PVK address to the students and members of the faculty on the Mar Gregorios College of Law, Trivandrum.
[Address for the ‘Wordsmith’s Lounge’ and the IQAC of the Mar Gregorios College of Law in Trivandrum on 9 July 2024]
‘The Law, the Truth, and the Humanities’
Ladies and gentlemen,
I am going to treat you as judge and jury and present a case before you.
In brief, my case is that law is the queen of the humanities. My arguments to persuade you will be along the following lines. I will present a theory about perception and knowledge. I will then try to show that justice and fair laws are the noblest of human endeavours. However, the reality of our courts and related institutions are nowhere near ideal or noble. Can this be changed? I will make an opening statement, call some expert witnesses and close with some arguments that I hope will move you to accept my point of view. If I were a lawyer, my client would be the State of India.
The opening statement
I once passed on a copy of Josy Joseph’s ‘A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India’ (2016) to a lawyer. After taking a look at the cover page, he asked me “What is this book about? “Corruption in India” I said. He held it up and asked softly “Only one volume?”
The query came from Adv. Suresh Venkatachalam, as he is known in the High Court of Kerala. He is a gentleman, a scholar and a lawyer, a trial lawyer specialising in civil law. I knew his views on the law and the courts and understood what depth of feeling and thought lay behind that simple question. Like most good lawyers, Adv. Suresh knew that law covered a spectrum; one that extends from penetrating and subtle analysis of the ethical dimensions of crime and punishment to the sordid goings-on in some of our courts of law.
Today I would like to plead that law is the queen of the humanities. Philosophy has claims to that seat. But two important branches of philosophy – ethics and epistemology – are part of the study of law. History is another claimant. Her case is strong, but does not match that of law. Literature once behaved as if it was the prince of humanities, a claim undermined by its sister subject, literary criticism and its step-twin, literary theory. When you hitch your intellectual wagon to a gang of ideologues who believe that there as many truths as there are people, your case collapses.
Testimony of experts.
Allow me to call my first witness. He is John R. Searle (1932 – 2025), epistemologist and philosopher of the mind. My case is based on certain theories he had about the world, human perception and language and the role of the human mind in linking these. (Please note that, following Searle, we will not distinguish between the body and the mind here. We do not have a body and a mind but one mind / body.)
Searle’s philosophy is called ‘Direct Realism’. It is based on the observation that the biological purpose of perception is to give us knowledge of the outside world. What we see is what exists. Millions of people go through life doing myriad things based on the inputs of their senses. We sit on chairs and have meals from plates on tables. We jump out of the way of an approaching KSRTC bus or open an umbrella when it begins to rain. Every policeman in Kerala is a direct realist, though none of them will have heard of John Searle. This is why cases get solved in Kerala. When a young man in Trivandrum who had killed four of his close relatives told the police that he was guided by aliens and that he was about to leave for the astral world, the police did not enlist ISRO for help. They sent him to a psychiatrist for evaluation and possible treatment. Only direct realists would do such a thing. Philosophers might reach for a snake to tie a cow to a tree or hang a man by his neck. But the cowherd and the hangman pick up a rope. Searle reiterates this common-sense endorsed position because the philosophical traditions of the East and the West cast doubt on the reliability of sense data.
Searle’s great contribution was to explain the philosophical status of phenomena like law.
Searle said that we live in one world. This world is made up of material facts and social facts. He used the terms brute facts and institutional facts for material and social facts. Brute things are those that have material existence, like tables and snakes and mountains and fire and smoke. Institutional facts are created by men using language, through what philosophers call a “speech act”. This is a performative act; an action that is effected or performed through words. By uttering words that declare something, a reality can be created. The thing it is describing can be created.
Here are two examples. One, a currency note. The brute fact about it is that it is a piece of paper and ink. When it states “I promise to pay the bearer the sum of five hundred rupees”, it is transformed into an economic instrument. When the RBI governor, woken up close to midnight, declared that his earlier promise is now null and void it reverts to paper and ink.
