Emergenc Emergency
T
he Emergency Ru on the country by Indira Ga he EmergencyMinister Rule (1975-77) impos suspended fr on the country by the individual Congress Prim Ministerrights, Indira Gandhi only abriefl it alsonot cast ten suspended individual freedoms and demo autocratic possibility o rights, it also cast a tenacious shadow of Indian contemporary hi autocratic possibility on the discourse of Indian contemporary history. In the wake the student-led movem the student-led movement in Bihar G shaping under theand lead shaping under the leadership of the veter freedom fighter Jayapr freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan ma student activists and te student activists and teachers, both from Hindu Nationalist Ras Hin Sangh (RSS) and the Sa Party of India) Left ex Pa expulsion while non-a ex were suspended. Lat staying underground we president of the Jawa sta Students’ Union was pre 1975. While politicisi youth student figures Stu Emergency accelerat 19 pro-establishment lea yo institutions. The polit contributed to theEm int excecess of the Emer pro strong anti-Indira ins sta a key metaphor in Ind co whenever the events ex exercise of civil libert str ak wh ex
T
1
1
Emergency
T
he Emergency Rule (1975-77) imposed on the country by the Congress Prime Minister Indira Gandhi not only briefly suspended individual freedoms and democratic rights, it also cast a tenacious shadow of autocratic possibility on the discourse of Indian contemporary history. In the wake of the student-led movement in Bihar and Gujarat shaping under the leadership of the veteran freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan many student activists and teachers, both from the Hindu Nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the non-CPI (Communist Party of India) Left experienced arrest and expulsion while non-aligned student groups were suspended. Later in the year, after staying underground for several months, the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union was arrested in November 1975. While politicising campuses and bringing youth student figures to the forefront, the Emergency accelerated the erasure of the pro-establishment leanings of key educational institutions. The politics they sheltered contributed to the introspection on the excecess of the Emergency and articulated a strong anti-Indira stand. This episode became a key metaphor in Indian politics, convoked whenever the events of the day threaten the exercise of civil liberties.
1
Liberalisation
T
he gradual economic liberalization in India since the early 1990s has not only brought material changes and contrasts, it has also accelerated state disengagement from the Nehruvian and socialist forms of public-funded education. On the one hand, student organisations in universities, from Swadeshi to Marxists resented market-oriented reform attempts inside campuses, but also addressed its national consequences, for farmers’ livelihood, factory workers’ health, environment in mining areas, etc. In traditionally leftist universities such as Jawaharlal Nehru University or Jadavpur University, the loosening regional grip of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), partially induced by its faulty
industrial policy caused much acrimony. Against the backdrop of the privatization of education, other student organisations rejoice over the crumbling of public higher education in the country, considering it as an enabler in realising one’s dreams. However, the individualisation of aspirations that privatization brings among students, threatens the existence of campus as a public sphere, thereby making it more difficult for organised politics to access spaces that assert collective interests. With the privatization of education, university tends to align with the broader suspicion towards collective action, making such spaces less likely to develop a political character of their own.
2
t n
e
Dissent
“
Ye vijay tukra tukra gang ki vichardara ke kilaf shud rashtravad ke vijay ka, ye vijay pratik hai.” (This victory is against the break-break gang [reference to left student politics in Jawaharlal Nehru University], the victory of pure nationalism, this victory is its symbol). The statement, pronounced on election result day by Bharatiya Janata Party President and endorsed by millions, is a testimony of the current public status of select few universities, accused of standing against the national interests of India. There has been a shift in how the anti-establishment politicised student has been marked by the state, from being dismissed as an irresponsible lot to a ‘cartel’ causing national discord. Two causus-belli precipitated a tilt in public discourse: on January 17, 2016, Rohith Vemula, a student activist of a Dalit student organisation in Hyderabad Central University committed suicide after being suspended by its administration. Less than a month later three representatives of the students’ union of Jawaharlal Nehru University were arrested, accused of supporting a protest in favour of Kashmir’s self-determination. The protests it triggered, as well as the public discontent against the demonisation of freespeech reshaped the destiny of campus-based political cohorts for the foreseeable future.
3
RESERVATIONS RESERVATIONS
C
T T
he term reservations he term reservations points topoints a system to a system of positive of positive discrimination discrimination formulated formulated in pre-independent in pre-independent India, subsequently India, subsequently acquiringacquiring constitutional constitutional status. Itstatus. slowly It slowly brought into brought the universities into the universities small cohorts small of cohorts of first-generation first-generation learners learners from Dalit from andDalit tribal and tribal communities, communities, training Dalit training leaders, Dalit leaders, while while triggering triggering entrenched entrenched debates debates on how to onend how to end caste-divisions caste-divisions in campuses. in campuses. The politicisation The politicisation of caste of identities caste identities took a new took turn a new when turn in when in 1990, the 1990, application the application of Mandal of commission Mandal commission introduced introduced an additional an additional 27 per cent 27 per nationalcent nationallevel quota level forquota so-called for so-called Other Backward Other Backward Classes Classes (OBC), triggering (OBC), triggering furious reaction furious reaction from upper from castes, upperboth castes, thatboth yearthat andyear again and again in 2006, in when 2006, thewhen provision the provision was introduced was introduced in higherineducation. higher education. Ranging Ranging from students’ from students’ self-immolation self-immolation to legal action, to legalthe action, polarisation the polarisation it introduced it introduced cuts across cutstraditional across traditional partisan partisan divides. It divides. brought It into brought campus into campus spaces spaces anti-Mandal anti-Mandal political political agitations, agitations, as well as as well as fierce debates fierce debates on the extent on thetoextent whichto the which the reservations reservations for various for communities various communities were were actually actually enforcedenforced for student for admission student admission and and faculty recruitment. faculty recruitment. Equally acrimonious Equally acrimonious were were the debates the debates about the about sincerity the sincerity of the student of the student organisations’ organisations’ sudden pro-Mandal sudden pro-Mandal stands. stands. Driven by Driven a suspicion by a suspicion of their socialist, of their socialist, Marxist, Marxist, Dalit andDalit Hindu and nationalist Hindu nationalist leanings,leanings, much much accusation accusation was levied was onlevied them on by them independent by independent OBC groups OBCwho groups charged who charged them of opportunely them of opportunely jumping jumping on the bandwagon. on the bandwagon. Such debates Such debates are are also tiedalso to the tied drafting to the drafting and implementation and implementation of of additional additional provisions provisions for the deprived for the deprived sectionssections at university at university level. level.
44
a a c In c a e re lo re to
CASTE ASSERTIVENESS
A
midst its several metamorphoses over the centuries, the importance of caste hierarchy continues to imbue the social landscape, inside and outside campus spaces. Keeping endogamy and inequality of opportunities at its core, caste is less a traditional village-based ritual pollution and more a collective pride assertiveness crystallized by political social engineering. In universities, it structures the reality of campus life in at least four different ways. Like a gruelling obstacle race, the Dalit students endure hindrances that affect their academic results and their university socialisation, lowering their professional prospects. Such reality has pushed numerous Dalit groups to organise politically on the line of caste, emulating the relative success of Dalit parties in some parts of the country. From the left to the right, it pushed other student organisations to embody the Ambedkarite ideology, with more of less enthusiasm, in their political agenda. Using campus as a reformist intellectual platform, feminist, queer, Marxist, environmental and Hindu nationalist movements are urged to introspect on the caste-undertones of their regional groundings, while they in turn challenge Dalit-centric student groups for their secular, yet sectarian understanding of India.
