Mike Levien: Could you say more about the role of a public intellectual?
Ashis Nandy: I think there is not one. I would look at it as some kind of an ethical commitment. It is moral, no doubt about that. On the one hand, I think you should be yourself…you have to be yourself to be truly creative. On the other hand, I expect some kind of sensitivity from an intellectual who wants to attain the highest levels of creativity. That sensitivity cannot be had only on the basis of a very well worked out ideological position. That has to come as a product of a dialogue with life. I mean, it has to come from a form of dialogue which is at least partly independent of the most formalized thought that you pick up while you are a student…. The same forces within yourself, the psychological forces, that have pushed you to becoming an academic should also sensitize you to the fact that there is this relatively unknown, uncharted world of knowledge and relatively less accessible human beings living next door to you as neighbors, and if you live with the principles of an open society and democratic participation then you have to enter their life-world, in some form or other and make sense of it and make your writings reflect that encounter. That’s good enough. Let us not play god. Let us not have such a sense of self-importance that our ideas and our ideologies will liberate others. I mean they are good enough for us and that is good enough. You live with your ideologies because you have nothing else to fall back on. In most cases you don’t even have a faith. I don’t have a faith and I may have to depend on ideology. But I don’t have the arrogance to think that Indians should be converted to it. I don’t want to act like a missionary. I think that there should be an element of self-destructiveness built into one’s theoretical formulations so that it doesn’t acquire a stranglehold over the fate of millions. That healthy skepticism, that belief that ultimately your ideas are fragile, that however much it might give you a false sense of immortality and contain your fear of death, it cannot and should not survive any space and time that you navigate. That it should not acquire a certain kind of universal applicability over geographical, temporal, and generational boundaries . . . this is absolutely essential in our times.
