“Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s Imported Gaze: How Faux Intellectualism Misreads India to Serve Western Liberal Dogma”, reversethegaze.substack.com, March 12, 2026
“Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s recent essay in The Indian Express, “From a book on authoritarianism, lessons on ‘realism’ for India,” offers a sweeping indictment of what he calls contemporary Indian “realism.” In his telling, realism has become a philosophy of submission: a “suck up, kick down” creed that excuses imperialism abroad and authoritarianism at home. It is a powerful charge. It is also, on close reading, a deeply misleading one.
Mehta’s column is built around Czesław Miłosz’s classic study of intellectuals under communist rule, The Captive Mind. Miłosz’s fictional “Murti‑Bing pill” describes how writers and thinkers reconcile themselves to an authoritarian state by redefining their complicity as realism and responsibility. Mehta draws a parallel with present‑day India: “realism” is whatever aligns with the preferences of those in power; it has no criteria independent of power’s choices; it produces a psychological affinity between accepting global hierarchies and domestic authoritarianism; and it ends by insisting that adaptation to power is all there is.
He concludes that this mindset makes us “more genuflecting to imperialism now than when we were weak, and happier with authoritarianism than when we were poorer.” These are serious concerns. But they also raise an obvious question: who, exactly, is doing the genuflecting?….”
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