There is however a commonsensical understanding which equates acquittal with justice – thus a formal and legal action is granted ethical value. It could be that in some instances, an acquittal is the form of justice, but it is not always clear that it is indeed that. Consider the acquittal of a politically-connected wrestler-politician, accused by six women wrestlers of harassment. He had declared that if the charges of harassment against him are proved, he would hang himself. The Delhi High Court decided that there was not sufficient proof to prosecute him since the prosecution had not made out a case that would justify conviction, and served him an ‘honourable acquittal’.

Now, this is a phrase that is not defined in the laws of the country and is considered an invention of the judiciary – and judges have wondered at how exactly it ought to be deployed. The consensus appears to be this:

“When the accused is acquitted after full consideration of prosecution evidence and that the prosecution had miserably failed to prove the charges levelled against the accused, it can possibly be said that the accused was honourably acquitted.”

What this means is this: while an accused has been exonerated, this does not mean he is not guilty – it is only that the case against him is not water-tight.

It is useful in this context to consider those instances where a person accused of sexual harassment feels vindicated when enquiry committees and courts declare that there is no sufficient proof to establish that he had indeed committed this crime. Or when they raise doubts about the complainant’s intentions – she had been in a relationship with him, and therefore one cannot really view his behaviour as serious misdemeanour; or that she is foisting false charges, because she is sexually jealous and so on. Here again, objectionable behaviour has not been ‘proved’, not that it has not taken place. The benefit of the doubt, as in all criminal cases, goes to the perpetrator, and the victim is left with her misgivings, anger and anxiety.

In this context, I would like to reference a murky instance – when a woman raised charges of assault against her intimate partner, a Muslim man. The complainant, a Hindu, used phrases made popular by the Hindu right, to further accentuate her accusations. Given that the accused is a well-known journalist who has reported fearlessly on the non-legal actions of the Hindu Right, some of us wondered if he was being scapegoated, and if the charges against him were not concocted. For one, the woman did not go to the police, or the courts, rather she went public with her complaint on social media. This seemed odd, since she is a lawyer. Otherwise, it would not have appeared all that unusual. For, social media amplifies the reach of such accusations, and makes for a putative, even, if provisional, community of sufferers. The accused in question also stands ‘outed’ and the shame bestowed on him by this act likely appears a recompense for all that the victim ostensibly endured.

But the fact also is that when this happens, the accused stands condemned even before the trial begins. This is problematic from the point of view of due legal process, and one’s liberties, especially at a time when constitutional claims and rights are regularly abridged by politicians, the judiciary and the police.

Yet, for women and those of other genders who express their anger and dismay at a patent wrong that is unlikely to be recognised as such, their actions appear fair. After all, the criminal justice system systematically ‘criminalises’ complainants, rather than the accused, when it comes to sexual crimes – starting from the moment when a person attempts to file a first information report to the court trials, when their testimony is viewed with suspicion. As in some other countries, here too, to be speaking of rape in public is enough to mark a woman as ‘dishonourable’ and therefore ‘dissembling’.

It is another matter that women have braved a hostile system, in their fight for justice and truth – and such women have been mostly from the oppressed and marginal communities. They appear for the nth time before tribunals, speak to journalists, file yet another affidavit in court… whatever trauma or suffering they endure, their minds appear fixed on the distant goal of justice, and through it, they seek to affirm their dignity.

There is much room for thought, though with respect to this particular case, involving the journalist: given the multiple and overlapping inequities that shape our social order and lives, to implicate someone who is in a politically vulnerable situation using language that renders him even more vulnerable can have vicious outcomes, as happened when the journalist was subject to threats and warned of impending violence to his person. Also, the social media note became the basis for a complaint filed with the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). The latter responded right away – it was as if the anti-minority tone and phraseology, used by the alleged victim, resonated with the more general culture of resentment and hate within which both citizens and state apparatuses operate today. The Delhi police were directed to conduct an enquiry, but while the accused cooperated, the victim did not turn up for the hearings. After a period of 300 days and more, the case was closed. The accused felt vindicated thereafter and has since been reinstated in his original post as a journalist with a leading news portal.

But does this mean that he has been ‘justly’ served, or only ‘honourably’ acquitted? Is it a case of acquittal sliding into a notion of justice? After all, there was nothing to indicate that that the alleged perpetrator was innocent of the crimes he was accused of – at the end of the day, it was her words against his, and vice versa. And as these testimonies interlock, we have a political and moral stalemate. Her silence and his triumphal anger remain what they are – and we are left with this uneasy sense of how might we speak of those whose public politics might be worthy and progressive, but who can and do violate the bodily, emotional and intellectual integrity of their partners, lovers, wives… while in this case, we may never know what transpired, the fact remains that progressive men are not progressive all the way through and many have been indifferent to feminist thought, ideas and politics.

The problem is that in spite of our continuing to call out male sexual entitlement, it remains taken for granted and the onus is on women – and persons of other vulnerable genders – to prove that they have undergone an unpleasant and harrowing experience. The politics of outrage that is on display when women come out with their stories, is often short-lived, as we move on from one terrible tale to the next. And in the process, we stop paying attention to how we use words to reference and reflect on what we have heard, or been witness to. Often, the words we deploy in our rage remain entangled with a discourse that has gone anodyne – being used by the state, as well as by the NGO sector, and which is signalled by phrases such as, ‘violence against women’ or ‘gender-based violence’.

In 2002, the women’s movements in India, realised what we were missing out on, if we did not interrogate time-worn phrases and arguments – this happened in the wake of the horrific crimes against Muslim women in Gujarat. We knew that we needed to situate these within a larger culture of hatred, resentment and impunity, which was fast being ‘normalised’. Secondly, we also learned from work undertaken by Dalit and civil rights groups, which worked with victims of assault from Dalit and Adivasi communities – that in caste society, rape is a routine act, linked to an assertion of caste Hindu masculine authority, and caste Hindu feminine complicity. Both come together to sustain caste ‘honour’ and identity. In this sense, sexual assault in the Indian context is a structural feature of the caste order, and what transpired in Gujarat in 2002, and in other places prior to that, Surat in 1994, for instance, were concentrated and directed acts of violence against Muslim women. These built on a culture of normalised hurt, only the acts that furthered such hurt, were at once grotesque and menacing, a veritable spectacle, as Tanika Sarkar termed it.

The normalcy accorded to the act of ‘rape’ in caste society stands testimony to the hold of what Dr Ambedkar termed ‘mental habitude’ while explaining the ways in which we act out caste. It is not an act that is to be regretted, or punished – it is a public secret, a dark underside that both shapes and haunts the routine life of caste. This tolerated criminality, this lawlessness that is law, to cite Dr Ambedkar again, renders its victims to be non-human, or only partially human. And we do this as a matter of course, for this denial of humanity to various sections of the population operates across the caste system, attuned, to ‘an ascending scale of respect and a descending scale of contempt’.

This caste habitus has acquired a certain tenor in the age of the Hindu Right, but its roots are deeper – it is closely tied into our sexual politics. As feminists, we need, therefore, to countenance the habitual sexualisation of subaltern women, and the violence that secures it, as a problem that implicates all women. Also, others, especially men, who are in the forefront of the struggle against Hindutva and/or the caste order, need to also countenance this habitus, which exists as a generalised culture of misogyny and hatred and is available as a generalised patriarchal ‘resource’.

I met Sharmila, rather I saw her for the first time in 1994, at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla. I had been invited to read a paper along with some others from southern India at a conference on feminist studies. We sort of formed a ‘gang’ and laughed our way through the proceedings - provoking Tanika Sarkar to wonder, rather wistfully, it seemed to me at the time, at what made for all that mirth. Just a sense of girlish happiness, perhaps, or the joy of being part of an intellectual conversation in which we had no immediate stake - except for two persons, U Vindhya and Padmini Swaminathan, none of us, Jayanthi, Anuradha, Gita Wolf and myself were in academic spaces.

In any case, Sharmila was a quiet, determined presence at Shimla and I remember her, dainty and elusive, in an orange long skirt and stylish blouse. We did not speak much - but I kept looking for her during each session of the conference. She listened to all speakers with an intensity that was overwhelming, and unlike us, did not pass notes or grin across the room, should we find anything odd or funny.

My book, Towards a Non-brahmin Millennium: from Iyothee Thass to Periyar was published a few years later, in 1998. Sharmila was one of the first to read it, and she got back to me with questions - and invited me to present my work at a refresher course organised by the Centre for Women’s Studies. That was, I think, 1999, and since then, I have visited the Centre twice every year, at least, and sometimes, thrice. That first talk that I gave was translated in full - Sharmila took pains to do this, literally sentence for sentence. I was overwhelmed. I had not expected this.

Every year thereafter, I was asked to come and speak to students, to faculty members… one of these meetings proved memorable. Sharmila and I were having tea at one of the makeshift canteens on campus. Rather, I drank tea, while Sharmila kept coaxing me to have more tea and some snacks, while not imbibing anything herself. This would be a routine. She would spread a feast but not partake of it - even if the delicacies were from the Konkan coast, her original home. In this campus-snack moment, she earnestly explained to me why December 25, the day that Babasaheb Ambedkar and others consigned the Manusmriti to ashes at Mahad ought to be observed as Women’s Day, rather than March 8.

