5 min readSep 2, 2026 05:33 PM IST First published on: Sep 2, 2026 at 05:32 PM ISTIn his Pulitzer Prize-winning Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), historian Richard Hofstadter traces a suspicion of the expert to a populist strain that equated learning with elitism and plain speech with virtue. This resentment of and opposition to the life of the mind, he argues, was not a product of McCarthyism alone; it was, in fact, deeply embedded in American culture, in its material pragmatism that measured worth in utility and profit, its populist politics and religious evangelism.Hofstadter was writing during the Cold War, but the cyclical antipathy to the dimag — the mind — or what is born of it — dimagi, the intellect — is not an American phenomenon alone. In Age of Anger (2017), Pankaj Mishra situates the global turn against expertise within a much older resentment — the sense, cultivated since the Enlightenment’s uneven arrival in the postcolonial world, that rationalist elites have hoarded the fruits of modernity for themselves.AdvertisementThat resentment travels easily through a deeply stratified society, attaching itself to old hierarchies of caste, language, and privilege, exacerbated in no small measure by elite gatekeeping. In India, over the last decade, a confrontational majoritarian political project, a compliant echo chamber, and the digital public square have recast the expert as a nebulous figure, an adversary often to the national mood of vikas.The damage this does to public life — the hollowing out of institutions that once mediated between knowledge and power — is profound. But institutional erosion alone does not explain why so many people are willing to accommodate it. This is especially paradoxical in a country that adores degrees arguably more than any other society in the world: The IIT rank, the medical seat, the government service examination.Also Read | India must catch up in this China-US tech racePerhaps the answer lies in what it does not respect, and sometimes, resents. The degree’s original purpose: Independent thought. We are comfortable with intellect that has been institutionalised, monetised, and made obedient, not with the one that is unruly and curious, that asks questions, that says no.AdvertisementConsider just one example: Competitive examinations. The defining feature of most of them is not that they are hard, but that they are hard in a specific way. They reward speed and retention under constraints of time and pressure. A student preparing for these exams is not being trained to weigh conflicting evidence or bear with unresolved questions. They are being trained to eliminate ambiguity as fast as possible, because ambiguity costs marks and marks cost a seat that a few hundred thousand others also want. The degree is a mobility instrument — it moves a family across a caste line, a class line, a marriageability threshold, a generation’s worth of precarity. So the ability to shoehorn oneself into its requirements is useful, especially in an uncertain job market. It is, however, not the same skill as independent thought. And after years of selecting for the first, there is no obvious reason a society would suddenly reward the second once the exam is over, especially if the costs are disproportionately high.What happens when inquiry is treated as an obstacle to advancement? Citizens come to mistake confidence for truth and doubt for weakness. The dimagi becomes subservient to the jugaadu in the republic of the glib and the obsequious. And yet there is virtue in treating the mind’s slow, unglamorous work — research, revision, imagination — as a public good worth protecting, the way clean air or an independent judiciary is a public good. Its value is not immediately measurable but lies in the possibilities it keeps open: The questions not yet answered, the arguments not yet settled, the futures not yet foreclosed.you may likeJonathan White, in In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea (2024), argues that democracies survive on the conviction that the future is genuinely open, that alternatives to the present exist and can be reasoned toward, rather than simply awaited or feared. That conviction has always been produced by argument — by thinkers willing to sketch what has not yet happened and defend it against opponents. Take away the sustained, difficult work of thinking, and what remains is a politics of pure reaction: A “now or never” urgency that treats every problem as an emergency to be solved through directives rather than a question to be worked through.A nation that cannot argue about its future — that treats the economist’s dissent, the historian’s revision, the stand-up comic’s satire as inconvenient noise — loses not just the capacity to correct itself but the possibility of imagining something different from what it has. A society that treats its dimag with suspicion forfeits the very faculty by which futures are imagined into being. It contracts into an eternal present, governed by whoever promises the most confident escape from it.The writer is senior associate editor, The Indian Express. paromita.chakrabarti@expressindia.com