5
GENDER
A
midst blatant underrepresentation of women in Indian politics, debates around gender issues have taken a central place in campus spaces. Epitomized by the student-led protest in reaction to the 2012 gang-rape of a paramedic trainee in Delhi, questions surrounding female protection in universities became more insistent. Hardhitting inquiries were raised on the prevention of sexual harassment and denunciation of atrocities such as honour killing, foeticide and other structural inequalities endured by women as outlined by NFHS reports. However, in the shadow of such a trope, a growing range of claims for gender-based assertiveness rooted in self-expression and identity building takes the front stage. Denouncing conservative gender roles, pamphlets challenge curfews for women in Banaras Hindu University, protest anti-Valentine Day statements in Kerala universities, reclaim access to public spaces in Allahabad University, and rebuke the social stigma of menstruation in Jawaharlal Nehru University. Around the country, the reclaiming of rights for the LGBT+ communities uses campus as a comparatively safer space where self-help groups take progressively assertive stand in campus spaces. The intersection between queer discrimination and other forms of prejudice based on caste and class has not yet made its foray in the pamphleteer literature.
6
HINDU NATIONALISM While aspirations for Ram rajya and Hindu rashtra in universities have diverse fortunes, Hindufirst desires and anti-Muslim sentiments visible on the national stage infuse university spaces widely. Created after independence to bypass the ban on the RSS in the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination, and to counter communist influence in universities, the ABVP indu nationalism is a structuring force in campus became effectively an all-India spaces. In a directive way, organisation in the mid-1970s, it is championed by the branches incarnating the main electoral force of Hindu nationalism in of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). In a semi-organised campuses since then. Attached to a ‘patriotic’ agenda, vitriolic fashion, it is permeated by against Pakistan and China, the various student-led outfits of the Sangh Parivar such as Akhil ABVP speaks the voice of the victimised majority, who suffered Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad displacement (Kashmiri pandits), (ABVP) and the Bajrang Dal. religious conversion, and insults to their Hindu faith. It considers Muslim a suspicious community pampered by ‘pseudo-seculars’ and ‘minority appeasement’ parties. Increasingly attracted by the electoral successes of the Bharatiya Janata Party, it ethnicises Muslims as a reified, bigot and untrustworthy community responsible for both India’s partition and the destruction of Hindu temples during the Mughal era. In its everyday interventions, ABVP often focuses on student welfare and seva (service) rather than on ideological contributions.
H
7
1
2
industrial policy caused much acrimony. Against the backdrop of the privatization of education, other student organisations rejoice over the crumbling of public higher education in the country, considering it as an enabler in realising one’s dreams. However, the individualisation of aspirations that privatization brings among students, threatens the existence of campus as a public sphere, thereby making it more difficult for organised politics to access spaces that assert collective interests. With the privatization of education, university tends to align with the broader suspicion towards collective action, making such spaces less likely to develop a political character of their own.
he gradual economic liberalization in India since the early 1990s has not only brought material changes and contrasts, it has also accelerated state disengagement from the Nehruvian and socialist forms of public-funded education. On the one hand, student organisations in universities, from Swadeshi to Marxists resented market-oriented reform attempts inside campuses, but also addressed its national consequences, for farmers’ livelihood, factory workers’ health, environment in mining areas, etc. In traditionally leftist universities such as Jawaharlal Nehru University or Jadavpur University, the loosening regional grip of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), partially induced by its faulty
T
T
he Emergency Rule (1975-77) imposed on the country by the Congress Prime Minister Indira Gandhi not only briefly suspended individual freedoms and democratic rights, it also cast a tenacious shadow of autocratic possibility on the discourse of Indian contemporary history. In the wake of the student-led movement in Bihar and Gujarat shaping under the leadership of the veteran freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan many student activists and teachers, both from the Hindu Nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the non-CPI (Communist Party of India) Left experienced arrest and expulsion while non-aligned student groups were suspended. Later in the year, after staying underground for several months, the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union was arrested in November 1975. While politicising campuses and bringing youth student figures to the forefront, the Emergency accelerated the erasure of the pro-establishment leanings of key educational institutions. The politics they sheltered contributed to the introspection on the excecess of the Emergency and articulated a strong anti-Indira stand. This episode became a key metaphor in Indian politics, convoked whenever the events of the day threaten the exercise of civil liberties.
Liberalisation
Emergency
3
Ye vijay tukra tukra gang ki vichardara ke kilaf shud rashtravad ke vijay ka, ye vijay pratik hai.” (This victory is against the break-break gang [reference to left student politics in Jawaharlal Nehru University], the victory of pure nationalism, this victory is its symbol). The statement, pronounced on election result day by Bharatiya Janata Party President and endorsed by millions, is a testimony of the current public status of select few universities, accused of standing against the national interests of India. There has been a shift in how the anti-establishment politicised student has been marked by the state, from being dismissed as an irresponsible lot to a ‘cartel’ causing national discord. Two causus-belli precipitated a tilt in public discourse: on January 17, 2016, Rohith Vemula, a student activist of a Dalit student organisation in Hyderabad Central University committed suicide after being suspended by its administration. Less than a month later three representatives of the students’ union of Jawaharlal Nehru University were arrested, accused of supporting a protest in favour of Kashmir’s self-determination. The protests it triggered, as well as the public discontent against the demonisation of freespeech reshaped the destiny of campus-based political cohorts for the foreseeable future.
“
Dissent
GENDER
A
CASTE ASSERTIVENESS
A
RESERVATIONS
T
midst blatant underrepresentation of women in Indian politics, debates around gender issues have taken a central place in campus spaces. Epitomized by the student-led protest in reaction to the 2012 gang-rape of a paramedic trainee in Delhi, questions surrounding female protection in universities became more insistent. Hardhitting inquiries were raised on the prevention of sexual harassment and denunciation of atrocities such as honour killing, foeticide and other structural inequalities endured by women as outlined by NFHS reports. However, in the shadow of such a trope, a growing range of claims for gender-based assertiveness rooted in self-expression and identity building takes the front stage. Denouncing conservative gender roles, pamphlets challenge curfews for women in Banaras Hindu University, protest anti-Valentine Day statements in Kerala universities, reclaim access to public spaces in Allahabad University, and rebuke the social stigma of menstruation in Jawaharlal Nehru University. Around the country, the reclaiming of rights for the LGBT+ communities uses campus as a comparatively safer space where self-help groups take progressively assertive stand in campus spaces. The intersection between queer discrimination and other forms of prejudice based on caste and class has not yet made its foray in the pamphleteer literature.