Coming from a state, where the Christian church had contributed to the making of a robust civic consciounsess and whose members were, for the most part, Dalit-bahujans, I wondered if this might not conflict with Christmas. She had not thought of that, and admitted that might be a problem. But notionally, she wished me to stay with the idea of December 25 as Women’s Emancipation Day. This was also when she introduced me to Pratima Pardesi, an Ambedkarite feminist thinker and activist - and said that the idea for rethinking women’s day came from her and other Dalit feminists in Pune.

On another occasion, when she she sought me out was when she wished to discuss the travails and joys of transacting feminist ideas in a multi-caste classroom. This was on a lovely winter morning. She parked her car in the precincts of the Pune University guest house, and took a walk with me - during which time, she spoke of the irritation expressed by some of her students, when she brought up the question of caste in the classroom, and encouraged conversations on the subject. What did that have to do with women’s studies, demanded an impatient student. And Sharmila had to explain that caste had everything to do with women’s studies, and invited the miffed student to explain her reluctance with respect to the subject. That was Sharmila all over - she engaged with students with an earnestness even when they expressed views that were contrary to all that she held dear. And this is what enabled her and the wonderful team at the Centre - Anagha, Swati, Deepa, Sneha, Lalit and Sanjay and others who were seasonally present - to undertake the radical pedagogic work that we have since come to identify with the place; work that centred student intellectual exchanges and which ensured that persons across class and caste divides learned to work and think together

Then there was that time, when Sharmila came to Chennai to receive the Malcolm Adiseshaiah Award for her work as a sociologist. Her acceptance speech was brilliant - focusing on what she termed Phule-Ambedkar-Feminist pedagogies. We had not quite heard anything like that in our city, and I sat her down during that visit, and did a short interview for Dalit Murasu (Dalit Drum) - in which I summarised as well key moments in her presentation. She was excited about her work being made available in this synoptic fashion to Tamil readers.

Another memorable and somewhat favourite moment for me was when she invited me home to look at her Ambedkar memorabilia - she was working to write a book (along with Praveen Chavan) on what she had termed Dalit counter-publics, which would deal with the public exchanges that transpired at key Ambedkarite spaces: Mahad, Dikshabhumi and Chaityabhumi. The booklets that were continously sold, the cassettes that featured Bhimgeeth and anticaste and anticlass songs, posters, calendars that commemorated key moments in anti-caste histories across the sub-continent… Sadly, she did not live to complete this work. It was an one-of-a-kind endeavour, for in and through this assembalge of texts and objects, she was looking to propose a vision of civility and intellectual labour, and to call attention to a new and critical urbanity that Dalits had built over the decades.

I could go on, but I can’t quite push myself to think of all those occasions that were central to my intellectual and political journey as well, as a feminist thinker, invested in anti-caste and Dalit thought and politics. She opened up the world of Phule-Ambedkarite-Marxist ideas and practices in Maharashtra to me, and it was through her I met all those wonderful men and women - Gopal Guru, Umesh Bagade, Wandana Sonalkar, Dhammasangini, Ram Bapat, Dilip Chavan and many others. I miss her, and it is hard to remember without regret and longing.

And yet there was also a lightness that was possible with her: while many of us who knew her respected her work, and loved her dearly, we also teased her at times, for her earnestness. As happened during another intellectual feminist retreat at Shimla in 2010 - she was determined to get speakers from the Centre to be well-prepared with their presentations and so did not want them to spend time on the merriment that some of us indulged in. But we wanted to sabotage her plans, and did so - we dragged these potential speakers and Sharmila out of their rooms, and made them join us, as we drank, chatted and danced the evening and a good part of the night away. No one regretted it.

We continued to meet and exchange ideas, views thereafter - on the Ambedkar cartoon controversy, on the ways in which we could bring in South and South-eastern Asia contexts into our Women’s Studies classrooms, on the future of Women’s Studies… until we could not talk as we always did. I think our last exchange was in March 2013, when she sent me her book, Against the Madness of Manu which had just been published. My return gift was a long essay on women’s peace activism, where I drew together a number of instances of women protesting war and the use of weapons for committing acts of mass violence - from England to Sri Lanka, and from Lebanon to Ireland.

Thereafter we did not speak, and while I kept in touch with friends, during the entire time she was in hospital, I did not have the courage to visit her. I had endured great loss on the friendship front over the preceding decade, and did not, at the time, have the wherewithal to deal with yet another dear one in pain.

This was my last note to her, an email that I sent on June 28, 2013:

Fri, Jun 28, 2013, 6:23 PM

Dearest Sharmila

I have been conversing with you in my head these last two days. I think of that wonderful morning many years ago when you took me home and fed me breakfast and we spoke of your father, Siddhartha College and much else. There is so much that we’ve shared, and I leaned on you while walking some of the paths that I did these past few years. It has been a compelling and respectful intimacy - and I hope the strength of that is with you as you endure what has become randomly, unfairly yours -

I love and cherish our friendship, your work and much else. I wish I could spontaneously pray, believe me, I would if I could. In any case, I shall think of the Amitava Buddha and Kwanin, the healer. With Ambedkar, we have learned the value of maithri and compassion -

Love, Geetha

The month continues to be dotted with the spirit of service and equally of sacrifice. This year (2026) during the hot weeks of a typical Chennai summer, we were grateful for the Shi’i volunteers who handed out large glasses of lemonade and buttermilk – especially on the days leading to Ashura, when the martyrdom of Imam Hussain and Hasan is recalled.

I had got interested in the phenomenon of Ashura through a congruence of concerns. Years ago, I devoted several months to reading Mahatma Gandhi’s writings. I was intrigued by his invocation of Imam Hussain and Hasan in the early years of satyagraha, or penance in the name of truth, in South Africa. He upheld their courage and spirit of sacrifice as worthy of emulation by Indians who stood to be shamed by unfair racial laws. The two men, he argued, had confronted the tyrant, Yazid, and had paid for their act of protest with their lives. Satyagraha, he reasoned, was essentially a call to martyrdom. Gandhi invoked other examples as well, Prahlad and Harishchandra from the Hindu puranas, Jesus Christ himself, and the suffragettes in England who were determined to stand up and suffer for their right to the vote. This rather eclectic line of martyrs took my breath away, and I marvelled at the clustering of ideas and histories around a new norm, in this case, satyagraha – sufferance for one’s cause, facing up to the might of the state with forbearance and love.

Ashura came up again in my readings in Islamic feminism, which I undertook in the months, following the bombing of the twin towers, to reckon with the Islamophobia of the times, and also to make sense of changes that we were unfolding in India. For the 21^st century has been witness to Muslim women mobilising on the streets, to demand their rights to justice and peace, not only in the larger social world, but equally in their families.

As I read along, I was deeply moved by accounts of women who spoke during Ashura, bringing forth their understanding of suffering and injustice, even as they re-narrated the story of martyrdom that is central to the commemoration of the Imams’ lives. I first came across these instances of speech-making in a paper read by a feminist scholar in the Berkshire Women’s History conference in 2005. And I kept up with my search for similar arguments, and that was how I came across Lara Deeb’s work on the Hizballah in Lebanon. I present here parts of an essay I wrote on Deeb’s work – as Lebanon continues to suffer, I want as well to recall how ordinary citizens negotiate difficult times. And equally, invoke the spirit of Karbala (the city that holds the tombs of the martyred Imams), which is writ large in the Muharram festivities – whether Gaza, Lebanon or nearer home, Kashmir. The world of faith is complex and layered, and answers to existential and political anxieties in rather startling ways.

***

Lara Deeb’s An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon (2006), examines women’s lives and public work in war-torn Lebanon – a theme that is as relevant today, as it was two decades ago, as Israel continues to bomb and destroy that nation. Deeb’s story unfolds in Al-Dahiyya a suburb of Beirut, identified with the Hizballah and its politics – a part of the city where the air is redolent with what she calls ‘a particular mix of politics and piety’. This is a cityscape, she goes on to argue, framed by images of orphans, religious leaders, martyrs…and women in hejab or the Iranian abaya, who are visibly present on the streets, which, in turn are free from catcalls and harassment.

