Abstract
Writing a conventional obituary for Prof Dhirubhai L. Seth (or Dhirubhai!)—the former Director and one of the founding members of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and member of advisory board of this journal—is a difficult task.
Dhirubhai was a theorist of the present. He would always respond to the challenges, issues and anxieties posed by the contemporary moment. The past in Dhirubhai’s framework is always seen in relation to contemporary concerns. For him, ‘historicization of an event, or an object…or an institution of a distant past becomes credible, and makes good historical sense, only when it is done in terms of contemporary concerns and sensibilities’ (DLS, p. 25). Dhrubhai’s intellectual adherence to here and now forces us to always engage with him as our contemporary. His lively, assertive and interven-tionist intellectual quest cannot be treated as history. For this reason, the colourful intellectual personality of Dhirubhai cannot be commemorated in an orthodox unadventurous mode.
The vastness of Dhirubhai’s work poses a challenge of a different kind. He used to describe himself as a writer of short stories to justify his faithfulness for writing long essays instead of books. These essays address a number issues such as nationalism, democracy, caste, religion, backwardness, institutional development, non-party political processes, grassroots movements, intellectualism and so on. Although there are two edited volumes based on his various writings —Satta Aur Samaj: Dhirubhai Sheth (edited by Abhay Kumar Dubey, 2009) and At Home with Democracy: A Theory of India Politics (edited by Peter R. deSouza, 2018)—it is very difficult to provide a thematic label to Dhirubhai’s intellectual universe. Any conventional tribute, especially in strict professional academic sense, is almost meaningless, if not entirely futile.
To avoid such explanatory difficulties, we must engage with Dhirubhai’s notion of intellectualism: How did he conceptualize the role of intellectuals in a postcolonial society like India?
Dhirubhai makes a crucial distinction between academic work and intellectual pursuit. For him, academic work refers to the formal, professional engagement with a particular subject matter. On the other hand, intellectual work is seen as a creative devotion to an idea simply to nurture a process of constructive thinking. Dhirubhai introduces an innovative dimension to this conceptual distinction. He emphasises the decisive role of language in the realm of ideas. He writes:
(There are) …two languages of social thinking on India: English and the bhashas. When written in English an essay in political sociology would sound scholarly and even social scientific. The same thing when rendered in Gujarati sounded, at the best, commonsensical. It appeared as if the use of English lent the essay an air of being academic and scientific. The same thing in Gujarati cannot be written without bringing the play of agencies involved, and consequences entailed, into the process of depicting that reality. My work has been an attempt to de-academize the idea of social change and to bring back the reality of agents, issues, and implications/consequences involved. (Sheth, 2018, p. Vii)
The effort to de-academize the notion of social change in a broad framework of Indian democracy is a useful vantage point to understand Dhirubhai’s conceptualization of intellectual work. In an essay written in 1992, he identifies two crucial spheres of social action: the state and the movements. In his view, despite the fact that the state and movements are guided by different compulsions, they draw legitimacy from each other. He writes:
The state and the movements…often do not work in tandem….through political and social mobilisation of populations, often on issues of rights, the movements seek to compel the state— which is guided primarily by the reason of governance rather than of transformation— to adopt policies and enact legislation which, left to itself, is not inclined to pursue….the state…tends to ignore the demands made by the popular movements in favour of accommodating sectional interests of the elites both in the formulation and implementation of social policies (Sheth, 1992)
Dhirubhai envisages an independent role of intellectuals to create a workable political equilibrium for the survival of democratic practices. He argues that ‘the intellectuals, by differentiating themselves from the larger social elite, can perform an independent role, i e, of mediating between the state and the popular movements’ (Sheth, 1992).
However, if the intellectuals fail to function as a committed yet autonomous group and continue to operate as pro-state elite, the democratic character of politics would decline and eventually breakdown. Dhirubhai imagines a critical possibility. He writes:
…if… the intellectuals remain as an undifferentiated part of the larger social elite primarily interested in defending their power…the movements tend to acquire virulent, even violent forms…In such a situation, variegated forms of movements begin to strain the very fabric of liberal democracy and render it incapable of processing issues in any rational-political frame of policies. When this happens, the state is overtaken by a severe political crisis, in coping with which it begins to lose, rather rapidly, its democratic character (Sheth, 1992).
This observation must be seen in relation to the contemporary moment of Indian politics. The political class has successfully created an anti-intellectual environment. The slogans like ‘hard work is important than Harvard’, ‘Khan Market gang’, ‘Urban Naxals’ and so on are often invoked to devalue the significance of independent intellectual work, especially in the field of social sciences and humanities. The decline of democratic norms and practices in the sphere of politics is also very evident.
This erosion of democracy is a serious political and intellectual concern. However, Dhirubhai’s analysis does not merely ask us to offer a critique of it. Instead, it encourages us to rethink our role as intellectuals and to find out the reasons behind our collective failure in producing constructive criticisms of the state and/or of the movements.
Recognising Dhirubhai as a practitioner of this kind of critical intellectual politics, in my view, could be the most appropriate tribute to him.