Ambrose Pinto SJ
I am a Jesuit from India, heading a University college. Just a month ago, a fellow Jesuit from the Province of Mumbai who completed his doctoral studies at the National Law School, Bangalore, was felicitated by the community, and at this function he made a presentation on intellectual life in the Society of Jesus. The reflections in this paper were provoked by that presentation. What struck me most was that the institutions of the Society in India – our schools and colleges – have produced more intellectuals in different spheres than the Society of Jesus from its members. And yet it is important to ask, “What kind of intellectuals has the Society of Jesus produced both from within and through its institutions? Are they really the people who belong to the intellectual class in the Jesuit sense?”
In India, we have names like Frs. Heras, the famous historian from Mumbai, Cecil Saldanha, the Botanist from Bangalore, Yeddanpalli, the Chemist from Chennai, Bulke, the Hindi Scholar from Ranchi, and a host of others who are no more but have left a mark as scholars in their respective fields. A few are still making a contribution through their laboratories and research publications in some of the colleges and institutes. And the products of our institutions are more numerous and far more renowned than the Jesuits of the past or present. While Dr. Abdul Kalam, the man behind India’s nuclear programme and the present President of the country was a product of St. Joseph’s College, Trichy, Raja Ramanna, his co-worker in the nuclear programme studied in St. Joseph’s, Bangalore. These two josephites were behind India’s nuclear programme. The founder of the hotmail is a product of St. Joseph’s Boys High School, Bangalore; the same is true of the founder of Google. The Society of Jesus in India can be proud, no doubt, of its institutions’ contribution to the field of sciences, social sciences, information and governance.
But this pride when examined in the light of the options of the Society may put us to shame. Let us first take the case of Dr. Abdul Kalam, the President of the country. In spite of being a Muslim, the Bharatiya Janata Party, a party committed to exterminate the minorities from the country, was not against his elevation to the highest post of the land after the genocide of Muslims in the state of Gujarat. Abdul Kalam is a pure intellectual who has pursued Physics for the sake of Physics without any ideology, and is perhaps not conscious of being used by the politicians to serve their purpose. A concerned intellectual would have declined the offer of Presidency, given the fascist nature and ideology of the party.
As a political party committed to the establishment of a theocratic state, the BJP has attacked intellectual life at every step. Like all fascist groups, it is anti-intellectual, and continues to be suspicious of independent academicians and all those in intellectual circles committed to enhance the quality of life of citizens.[2]
The subaltern consciousness can be either indoctrinated or autonomous. Too often, indoctrination of that consciousness, and repression of its autonomous side is engaged in by groups with power and vested interests in retaining that power. The overall result is an impoverished intellectual class, an indoctrinated middle class and subaltern groups that keep the social status quo intact.
The success of the BJP in India can be attributed to the de-intellectualized and de-culturised middle class in the country. Its members are increasingly being indoctrinated by the discourse of the state and the party in power, and the autonomous dimension of the intellect is not allowed free play by authoritarian groups. The Dalits, Tribals and backward classes regard themselves as inferior only because they have been indoctrinated to think in that way by hegemonic powers. Behind the nationalism of the BJP is a cynical power game to keep the society unequal. To destroy fascism, the country needs an intellectual response firmly rooted in the notions of the Preamble of the Indian constitution – equality, fraternity and justice.
But this is not easy since the fascist project in the country has succeeded in exploiting and using the very principles of liberal democracy. While the framers of the constitution and the governments that followed spoke of gender justice, the BJP has lent “sati” (the cruel practice of burning women on the funeral pyre of their husbands) a kind of sanction by glorifying an instance when it did in fact occur. Members of the party explained it as the selflessness of the woman, as a part of the country’s heritage, and even erected a temple there, turning the helpless young woman who was compelled to jump into the funeral fire by relatives into a goddess. When five untouchables were burnt for skinning cows, a sacred animal for the caste Hindus, the then Prime Minister, instead of condemning the act, legitimized it by saying that cows are sacred to caste Hindus, and this despite the fact that over 75 per cent of Indians consume beef. Why do these heinous acts take place? The answer is simple. It is the power of indoctrination. As long as education remains indoctrination, the subjugation of the weaker by the stronger will continue. To establish a fascist culture one has to reconstruct the past by manufacturing facts. When the autonomous element of the intellect is promoted, the poor will raise questions about their inequality and exploitation. They will be able to confront and respond to the forces of unjust power and privilege. Democracy is inimical to cultural nationalists. The culture the BJP speaks of is the culture of caste and privilege, the perpetuation of which will further their interests.
The role of the intellectual is to locate himself/herself in the midst of the social, economic and political reality and respond to the issue of marginalisation and exploitation of the masses. An Indian Jesuit, therefore, has to be essentially different from Jesuits in other countries. His mission though universal is specific; he needs to define his identity in terms of his milieu. He is expected to be a voice of the voiceless instead of staying aloof or becoming a part of the establishment. There can be no neutral intellectuals. Neutrality in reality means providing support to the establishment. Can we loudly proclaim that the Society in India has produced concerned intellectuals to speak on behalf of the masses? To respond to the fascist nature of the polity and society, what is needed is an ideological agenda – something that the Society of Jesus has lacked in India. Our formation programmes are cut-off from the realities of the lives of the subalterns. The involvement programmes in formation houses lack ideology and tend to be activities scholastics take on to relax from the routine of academics, which themselves lack focus. The formators and educators in formation houses, colleges and schools have been forming students and Jesuits in ivory towers where what takes place is indoctrination and not education, preparing people to merge with the establishment instead of critically resisting its structures. We need a culture of dissent to work for transformation. Unfortunately, Jesuits in India for the most part do not have it. We are not prepared to think; perhaps we are even afraid to think differently.
