In 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.

That 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........

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