[PVK’s note added as this speech was being prepared for PVK Blog ‘Book Mark’. This dramatic, and for most of its law-abiding citizens, traumatic experience was delivered, like a blow on the head, on 8/Nov/2026 by India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, who said it would wipe out black No economist of credibility has, to date, said that it was anything other than a disaster.]
Example two. When on January 26 1950 the Constituent Assembly declared “We the people of India solemnly resolved to constitute India into a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic” and promised “to secure for its citizens justice, liberty, equality and fraternity”, it gave rise to a new reality, one in which all of us live. It did not, at that moment, make any difference to the material reality of India. But it created, through language and the general agreement of the citizens of the country, a new entity, the Republic of India. The same act created another institutional fact, the Supreme Court.
3. My next two witnesses will perform the same function. Through their testimonies I hope to show that of all institutional realities created by man, the noblest, most refined and most beautiful is that of law. Let us summon M/s Michael Sandel and Lawrence Lessig.
Anthropologists tell us that with agriculture and the coming of civilization came inequality and hierarchy. The belief systems that rose often justified these inequities. Plato, for instance, came up with the golden lie in ‘The Republic’. This foundational work of political theory was composed between 380 and 370 BCE. It is suggested that there is a natural hierarchy, ordained by “god”. Citizens are of four types; those born with gold in them and those with silver. Those with gold are the highest class; they are the guardians. Below them is the group that has silver in them. Below them are the farmers and craftsmen who have iron and bronze in them. Slaves, the bulk of the population, are not mentioned.
India too had a similar myth. ‘The Rig Veda’ (believed to have been composed between 1500 and 1200 BCE) says that those who came from Prajapathi’s head were brahmans, priests, those from his arms were kshatriyas, those from his thighs were vaishyas and those from his feet sudhras. Those below the varna system were subhuman. In modern parlance they are the dalits.
Both myths had the same social and political function. They justified hierarchy and its heritable nature. Thus the status quo was maintained.
Agriculture and civilization were, therefore, marked by inequality and violence, both regular violence of those maintaining these systems and the sporadic violence of those protesting the arrangements.
It is an aberration then, that in places with entrenched inequalities, movements rose that sought to establish more egalitarian systems. The Enlightenment in Europe was the first of these movements. The principles of liberty and equality and fraternity were stirring but the effort to translate them into social reality was not smooth or easy. By the mid-20th century, though, after the epic violence of two world wars and some revolutions, the movement toward equality shaped the welfare state of the liberal democracies of Europe. They became, sometimes, models for other regions of the world. If the Enlightenment spoke about universal human rights but restricted it to white males, their gradual extension to other groups began a slow march that is still taking place. The last four decades have seen severe setbacks, particularly because many of the liberal democracies have turned into libertarian oligarchies or plutocracies or illiberal democracies. Here, in theory, all are equal. The practice is very different, though. As Thomas Piketty has shown, inequality has never been as acute as it is today. This is true of both the USA and of India.
[PVK’s note: Thomas Piketty is the young French economist who took the academic and the educated public all over the world by storm when he came out with his landmark work ‘Capital in the Twenty-first Century’ (2013). At a time when everyone thought that there was no viable alternative to capitalism, he dared bring back concepts like socialism and communism. I read a few pages when it first appeared at Modern Books, Trivandrum and laid it aside. Too heavy, I could see for my rather tender intellectual digestion. But his ‘A Brief History of Equality’, the English translation of which came out in 2022, sits on my shelf and, while I am yet to give it the cover to cover treatment. But it is a pleasure dipping into it, both for the clarity of his writing and for the message he has for us: progress may not be inevitable but “between 1780 and 2020 there has been definite developments toward greater equality of status, property, income, genders, and races within most regions and societies on the planet”. He mentions, I noted, “India and its castes” as “eternally inegalitraian” Lack of space does not permit me to go into more details.]
It is in this context that one has to consider the work of M/s Sandel and Lessig.