The Hizballah as is well known has challenged Israel’s polices of aggression and occupation of parts of Lebanon since 1982. It has also sought to uphold the political rights of Lebanon’s historically disenfranchised Shi‘i Muslim community. What is perhaps less known is the civic culture that their presence and authority in parts of Lebanon have inspired and achieved. Deeb argues that this culture may be understood as emerging in the context of a fascinating traffic between notions of piety and ideas of modernity. According to her, the conjuncture of the 1970s which witnessed Shi’ite mobilization in the city, also saw the community reckon in complex ways with the meanings of ‘modernity’. Three elements, she notes, came to be emphasized in the course of this reckoning: the idea of being ‘civilized’, as opposed to being ‘backward’; the notion of material betterment, in the face of poverty and ignorance; and finally, an assertion of the importance of spiritual growth or progress. These three notions translated into particular practices of piety and as far as women were concerned, notes Deeb, this required them to adhere to what she calls ‘authenticated’ faith, even as they learnt to live that faith out in defined modern contexts. In other words, to be considered ‘modern’, and not ‘backward’, women had to also be visibly pious in rather determined ways. This play between piety and progress, it would seem from Deeb’s work, was most visible in the context of Ashura. Before I get to Deeb’s work, I would like to pause to take note of another interesting piece on the Karbala festivities.

Describing an Ashura that she witnessed in the Iranian city of Shiraz, Ingvild Flaskerud writes that the innocence and untimely death of Ali Asghar, Hussain’s baby son who was killed when his father brought him to Yazid’s camp, asking for water, was invoked on that occasion through a frangible baby cradle. Likewise, Roqayyeh, Hussain’s baby girl who too died was lovingly remembered through little gifts – doll, small paper cups, plates, in short things a little girl is bound to appreciate. Some mourners brought shoes for the little girl, who it is said, was forced to walk barefoot by the tyrant’s army. She was killed thereafter in a dark corner, which provoked women, across these centuries to provide her with candles as offerings. These offerings were also made in the belief that as innocent martyrs to a larger and noble cause, these men and boys and girls would intercede on behalf of the mourners and touch them with grace and all the worldly gifts that divine grace could sanctify and guarantee (Ingvild Flaskerud. “‘Oh, My Heart is Sad, it is Mohaarum, the Month of Zaynab: the Role of Aesthetics and Women’s Mourning Ceremonies” in The Women of Karbala: Ritual Performance and Symbolic Discourses in Modern Shi’i Islam, University of Texas Press, 2005: 46-92).

As I mull over this extract, Gaza’s children come to mind - and also the shame of their deaths. As the UN report on the war and deaths in Gaza has noted, around 30% of the killed are children. Karbala, one realises, hovers over this landscape. And one cannot but think of mothers, sisters… and all those who are left to mourn the dead.

In Shi’i societies across the world, the women of Karbala, chief amongst whom are Fatemah, the Prophet’s daughter and Imam Ali’s wife, and Zaynab, Hussain’s devoted sister (and Fatemah’s daughter) are specially invoked. Their stories are recalled, as exempla, so that women in the present may learn to emulate them, and arrange their lives to reflect the piety, endurance and courage either woman had exhibited. In Iran, both of them have alternately served as symbols of ideal womanhood, with the tendency to re-read their lives as inspiration gaining ground in the years leading up to the founding of the Islamic republic. Fatemah’s wisdom, grace and faithful abiding by her husband Ali, and the insuperable status she enjoyed as the Prophet’s daughter on the one hand and Zaynab’s loyalty to her brother, her piety and her role as messenger, the one who carried the doomed family’s sense of its own spiritual mission forward, as she confronted Yazid, on the other have been alternately presented as qualities all women would want to emulate.

In the work of Iranian dissident thinkers such as Ali Shariati and Morteza Motahari, the women of Karbala were not necessarily only mourners and keepers of memory, rather they were seen as opposing political wrong and ranging themselves on the side of the oppressed. Zaynab was posited as her brother Hussain’s helper and companion, ministering to the poor and needy, partaking of his revolutionary dream, and so convinced of it that she even left behind her husband to be with her brother. She was also seen as an educator, who could carry forth Hussain’s ideals amongst those who did not know them. (Kamran Scott Aghaie, “Fatemah, Zeynab and Emerging Discourses on Gender” in The Martyrs of Karbala: Shi’i symbols and rituals in Modern Iran, University of Washington Press, 2004: 113-130).

The Islamic republic of Iran has tended to take a more conservative view of both Fatemah and Zaynab. While reverentially acknowledging their importance, the ruling Imams nevertheless made it clear that their lives indicated how women had ever been steadfast supporters of the rule of the faithful, of the Imamate, and had helped upkeep its sacral authority. These ideals of womanhood acquired a distinctive emphasis in Lebanon, notes Deeb, where the Shi’i were a decisive minority, and stood opposed to the regime. In this context, re-living Karbala came to mean two things: the one had to do with commemoration, only in the context of Lebanon the martyrdom at Karbala appeared seamless with the present, given contemporary Shi’i opposition to the twenty-two-year-old Israeli occupation.

Deeb posits that the second mode of reliving Karbala fixes on the community’s sense of Zaynab. She notes how, gradually, Zaynab has come to replace Fatemah as a role model for women. From taking their cues from her mourning her brother’s unjust death, and being part of public rituals of lamentation, Shi’i women, she points out, have gone on to associate her fate with a life given over to generous public care. One of the women that features in Deeb’s book thus states:

“Sayyida Zaynab after the Imam’s martyrdom, she raised all the orphans. She stood by their side and lessened their pain…She has taught us that no matter what we experience it will never be as much as what she bore. She is the model for our work. From her we learn to help others” (Deeb: 202).

Another notes: “whenever I am faced with a problem, I ask myself, am I going to act like Zaynab or not? If someone knocks at my gate, am I going to help him or not? Am I going to feel with others or not, am I going to give more of myself or not, am I going to have the courage to face oppression or not?” (Deeb: 205)

Deeb argues that this learning by example, even as it is seen as continuing across vast expanses of time, must be seen for what it is – a response occasioned by the civil war in Lebanon and the need to rethink Islam in the context of poverty and death and the implacable fear and hatred it continues to evoke in the minds of Anglo-America and Europe. The memory of Karbala that the Shi’i women invoke is always already in the modern moment, insisting on its compatibility with the demands of the modern world. Thus, a civic association that runs a free and subsidized medical care centre takes great pains to advertise its technical expertise; a women’s group that supports the poor through welfare and care, organizes its work meticulously, using visual publicity, modern means of networking and marvellous managerial skills to articulate a charity system that reaches the very poor (Deeb: 165-203).

Deeb notes too that the near absence of state welfare provisions has made such work almost a necessity, which is further accentuated by the women’s sense of their labour as undertaken in a spirit of piety. That is, public service is constitutively a religious duty, an enjoining that women are eager to heed. This piety insists that the work women do is not mere charity. Rather the women are clear that they are fostering in those they work with, as in themselves, a sense of ‘taw’iyya’ or the act of calling attention to, warning, making someone conscious (Deeb, 183-84). The poor are not viewed as permanent dependants but as those who ought to be taught to cultivate taw’iyya so that they would learn to take hold of their lives.

These women are also clear that their acts of public piety mirror the martyrdom of men on the battle field. They assert this in any number of ways: by performing consciously and seriously their Islamic identity in public, wearing the hejab, observing the Ramadhan fast and praying. But they are also clear that this does not exhaust the range of things they could and need to do, to be Muslims, in the spirit of Karbala. So, on one hand, they agree, as it appears from Deeb’s account, but in a spirit of contentious unease, that a woman’s duty to her household is primary, since Islam enjoins this. On the other hand, they seek to re-work this ‘feminine’ vocation. They do this through insisting that women ought to want to abide by this vocation, and even by the terms of the Sharia, cannot be forced to perform their domestic duties; they also make it clear that their acts of piety and service would continue even after marriage, or they would negotiate time and space for it, if already married. Deeb points out that often the women have to fight sexism at home and in the larger kin network, and that they do not hesitate to do so, since they hold their public vocation as passionately as they insist on their readiness to do regular ‘feminine’ tasks (Deeb, 214).

The public piety that Deeb’s work attempts to trace and define through a careful sifting of temporal, everyday acts of care and nurture, of education and argument, represents for her, and her ‘subjects’, a living of the faith, in the spirit of Karbala. Paradoxically, yet entirely fittingly, living the faith becomes, in the context of Lebanon, central to female citizenship, even if this manner of being a citizen is validated mostly within the moral world of Shi’i Islam and the political world of the Hizballah, within a universe where practices of piety constitute an admonition to oppressive authority. As Deeb astutely puts it, it is not entirely clear if this model would work should the Hizballah cease to be in opposition!

***

The Karbala narrative and the Ashura rituals posit a complex relationship between one’s determination to remember injustice and one’s desire to leaven that memory by doing good. While Karbala incites a call to fight a righteous war, this is clearly understood to be a male vocation. Unlike in Iran when women were enjoined to and some did join the army, during the Iran-Iraq war, in Lebanon, this did not happen.

Further, women took especial care to hold the memory of injustice carefully, and as in the example quoted above, made it the basis of their life choices and actions: how could they be like Zaynab, act as she would, in their circumstances. This has meant that rather than nurture vengeance they have drawn on the example of the women of Karabla to strengthen themselves to commit founded acts of compassion and care. This experience does not re-define the relationship between home and the world, but certainly enables a redefinition of the self’s relationship to the world. Positioned differently towards the world on account of its distinctive assumption of public piety, the self could now claim nurture and care as important virtues, not in the spirit of the home, but in the spirit of justice.