6
midst its several metamorphoses over the centuries, the importance of caste hierarchy continues to imbue the social landscape, inside and outside campus spaces. Keeping endogamy and inequality of opportunities at its core, caste is less a traditional village-based ritual pollution and more a collective pride assertiveness crystallized by political social engineering. In universities, it structures the reality of campus life in at least four different ways. Like a gruelling obstacle race, the Dalit students endure hindrances that affect their academic results and their university socialisation, lowering their professional prospects. Such reality has pushed numerous Dalit groups to organise politically on the line of caste, emulating the relative success of Dalit parties in some parts of the country. From the left to the right, it pushed other student organisations to embody the Ambedkarite ideology, with more of less enthusiasm, in their political agenda. Using campus as a reformist intellectual platform, feminist, queer, Marxist, environmental and Hindu nationalist movements are urged to introspect on the caste-undertones of their regional groundings, while they in turn challenge Dalit-centric student groups for their secular, yet sectarian understanding of India.
5
he term reservations points to a system of positive discrimination formulated in pre-independent India, subsequently acquiring constitutional status. It slowly brought into the universities small cohorts of first-generation learners from Dalit and tribal communities, training Dalit leaders, while triggering entrenched debates on how to end caste-divisions in campuses. The politicisation of caste identities took a new turn when in 1990, the application of Mandal commission introduced an additional 27 per cent nationallevel quota for so-called Other Backward Classes (OBC), triggering furious reaction from upper castes, both that year and again in 2006, when the provision was introduced in higher education. Ranging from students’ self-immolation to legal action, the polarisation it introduced cuts across traditional partisan divides. It brought into campus spaces anti-Mandal political agitations, as well as fierce debates on the extent to which the reservations for various communities were actually enforced for student admission and faculty recruitment. Equally acrimonious were the debates about the sincerity of the student organisations’ sudden pro-Mandal stands. Driven by a suspicion of their socialist, Marxist, Dalit and Hindu nationalist leanings, much accusation was levied on them by independent OBC groups who charged them of opportunely jumping on the bandwagon. Such debates are also tied to the drafting and implementation of additional provisions for the deprived sections at university level.
4
HINDU NATIONALISM
H
While aspirations for Ram rajya and Hindu rashtra in universities have diverse fortunes, Hindufirst desires and anti-Muslim sentiments visible on the national stage infuse university spaces widely. Created after independence to bypass the ban on the RSS in the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination, and to counter communist influence in universities, the ABVP indu nationalism is a structuring force in campus became effectively an all-India spaces. In a directive way, organisation in the mid-1970s, it is championed by the branches incarnating the main electoral force of Hindu nationalism in of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). In a semi-organised campuses since then. Attached to a ‘patriotic’ agenda, vitriolic fashion, it is permeated by against Pakistan and China, the various student-led outfits of the Sangh Parivar such as Akhil ABVP speaks the voice of the victimised majority, who suffered Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad displacement (Kashmiri pandits), (ABVP) and the Bajrang Dal. religious conversion, and insults to their Hindu faith. It considers Muslim a suspicious community pampered by ‘pseudo-seculars’ and ‘minority appeasement’ parties. Increasingly attracted by the electoral successes of the Bharatiya Janata Party, it ethnicises Muslims as a reified, bigot and untrustworthy community responsible for both India’s partition and the destruction of Hindu temples during the Mughal era. In its everyday interventions, ABVP often focuses on student welfare and seva (service) rather than on ideological contributions.
7
1
2
industrial policy caused much acrimony. Against the backdrop of the privatization of education, other student organisations rejoice over the crumbling of public higher education in the country, considering it as an enabler in realising one’s dreams. However, the individualisation of aspirations that privatization brings among students, threatens the existence of campus as a public sphere, thereby making it more difficult for organised politics to access spaces that assert collective interests. With the privatization of education, university tends to align with the broader suspicion towards collective action, making such spaces less likely to develop a political character of their own.
he gradual economic liberalization in India since the early 1990s has not only brought material changes and contrasts, it has also accelerated state disengagement from the Nehruvian and socialist forms of public-funded education. On the one hand, student organisations in universities, from Swadeshi to Marxists resented market-oriented reform attempts inside campuses, but also addressed its national consequences, for farmers’ livelihood, factory workers’ health, environment in mining areas, etc. In traditionally leftist universities such as Jawaharlal Nehru University or Jadavpur University, the loosening regional grip of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), partially induced by its faulty
T
T
he Emergency Rule (1975-77) imposed on the country by the Congress Prime Minister Indira Gandhi not only briefly suspended individual freedoms and democratic rights, it also cast a tenacious shadow of autocratic possibility on the discourse of Indian contemporary history. In the wake of the student-led movement in Bihar and Gujarat shaping under the leadership of the veteran freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan many student activists and teachers, both from the Hindu Nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the non-CPI (Communist Party of India) Left experienced arrest and expulsion while non-aligned student groups were suspended. Later in the year, after staying underground for several months, the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union was arrested in November 1975. While politicising campuses and bringing youth student figures to the forefront, the Emergency accelerated the erasure of the pro-establishment leanings of key educational institutions. The politics they sheltered contributed to the introspection on the excecess of the Emergency and articulated a strong anti-Indira stand. This episode became a key metaphor in Indian politics, convoked whenever the events of the day threaten the exercise of civil liberties.
Liberalisation
Emergency
3
Ye vijay tukra tukra gang ki vichardara ke kilaf shud rashtravad ke vijay ka, ye vijay pratik hai.” (This victory is against the break-break gang [reference to left student politics in Jawaharlal Nehru University], the victory of pure nationalism, this victory is its symbol). The statement, pronounced on election result day by Bharatiya Janata Party President and endorsed by millions, is a testimony of the current public status of select few universities, accused of standing against the national interests of India. There has been a shift in how the anti-establishment politicised student has been marked by the state, from being dismissed as an irresponsible lot to a ‘cartel’ causing national discord. Two causus-belli precipitated a tilt in public discourse: on January 17, 2016, Rohith Vemula, a student activist of a Dalit student organisation in Hyderabad Central University committed suicide after being suspended by its administration. Less than a month later three representatives of the students’ union of Jawaharlal Nehru University were arrested, accused of supporting a protest in favour of Kashmir’s self-determination. The protests it triggered, as well as the public discontent against the demonisation of freespeech reshaped the destiny of campus-based political cohorts for the foreseeable future.
“
Dissent
GENDER
A
CASTE ASSERTIVENESS
A
RESERVATIONS
T
midst blatant underrepresentation of women in Indian politics, debates around gender issues have taken a central place in campus spaces. Epitomized by the student-led protest in reaction to the 2012 gang-rape of a paramedic trainee in Delhi, questions surrounding female protection in universities became more insistent. Hardhitting inquiries were raised on the prevention of sexual harassment and denunciation of atrocities such as honour killing, foeticide and other structural inequalities endured by women as outlined by NFHS reports. However, in the shadow of such a trope, a growing range of claims for gender-based assertiveness rooted in self-expression and identity building takes the front stage. Denouncing conservative gender roles, pamphlets challenge curfews for women in Banaras Hindu University, protest anti-Valentine Day statements in Kerala universities, reclaim access to public spaces in Allahabad University, and rebuke the social stigma of menstruation in Jawaharlal Nehru University. Around the country, the reclaiming of rights for the LGBT+ communities uses campus as a comparatively safer space where self-help groups take progressively assertive stand in campus spaces. The intersection between queer discrimination and other forms of prejudice based on caste and class has not yet made its foray in the pamphleteer literature.