Michael J Sandel (1962 -) is professor of political philosophy at Harvard University. He examines questions of fairness and justice in his work. He uses hypothetical situations, thought experiments and real life incidents to explore both the theory and the practical side of ethics. Is torture by government agents permissible? If so, when and why? Should drug companies charge as much as they like for essential medicines? Is affirmative action good? Should the rich be able to purchase seats at elite universities for their kids? Should organs for transplants be made available through auction? Is price gouging healthy? Is it okay for a rich man to pay a poor one to stand in line in a queue so he can just walk in to a music concert? Should the US soldiers have killed the peasants they came across in a raid in Afghanistan in case they were Taliban or let them go? How many times more than an ordinary worker’s wages should the salary of a CEO be? Why should different people be paid different amounts for similar work?
All these questions involve both personal morality and public good. With razor sharp intelligence and a heart full of love and compassion Sandel tries to find answers to these questions. His answers go against the spirit of the free market; the device Americans trust to solve every problem. His books are detailed, Socratic attempts to find answers to these puzzles. The answers he finds are based on the notions of the common good, shaped by empathy, humility and good sense. There is something Gandhian about his vision, the Gandhi who was always searching for a better way for himself and the world not the Gandhi who left his spectacles on Indian currency notes and disappeared.
His fellow witness is Lawrence Lessig (1961-) Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. In a series of lectures at the University of Chicago in 2014-15, Prof. Lessig probed into the roots of corruption in America. (Remember, American exceptionalists do not even recognise corruption as a problem in the USA, but Lessig is a scholar, not a nationalist.)
Corruption in America, Lessig showed, sprang from Congress or parliament. The US Constitution was based on the equal weight principle, the idea that no inequality should be permitted in a democracy. The principle of equal opportunity is also basic to it. But these principles have been, systematically and over decades, eroded. Lessig demonstrates how. Here are two examples he gives.
In Texas in the South, a court order restricted those who could vote in a primary election to whites only. The general election was based on the rights of all adults to vote. For 95 years, this filter made sure that blacks could only vote for those first chosen by white males. This two stage process ensured that democracy was responsive only to white voters. A flawed system put in place by courts.
Lessig’s second example comes for “New America”, contemporary America. Here a two tier process is still in place. This time it is based on wealth. A small group of funders decides who should run for election. Lessig shows how, at one point, 0.05 percent of Americans decided who should run in the general election. In 2014 the US SC struck down the aggregate limits on campaign contributions. Now super PACS or political action committees collect money to fund candidates and campaigns to effect policy and to craft specific laws. Successive court rulings have created this situation. So this is not illegal.
The result is a two tier system. There is, first, a Green Primary; green because the greenback or the dollar will decide who will run. Then there is the general election in which everyone can vote. So a miniscule number of funders, who represent elite and business interests – drug companies, petroleum companies, venture capitalists or big tech companies – decide who should run. This is a far cry from what the US Constitution intended. Much of the institutional corruption in the US is legal.
This form of legal, institutional corruption has become a permanent feature of the US political system. This is not democracy as envisaged in the Constitution of the USA.
A footnote on Lessig. He did not just deliver these lectures, write a book and walk away. He ran, or tired to run, for the 2016 presidential race using a crowd-funded PAC. He had, originally, a single point agenda. Get elected, enact campaign reform laws removing the role of big funders and quit once the new laws began to bite. He raised some money, ran a campaign but could not even make it to the primaries. We must salute Lawrence Lessig, a professor who walked the talk.
Professors Sandel and Lessig show great intelligence and courage and imagination. They understand that the social institutions that we create shape not only our social world but also sculpt our natural world. Look at human generated CO2 and what it is doing to the globe. Both understand that the most influential institutions are greedy and profit-driven. They can imagine a better future; better for everyone and not just the super-rich and their hangers-on. They urge citizens to drive the change that will bring in new laws that will create a better world.
My next witness is Manoj Mitta. He is a law graduate who works as a reporter at the Supreme Court, often writing a sound first draft of history. I will lean on his latest work ‘Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India’(2023). Mitta takes a detailed and methodical look at how traditional institutions in India, built on discrimination and deeply entrenched ways of maintaining divisions while making them appear natural and normal, slowly groped their way towards formal recognition of equality. The impetus came sometimes from dalits or avarnas, sometimes from the British and, quite often, from reform-minded Brahmins, many of them lawyers. It was not an easy journey. Every measure of progress was hard fought. Often, it was a case of one step forward two steps backward and, in true Indian style, a few steps to the side. Mitta focuses on laws and law making, from the birth of the idea in some bright minds to the nitty gritty of getting the language on a proposal right. The moving of drafts through committees, the lobbying, the role of the press and pressure groups are all recorded. The process involved reading, research, dialogue and debate. Mitta shows how not just the general intent of legal bills and other instruments but even the wording of clauses and phrases could decide what real world fate lay ahead for people charged or not charged for various crimes and offences. He shows, with clarity and elegance, how man-made laws shape our society.