I am not sure how much of this spirit of justice and care has survived the war years – but it is evident that memories of loss and suffering are renewable, and in their wake, compassion is bound to re-emerge and likely has, on the streets of Lebanon. We know it has never really left the streets of Gaza.

Peter’s classes on the literature of African people took us into literary and historical worlds that have remained stimulating and enriching. Of Goan origin, his was a peripatetic life. Born and educated in Uganda, he had moved to complete university at Leeds in the 1970s, when General Idi Amin threw out persons of Indian origin from the country. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a fellow student and he became friends forever at Leeds, which explains the fervour with which Peter taught African writing, in Iowa, after his eventual settling down in the USA.

I enrolled in two of his classes (in the mid-1980s), one on African writing and the other, a fascinatingly titled offering – ‘Joseph Conrad and his Descendants’. We read six novels of Conrad (Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent, The Secret Sharer and Nostromo) and work by writers from lands that featured in Conrad’s fiction – Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Kenya), V S Naipaul (Trinidad & Tobago), Wilson Harris (Guyana), Tayeb Salih (Sudan), Ayi Kweh Armah (Ghana), Lloyd Fernando (Malaysia) and Ishmael Reed (USA). While we had to read one novel by each writer, we ended up reading all that some of them had written, particularly Ngũgĩ and Armah. My favourites from this list were many, but at the time, I was mesmerised by Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, which was gendered in complex, unexpected ways and Armah’s Why are we so Blest that seemed like a parable on the colonisation of the African continent. Peter made us read African thinkers as well: Amilcar Cabral, Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon…

We did not read any women writers for this course, indeed Peter said he had not come across any from the African continent or the Caribbean whose work signified on, drew from or was shaped by Conrad. He was familiar with the work of women writers from these regions (He admired South Africa’s Bessie Head immensely) but was nonplussed that none appeared to be a Conradian, so to speak. Eventually, he found out that Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow was a good candidate for the course, but by that time, the course was over!

Peter had got the idea for the Conrad project from conversations with Ngũgĩ at Leeds. Rather than being dismissive of Conrad, Ngũgĩ had sought to engage with the ‘doubleness’ that was experienced by white men and women, as they ventured into African and Latin American spaces – this doubleness made for colossal egoism as well as self-disenchantment. Conrad’s troubled protagonists seemed emblems of the essential savagery of the colonial project, which did not spare those who were its agents. Subsequently, Ngũgĩ revised his position and did not think that white consciousness was riven – it appeared to be constitutively hypocritical and base. Peter, though, held on to the possibilities of reading Conrad, against the grain, and he did this through this course. The course was taught in 1987, but before that Peter had written about Conrad and Africa. He wrote up on the course as well, pulling classroom debates into his argument, and taking note of how we learned together, to read across texts, and contexts, without losing sight of the specificity of either.

My term paper for this class though did not engage with the relationship between Conrad and his descendants. I returned to the descendants with intensity in the African Writers course, and wrote a long paper on Ngũgĩ’s fictional world, and his journey from a reflective writer to a self-consciously political novelist, committed to capturing the presence of, and resistance to neo-colonial capitalism. I wanted to write on Armah, and his epic critique of Arab and European colonisation of parts of Africa – this did not happen, for I had left the university, and was back in India, and absorbed into the women’s movements.

It is interesting though to reflect on what I actually wrote for the Conrad course. I read Conrad’s novels that had to do with Russia – Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent and The Secret Sharer – as expressions of his wrestling with the inky darkness that it cast on his native Poland. And his attempts to engage with its menacing as well as productive power. At the time, I was doing a tutorial on western Marxism with the late Tom Lewis, a left leaning teacher in Iowa, who worked with groups in El Salvador. Simultaneously I was following long-standing arguments about the failure of Soviet socialism in and through samizdat literature – from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Rudolf Bahro’s The Alternative in Eastern Europe, and From Red to Green proved influential as well. Along with all this, I was part of the Nicaragua solidarity group, and so was reading Ernesto Cardenal, amongst others.

My sense of communisms was thus eclectic and happily messy and out of this messy understanding, I strove to create order, in a corner of my mind – through a reading of Conrad’s work in ways that captured the problem that was Russia. Writing that paper helped me situate some of the ambiguities and uncertainties about Soviet socialism that were writ large in the literature I was reading, within broad historical and literary contexts. At the same time, I remained ‘socialist’ and my tutorial with Tom Lewis was testimony to that – we read Lenin’s What is to be Done? State and Revolution, parts of Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (the Quentin Hoare translation) almost in full, Louis Althusser’s For Marx and sections from Herbert Marcuse. In addition, I was steeped in feminist literature on the subject, gleaned mostly from the Anglo-American second wave, with a smattering of texts by Alexandra Kollantai. In all this, Conrad appeared an anomaly and yet, he offered a way of thinking through a mess of ideas – his narrative complexity unpacked for me, the relationship between history and storytelling and ideas and persons.

To return to Conrad and Peter: he taught us to read texts in unusual ways. Postcolonial literary criticism was in its early years, and the hermeneutics of suspicion that would become its hallmark was not progressive dogma yet. Also, the reality of Palestine and apartheid South Africa meant that we were still within the time of anticolonalism.

True enough, there was Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, since associated with the postcolonial project, and we read either. But to us, they were not literary or cultural critics so much as thoughtful men who chose to speak and write for a larger public. Their writing was not understood to be of only epistemic significance, in spite of Said’s critical partiality to Foucault. For, to us, Said was the author of both The World, the Text and the Critic, as well as The Question of Palestine and After the Last Sky. He introduced us to important voices from the Arab world, literary, artistic and musical. Just as he made us understand the colonial past in its present guise, and the role of native elites as he called them in sustaining aspects of that past.

Fanon’s work, which we read in Peter’s class, The Wretched of the Earth and Towards an African Revolution made for a sober understanding of postcolonial realities. The chapter titled, The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness, in the former, was one that many of us read and re-read. Also, Peter ensured that we understood just what these trials were – he made some of us read Wole Soyinka’s A Play of Giants, an exceptional play, that answered to the Africa of Mobutu, Hastings Banda, Bokassa, and Idi Ami.

In mapping the postcolonial historical contexts in Africa in this manner, Peter pushed us to read texts in a connected and non-polarised way, and without losing sight of how colonial power and authority recast African and other coloured subjects. In particular, he wanted us to grasp the richness at the heart of hybridity, whether of the western educated ‘native’ intellectual and writer, or the adventurer who could not put away the imaginative possibilities of the ‘African darkness’ that he constantly sought to berate and worry about. Years later, reading Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, I was reminded of Peter’s prescient lectures on the subject of whiteness and how it is continually haunted by the darkness that it demonises.

I returned to India, to the city of Madras, in the late 1980s and I have lived here since, reading, writing, researching and working with feminist and anti-caste collectives. I think what Peter taught us all those years ago has remained with me and fed into my work in unexpected ways. When I began working on my first book on the anti-caste movement in the late colonial period in Tamil Nadu, I had to read a range of texts: speeches, pamphlets, editorials, chapbooks… I did not want only to point to how they had been ignored or overlooked in historical and political accounts of the time, by scholars as well as public intellectuals. Rather, I wanted to read them in the context of other such texts, which were differently ideological – for example, those produced by the nationalists and the socialists. I think I had picked up this strategy from Peter. For, he made us do this not as an exercise in comparison but to understand how we work from within hegemonic text worlds but also destabilise them, or build new ones.

And in doing so, he pointed to the connected nature of politics – that to be adversarial or work at contradictions to one’s purpose and vision does not mean that one abandons or cancels out what appears powerful. Rather we work with and through power, and look for those cracks that point to the unstable nature of political and cultural authority. This helped us to view class or caste adversaries as not insuperable. They were powerful and brutal but also limited – and it was important to grasp the exact nature of these limitations, not just in a political and economic sense, but in an imaginative sense as well. This meant, as well, that we remain alert to the creative potential of all that exists along with, but also outside of power – and which finds its way into literature, art and theatre.

Rest in peace, dear Peter.

The lead up to the crucifixion comprises of a series of quietly dramatic scenes, each of which has Jesus confronting power and its deceptions – the chief priests of the temple who claim he has dared challenge Caesar’s authority; Pilate who is fascinated, nonplussed and bewildered by Jesus’ enigmatic silence; and the soldiers who mock him and behave, as ‘protectors’ of law and justice tend to do, from his time to ours, possessed as they are of banal evil.

Transposed to the present, this could well be the fate of prisoners of conscience, conscientious objectors, indeed of all who believe that law and authority, steeped in impunity, ought to be resisted. All resistance in this sense awaits a new time, when we are born into a new life.