6
midst its several metamorphoses over the centuries, the importance of caste hierarchy continues to imbue the social landscape, inside and outside campus spaces. Keeping endogamy and inequality of opportunities at its core, caste is less a traditional village-based ritual pollution and more a collective pride assertiveness crystallized by political social engineering. In universities, it structures the reality of campus life in at least four different ways. Like a gruelling obstacle race, the Dalit students endure hindrances that affect their academic results and their university socialisation, lowering their professional prospects. Such reality has pushed numerous Dalit groups to organise politically on the line of caste, emulating the relative success of Dalit parties in some parts of the country. From the left to the right, it pushed other student organisations to embody the Ambedkarite ideology, with more of less enthusiasm, in their political agenda. Using campus as a reformist intellectual platform, feminist, queer, Marxist, environmental and Hindu nationalist movements are urged to introspect on the caste-undertones of their regional groundings, while they in turn challenge Dalit-centric student groups for their secular, yet sectarian understanding of India.
5
he term reservations points to a system of positive discrimination formulated in pre-independent India, subsequently acquiring constitutional status. It slowly brought into the universities small cohorts of first-generation learners from Dalit and tribal communities, training Dalit leaders, while triggering entrenched debates on how to end caste-divisions in campuses. The politicisation of caste identities took a new turn when in 1990, the application of Mandal commission introduced an additional 27 per cent nationallevel quota for so-called Other Backward Classes (OBC), triggering furious reaction from upper castes, both that year and again in 2006, when the provision was introduced in higher education. Ranging from students’ self-immolation to legal action, the polarisation it introduced cuts across traditional partisan divides. It brought into campus spaces anti-Mandal political agitations, as well as fierce debates on the extent to which the reservations for various communities were actually enforced for student admission and faculty recruitment. Equally acrimonious were the debates about the sincerity of the student organisations’ sudden pro-Mandal stands. Driven by a suspicion of their socialist, Marxist, Dalit and Hindu nationalist leanings, much accusation was levied on them by independent OBC groups who charged them of opportunely jumping on the bandwagon. Such debates are also tied to the drafting and implementation of additional provisions for the deprived sections at university level.
4
HINDU NATIONALISM
H
While aspirations for Ram rajya and Hindu rashtra in universities have diverse fortunes, Hindufirst desires and anti-Muslim sentiments visible on the national stage infuse university spaces widely. Created after independence to bypass the ban on the RSS in the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination, and to counter communist influence in universities, the ABVP indu nationalism is a structuring force in campus became effectively an all-India spaces. In a directive way, organisation in the mid-1970s, it is championed by the branches incarnating the main electoral force of Hindu nationalism in of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). In a semi-organised campuses since then. Attached to a ‘patriotic’ agenda, vitriolic fashion, it is permeated by against Pakistan and China, the various student-led outfits of the Sangh Parivar such as Akhil ABVP speaks the voice of the victimised majority, who suffered Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad displacement (Kashmiri pandits), (ABVP) and the Bajrang Dal. religious conversion, and insults to their Hindu faith. It considers Muslim a suspicious community pampered by ‘pseudo-seculars’ and ‘minority appeasement’ parties. Increasingly attracted by the electoral successes of the Bharatiya Janata Party, it ethnicises Muslims as a reified, bigot and untrustworthy community responsible for both India’s partition and the destruction of Hindu temples during the Mughal era. In its everyday interventions, ABVP often focuses on student welfare and seva (service) rather than on ideological contributions.
7
4
he term reservations points to a system of positive discrimination formulated in pre-independent India, subsequently acquiring constitutional status. It slowly brought into the universities small cohorts of first-generation learners from Dalit and tribal communities, training Dalit leaders, while triggering entrenched debates on how to end caste-divisions in campuses. The politicisation of caste identities took a new turn when in 1990, the application of Mandal commission introduced an additional 27 per cent nationallevel quota for so-called Other Backward Classes (OBC), triggering furious reaction from upper castes, both that year and again in 2006, when the provision was introduced in higher education. Ranging from students’ self-immolation to legal action, the polarisation it introduced cuts across traditional partisan divides. It brought into campus spaces anti-Mandal political agitations, as well as fierce debates on the extent to which the reservations for various communities were actually enforced for student admission and faculty recruitment. Equally acrimonious were the debates about the sincerity of the student organisations’ sudden pro-Mandal stands. Driven by a suspicion of their socialist, Marxist, Dalit and Hindu nationalist leanings, much accusation was levied on them by independent OBC groups who charged them of opportunely jumping on the bandwagon. Such debates are also tied to the drafting and implementation of additional provisions for the deprived sections at university level.
T
RESERVATIONS
5
A
midst its several metamorphoses over the centuries, the importance of caste hierarchy continues to imbue the social landscape, inside and outside campus spaces. Keeping endogamy and inequality of opportunities at its core, caste is less a traditional village-based ritual pollution and more a collective pride assertiveness crystallized by political social engineering. In universities, it structures the reality of campus life in at least four different ways. Like a gruelling obstacle race, the Dalit students endure hindrances that affect their academic results and their university socialisation, lowering their professional prospects. Such reality has pushed numerous Dalit groups to organise politically on the line of caste, emulating the relative success of Dalit parties in some parts of the country. From the left to the right, it pushed other student organisations to embody the Ambedkarite ideology, with more of less enthusiasm, in their political agenda. Using campus as a reformist intellectual platform, feminist, queer, Marxist, environmental and Hindu nationalist movements are urged to introspect on the caste-undertones of their regional groundings, while they in turn challenge Dalit-centric student groups for their secular, yet sectarian understanding of India.
CASTE ASSERTIVENESS
6
midst blatant underrepresentation of women in Indian politics, debates around gender issues have taken a central place in campus spaces. Epitomized by the student-led protest in reaction to the 2012 gang-rape of a paramedic trainee in Delhi, questions surrounding female protection in universities became more insistent. Hardhitting inquiries were raised on the prevention of sexual harassment and denunciation of atrocities such as honour killing, foeticide and other structural inequalities endured by women as outlined by NFHS reports. However, in the shadow of such a trope, a growing range of claims for gender-based assertiveness rooted in self-expression and identity building takes the front stage. Denouncing conservative gender roles, pamphlets challenge curfews for women in Banaras Hindu University, protest anti-Valentine Day statements in Kerala universities, reclaim access to public spaces in Allahabad University, and rebuke the social stigma of menstruation in Jawaharlal Nehru University. Around the country, the reclaiming of rights for the LGBT+ communities uses campus as a comparatively safer space where self-help groups take progressively assertive stand in campus spaces. The intersection between queer discrimination and other forms of prejudice based on caste and class has not yet made its foray in the pamphleteer literature.
