The indictment of fascism was the work of Antonio Gramsci, Ignazio Silone and the Frankfurt School in Germany. The rise of the knowledge society was announced by intellectuals like Daniel Bell, Fritz Machulin and Ralf Dahrendorf. The first playful critiques of the hegemony or dominance of science came from Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault. The velvet revolution of Czechoslovakia was led by public intellectuals like Václav Havel and Ivan Klima.

Who are the intellectuals and public intellectuals as a category? How does one understand them sociologically? The magic of knowledge in modern life has often required the mystique of the intellectual. Intellectuals as a sociological group dance above ideology. In playfully distancing themselves from class, interest and social strata they perform a double function. As persons, they articulate the worldview of a society, as actors they emphasise the performative nature of the idea. Knowledge is one of the great operas of modern society. As knowledge got specialised, functionalised, segmented, the intellectual become more a bureaucrat of knowledge, he became an expert. Expert knowledge awed the popular imagination but never appealed to it.

For knowledge or an idea to be born as a popular vehicle, it needed the public intellectual. The public intellectual choreographs intellectual connections. He weaves ideas together. He is an expert who carries expertise lightly. He is a man who popularises ideas without being populist. He makes ideas feel homely, without ever destroying their bite. He synthesises knowledge while sustaining its dissenting power and its ferocious eccentricity.

A public intellectual is a person who regardless of his location takes ideas as his focus and articulates their vision and their consequences. He transcends the university or the media though he might be located in them.

For a man who defines the problematic of modern life, he is a problem himself. His commitment to ideas alienates him from any particular group. Intellectuals are by definition suspect because they in turn suspect every idea in wrestling with it, exploring it, criticising it. They give it passion, power, vision and holism. They transform ideas into theatre.

An intelligentsia consumes ideas while intellectuals create and interpret it. Intelligentsia are bred in the university but the intellectuals often live outside. They have always been a threat to the state. America during the McCarthyite period hunted down the intellectual just as Stalinist Russia did in the Lysenko era. Other countries can benefit. The Nazi’s witch-hunt gave to America its greatest intellectuals from Herbert Marcuse to Hannah Arendt.

Where does India stand? By Independence, the debates had got too fragmented but there were still some great examples. The debates around urban planning were triggered by the French architect Le Corbusier around his notion of Chandigarh. Planning as an idea was upheld by public intellectuals like Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, Michal Kalecki and Jan Tinbergen. The idea of the importance of science was enacted by Bernal, Zaheer, Blackett and Bhabha.

The heyday of the public intellectuals came after the Emergency when a shoal of intellectuals fought back to create a vision of civil society. It was at that time that journalists like Arun Shourie, political scientists like Rajni Kothari, economists like Ashok Mitra articulated a powerful vision of democracy. What gave this additional impetus were social movements that provided a critique of science, development, rights and of the tyranny of bureaucracies. This was the heyday of the public intellectual weaving dreams, knitting together socialism and democracy, tradition and modernity. The rise of liberalisation and globalisation created a generation of media lovelies who created controversy but disappeared by the next fortnight. Media did provide us public intellectuals but that faded as the media became more global.

Who are the public intellectuals in India today? Who commands a sweep of ideas without being narrow or reductionist? One can list twelve. Oddly, only one of them is a scientist and there are no members from law or media. All are above fifty. The new generation might need other names.

My happy dozen consists of the following. The psychologist Ashis Nandy for creating a playful dissenting imagination around science, creativity and culture. The novelist U.R. Ananthamurthy as translator and interpreter of cultures, Salman Rushdie for being the novelist of the Islamic Imaginary, Vandana Shiva as the creative source of a feminist science, Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze for an ethical vision of economics, V.S. Ramachandran for his innovative ideas about the brain, the writer Mahasweta Devi for her idea of the tribe and its tragedy, Aruna Roy for celebration of the joys of information, Gayatri Spivak for articulating the vision of the diasporic intellectual, Medha Patkar for singing the dirge of development and C.K. Prahalad for showing that management can have an innovative conscience.

Some have appeared in the list of the world’s leading public intellectuals compiled recently by Foreign Policy. I must confess these lists are as seductive as those of cricketers and film stars and as controversial and biased.

Ideas are mobile, fluid and harsh. Some of these names may lose their lustre in a decade. The power of ideas is unforgiving and the fate of ideas is often ironic. But while it lasts, let us honour them. One celebrates and salutes them all for keeping vision alive, courage alive and ideas alive.

The writer is a social scientist