***

It is worth pondering about the meaning of ‘returning to life’ – those who were killed because they refused to heed terror and violence, move beneath the earth, when the injustice that ended their lives is recalled, time and again; and dust and ashes throw up memories of what power would like us to forget. The Mothers of the Disappeared, whether in Argentina or Sri Lanka, or nearer home in Kashmir have kept alive a memory of death and disappearances, and therefore, of bodies that otherwise would have been consigned to oblivion. Grief assumes a form of abiding by those cruelly taken away, as we were witness to, in the wake of the bombing of a school in Iran by the US Airforce in March 2026: mothers and fathers kept vigil by the graves of their children, through the holy month of Ramadhan.

Then, there is Gaza. In Mahmoud Darwish’s words:

The enemies may triumph over Gaza
They might break its bones
They may plant tanks in the stomachs of her children and women
They may throw it into the sea, sand, or blood, but it
Will not repeat the lies and say to the invaders: Yes
And it will continue to explode
It is neither death nor suicide
But it is Gaza’s way of declaring its worthiness to live.

(https://liveencounters.net/2024-le-pw/01-january-le-pw-2024/mahmoud-darwish-gaza/)

***

In this context, we may want to ponder over the modest signs of remembrance that dot every hamlet that has witnessed violence against Dalits: a photo, a stone planted over a grave, a quiet ritual every year… these dead are always with us, and ask for us to remember how we hurt, maim and kill, in an everyday sense.

The social death visited upon Dalits through terror and economic and social boycott has been countered with the will to live, and to declare one’s worthiness to live. This declaration is writ large in Dr Ambedkar’s political and social thought. He valued what he held to be “the uniqueness of every individual” and took note of “his incommensurability with others” as well as “the infinite diversity of active tendencies and combination of tendencies of which an individual is capable” (Babasaheb Ambedkar, Writings & Speeches [BAWS], Volume 3, p. 321). Citing this passage from Jacques Maritian’s The Conquest of Freedom, he defined what he understood by the term, “the human person”:

When we say that a man is a person, we do not mean merely that he is an individual, in the sense that an atom, a blade of grass, a fly, or an elephant is an individual. Man is an individual who holds himself in hand by his intelligence and his will; he exists not merely in a physical fashion. He has spiritual super-existence through knowledge and love, so that he is, in a way, a universe in himself, a microcosm, in which the great universe in its entirety can be encompassed through knowledge. By love he can give himself completely to beings who are to him, as it were, other selves. For this relation no equivalent can be found in the physical world. The human person possesses these characteristics because in the last analysis man, this flesh and these perishable bones which are animated and activated by a divine fire, exists ‘from the womb to the grave’ by virtue of the existence itself of his soul, which dominates time and death. Spirit is the root of personality. The notion of personality thus involves that of totality and independence, no matter how poor and crushed a person may be, he is a whole, and as a person subsistent in an independent manner” (BAWS, Volume 3, p. 95).

At the same time, the individual qua individual stood to realise her potential only in and through her association with others: “conjoint activity” was necessary in order for her to come into her own. Social endosmosis, argued Ambedkar, was the basis for fraternity, and thereby democracy. The latter was not a political ideal merely, rather it denoted “primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience... essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellowmen” (BAWS, Volume 1, p. 57).

It is not accidental that Ambedkar declared that the Dalits had come into a new life by rebelling against existing norms: they had moved from a situation of social anomie and death to another order of existence, through what was a “new life movement”. This latter had “taken hold of the untouchables” such that all over India they were “fighting against the indignities and injustices which the Hindus in the name of their religion have heaped upon them” (BAWS Volume 9, 420) They were ready to be reborn into another ethics, experience a conversion from abjection to living. That is, they were looking to be resurrected into another order of being, through pursuing the Buddha dhamma. This dhamma, Ambedkar noted, was for all those who looked to annihilate caste and to be reborn into another kind of social existence.

***

Keeping faith with those who had lost their lives to injustice, and keeping hope alive: the resurrection is an event that speaks to us in unexpected ways. Caldwell Manners, writing for Raiot, invokes the fate that befell Hind Rajab, and notes:

Hind Rajab repeatedly cried out, “Come get me.”

But no one could reach her. The Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulance was delayed, then destroyed, and the Israeli Occupation Forces killed those sent to rescue her. What does mercy mean when no one can arrive in time? When rescue is attempted but prevented? When the body cannot be taken down before death comes? In the crucified, God is found not in the act of abandonment, but in the body that refuses to be abandoned.

(https://raiot.in/they-have-threatened-us-with-resurrection-easter-and-the-voice-of-hind-rajab/)

It is fellowship that matters, whether it is tending the crucified body, and thereafter, reporting the miracle of renewal, as the women do, in the Gospels, or asserting the worthiness of living for those who are denied it, as Ambedkar does. Radical solidarity and love are what we are reminded of, on Easter Sunday.

I want to go over and think through Rohith’s letter to us, to posterity. These words are haunting – ‘I feel a growing gap between my soul and my body. And I have become a monster.’ The soul, whether it exists or not, is a word that is an intimation of our humanity, that ineffable sense of self which enables us grasp the world in all its terror and beauty, and imagine a better, just and happier future. It represents a yearning to transform ourselves, such as we are, and the world.

For those who are possessed of this desire for transcendence, the distance between a life of the mind, and the imagination and bodily existence and material life has always appeared both baffling and insurmountable. Women who came into a sense of themselves as sentient beings and longed to transcend the limited world of domesticity, poverty, of the kitchen and the field – they knew and suffered from this gap between the soul and body. As Gerda Lerner, the feminist historian put it, to think connoted something unnatural – and how might one think from within the mess of life, of milk and menstrual blood, and diapers and the kitchen? Besides, to think and ask questions put women beyond the pale of what was viewed as sociability, and in order that they do not thus transgress, they were denied, she notes, the possibility of affective love – Queer persons have known this sense of gap in an entirely different sense, between their sense of who they are, and how the world views them…

For Dalits, this gap has appeared fateful. A reminder of the body that must be kept away, and not touched. As Dr Ambedkar wrote of what it meant to be a thinking Dalit in the 1940s, on the eve of the transfer of power, from British to Indian hands:

The Untouchables are the weariest, most loathed and the most miserable people that history can witness. They are a spent and sacrificed people. To use the language of Shelley they are— “pale for weariness of climbing heaven, and gazing on earth, wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth”. To put it in simple language the Untouchables have been completely overtaken by a sense of utter frustration. As Mathew Arnold says1 “life consists in the effort to affirm one’s own essence; meaning by this, to develop one’s own existence fully and freely, to have ample light and air, to be neither (. . . . . . .)* nor overshadowed. Failure to affirm one’s own essence is simply another name for frustration. Its non-fulfilment of one’s efforts to do the best, the withering of one’s faculties, the stunting of one’s personality”.

For Rohith, the possibilities that awaited him, and other young persons like him – to do with learning, love, politics, appeared weighed down by the sheer materiality of existence, of want, of being ‘untouched’ and ‘untouchable’…. His love for science and the stars was an expression of his understanding of the universe as interconnected, but his realisation that one cannot connect with one’s fellow human beings brought sorrow, and made him wonder if he was a misfit, a ‘monster’. In a sense, this is the ultimate indictment of caste and untouchability – that it makes a practice of what Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing, and Babasaheb Ambedkar described as the ‘associated’ life, appear monstrous; that is, to co-exist in fraternity, in a spirit of social fellowship is made to appear impossible, and what is left to us is a second-hand existence – such that, to paraphrase Rohith, our love appears constructed, our beliefs colored and our originality validated through artificial art.

To Rohith this had to do with the nature of our existence, which had become ‘divorced from Nature’ and led to a ‘man reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility, to a vote. To a number. To a thing.’ It is not only the Hindu social order, as Dr Ambedkar called it, that had done this, but equally ameliorative politics that has sought to counter caste: the ways in which identities when marshalled for governance and justice are viewed in the aggregate – in terms of numbers and votes – and seldom as representing selves that have not been granted the dignity of existence. This is something that Dr Ambedkar was conscious about – to him Dalit presence in education, the services, in economic life was a necessity that did not have only to do with the identity imposed on them. It had to do, as well and more, with what was being destroyed – the individual human person, whose self, persona had been confiscated as he put it, in his testimony to the Southborough Commission. Small wonder that he viewed the act of countering such confiscation as one that was tantamount to self-determination, a term used with reference to nationalist struggles within empires, but which he insisted had as much to do with individual lives and community existence whose purpose was given by others.

To realise the potential that is there in the individual, cruelly denied the right to realise it, the self had to be acknowledged – and made present in a space where the occluded Dalit would henceforth help re-set the terms of associated life, that is, Dalits would expand the remit of public life, political movements… Ambedkar would have relished and ruminated over Rohith’s description of the individual human person - a glorious thing made up of star dust. In the last years of his life, he wanted to set up a social centre for Dalit well being, and had drawn up a plan of action – it was not enough to be politically active, one needed to be culturally and socially nourished as well.

Rohith’s wistful invocation of the cosmic web of which he felt he and indeed all of us are a part, was shadowed by sorrow – ‘Maybe I was wrong, all the while, in understanding the world. In understanding love, pain, life, death.’ And here his recall of his origins, is both important and heart-rending – for it is this which made it hard for him to travel to the stars, as he wished to. ‘My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness. The unappreciated child from my past.’