A
GENDER
H
7
While aspirations for Ram rajya and Hindu rashtra in universities have diverse fortunes, Hindufirst desires and anti-Muslim sentiments visible on the national stage infuse university spaces widely. Created after independence to bypass the ban on the RSS in the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination, and to counter communist influence in universities, the ABVP indu nationalism is a structuring force in campus became effectively an all-India spaces. In a directive way, organisation in the mid-1970s, it is championed by the branches incarnating the main electoral force of Hindu nationalism in of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). In a semi-organised campuses since then. Attached to a ‘patriotic’ agenda, vitriolic fashion, it is permeated by against Pakistan and China, the various student-led outfits of the Sangh Parivar such as Akhil ABVP speaks the voice of the victimised majority, who suffered Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad displacement (Kashmiri pandits), (ABVP) and the Bajrang Dal. religious conversion, and insults to their Hindu faith. It considers Muslim a suspicious community pampered by ‘pseudo-seculars’ and ‘minority appeasement’ parties. Increasingly attracted by the electoral successes of the Bharatiya Janata Party, it ethnicises Muslims as a reified, bigot and untrustworthy community responsible for both India’s partition and the destruction of Hindu temples during the Mughal era. In its everyday interventions, ABVP often focuses on student welfare and seva (service) rather than on ideological contributions.
HINDU NATIONALISM
Emergency
T
Liberalisation
“
Dissent
he gradual economic liberalization in India since the early 1990s has not only brought material changes and contrasts, it has also accelerated state disengagement from the Nehruvian and socialist forms of public-funded education. On the one hand, student organisations in universities, from Swadeshi to Marxists resented market-oriented reform attempts inside campuses, but also addressed its national consequences, for farmers’ livelihood, factory workers’ health, environment in mining areas, etc. In traditionally leftist universities such as Jawaharlal Nehru University or Jadavpur University, the loosening regional grip of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), partially induced by its faulty
industrial policy caused much acrimony. Against the backdrop of the privatization of education, other student organisations rejoice over the crumbling of public higher education in the country, considering it as an enabler in realising one’s dreams. However, the individualisation of aspirations that privatization brings among students, threatens the existence of campus as a public sphere, thereby making it more difficult for organised politics to access spaces that assert collective interests. With the privatization of education, university tends to align with the broader suspicion towards collective action, making such spaces less likely to develop a political character of their own.
2
3
Ye vijay tukra tukra gang ki vichardara ke kilaf shud rashtravad ke vijay ka, ye vijay pratik hai.” (This victory is against the break-break gang [reference to left student politics in Jawaharlal Nehru University], the victory of pure nationalism, this victory is its symbol). The statement, pronounced on election result day by Bharatiya Janata Party President and endorsed by millions, is a testimony of the current public status of select few universities, accused of standing against the national interests of India. There has been a shift in how the anti-establishment politicised student has been marked by the state, from being dismissed as an irresponsible lot to a ‘cartel’ causing national discord. Two causus-belli precipitated a tilt in public discourse: on January 17, 2016, Rohith Vemula, a student activist of a Dalit student organisation in Hyderabad Central University committed suicide after being suspended by its administration. Less than a month later three representatives of the students’ union of Jawaharlal Nehru University were arrested, accused of supporting a protest in favour of Kashmir’s self-determination. The protests it triggered, as well as the public discontent against the demonisation of freespeech reshaped the destiny of campus-based political cohorts for the foreseeable future.
T he Emergency Rule (1975-77) imposed on the country by the Congress Prime Minister Indira Gandhi not only briefly suspended individual freedoms and democratic rights, it also cast a tenacious shadow of autocratic possibility on the discourse of Indian contemporary history. In the wake of the student-led movement in Bihar and Gujarat shaping under the leadership of the veteran freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan many student activists and teachers, both from the Hindu Nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the non-CPI (Communist Party of India) Left experienced arrest and expulsion while non-aligned student groups were suspended. Later in the year, after staying underground for several months, the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union was arrested in November 1975. While politicising campuses and bringing youth student figures to the forefront, the Emergency accelerated the erasure of the pro-establishment leanings of key educational institutions. The politics they sheltered contributed to the introspection on the excecess of the Emergency and articulated a strong anti-Indira stand. This episode became a key metaphor in Indian politics, convoked whenever the events of the day threaten the exercise of civil liberties.
1
4
he term reservations points to a system of positive discrimination formulated in pre-independent India, subsequently acquiring constitutional status. It slowly brought into the universities small cohorts of first-generation learners from Dalit and tribal communities, training Dalit leaders, while triggering entrenched debates on how to end caste-divisions in campuses. The politicisation of caste identities took a new turn when in 1990, the application of Mandal commission introduced an additional 27 per cent nationallevel quota for so-called Other Backward Classes (OBC), triggering furious reaction from upper castes, both that year and again in 2006, when the provision was introduced in higher education. Ranging from students’ self-immolation to legal action, the polarisation it introduced cuts across traditional partisan divides. It brought into campus spaces anti-Mandal political agitations, as well as fierce debates on the extent to which the reservations for various communities were actually enforced for student admission and faculty recruitment. Equally acrimonious were the debates about the sincerity of the student organisations’ sudden pro-Mandal stands. Driven by a suspicion of their socialist, Marxist, Dalit and Hindu nationalist leanings, much accusation was levied on them by independent OBC groups who charged them of opportunely jumping on the bandwagon. Such debates are also tied to the drafting and implementation of additional provisions for the deprived sections at university level.
T
RESERVATIONS
5
A
midst its several metamorphoses over the centuries, the importance of caste hierarchy continues to imbue the social landscape, inside and outside campus spaces. Keeping endogamy and inequality of opportunities at its core, caste is less a traditional village-based ritual pollution and more a collective pride assertiveness crystallized by political social engineering. In universities, it structures the reality of campus life in at least four different ways. Like a gruelling obstacle race, the Dalit students endure hindrances that affect their academic results and their university socialisation, lowering their professional prospects. Such reality has pushed numerous Dalit groups to organise politically on the line of caste, emulating the relative success of Dalit parties in some parts of the country. From the left to the right, it pushed other student organisations to embody the Ambedkarite ideology, with more of less enthusiasm, in their political agenda. Using campus as a reformist intellectual platform, feminist, queer, Marxist, environmental and Hindu nationalist movements are urged to introspect on the caste-undertones of their regional groundings, while they in turn challenge Dalit-centric student groups for their secular, yet sectarian understanding of India.
CASTE ASSERTIVENESS
6
midst blatant underrepresentation of women in Indian politics, debates around gender issues have taken a central place in campus spaces. Epitomized by the student-led protest in reaction to the 2012 gang-rape of a paramedic trainee in Delhi, questions surrounding female protection in universities became more insistent. Hardhitting inquiries were raised on the prevention of sexual harassment and denunciation of atrocities such as honour killing, foeticide and other structural inequalities endured by women as outlined by NFHS reports. However, in the shadow of such a trope, a growing range of claims for gender-based assertiveness rooted in self-expression and identity building takes the front stage. Denouncing conservative gender roles, pamphlets challenge curfews for women in Banaras Hindu University, protest anti-Valentine Day statements in Kerala universities, reclaim access to public spaces in Allahabad University, and rebuke the social stigma of menstruation in Jawaharlal Nehru University. Around the country, the reclaiming of rights for the LGBT+ communities uses campus as a comparatively safer space where self-help groups take progressively assertive stand in campus spaces. The intersection between queer discrimination and other forms of prejudice based on caste and class has not yet made its foray in the pamphleteer literature.
