Bawdy Line. Intellectual jeopardy

It was in the wake of the trial, in 1894, of the French ‘gaddaar’ Alfred Dreyfus that the word ‘intellectual’ was brought into being and first summoned into service. Dreyfus, a captain in the French artillery, was accused of treason, tried and convicted for selling military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. Two weeks after his conviction in a closed court, Dreyfus was put through the ceremony of military degradation, where he was publicly shamed, his medals, badges, epaulettes and other insignia were torn off, his sword broken, his cap knocked off, even as he protested his innocence and feebly shouted ‘Vive la France! Long live the Army!’ He was subsequently deported to Devil’s Island, French Guyana. The French establishment, the French people, and almost all major newspapers assumed his guilt; and when the forensic evidence was found to be false and fabricated, the authorities invoked the greater good of the nation-state to suppress calls for reopening the case. When that fell through, they dog-whistled to the right-wing press to try and infect public opinion with anti-Semitic rage. Dreyfus was, after all, a Jew from Alsace.

Chants of ‘Death to the traitors’ and ‘Death to the Jews’ became commonplace in the streets of Paris. A strange, coercive moral terror roiled the possibility of any real questions being asked on the innocence of Dreyfus. It was a scandal that convulsed the French nation and sundered all public opinion into two factions: a small minority that believed in the innocence of Dreyfus (the Dreyfusards), and a bloodthirsty majority that bellowed for his blood (the anti-Dreyfusards). Into this sulphurous maelstrom of public opinion was released Emile Zola’s open letter to the President of the French Republic Félix Faure. Printed on the entire front page of L’Aurore , it brought out ineluctable forensic details (marshalled to maximum literary effect) that established not just Dreyfus’s innocence, but also the guilt of the true perpetrator of the crime, Ferdinand Walzin Esterházy. It stated, in a carefully objective way, with evidence, the complicity of an assortment of generals in conducting a foul and ‘monstrously biased’ inquiry, the culpability of at least three handwriting experts who submitted reports that were wilfully deceitful and fraudulent, the criminal misconduct of the War Office in using the press to coordinate an abominable campaign to mislead the people of the republic. Zola signed off with the following: “My fiery protest is simply the cry of my heart. Let them dare, then, to bring me before a court of law and let the inquiry take place in broad daylight. I am waiting.” Within the week the word intellectual ( intellectuel ) had attained common currency as a term of abuse for the Dreyfusards. Maurice Barres, darling of the anti-Dreyfusards, wrote a lengthy piece in Le Journal called ‘La Protestations des Intellectuels’, in which he mocked them and explained the term. Half-cultured poisoned spirits, he called them, those who were ashamed to think like the simple French, had no rootedness to the true culture of la patrie (the Fatherland), traitorous and unfaithful to blood and soil, blighted in thought and abnormal because their only allegiance was to the mind. And to sceptical inquiry.

‘ Sambhal ke rahna apne ghar mein, apne hi gaddaaron se ’. This song from the 1958 film Talaq was recently circulated in a large WhatsApp group that includes me. This group was started largely for the purpose of interchange of banter and repartee and perhaps entertainment, but now has started looking like a syndicate of reactionaries that fetishises the nation and believes, in a sternly prescriptive way, that Kanhaiya Kumar’s guilt is necessary to the safety of the country. This is a bloc of anti-JNUphiles, all struck with nationalistic piety, all consistent in their belief that any defence of Kumar, Umar Khalid and JNU is treasonous. They are also consistent (in their fulminations) in their use of the word ‘intellectuals’ pejoratively. Actively vocal members of this group are, I daresay, gravity donating figures in the world of medicine. They include: a pioneering laparoscopic and ano-rectal surgeon (the anus is to him what daffodils were to Wordsworth), an incredibly gifted and prolific neurosurgeon (known for clipping cerebral aneurysms with spectacular and joyous regularity), a trailblazing cardiac surgeon, an eminent oncologist, a thoracoscopic surgeon (on the cusp of greatness), a famous sleep medicine specialist, etc. All friends and colleagues. This is an abbreviated sample post (not an original production, but forwarded in the group):

Khatre ka udghosh baja hain, ranbhoomi tayyar karo,

Sahi waqt hain chun chun karke, gaddaron par vaar karo.

Nahi tumhare bas mein ho toh humein bol do Modi ji,

Samvidhan se bandhe hamare haath khol do Modi ji.

Agar nahi kuchh kiya samucha bhaar uthaane waale hain

Hum Bharat ke bete bhi hathiyaar uthane waale hain

I cannot believe that in a group of 150-odd doctors there isn’t a single JNUphile/ partisan of Kumar; leastways none coming out openly. All this, in the polite conventions of WhatsApp messaging, is allowed to go unchallenged.

As I sat down to explain L’affaire Kanhaiya to our nine-year-old, I wondered where I would want his loyalties to be — to the mind, to sceptical inquiry, to reason? Or to the mindless worship of something absolute? This whole thing bears an odd relationship to the life of the mind. What is the right place of the nation and nationalistic piety in the life of its people? The hubris of religion that it has acquired in many of us — is it on account of a religious impulse? Does it come from the desire to worship? Is the object of piety a secondary matter? Nation worship, like religion, in its marrow, has some articles of faith that are sacred. You can run in your head Douglas Adams’s summa of religion: “Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? Because you’re not!’ If one were to implant in a child credulity about the sacred, will they not learn to look upon the sacred as a resource? And a warrant?

These disruptive ideas of scepticism that I might want my son to understand, the ones that place principles of truth and justice above the nation, are they not the same ones that might also plonk questions in his head about the petty vindictiveness of God in the Satyanarayan Katha ; or the need for propitiating such a being at all? Would I not want him to realise, perhaps even before his voice breaks, that a moral and ethical life can be lived without religion?

I also told little Rudra the Dreyfus story. He was pleased with the manner in which it ended, in 1899, with the eventual pardoning of Dreyfus. The French republic had regarded the rights of one Jew, under the law, as having more value than a national climbdown.

I do hope that he grows up to be an insufferable little intellectual.

Ambarish Satwikis a Delhi-based vascular surgeon and writer; asatwik@gmail. com

COMMENT NOW