The weight of this utterance was evident to all when his identity was rendered suspect and he was termed a non-Dalit – a patriarchal claim that deliberately violated the sense of belonging and dignity that came from being Radhika Amma’s son. Equally, the fatal accident of birth hurt him in other ways – his childhood loneliness, to do with his alienating relationship with his father and his family, perhaps made for a fraught sense of being. Seldom do we think through the ways in which the practice of ‘untouchability’ shapes consciousness, affects the way we inhabit our bodies… for the perpetrators, it translates into swagger and bullying and for those who are the victims of this bullying, there is pain, anger but also an experience of dissociation, anxiety. Sushrut Jadhav, Yashpal Jogdand and Divya Kundukuri have called attention to the psychological and existential impact of the violence that is untouchability and all that flows from it – without pathologizing a historical and sociological condition, they have focused on consciousness and on being as such, to understand how the self is held ransom by a cruel social order.

In this context, I would like to raise some questions about how we might think of what Rohith – and Senthil Kumar and Payal, and countless others endured – to say this in Rohith’s words: ‘I am just empty. Unconcerned about myself. That’s pathetic. And that’s why I am doing this.’

We have called it institutional murder, asked for justice, demanded the Rohith act… and perhaps Telangana and Karnataka will eventually pass this legislation. And, now we have the UGC guidelines and the proposal to set up Equity committees…

Equally, we might want to think of other ways in which institutions of higher education need to be rethought… for while policy directives and rules are important gains for the movements that all of us have been part of - there is yet a case to be made for putting in place other sorts of arrangements as well.

The feeling of ‘not belonging’ though one wants to belong and make the most of university spaces, often idealised as spaces of unfettered learning, and of dialogue – this has to do partially at least with the way cultural capital works in any context, the easy and casual ‘consciousness of kind’ that exists amongst young persons born to books, and art; dismissive contempt for those who don’t know this culture, indeed, cannot be part of this culture, won’t get the jokes, the references to world cinema, to music of a certain kind… and it is only through deliberate association, through alternate student groups or reading circles or support networks that students get ‘to belong’. Even so, women and queer students have been beset by a sense of non-belonging, in existing student bodies, and have formed organisations of their own, without ceasing to be part of existing ones…

More fundamentally, not belonging also has to do with the way in which non-elitist cultures are not valued, indeed not acknowledged as such; just as how knowledge that inheres in labour and the skill of the worker is not granted that status. While there has been attempt at ‘inclusion’ in the syllabi, there has been no, or not enough conceptual discussion on the ‘enculturing’ that unfolds in oppressed communities, and what that means, and how might one view it as a significant expression of a common and shared humanity – and such an enculturing has to do with a range of things, from food to song, from how we tend space to how we practise affection…

While Dalit thinkers have spoken continually about such enculturing in our various and varied contexts, such ‘vernacular’ debates do not figure as they ought to, in our reimagining the university. And whatever attempts have been made have been spontaneous, deliberate and voluntary, from the beef festivals to the wholesale rethinking of culture that happens in Chennai every year, thanks to Neelam Cultural Centre that conducts a set of events every April to mark Dalit History Month. The point is to ‘belong’ to a university space is an affective need and for this, the university has to be in touch with the hinterland, the world outside in meaningful ways… for the streets are more resonant than our classrooms with changing social and cultural relationships and expressions, and also unchanging custom and habit…In our imagining of the university, this remains a matter to do with individual teachers, rather than a way of thinking about pedagogy, and about the traffic that has to be sustained between the university and the world outside. For only this helps us access learning held out by social and historical developments. In the present, these latter acquire importance chiefly as subjects of research, but it is important as well to ask how we may grasp them as they unfold, are in process, and work with the possibilities they offer to enrich university life and learning… rather how might teachers and the pedagogies that are pursued be open to evolving cultures of dissent, to new expressions?

Secondly, the longing for knowledge which brings students to universities, how is that addressed? Is it disregarded, when the student is viewed as not capable of living up to certain standards? Is it understood in relation to the student’s context, to where she comes from, and her understanding of knowledge? And in this context, it becomes important to inquire into how teachers are prepared or not prepared to receive students from marginal and oppressed cultures and social worlds - and how they understand or fail to understand the life worlds of their wards… In a personal sense, teachers are open to student needs - Perumal Murugan has a book of essays on his experience as a teacher in a government college in small town Tamil Nadu, and he points to how he had learned to be a better teacher by being receptive to students, especially to those who are not ‘present’ in class as they ought to be, because they also work while studying, and tend to doze off in class, if they make it…and how he had worked along with them to help them retain a measure of enthusiasm of learning…

But we need to think beyond such instances of teacher good will and here this question becomes important: how might we draw on anti-caste traditions of protest, thought, knowledge and practice, in a pedagogic sense? How might teachers be ‘oriented’ to acknowledge the existence of such traditions, and learn from them in order to engage in conversations with students who wish to travel to the stars…

This appears an important consideration – given both the ubiquity of caste not only in the classroom but the staffroom, and the silence that accompanies such ubiquity. In Tamil Nadu’s universities caste is a public secret in some, and a not so public secret in others – and it is not unusual for not just students, but faculty to be asked ‘under which quota have you been selected?’ Yet caste is not a subject of analytical discussion, in any classroom whatsoever - and it is possible even in Dravidian land for teachers to not know about anti brahmanical and anti caste struggles and also remain deliberately disinterested in dalit struggles and histories…

Lastly: the nurturing of the imagination, of the stardust that we are made of - and today this is a challenge in more ways than one. For, this appears no country for young persons… and universities are unable to affirm the rights of young persons to their views, choices… The cynicism that has greeted dalit and other subaltern aspirations so evident in the events that unfolded after Rohith passed, is now official policy in many places. And even if it isn’t, when young people are punished for their views, they receive little or no support from the institutions they are part of - at best there are individual teachers who caution them to be strategic or express themselves in ways that do not invite punitive state action.

The problem is not only the political present but our social pasts as well: while we have evolved a culture of sustaining the imagination when it comes to freedom of expression, of the mind, we are yet to sustain one that combines the desire and joy of freedom with the will to equality. We do not consider social justice struggles poetic - there is no hymn to equality as there is to liberty in our progressive circles, unless it has to do with revolutionary justice. In this context, we need to work at evolving the means or ways to nurture anticaste imaginations -

I remember listening to an African American sociologist, George Lipsitz who began his presentation on the future of subaltern urban cultures, by proclaiming, ‘I have come to speak of love…’ and went on to do just that. In his address he made clear that love was inseparable from building anew and from justice. In this context, he recalled the tender rehabilitation measures undertaken by people of Vietnamese origin and African Americans, in the wake of Hurricane Katharina that had ravaged the city of New Orleans.

Love is a crucial axis in anti-caste thought. While testifying before the Simon Commission, Ambedkar ruefully noted that one cannot make a person love his fellow being through an act of legislature, thereby pointing to what law can and cannot do. But as he made clear love was at stake and he would go on to gloss it in diverse ways, settling for the term ‘maitri’ in The Buddha and His Dhamma.

Rohith Vemula wanted justice and love, compassion and equality, and above maithri. And we need that imagination of maithri in our campuses, and which nurtures social fellowship: the onus to do this ought not to be only on those who are convinced of the virtue of fraternity but those who do not ask themselves why we are not fraternal, as a people, and if we are, why is that limited, either to kin or caste or ideological networks. The imagination to realise interbeing, to cite Thich Nhat Hanh, and social endosmosis as Ambedkar called it - this is necessary not only in the face of unrelenting hatred and resentment, but also because it takes us away from hierarchy, from graded inequality and untouchability and that imagination is what Rohith Vemula had, and which was disregarded, vilified. And it is that imagination that will help us be a more humane and just society.

V. Geetha

“Who can accept that the Vedas contain something not comprehensible by human senses? Who can accept that there is an eternal connection between a word and its meaning? Who can accept that sound is not created nor manifested but is eternal? … Why did the Brahmins make such a desperate attempt for establishing a desperate conclusion? What did they want to gain thereby? Was it because the Vedas had been made the exponent of the Chaturvarna with the Brahmins as the Lord of all?”

Dr Ambedkar, Riddle No. 5: Why did the Brahmins go further and declare that the Vedas are neither made by Man nor by God? BAWS: Volume 4, Dr Ambedkar Foundation, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of India, 2014 (reprint), p. 36).

Riddles in Hinduism raises a range of questions to do with the received wisdom of Hindu texts, the mythic prowess and infallibility attributed to various gods and with the cruel ambiguity that inhered in its legal strictures. By raising these questions Dr Ambedkar sought to denaturalize knowledges that were resident in Hindu lore and scripture. This on the one hand. On the other hand, he enquired into the making of these knowledges, and their sacred character. The sacred bothered him for a host of reasons: for one, he held the Hindu social order had been rendered sacerdotal, which explained both its longevity and its resistance to change. Secondly, he was deeply interested in the role of the intellectual class in sustaining the idea of the sacred – their privileged relationship to the sacred, he came to argue, rendered their authority permanent, and placed them at a remove, and forever, from all others in the social order.

