Kishen Pattanayak, The Last Flicker Of A Great Tradition

Yogendra Yadav

When Kishen Pattanayak (1930-2004) passed away 20 years ago, a small circle of friends, comrades and admirers mourned him. They recalled Kishen ji’s saintly virtues, personal sacrifices and political wisdom. People’s movements across the country — from Karnataka and Kerala to Maharashtra, Odisha, Bengal and Hindi states — remembered him as their friend, philosopher and guide, a mentor for innumerable activists. His death was hardly noticed in the “national” media except to report the passing of a former member of Parliament (and an obituary by this writer in this paper). Outside a tiny circle, he was not recognised as a political thinker. English speaking intellectuals and academic political theorists did not know he existed. They still don’t.

September 27 was his 20th death anniversary. A glimpse into the world of Kishen Pattanayak’s ideas can help us deal with the ideological void and political predicament that we confront today. It may also illustrate and take forward the debate on the “death” of modern Indian political thought.

Kishen ji belonged to the modern Indian tradition of political leaders who offered a vision for the future, an understanding of the present and a prescription for the way forward. He was elected to Lok Sabha in 1962 when he was just 32. After Lohia’s death he opted out of the infighting within the Socialist Party and went on to create an ideological forum (Lohia Vichar Manch) in 1972, a non-party political organisation (Samata Sangathan) in 1980 and finally a political party (Samajwadi Jan Parishad) in 1995. Thinking, speaking and writing was an integral part of his politics.

He wrote regularly in his mother tongue Odiya but much more extensively in Hindi. He was the founder-editor of Samayik Varta (1977-2004), a Hindi monthly, and Bikalpa Bichara, an Odiya magazine. Hundreds of his Hindi articles have been collected into six volumes so far: Vikalphin Nahin Hai Duniya, Bharat Shudron Ka Hoga, Bharatiya Rajniti Par Ek Drishti, Kisan Andolan: Dasha aur Disha, Badlaav Ki Kasauti and Sambhavanaon Ki Talash. Besides, there are two Odiya collections: Bichara Ra Tipa Khata and Bharatiya Buddhijibi Ra Sankata O Anyanya Prabandha.

How come someone who wrote so extensively, and with astonishing depth, remained invisible to the world of political theory? First of all, because English was not his principal medium. He was well versed in English and knew Bengali (which he learnt to savour Tagore’s poetry), but rarely wrote in or was translated into English. He mainly addressed the concerns of social and political activists in India, not the professional preoccupations of the discipline called political theory. Though his concerns were global and civilisational (his first article was on Milovan Djilas), his reflections were anchored in the world of political action at home. Besides, his thinking did not fit into any neat ideological box that could attract powerful camp followers. He was not Lohiaite enough, not just a socialist, not quite a Gandhian and not acceptable to the Left intellectual establishment of that time.

In his understated ways, drawing as little attention to himself as he possibly could, he was weaving the texture of a new ideology, a world-view needed to face the challenges of the 21st century. No flashy pronouncements, no claims of grand theory, no sectarian polemics, no hero worship — just quiet and stubborn pursuit of truth was his political calling. Underlying his political vision was a deep anxiety about the fate of humankind: “On the cusp of the twenty-first century, we are entering an age of nescience (agyana)”. Behind the spectacle of the Information Age and claims of the knowledge society, he found that the human mind was shrinking. Our collective capacity to respond to the challenges that face humanity is declining. His plea was for new ideas and new shastras — fresh treatise and canon — for the new century.

This, he feared, was not happening, as the inflow of fresh ideas always requires geographical and cultural shifts in the locus of ideas. But the mid-20th century shift of the global intellectual centre from Europe to the US has stifled this possibility. “Political rebellion in the colonised countries was a vast site of the audacious yet indomitable quest for resurgence of oppressed humanity.” We need to find ways to allow the energy and languages of Asia, Africa and Latin America to reshape the global imagination. However, the intellectuals in the Global South were not up to this historic challenge. A trenchant and sometimes acerbic critique of Indian intellectuals and their subservience to the West was a recurring theme in Kishen ji’s writings. He just could not stand the idea that India was condemned to re-enact the life, or worse, the autobiography, of Europe, and that we could not imagine our liberation outside the received Western frames.

Kishen ji’s mission was to alert humankind of the dangers that faced it and to create a pool of ideas and energies to take on this challenge. He did so by focusing on the here and now, on contemporary India, and through the most creative and powerful activity of our times — politics. He did not propound a new “ism”. The provisional name that he came up with was just “deshiya chintan” — not nativism but a vision rooted in desh and kaal. For this purpose, he drew upon and also bridged two powerful streams of thought that ran parallel to each other in the 20th century. He was himself located in one of these: The egalitarian tradition that included all shades of the Left, the Phule-Ambedkar tradition and feminism. Within this stream, he came from the socialist sub-stream associated with Acharya Narendra Dev, Jayprakash Narayan, and Rammanohar Lohia that helped him recognise the multiple axes of oppression — class, caste, gender and race.

While retaining a commitment to the idea of revolutionary transformation, he firmly rejected the traditional socialist fantasy of an economy of abundance. The future of humankind has to be built on a recognition of scarcity of resources, a critique of consumerism and a rethinking of appropriate technology. In his critique of modern civilisation, Kishen ji drew upon another less recognised stream of decoloniality — the indigenous tradition that led to and followed from Gandhi. He, of course, combined it with a critique of modern civilisations for their inhumanity and inequality.

These abstractions emerged from his immersion in the concrete issues, debates and dilemmas of his time. He passionately opposed the formation of WTO as a design for recolonisation. He defended the farmers’ demand for remunerative prices against the then leftist critique that this was the demand of “kulak” farmers. He recognised big project-driven displacement as a political issue, while empathising with the anxieties of marginalisation of the Ahomiya and Rajbongshi. He staunchly defended caste-based reservation, while offering modifications to ensure that reservation becomes an instrument of destruction of caste. He joined the Lokvidya campaign for respecting and reconstructing existing “traditional” knowledge against the hegemony of modern science. And he pointed out the weaknesses of secularism in the face of the RSS-BJP onslaught, his key concern in his last years. Investing in positive nationalism and re-energising social justice was for him the way to take on this challenge.

Kishen ji’s complete immersion in the politics of here and now, his ability to transcend partisanship and detach the validity of ideas from their sources and link the local to global issues set him apart from political leaders and professional intellectuals of his time. He was, arguably, the last flicker of a great tradition of modern Indian political thought.

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