While the broad story is one of progress towards equality, at least in nominal terms, Mitta traces a second trajectory which is the bleak story of the killing of dalits in independent India. He records the connivance of the administration, police, judiciary and the media in keeping this horror show going. From the story of putting depressed class prisoners “in stocks” or chains, a discriminatory practice since upper caste prisoners were not subject to such humiliation, to the lynching of people suspected of the slaughter of specimens of Bos taurus or Bos indicus, or, for the ordinary man, ‘the holy cow’, Mitta’s monumental effort tells a gripping tale. It is as much a description of past events as a humane and scholarly plea for continuing the good fight.
My last witness is Dr Meera Nanda, historian and philosopher of science. She has been one of the most articulate and powerful voices of reason and advocates for justice in India for over a generation. Just as an undisturbed compass will only point to the north, Nanda seeks out the truth and is helped in this by a built-in, super-efficient detector of lies, falsehoods and bull shit.
I cite her most recent book ‘A Field Guide to Post-Truth India’ (2024). The fight for equality (and justice) is part of the fight for truth. Discovering truth is a tough job at the best of times. Now there is also the phenomenon of post-truth, a hydra-headed, shape-shifting monster that is designed to throw dust into everyone’s eyes.
Post-truth was born when postmodernism, an intellectual and elite movement, merged with the popular sphere. An intellectually anarchist strain joined an ultranationalist body when this happened. It produced the Big Lie in America, the fantasy that Trump had won the 2020 election. Not even some 60 or so court verdicts, still reliant on facts and evidence, have shaken that belief in the USA. In India a Deep Lie took root. It has many dimensions and has spawned many avatars. That deeply held beliefs are true is one of them. That there is no objective reality is another. That Hindus are in danger of becoming a minority in India, that all knowledge originated in India and that Indian Knowledge Systems, now being injected into the Indian educational system, are the best in the world are all part of the same fantasy-ridden landscape. Most alarming is her warning that the ruling dispensation will retain the shell of the painfully built up institutions of modernity, like the SC, while extracting and discarding its essence. All textbooks will soon be rewritten and a bizarre pre-modern mind-set will again take root. India will be both post-truth and post-secular.
Courts have tried to correct this in some cases. Nanda points out how Pathanjali’s claims about Covid and liver disease were dismissed as false and dangerous by the Indian judicial system.
Social reality is difficult to map because it is largely shaped by ideas which reside in people’s heads. Brain scans will not help us. But a Meera Nanda can hand-guide us through this dark landscape. Her profound knowledge of Indian thought, her sensitivity to current trends and a refusal to delude herself are among the attributes that help her do this.
The closing statement.
Let me cite an ex-trial lawyer named Frederick Schauer, currently a professor of law. In his subtly argued book ‘The Proof: Uses of Evidence in Law, Politics, and Everywhere Else’ (2022) he makes a distinction between truth and evidence. Trial lawyers have to win cases for their clients and cases depend on evidence. The evidence might be linked to the truth but that is not always the case. Compromises might be needed.
Having said that let us look at the case I have tried to build.
John Searle’s theory about direct realism or naturalism as it is often called tells us that we get good knowledge of the outside world through our senses. We construct a social world through language. The concept of justice is a biologically evolved instinct. Societies based on agriculture were hierarchic and unequal. Starting with the Enlightenment in Europe, people have started to try to reduce inequality. The chief mechanism for this was the enactment of laws. People built institutions to put in place systems that deliver justice. These are probably the most beautiful edifices man has built. The thinkers, philosophers and lawyers who perform this civilisationally vital job are some of the noblest, most intelligent and most magnanimous of citizens. (They were my witnesses.) They think of the welfare and happiness of all citizens, not just those who share their social identity. In India this work is represented by the Constitution. The integrity of this magnificent work has to be preserved. Into it has flowed the quality of mercy and egalitarianism and tolerance and reason that came from the constitutions of France and the USA but as mediated by Indian minds.
