Editorial Note, Nov-Dec, 2014

The lead article in the current number of Social Scientist, which contains the text of Romila Thapar’s Nikhil Chakravartty Memorial Lecture this year, discusses an issue which has not received the attention it deserves, namely the role of the ‘public intellectual’. The concept itself is of recent vintage and refers to something sui generis. While ‘intellectuals’, in the wider sense of the term, have made occasional forays into the ‘public domain’, outside of their respective professions, on certain exceptional issues like wars (the entire cream of the world of arts and letters in Britain, for instance, had come out against the Vietnam War in the seventies), the term ‘public intellectual’ means something more; being a ‘public intellectual’ is a state of being, not a rare, occasional diversion. It refers to a group of intellectuals that, apart from its professional work and without in any way compromising with the quality of its professional work, makes it a point to take public stands on issues, especially of social justice and citizens’ rights, and resists State policies that are perceived to be violating them. Such ‘public intellectuals’, Thapar argues, need to be autonomous \ of the centres of power, and to be imbued with social concern as well as am commitment to rational discourse. She traces the lineage of ‘public intellectuals’ back\ to Socrates in the West and the Buddhist tradition inter alia in the Indian context.