A
GENDER
H
7
While aspirations for Ram rajya and Hindu rashtra in universities have diverse fortunes, Hindufirst desires and anti-Muslim sentiments visible on the national stage infuse university spaces widely. Created after independence to bypass the ban on the RSS in the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination, and to counter communist influence in universities, the ABVP indu nationalism is a structuring force in campus became effectively an all-India spaces. In a directive way, organisation in the mid-1970s, it is championed by the branches incarnating the main electoral force of Hindu nationalism in of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). In a semi-organised campuses since then. Attached to a ‘patriotic’ agenda, vitriolic fashion, it is permeated by against Pakistan and China, the various student-led outfits of the Sangh Parivar such as Akhil ABVP speaks the voice of the victimised majority, who suffered Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad displacement (Kashmiri pandits), (ABVP) and the Bajrang Dal. religious conversion, and insults to their Hindu faith. It considers Muslim a suspicious community pampered by ‘pseudo-seculars’ and ‘minority appeasement’ parties. Increasingly attracted by the electoral successes of the Bharatiya Janata Party, it ethnicises Muslims as a reified, bigot and untrustworthy community responsible for both India’s partition and the destruction of Hindu temples during the Mughal era. In its everyday interventions, ABVP often focuses on student welfare and seva (service) rather than on ideological contributions.
HINDU NATIONALISM
Emergency
T
Liberalisation
“
Dissent
he gradual economic liberalization in India since the early 1990s has not only brought material changes and contrasts, it has also accelerated state disengagement from the Nehruvian and socialist forms of public-funded education. On the one hand, student organisations in universities, from Swadeshi to Marxists resented market-oriented reform attempts inside campuses, but also addressed its national consequences, for farmers’ livelihood, factory workers’ health, environment in mining areas, etc. In traditionally leftist universities such as Jawaharlal Nehru University or Jadavpur University, the loosening regional grip of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), partially induced by its faulty
industrial policy caused much acrimony. Against the backdrop of the privatization of education, other student organisations rejoice over the crumbling of public higher education in the country, considering it as an enabler in realising one’s dreams. However, the individualisation of aspirations that privatization brings among students, threatens the existence of campus as a public sphere, thereby making it more difficult for organised politics to access spaces that assert collective interests. With the privatization of education, university tends to align with the broader suspicion towards collective action, making such spaces less likely to develop a political character of their own.
2
3
Ye vijay tukra tukra gang ki vichardara ke kilaf shud rashtravad ke vijay ka, ye vijay pratik hai.” (This victory is against the break-break gang [reference to left student politics in Jawaharlal Nehru University], the victory of pure nationalism, this victory is its symbol). The statement, pronounced on election result day by Bharatiya Janata Party President and endorsed by millions, is a testimony of the current public status of select few universities, accused of standing against the national interests of India. There has been a shift in how the anti-establishment politicised student has been marked by the state, from being dismissed as an irresponsible lot to a ‘cartel’ causing national discord. Two causus-belli precipitated a tilt in public discourse: on January 17, 2016, Rohith Vemula, a student activist of a Dalit student organisation in Hyderabad Central University committed suicide after being suspended by its administration. Less than a month later three representatives of the students’ union of Jawaharlal Nehru University were arrested, accused of supporting a protest in favour of Kashmir’s self-determination. The protests it triggered, as well as the public discontent against the demonisation of freespeech reshaped the destiny of campus-based political cohorts for the foreseeable future.
T he Emergency Rule (1975-77) imposed on the country by the Congress Prime Minister Indira Gandhi not only briefly suspended individual freedoms and democratic rights, it also cast a tenacious shadow of autocratic possibility on the discourse of Indian contemporary history. In the wake of the student-led movement in Bihar and Gujarat shaping under the leadership of the veteran freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan many student activists and teachers, both from the Hindu Nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the non-CPI (Communist Party of India) Left experienced arrest and expulsion while non-aligned student groups were suspended. Later in the year, after staying underground for several months, the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union was arrested in November 1975. While politicising campuses and bringing youth student figures to the forefront, the Emergency accelerated the erasure of the pro-establishment leanings of key educational institutions. The politics they sheltered contributed to the introspection on the excecess of the Emergency and articulated a strong anti-Indira stand. This episode became a key metaphor in Indian politics, convoked whenever the events of the day threaten the exercise of civil liberties.
1
1
2
industrial policy caused much acrimony. Against the backdrop of the privatization of education, other student organisations rejoice over the crumbling of public higher education in the country, considering it as an enabler in realising one’s dreams. However, the individualisation of aspirations that privatization brings among students, threatens the existence of campus as a public sphere, thereby making it more difficult for organised politics to access spaces that assert collective interests. With the privatization of education, university tends to align with the broader suspicion towards collective action, making such spaces less likely to develop a political character of their own.
he gradual economic liberalization in India since the early 1990s has not only brought material changes and contrasts, it has also accelerated state disengagement from the Nehruvian and socialist forms of public-funded education. On the one hand, student organisations in universities, from Swadeshi to Marxists resented market-oriented reform attempts inside campuses, but also addressed its national consequences, for farmers’ livelihood, factory workers’ health, environment in mining areas, etc. In traditionally leftist universities such as Jawaharlal Nehru University or Jadavpur University, the loosening regional grip of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), partially induced by its faulty
T
T
he Emergency Rule (1975-77) imposed on the country by the Congress Prime Minister Indira Gandhi not only briefly suspended individual freedoms and democratic rights, it also cast a tenacious shadow of autocratic possibility on the discourse of Indian contemporary history. In the wake of the student-led movement in Bihar and Gujarat shaping under the leadership of the veteran freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan many student activists and teachers, both from the Hindu Nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the non-CPI (Communist Party of India) Left experienced arrest and expulsion while non-aligned student groups were suspended. Later in the year, after staying underground for several months, the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union was arrested in November 1975. While politicising campuses and bringing youth student figures to the forefront, the Emergency accelerated the erasure of the pro-establishment leanings of key educational institutions. The politics they sheltered contributed to the introspection on the excecess of the Emergency and articulated a strong anti-Indira stand. This episode became a key metaphor in Indian politics, convoked whenever the events of the day threaten the exercise of civil liberties.
Liberalisation
Emergency
3
Ye vijay tukra tukra gang ki vichardara ke kilaf shud rashtravad ke vijay ka, ye vijay pratik hai.” (This victory is against the break-break gang [reference to left student politics in Jawaharlal Nehru University], the victory of pure nationalism, this victory is its symbol). The statement, pronounced on election result day by Bharatiya Janata Party President and endorsed by millions, is a testimony of the current public status of select few universities, accused of standing against the national interests of India. There has been a shift in how the anti-establishment politicised student has been marked by the state, from being dismissed as an irresponsible lot to a ‘cartel’ causing national discord. Two causus-belli precipitated a tilt in public discourse: on January 17, 2016, Rohith Vemula, a student activist of a Dalit student organisation in Hyderabad Central University committed suicide after being suspended by its administration. Less than a month later three representatives of the students’ union of Jawaharlal Nehru University were arrested, accused of supporting a protest in favour of Kashmir’s self-determination. The protests it triggered, as well as the public discontent against the demonisation of freespeech reshaped the destiny of campus-based political cohorts for the foreseeable future.