This meant then that nothing was knowable except in terms already set and determined by them. For Ambedkar this was not only a question of epistemology, but also of history. For Brahminical knowledge systems appeared impervious to change, rather, even as they acknowledged breaks and discontinuous moments in time, such as those heralded by revolutions or catastrophes, none of these was allowed its singularity. Rather such events were recouped and reinterpreted within narratives and tropes, which were already in place. His reading of the Brahminical recasting of the Buddhist ideal of non-violence was an attempt to explain how this process worked. (I thought, in this context, what Marc Bloch had to say about words: “…to the great despair of historians, men fail to change their vocabulary every time they change their customs.” In our context, the vocabulary appears to have been deliberately kept in place.)

Brahminical ways of knowing had also made it difficult if not impossible to question, except within the terms allowed by its supple epistemological frameworks, long standing systems of inequality. In all those writings where he compared untouchability to serfdom, villeinage, Roman and American slavery and anti-semitism it is the persistence of these peculiarly Indian phenomena in time that Ambedkar tried to grasp: why had they not been superseded, what had helped sustain graded inequality and the abject separation that was untouchability? In a larger and more theoretical sense, his question was: what was the time of the caste order and untouchability, and how do we grasp it, when the texts at our disposal appear to be disinterested in accounting for time’s movement, except in a cosmological and fantastic sense? A related concern was: what was the historical temporality of knowledge, in the Indian context?

Such questions were askable, so to speak, because the modern era had put paid to Brahmin monopoly over knowledge, and the printing press had desacralized scripture. Science and in a different sense the emergence of History as a discipline, had helped interrogate the given-ness of Brahminical explanations of tradition and the past. On the other hand, in an everyday, commonsensical sense, the Hindu social order continued to absorb the shock of the new, so to speak: the manner in which the modern Hindu mind had separated the cause of liberty from that of equality was a case in point, as Ambedkar argued in Ranade, Jinnah and Gandhi. The modern had thus been partially allowed its charge, but only on the condition that the call for freedom was not immediately translated into an affirmation of the right of all to be free of social strictures and hierarchy. Freedom from alien rule was considered primary, important and a value that superseded other values. This supersession in turn disallowed equality its historical charge.

D. D. Kosambi linked such efforts at partial acceptance and adroit recouping of the new and the unfamiliar to the persistence of caste. He argued that for caste to persist, history must be negated: Referring to the emergence of the Satyanarayana festival in western India, he noted that this perhaps did not exist before the 19th century but had yet been made to seem ancient – and this must have been on account of Brahminical sanction. Often such sanction was made permanent in the form of texts that a Brahmin wrote or was called upon to write about a particular event or persona. In this instance, a local pir had been transformed into a Vaishnavite sant and eventually into a god. Such processes of reinscription, observed Kosambi, helped secure the stability of the caste order: “The caste system is designed to preserve Indian society in a static mould. Its principal function is the negation of history and therewith the negation of progress” (D D Kosambi, ‘Caste and Class in India’, in Brajadulal Chattopadhyay [Ed.] Combined Methods in Indology and Other Writings, OUP, 2002, p. 774-75).

The negation of history that bothered Ambedkar – and Kosambi – is a phenomenon that we continue to grapple with as historians; and not only in the sense that History continues to prove bothersome to those who are invested in social stability and control. We have also had to reckon with the manner in which the past is viewed as almost entirely seamless with the present, and called to do service to thoroughly contemporary agendas – which leads to the production of what Romila Thapar has described as our “contemporary pasts”. The historian in India thus has a double, one whose voice echoes what historians say, but is not interested in comprehending the historical process and more invested in claiming the past, as ancestry, golden age, or as readable entirely within the terms of the now. In the event, such readings fail to achieve the delicate balance that historians seek to establish between evidence and truth, what may be inferred from what perhaps actually was, and between the biases of the historian and the larger picture she is at pains to comprehend.

How and why are such contemporary pasts produced? Prof Thapar points to the following modes of linking of past and present: Firstly, through the invocation of what she calls ‘collective memory’ which assumes a unified sense of the past that all ostensibly possess, but which is often fairly simplistic and relies on selective remembering and forgetting and does not imagine that there can be plural memories, or even changeable ones. Secondly, those who until now have been spoken for in history, but who now wish to speak, also look to the past to reconstruct their identities in the present. Such reconstructions assume coherence in light of contemporary needs rather than on what might be actually known from the past. A third aspect of rendering the past contemporary has to do with the urgent assertion of religious identities on the argument that these are given and primordial. These ways of reckoning with the past are played out in the public realm, and occasioned by specific events, often of a critical or crisis-ridden nature.

Unsurprisingly, these public expressions of the past are rooted in sectarian claims, which jostle for attention and meaning, with equal conviction, sometimes bordering on vehemence. What we have here, then, is not quite the sort of negation of history that worried Ambedkar and Kosambi, but productions of the past that are intriguing, fascinating and often problematic.

Importantly, Indian historians have worked against the grain of these productions, these various contemporary pasts that shape public understanding. Drawing on the material evidence of inscriptions, artefacts and literature, they have argued for a historical temporality that is uneven and differentiated across regions; and which has to do, not only with the Indian nation’s current boundaries, but which link events and influences across oceans and trade routes. They have moved away from celebratory descriptions of kings and dynasties, communities and traditions, calculated to affirm patriotic, regional or religious and caste pride and gone on to explore what Romila Thapar calls “a broad based study of social forms”, with a focus on “religious movements, patterns of the economy and on cultural articulations... varying cultures – from that of forest dwellers, jhum cultivators, pastoralists, peasants, artisans, to that of merchants, aristocracies and specialists of ritual and belief…” In other words, historians have pointed to the essential plurality of pasts, multiple temporalities as well as the ways in which identities emerge over time, are reworked, cast away…

Prof Thapar’s own writing furnishes excellent examples of how a historian’s location in the present can be put to critical and not merely popular or polemical advantage, particularly the essays gathered in the volumes, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities through History and Indian Cultures as Heritage: Contemporary Pasts. Even though she is engaged with contemporary concerns to do with the use and abuse of history, she has preferred to respond from within the terrain of history-writing. That is, she argues, as a historian must, drawing on evidence, suggesting an interpretation rather than asserting it, and by pointing to the essentially open ended nature of historical analysis. She has thus called attention to how the historian views her discipline – as one that has to rethink its premises in the face of new ways of thinking, and in light of new evidence. As she has noted, on account of dalit and feminist writings, and the work of social and labour historians, and of those who write histories of religion and culture, Indian history writing has changed substantially, not only in terms of the objects of investigation, but also the methods of understanding and analysis.

It seems to me that we might benefit from her earnest affirmation of the historian’s craft – to use a phrase made famous by Marc Bloch - and sense of vocation to illumine complex and often murky debates to do with the past and present that all of us are confronted by and pushed to negotiate. And here we might want to reflect on our own biases as well. While we recognize that those who are invested in contemporary pasts tend to mythicise history, we tend to associate mythmaking largely with the regressive Right. But perhaps we might also want to ask whether those we consider progressive are more considerate of historical method. We might therefore not posit the historian’s task only in terms of the political positions she endorses, but also in terms of her sense of history as a form of knowledge.

In this context, I would like to index popular-critical approaches to the past – which are different from those espoused by the Hindu right - that speak to all of us, as citizens invested in a good and just society. There is the genre of resistant writing, which challenges dominant narratives, and retells important events from the perspective of oppressed and marginal groups. An assertive and celebratory identity is at stake in such expressions – and while they do draw from historical writings that have engaged with the undercastes and classes, the energy that shapes their content are movements and constituencies firmly rooted in the present. Brijranjan Mani’s work, Debrahmanising History is a case in point; and in a different sense, Gail Omvedt’s latter day work, particularly her writings on Buddhism and caste.

A second sort of writing has to do with undoing what is perceived to be the oversights of the past, and this has as much to do with questions of method, of not only sources, but also authorial intentions: once again, these draw from contemporary struggles and notions of justice, and debates to do with points of view. One of the persistent questions that this genre of writing raises is this: does the historian’s caste and class identity preclude her from examining certain sorts of historical evidence and in considering certain points of view as historically valid. A generation of young bahujan and dalit thinkers have thus sought to query what they describe as ‘savarna’ versions of the past, and gone on to query the work of generations of historians, including R. S. Sharma and Romila Thapar, amongst others.

A third set of texts seeks to create new canons of historical writing, putting together texts and arguments that retell a familiar episode, or which force a reckoning with sources that have purportedly remained outside the purview of the historian’s attention: we saw this in the range of texts that was published on 1857.

