Farrukh Dhondy: The British intellectual's changing currency

 “Our prehistoric cities were planned
The straight streets, the granary, the viaduct…
Now we, for profit, lay waste to the land
Our slum and high-rise cities are all f----ed!

Mohenjodaro, Harappa put to shame
The Mumbais and Kolkotas of today
The greed of politicians is to blame
And planners in the developer’s pay”a

— From The Korona Purana by Bachchoo

Some years ago Sanjoy Roy, an organiser of the Jaipur Literary Festival, came to see V.S. Naipaul to recruit his presence there. Nadira, Lady Naipaul, said he wouldn’t speak but he would be interviewed. Sanjoy said that would be perfect and suggested that he be interviewed by Shashi Tharoor.

“Er… not Shashi, not Shashi,” Vidia said, probably thinking the public and press would perhaps be distracted by other allegations, accusations and gossip that Shashi had been subject to.

“What about Tarun Tejpal?” Sanjoy ventured.

“Not Tarun either,” Vidia said, for the same reason that he had passed over Shashi.

“Then who would you suggest, Sir?” Sanjoy asked.

“How about Farrukh?” Vidia said.

“Dhondy?” Sanjoy asked. “He’s not an intellectual!”

“If he’s not an intellectual, I am the Empress of China,” Nadira retorted.

“No, no, I didn’t mean to reject Farrukh. He’d be perfect. I’ll get in touch with him today…” Sanjoy responded.

When he left, Nadira mischievously called me.

“Sanjoy Roy says you are not an intellectual,” she said.

“Recognition at last,” I said. “Only Frenchmen and Bengalis are ‘intellectuals’.”

I wanted to say we Parsis are constitutional lawyers, statues in Mumbai or the idle heirs of fortunes made in the nineteenth century Chinese opium trade, but didn’t. Perhaps my own suspicion of the label was born, not of being Parsi, but of having lived in Britain where W.H. Auden could write:

“To the man-in-the-street who, I’m sorry to say,
Is a keen observer of life,
The word intellectual suggests right away
A man who’s untrue to his wife.”

Writing a little after Auden, as World War II raged, George Orwell, one of the most perceptive analysts of the temper and temperament of the nation, wrote:

“…the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic world view… But they have a certain power of acting without taking thought. Their world-famed hypocrisy… is bound up with this. Also in moments of supreme crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct, which is understood by almost everyone, though never formulated. The phrase that Hitler coined for the Germans, ‘a sleep-walking people’, would have been better applied to the English.”

Nevertheless, England runs ‘think-tanks’ which venture opinions on everything.

I looked up Orwell’s essay again while, inevitably, confronted with the conflicting opinions about Covid-19 being thrust at the British public via the internet-published newspapers and the reports on TV programmes.

Orwell goes on in the same essay to call the politicians of the time, and of the period in Britain just before the war, mediocrities, idiots and hypocrites. He labels Anthony Eden and Lord Halifax ‘stuffed shirts’ and men of no talent and: “As for Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air…”

Again, events of the last few years in Britain confirm the fact that times may change but the characteristics of this nation exhibit a continuity.

Take, for instance Orwell’s contention about British hypocrisy. In the period before Britain decided, through a narrow vote, a patriotic sleep-walking, to leave the European Union, one Michael Gove, sometimes journalist and now a member of the Cabinet, appeared in print and in person attacking the experts and intellectuals who, through informed economic calculations and projections, predicted the economic and consequently social disaster that Brexit would bring. When David Cameron resigned from prime-ministership and Boris Johnson threw his hat into the ring, this same Gove pretended to support his candidature and waited till a crucial day before the election of Cameron’s successor by the Party, to denounce Johnson as a personality unfit for the office of PM and put in his own nomination papers instead. Boris was compelled to withdraw. Gove, a Lady Macbeth or Brutus of the affair, got nowhere.

When, two years later, after Theresa May had held the office and resigned and Boris went for it again, Gove pledged his support for this ‘unfit’ candidate and begged his way into the cabinet. Why Boris forgave or accepted him remains a mystery.

Or perhaps not so much of one, as now both of them, having denounced and denigrated the intellectuals and experts over the consequences of Brexit, appear on most days on TV to tell the British public that they the government, are being solely guided by the ‘experts’ on the coronavirus, even though the scientific certainties about Covid-19 are far from uncontroversial.

Orwell’s strictures about Britain being led by mediocrities and hypocrites through the sleep-walking herd instincts of its democratic voters, seems truer today than at any time since he wrote his essay. Priti Patel, appointed Home Secretary, is a parody of herself; Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary’s only brief seems to be to distance the country from Europe.

Rishi Sunak, the ex-hedge-fund man, now Chancellor, has announced that in the Covid lockdown, firms which face financial crises will be helped by taxpayer money. Several of these firms such as Virgin Atlantic, Easyjet, the clothes retailer Arcadia, the opticians Specsavers, the pub chain Greene King and several others are registered in tax-havens such as the Virgin Islands and Monaco and dodge the British taxes which Rishi will ransack to bail them out. This won’t be a matter of concern to him or to the British sleep-walkers — after all hedge-fund wallas have plenty of connections, allegiances and dealings with tax-haven, tax-dodging companies.

Oh Orwell, Orwell, where is thy sting?