“
Dissent
GENDER
A
CASTE ASSERTIVENESS
A
RESERVATIONS
T
midst blatant underrepresentation of women in Indian politics, debates around gender issues have taken a central place in campus spaces. Epitomized by the student-led protest in reaction to the 2012 gang-rape of a paramedic trainee in Delhi, questions surrounding female protection in universities became more insistent. Hardhitting inquiries were raised on the prevention of sexual harassment and denunciation of atrocities such as honour killing, foeticide and other structural inequalities endured by women as outlined by NFHS reports. However, in the shadow of such a trope, a growing range of claims for gender-based assertiveness rooted in self-expression and identity building takes the front stage. Denouncing conservative gender roles, pamphlets challenge curfews for women in Banaras Hindu University, protest anti-Valentine Day statements in Kerala universities, reclaim access to public spaces in Allahabad University, and rebuke the social stigma of menstruation in Jawaharlal Nehru University. Around the country, the reclaiming of rights for the LGBT+ communities uses campus as a comparatively safer space where self-help groups take progressively assertive stand in campus spaces. The intersection between queer discrimination and other forms of prejudice based on caste and class has not yet made its foray in the pamphleteer literature.
6
midst its several metamorphoses over the centuries, the importance of caste hierarchy continues to imbue the social landscape, inside and outside campus spaces. Keeping endogamy and inequality of opportunities at its core, caste is less a traditional village-based ritual pollution and more a collective pride assertiveness crystallized by political social engineering. In universities, it structures the reality of campus life in at least four different ways. Like a gruelling obstacle race, the Dalit students endure hindrances that affect their academic results and their university socialisation, lowering their professional prospects. Such reality has pushed numerous Dalit groups to organise politically on the line of caste, emulating the relative success of Dalit parties in some parts of the country. From the left to the right, it pushed other student organisations to embody the Ambedkarite ideology, with more of less enthusiasm, in their political agenda. Using campus as a reformist intellectual platform, feminist, queer, Marxist, environmental and Hindu nationalist movements are urged to introspect on the caste-undertones of their regional groundings, while they in turn challenge Dalit-centric student groups for their secular, yet sectarian understanding of India.
5
he term reservations points to a system of positive discrimination formulated in pre-independent India, subsequently acquiring constitutional status. It slowly brought into the universities small cohorts of first-generation learners from Dalit and tribal communities, training Dalit leaders, while triggering entrenched debates on how to end caste-divisions in campuses. The politicisation of caste identities took a new turn when in 1990, the application of Mandal commission introduced an additional 27 per cent nationallevel quota for so-called Other Backward Classes (OBC), triggering furious reaction from upper castes, both that year and again in 2006, when the provision was introduced in higher education. Ranging from students’ self-immolation to legal action, the polarisation it introduced cuts across traditional partisan divides. It brought into campus spaces anti-Mandal political agitations, as well as fierce debates on the extent to which the reservations for various communities were actually enforced for student admission and faculty recruitment. Equally acrimonious were the debates about the sincerity of the student organisations’ sudden pro-Mandal stands. Driven by a suspicion of their socialist, Marxist, Dalit and Hindu nationalist leanings, much accusation was levied on them by independent OBC groups who charged them of opportunely jumping on the bandwagon. Such debates are also tied to the drafting and implementation of additional provisions for the deprived sections at university level.
4
HINDU NATIONALISM
H
While aspirations for Ram rajya and Hindu rashtra in universities have diverse fortunes, Hindufirst desires and anti-Muslim sentiments visible on the national stage infuse university spaces widely. Created after independence to bypass the ban on the RSS in the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination, and to counter communist influence in universities, the ABVP indu nationalism is a structuring force in campus became effectively an all-India spaces. In a directive way, organisation in the mid-1970s, it is championed by the branches incarnating the main electoral force of Hindu nationalism in of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). In a semi-organised campuses since then. Attached to a ‘patriotic’ agenda, vitriolic fashion, it is permeated by against Pakistan and China, the various student-led outfits of the Sangh Parivar such as Akhil ABVP speaks the voice of the victimised majority, who suffered Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad displacement (Kashmiri pandits), (ABVP) and the Bajrang Dal. religious conversion, and insults to their Hindu faith. It considers Muslim a suspicious community pampered by ‘pseudo-seculars’ and ‘minority appeasement’ parties. Increasingly attracted by the electoral successes of the Bharatiya Janata Party, it ethnicises Muslims as a reified, bigot and untrustworthy community responsible for both India’s partition and the destruction of Hindu temples during the Mughal era. In its everyday interventions, ABVP often focuses on student welfare and seva (service) rather than on ideological contributions.
7
“The world is changing so fast that we cannot waste time.” The hand note is scribbled in haste on the back of a 15 paise postcard. It leans at the juncture of the 1989-1990 turmoil, engrossing the stack of hopes and anguishes dwelling in the university dormitories of the country. Peering into such repository of youthfulness, Memories of Change asks whether the thorny pamphlet, cyclostyled from a generation of students to the other is effectively a tool to envision the faulty lines of present times. Through socialising energetic calls for action on political ink, the object is inseparable from the everyday of student activism. While the pamphlet’s materiality in no longer the vanguard spur of political campaigning, its grammar has in part dematerialised, permeating social media, mass TV media and Manichean political speeches. While democracies are haunted by moral calls for harmony and oneness, constantly spearheaded by their elected representatives, is the lowly pamphleteer bitterness, based on competitiveargumentation, slanders, sincerity and veritas-claiming, the effective way to reimagine social rifts in the pursue social justice? Carefully xeroxing vivid fragments of Indian history over the past half-century, Memories of Change showcases the pamphleteer memories of educated youth by illuminating the transformative experience of the university hostel room, dragging us into the redbricked boudoir, both public and intimate, of citizen’s fabric. The main installations, reconstructing pamphlet wars stained with dinnertime dal, scrapable arguments, anxious aspirations and online vituperations do not claim facts over myths, nor truths over lies like in a well-pitched parchas. Instead, MoC tenderly points at those public campuses in which, through agonistic friendships, a public sphere is typed-out, editing selves and besting the circulation of cross-fertilising ideas. The plea of Memories of Change is thus not indictment but rather acknowledgement, praising a space that can both shift consensus clichés and reproduce them, while pasting together in many universities the chipped edges of combative ideologies. Through dotting textual agonism, oral testimonies and visual emotions, the exhibition celebrates the educational microcosm that incubates political imagination day-by-day. Grounded in the comparatively more egalitarian and less time-constrained ecology…yet tied to the abyssal layering of India’s social fabric, student politics offers a potentially formidable viewpoint through which cohorts’ worldviews
