that they often hire to coerce people into conformity.

To put the case positively, though, Bangladesh has a proud tradition of intellectual activism, of well-read men and women leading the way in dismantling authoritarian structures erected in the way of national self-realization and in overthrowing hegemonic systems of thought. But perhaps the last time the intellectuals of the country have, as a class, shown the will and the vision needed to advance the nation past oppressive structures was in the movement against dictatorship in the last few years of the Ershad regime.

Alas, most intellectuals of the country have by now either succumbed to the lures of parties and power or have pursued the path of quietism. Indeed, what we have witnessed in Bangladesh in the intellectual scene since the 1990s amounts to nothing less than what Julien Benda had described, albeit in a very different context, as the betrayal of intellectuals. That is to say, our intellectuals have, on the whole, abandoned the rigours of intellectual life and the self-denial involved in the process of scholarship, and have devoted themselves to the pursuit of success in worldly life, either in terms of political power or material well-being. In other words, most of our intellectuals have been compromising themselves and have been toeing party lines or upholding dogma rather than pursuing scholarship for its own sake or living the life of the mind.

A case in point is the use of signature campaigns to make a "protest" statement. Who can forget the many press releases during the final years of the Ershad regime, when most scholars artists, and writers united courageously to sign in one list or another to oppose dictatorial and anti-democratic measures adopted by those who had abrogated power? With the coming of democracy, one kept seeing such lists of names in press releases either for some cause or against some imposition. All too frequently however, the list of people who have signed these statements belong to one of the two leading parties of Bangladesh. So much so that you don't have to read through these statements anymore; either the message or the name of the people who have signed will tell you that these are partisan people who have signed out of a "herd" mentality and not because of their consciences.

What do our partisan intellectuals gain by such uncritical behavour? No doubt they have occasionally signed in statements for or against something because they genuinely believed in the cause embodied in a statement. But most often they have lent their names to the statement because they are following a party directive. To resist would be to forego all that officialdom can offer, to listen to their conscience and not to their parties would be to be ignored for some position and to turn a blind eye to allurements such as a house or a flat and other such perks. Even in our public universities, which should be not only intellectual centers of excellence but bastions of free thought scholars have mostly fallen in line with the prompting or party ideologues and directives.

To be sure, there are outstanding exceptions to what has been said above: there are a few exemplary intellectuals who continue to be opposition and who refuse to conform to party lines and who do exactly what their consciences tell them to do. One thinks of people such as Serajul Islam Chowdhury and Sardar Fazlul Karim, for example, as thinkers who continue to espouse causes that bring them no benefit and that they have adopted because of the stirrings of their conscience. Or one thinks of people like Rehman Sobhan and Kamal Hossein, patricians who have taken up the role of nurturing a tradition of supporting progressive causes and promoting the idea of civil society. Or one can take heart from the example of people like Mohammed Yunus, who banked on his knowledge of the economics of rural poverty and finance to come up with a microcredit scheme that has impacted on our world in a major way. Or of highly educated men and women who have dedicated themselves to field work in NGOs to remove gender, class, and racial disparity and to bring into focus the life of the marignalised, repressed, and oppressed. But, depressingly, most intellectuals have either abdicated their consciences or taken refuge in quietism in recent years.

When will this situation change? At times one feels that things are getting from bad to worse every day. Frequently, one is reminded of Ionesco's brilliant play Rhinoceros where almost every one in town is infected by a disease called rhinoceritis that is making everyone insensitive, aggressive, and one of a pack of brutal, thick-skinned people. But surely things are going to be different and not before long? One looks eagerly for signs that a new generation of intellectuals will soon emerge, fed up with the shameless politicking and crass materialism of their elders, motivated only by the principles of scholarship and patriotism, and aware that the country is greater than any party. It is easy to despair when one fails to see such people in the horizon but it is surely worth doing one's bit to enable such people to emerge sometime soon. Certainly, we need to have people like us, intellectuals privileged to teach in this great university, ready to do everything we can through our teaching and scholarship to create a new generation of intellectuals for the country's future, people who are motivated solely by a desire for receiving, transmitting, and augmenting knowledge, and for social, political, and cultural critique so that they can create a just society, a generation directed by patriotism and humanism, and not sectarian zeal or retrograde nationalism. Certainly, it is imperative "to strive, to seek, to find, and to yield"; to remember that a person's "reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

Fakrul Alam is Professor, Department of English, University of Dhaka.

This article is based on his paper read on 29 December at the workshop of the Bangladesh in the New Millennium project of the University of Dhaka.