This work is incomplete and in danger of being destroyed by organised greed and by people who think they are exceptional but have no concern for the common good.
The picture I have painted of lawyers may not square with the public perception of them. There are hundreds of lawyer jokes and the attitude behind them is not one of reverence. When an India techie in the USA, who was jailed for dowry-related harassment, was asked to comment on his situation he said that he understood the real meaning of this Q and A: ‘What do you say about some lawyers up to their neck in sand?” “Not enough sand.”
In December 2021 the Madras High Court held that the right to laugh was part of the right to free speech. Justice G. R. Swaminathan quashed a case against a man for “waging war against the state” for posting a funny comment on FB. The justice seemed to be suggesting to the policemen who had filed a suo moto case against a CPI-ML leader that the honourable policemen should learn to laugh at honourable / dishonourable jokes. He even suggested that the right to laugh be made a fundamental right. This is not needed in the USA because the First Amendment protects cartoonists and comics unconditionally. [Note: I must thank my good friend, our contemporary V K N or Vadakke Koottala Narayanankutty Nair, E P Unny for pointing out both the fact of this laudable judgement and its continuing relevance. Please look at Unny’s daily ‘pocket’ in the Delhi edition of ‘The Indian Express’. It is the best pick-me-up one can want or imagine. I am addicted to it.]
We cannot all run to the Supreme Court when we have a grievance or face injustice or have a joke to crack. There are one point four billion of us. And there are not many Suresh Venkatachalams around.
I began this address stating that I was defending the State of India. Pardon my arrogance and foolishness in thinking I could do such a thing or that anyone would consider me as one fit for that job. However, I dare hope that I have pointed to the value of our Constitution, the thinking behind it, and indicated that to lose it, in spirit or substance, would be disastrous. That is the current state of our nation.
My original contention was that law is the queen of the humanities.
Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case. Thank you.
A book list
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years. London: Vintage, 1998.
Joseph, Josy. A Feast of Vultures: The Business of Democracy in India. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 5016.
Lessig, Lawrence. “America: Compromised: Studies in Institutional Corruption”. The Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Lectures, The University of Chicago, 16 October 2014 to 13 November 2014, Mandel Hall, the University of Chicago.
Mitta, Manoj. Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India. Chennai: Context, 2023.
Piketty, Thomas. A Brief History of Equality. Translated by Steven Rendell. Cambridge, MA: The Beknap Press of Harvard UP, 2022.
Plato. The Republic. Translated by W. H. D. Rouse. New York: Mentor, 1956.
Rig Veda. Translated by T. H. Griffith. London. 1896.
Sandel, Michael. J. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? London: Allen Lane, 2009.
Sandel, Michael. J. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. London: Allen Lane, 2012.
Sandel, Michael. J. The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good. London: Allen Lane, 2020.
Schauer, Frederick. The Proof: Uses of Evidence in Law, Politics, and Everything Else. Cambridge,MA: The Belknap Press of the Harvard UP, 2022.
Searle, John R. The Construction of Social Reality. London: Penguin, 1996.
Searle, John R. Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power. New York: Columbia UP, 2007.
Searle, John R. Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception. Oxford: OUP, 2015.
Suzman, James. Affluence without Abundance: What We can Learn from the World’s Most Successful Civilization. 2017. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
Note: Some additions have been made to the original lecture that the audience at Mar Gregorious so graciously received with warmth and a lot of appreciation.
My special thanks to Ms Poornima Thampi, member of the faculty and the enthusiastic convenor of ‘Wordsmith’s Lounge’ and the then principal of the college, Dr. Geevarghese.
P. Vijaya Kumar / PVK
profpvk@gmail.com
Nandri. Namaskaram. Thank you.
PVK 06/June/2026.
PVK's Book mark 