“The world is changing so fast that we cannot waste time.” The hand note is scribbled in haste on the back of a 15 paise postcard. It leans at the juncture of the 1989-1990 turmoil, engrossing the stack of hopes and anguishes dwelling in the university dormitories of the country. Peering into such repository of youthfulness, Memories of Change asks whether the thorny pamphlet, cyclostyled from a generation of students to the other is effectively a tool to envision the faulty lines of present times. Through socialising energetic calls for action on political ink, the object is inseparable from the everyday of student activism. While the pamphlet’s materiality in no longer the vanguard spur of political campaigning, its grammar has in part dematerialised, permeating social media, mass TV media and Manichean political speeches. While democracies are haunted by moral calls for harmony and oneness, constantly spearheaded by their elected representatives, is the lowly pamphleteer bitterness, based on competitiveargumentation, slanders, sincerity and veritas-claiming, the effective way to reimagine social rifts in the pursue social justice? Carefully xeroxing vivid fragments of Indian history over the past half-century, Memories of Change showcases the pamphleteer memories of educated youth by illuminating the transformative experience of the university hostel room, dragging us into the redbricked boudoir, both public and intimate, of citizen’s fabric. The main installations, reconstructing pamphlet wars stained with dinnertime dal, scrapable arguments, anxious aspirations and online vituperations do not claim facts over myths, nor truths over lies like in a well-pitched parchas. Instead, MoC tenderly points at those public campuses in which, through agonistic friendships, a public sphere is typed-out, editing selves and besting the circulation of cross-fertilising ideas. The plea of Memories of Change is thus not indictment but rather acknowledgement, praising a space that can both shift consensus clichés and reproduce them, while pasting together in many universities the chipped edges of combative ideologies. Through dotting textual agonism, oral testimonies and visual emotions, the exhibition celebrates the educational microcosm that incubates political imagination day-by-day. Grounded in the comparatively more egalitarian and less time-constrained ecology…yet tied to the abyssal layering of India’s social fabric, student politics offers a potentially formidable viewpoint through which cohorts’ worldviews
Archival in spirit, the exhibition traces a journey through seven touchstones of Indian polity. It plunges us into the autocratic experiment of the Emergency (1975-77), witnesses the consolidation of caste and unpacks the emergence of gender empowerment aspirations. It also unravels a set of simmering debates around the unrolling affirmative action provisions, the deepening of economic liberalisation, the mainstreaming of Hindu nationalism and the criminalisation of dissent. Collected over several years in campuses such as Jawaharlal Nehru University, Banaras Hindu University, Hyderabad Central University, Presidency University or the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, the pamphleteer material of the Pamphlet Repository for Changing Activism (PaRChA) is curated to interrogate the relevance of campuses in going beyond their tradition of training grounds for inceptive politicians. Walking the fragile rope of political socialisation and destabilised by the three-cornered winds of muscle politics, government stigmatization, and so-called a-politicization through privatization, political pamphlets in university spaces remain a formidable testimony of an intermediary political platform, somewhere at the intersection between elites and subalterns. Line after line, emphasis after emphasis, emerges the bold, italicized and underlined contours of youth experiments with variously tinted fonts, ready to (re)write and (re)interpret the meaning of their collective stands. Behind the against, fights, struggles, we can spell out the concise threads between activist initiation, personal experiments and academic learning. Binding cadres with the student community they claim to embody, distributed pamphlets do not only let us unveil the backbone forces of party politics. They cover the walls with a competitive universe of its own, drawing an immense dendrogram of ideas, regenerating political organisations, civil society, Jean-Thomas Martelli
Archival in spirit, the exhibition traces a journey through seven touchstones of Indian polity. It plunges us into the autocratic experiment of the Emergency (1975-77), witnesses the consolidation of caste and unpacks the emergence of gender empowerment aspirations. It also unravels a set of simmering debates around the unrolling affirmative action provisions, the deepening of economic liberalisation, the mainstreaming of Hindu nationalism and the criminalisation of dissent. Collected over several years in campuses such as Jawaharlal Nehru University, Banaras Hindu University, Hyderabad Central University, Presidency University or the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, the pamphleteer material of the Pamphlet Repository for Changing Activism (PaRChA) is curated to interrogate the relevance of campuses in going beyond their tradition of training grounds for inceptive politicians. Walking the fragile rope of political socialisation and destabilised by the three-cornered winds of muscle politics, government stigmatization, and so-called a-politicization through privatization, political pamphlets in university spaces remain a formidable testimony of an intermediary political platform, somewhere at the intersection between elites and subalterns. Line after line, emphasis after emphasis, emerges the bold, italicized and underlined contours of youth experiments with variously tinted fonts, ready to (re)write and (re)interpret the meaning of their collective stands. Behind the against, fights, struggles, we can spell out the concise threads between activist initiation, personal experiments and academic learning. Binding cadres with the student community they claim to embody, distributed pamphlets do not only let us unveil the backbone forces of party politics. They cover the walls with a competitive universe of its own, drawing an immense dendrogram of ideas, regenerating political organisations, civil society, Jean-Thomas Martelli
Project Investigators Jean-Thomas Martelli Julien Levesque Exhibition Curator Jean-Thomas Martelli
Exhibition Coordinator Avarna Ohja
Curatorial Consultants Shreyasi Biswas Shemal Pandya Visual Communication Nithya Joseph Sanket Jadia Shemal Pandya Sweta Sen Exhibition Design Shemal Pandya
Research Assistant Avarna Ohja Meghna Sharma Mehak Ahmed Naireen Khan Nithya Joseph Sarfaraz Hamid Victor Alembik
Artists Anupam Roy Asma Bi Rahul M. Ronnie Sen Tushar Joag Varunika Saraf
Documentation & Production Bhasmang Joshi Kumar Gaurav Meghna Sharma Mehak Ahmed Naireen Khan Nithya Joseph Sarfaraz Hamid Shaista Naaz Shivam Mogha Shreyasi Biswas Shwetank Tewari Sooraj Malayattil Victor Alembik
Special Credits Amaury Evrard Antoine Briand Chandrika Acharya Himanshu Beck Premjish Achari Salman Hussain Saumya Mani Tripathi Sharmila Samant Shaunak Mahbubani
Content Providers Amit Sengupta Anand Patwardhan Arjun Ghosh Aroh Akunth Ashok Vardhan Ashutosh Kumar Deepa Dhanraj Kavita Krishanan Lenin Kumar Nitin Pamnani Rohan D’Souza Sanjay Joshi Students across the universities Subin Dennis Sudhanshu Lal Tapas Ranjan Tom Wilkinson Yousuf Saeed
Emergenc Emergency
T
he Emergency Ru on the country by Indira Ga he EmergencyMinister Rule (1975-77) impos suspended fr on the country by the individual Congress Prim Ministerrights, Indira Gandhi only abriefl it alsonot cast ten suspended individual freedoms and demo autocratic possibility o rights, it also cast a tenacious shadow of Indian contemporary hi autocratic possibility on the discourse of Indian contemporary history. In the wake the student-led movem the student-led movement in Bihar G shaping under theand lead shaping under the leadership of the veter freedom fighter Jayapr freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan ma student activists and te student activists and teachers, both from Hindu Nationalist Ras Hin Sangh (RSS) and the Sa Party of India) Left ex Pa expulsion while non-a ex were suspended. Lat staying underground we president of the Jawa sta Students’ Union was pre 1975. While politicisi youth student figures Stu Emergency accelerat 19 pro-establishment lea yo institutions. The polit contributed to theEm int excecess of the Emer pro strong anti-Indira ins sta a key metaphor in Ind co whenever the events ex exercise of civil libert str ak wh ex
T
1
1