The country has a history of intellectuals who have refused to be a part of the establishment.[3] During the BJP regime several intellectuals refused to give in to the agenda of the party, willing to pay a price for their convictions. It is true that in the Sciences, we have several who have opposed India’s nuclear programme and others who have taken Science to the villages but the tragedy is that the intellectual class on the whole, both within and outside the Society of Jesus in the country, has not been able to tie up with the aspirations of the marginalised in Indian society. Ours is an isolated existence. What is perhaps saddening is that through our institutions we have defended power, privilege and prestige and have failed to be gripped by issues of marginalisation, impoverishment and exclusion.
To respond to the communal and capitalist project in the country, the Indian Jesuits need an intellectual project that is committed to the preamble of the constitution. This project must necessarily fall back on the legacy of Ambedkar, Phule, Periyar and a host of others who struggled for equality, fraternity and justice in the land. People like Ambedkar, Phule and Periyar knew that only an intellectual response premised on the empowerment of the poor could transform the country. Theirs was a counter cultural agenda. They rightly perceived the root causes of marginalisation and poverty in the country and fought against it ideologically. They knew that the project needs the alliance of all people and they were able to draw people of good will from across social constituencies.
We cannot talk of intellectuals without an emancipatory agenda. One of the obstacles for the emancipatory agenda is our formation. You can’t make intellectuals out of conformists. And there is work to be done in terms of forming an autonomous consciousness to counter the widespread indoctrination that prevails. In one of the recent meetings of the Province Social Action Commission, several Jesuits from the field complained that while they have been intervening in the lives of the dalits through economic programmes, the forces of hindutva provide the ideological dimension even in the remotest villages to the very groups they serve. When these bodies call for meetings or gatherings all the people rush to the gatherings in the name of religion. What is taught there is once again indoctrination – the dalits and the tribals are asked to be aware of the designs of the missionaries. They are told that the missionaries would convert them and attack their Hindu identity. In spite of being termed as outcasts, untouchables and impure, they are told that they are Hindus. Since we lack an ideology, we have not been able to respond to the allegations through a counter ideology and add our mite to the transformative process. The Jesuits as a result still remain as outsiders to the entire empowerment programme of the impoverished in the country for the reason that the ideology in our social centres and missions is still provided by the forces of hindutva to keep the subaltern groups under control.
All this means that one cannot speak of intellectual life in India without the ideological dimension. Ideologies are always political since they are related to building consciousness and providing power. Ideology raises questions about who has power and why one group has so much power as to control the majority, and about how the powerless are to be empowered. If our mission is empowerment of the poor, we cannot do that without an ideological dimension. It is time that the Society of Jesus in India situates itself in the social, economic and political context. Intellectual life cannot be discussed in abstraction; it can be discussed only in relation to the poor in state and society.
That raises the final question. Is the Society of Jesus in India devoid of intellectual life? Not at all. But the intellectual life fostered by the Society both within and outside has remained a part of the establishment. The challenge is to form the “organic intellectuals” that Gramsci talks about. It is sad to note that we have produced so few concerned intellectuals. Barring a few exceptions, Jesuit education has not contributed to building subaltern consciousness or adding to the quality of life of the people. And without that intellectual life, we cannot be commissioned by the Lord to do the “magis” for him. Lisbert[4] in his farewell interview to JIVAN[5] spoke of the lack of professionalism in the Assistancy but it is not professionalism that the Assistancy lacks. We do not need managers and professionals for the establishment. What we need are agents of change in society.
Our communities and formation houses are too inward looking and more concerned about “self” than others. A complacent life cannot produce dissent. It is this lack of dissent that has kept the Assistancy from raising critical questions pertaining to the life and livelihoods of our people in the country and working towards an egalitarian social order. We need to work out alternatives to the present unjust social order since the Lord sends us on a mission, and that needs serious thought, reflection and action evolved from the lives of the people. There cannot be any intellectual life apart from the people whom the Lord has sent us to serve.
Ambrose Pinto SJ
St. Joseph’s College
P.B. 27094, Lal Bagh Road
Bangalore 560027
[1] Though the article was written at the time when the fundamentalist party BJP was in power, we feel that some of the questions raised need to be answered even during a different political dispensation which appears to favour a secular political agenda [Editor’s Note].
[2] The party refused to permit publication of the work of two eminent scholars - Sumit Sarkar and K.N.Panikar, on India
[3] The names of Ambedkar, an untouchable who spearheaded the empowerment of the community and fought against the caste order, Nehru, who along with Gandhi who resisted the British rule in the country, Arundhati Roy, who is a powerful voice against capitalism and nuclearisation of the Indian state, Medha Patkar who has globalised the local struggles of the tribals against eviction and a host of others, are known all over the world.
[4] Fr. Lisbert D’Souza, former Provincial of the South Asian Assistancy is now Assistant at the Curia in Rome
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