A fourth set comprises texts by who are not historians, as we understand the term, but who nevertheless were seriously engaged with a study of the past, to better understand and take forward their politics and struggles in the present: Ambedkar’s historical writings immediately come to mind. But the past also interested Nehru, as it did others who came to political prominence in the provinces, and for a range of reasons. This category of texts is the most complex and sensitive of all that I have listed so far, because the past is not celebrated so much as drawn on, to both validate as well as illumine the present. Interestingly, Ambedkar though marked his own approach in this context in rather specific ways: his sense of the past was mostly pedagogic and critical, and he referenced it to make sense of the present in fairly specific ways. For instance, his interest in what was termed the Brahminical counter-revolution in history was not only on account of what that purportedly achieved with respect to Buddhism; equally he wished to understand what he considered a counter-revolution in the present age of nationalism and Gandhi. In his extended version of Revolution and Counter-revolution in Ancient India, he had intended to write a chapter titled, The Present Age is the Age of Counter-revolution.

Those who study the past from the point of view of the silenced and the exploited are not always trained historians, but they work with historical material. They produce knowledge that is valuable in a social and political sense, and which helps mobilise identities and histories to contemporary ends, whether these have to do with political power or cultural assertion. How might we evaluate these knowledges?

I think this is an important question because sympathetic as historians might be to certain causes, and therefore to versions of the past that are politically and socially enabling, we might yet have to distinguish such efforts from the writing of history. For, what is at stake here is the historian’s craft – comprising tools, approaches honed over time, and a mode of analysis that resists polemic and dogma. In the name of relevance and usefulness, we imagine that we need to go beyond – and of course we must – as historians. But perhaps we need also to make a case for what we do as historians, and locate the historian’s responsibility within, rather than outside the terms of her craft. I would like to reference Prof. Thapar’s work in this context and consider two important texts, the early Ashoka and the Decline of the Mauryas and the later day Somanatha.

It seems to me that both these are fine examples of how a historian bears the imprint of her times, and responds from within the boundaries of her discipline. In her preface to Ashoka Prof Thapar lists all the work that had until then been done on Ashoka, and notes that there is room to do more, given the endless fascination that the man and his rule appeared to hold for modern historians. This was in 1961. How may we read this continuing historiographical interest in Ashoka? Historians working on Buddhism throughout the late colonial period were drawn to their task by the rationality and modernity that appeared implicit in Buddhism. The discovery of the Ashokan inscriptions proved exciting and suggested the possibility of an indigenous model of kingship and rule that was startlingly modern, and therefore a worthy inspiration. A ruler who had turned wise and compassionate, after an initial tryst with war and violence, seemed to speak to the times of Gandhian non-violence, and his affirmation of the dhamma seemed a undertaking that answered to contemporary anxieties about just and responsible rule.

But it was not only the professional historian who was drawn to Ashoka. The monarch was a heroic figure for those active in the public realm as well. And here I wish to call attention to one important and consequential instance of how Ashoka was rendered contemporary. He was a favourite of Jawaharlal Nehru, who appears to have envisioned him as a sort of ‘philosopher-king’ who won the world through acts of dhamma, rather than conquest. Nehru had a long standing and rather affective interest in Buddhism, and it was in and through the figure of Ashoka that he sought to construct an image of the future republican state, founded on strong Indian traditions, and informed by an ideal of rule that combined the rule of law with the imperative to compassion. Nehru’s sense of Ashoka and his claiming of Buddhism as a civilizational path which modern India would do well to follow were symbolized in and through a series of state ceremonies including the observance of 2500 years of the Buddha’s presence in this part of the world. Such ceremonies also helped to position India and its Buddhist past within a recognizably Asian historical context, linking her political aspirations to those evinced by the people and leaders of other countries, equally within the Buddhist sphere of influence, from Burma to Indonesia, and Sri Lanka to Nepal.

So, in a sense, Romila Thapar’s work on the great monarch and his context was part of a long history of engagement with Buddhism and its greatest imperial supporter, undertaken by scores of scholars, both professional and amateur. Clearly, for her too, the story of Ashoka and his reign symbolized something important, being of a generation that was witness to a young nation struggling to measure its presence in the modern world, and wear its past and present in ways that would allow it to claim either. But she worked at her material as a historian, bringing to her subject a methodological tidiness, reading her sources carefully and balancing received and reimagined versions of Ashoka and his rule with what the sources and material evidence offered her. On the other hand, she was not entirely immune to the power and charisma of the Emperor. This is evident in how she interprets the dhamma that Ashoka upheld in his edicts:

For Ashoka, Dhamma was a way of life…based on a high degree of social ethics and civic responsibility. Not being a theorizing brahman he saw this in terms of practical everyday life… Conscious social behavior based on a simple reasoned understanding of secular relationships was for him essential to any society. Under the influence of brahminical teaching this tendency was dying out in the society of his time. The twice born were given privileges and priorities not because of individual merit but because of the happy accident of birth. This feature of brahminical teaching was amongst the many that would be disputed by the teachings of Ashoka. …by holding out the possibility of heavenly bliss …. He tried to raise the idea of responsibility from mere etiquette to a genuinely felt social responsibility…

Yet, she refrains from romanticizing him and his rule and goes on to locate either within distinct material processes – of extended cultivation, expansion of trade, enhanced revenue extraction and the emergence of a centralized polity and State. These processes, she makes it clear, have to be read together, and no consideration of Ashoka’s greatness could afford to ignore the political nature of his experiments with the dhamma.

In Romila Thapar’s reading, then, Ashoka is neither an exemplar, nor one who was a product of a moment in time, who merely delivered what shifts in productive life and relationships demanded. He represented an ethic that was, to be sure, of his time, but it is also one that she clearly found necessary to underscore as central to our existence as well. As she notes:

Ashoka’s humanism lay not in his insistence on non-violence, whenever and wherever possible, but more important it lay in his insistence on responsible social behavior and …human limitations, when in earlier edicts he preached moderation in action. It is apparent on reading the edicts that he constantly stressed the dignity of man.

With regard to Somanatha: as we know, for a certain type of nationalism, it had become an important measure of what Islamic invasions ostensibly did to Hindu monuments in India, and the destroyed temple was nurtured as a symbol of Hindu injury and victimhood. In different yet related ways, Savarkar, K M Munshi and Vallabhai Patel subscribed to this sense of injury and in time viewed the rebuilding of the temple as a duty that every Indian ought to undertake. This “duty” was given a national character in the immediate aftermath of Partition.

Romila Thapar published - in 2004 - her reflective book on the temple, the raids that it sustained and the many sources in which the raids figure or do not figure and in doing so, she underlined the problems that inhere in interpreting the history of a site that has become considerably mythicized. Her interest in Somanatha was of course not accidental. Starting from the late 1980s, the question of Hindu injury was forefronted in public debates, and made the cornerstone of a politics of othering, blaming and hatred. This politics was brought to bear upon another historical site, the Babri Masjid, which, it was claimed had been built on the ruins of a Hindu temple. The site was also claimed as the birthplace of the god Ram.

On the eve of Indian Independence, Somanatha was touted as a symbol of Hindu suffering in the face of Islamic intolerance and violence – its very history seemed a vindication of the two nation theory, of the idea that Muslims and Hindus cannot expect to live together. In 1990, Babri Masjid emerged as the symbol of what appeared to persist in spite of Partition: a sense of injury, aggression that sought to revenge injury, and a politics that nurtured hatred and legitimized violence. The Masjid, it was made clear had to be destroyed – it belonged to a set of unfinished tasks to do with building a Hindu nation-state. True enough, Somanatha had been rebuilt, but had the wrongs done to it been avenged?

Romila’s response to the conjuncture of the 1990s was multifarious: a series of extended writings, which criticized the Hindu Right’s disdain for history and their disinterest in the historical method and epistemologies; and identified the conceptual issues at stake for the historian, indeed for all those who were historical-minded, the relationship between history and the present, religion and politics, civic cultures and hate cultures. Nowhere was her writing as acute and sophisticated, enduring and reflective in reflecting on these issues, as in Somanatha. A fascinating instance of a historian’s relationship to her sources, the book deconstructs the power of public rhetoric to do with the past and present in no uncertain terms. This is what she has to say about her endeavor in writing this book:

What I have tried to show is, that even monuments have their own history, wrapped in narrative. This may vary according to who is viewing the monument and reading the narrative, and what is the nature of the event associated with it. I have referred to three categories of texts that deal specifically with the history of what happened to the temple at Somanatha. There are other texts that tell us about the persons who might have had distant associations with it, such as references in medieval epics or in the folk traditions of Rajasthan and the western Ganga plain. They are all written at different periods of time and refer to persons and events that have an indirect connection with the main story, but provide vignettes of other ways of looking at it. And I have also tried to show that each view can be quite different if not contrary to the other. In such a situation it is difficult to accept only one view as the accurate view. There has to be a critical assessment of all categories of evidence and an analysis of each, in order to understand the social and cultural dimensions of the past.

We see here a fine instance of how the historian is most relevant to her times when she practices her craft, uses it to organize the sort of knowledge that history alone can provide: open-ended, tentative, and assembled out of such evidence and clues that are available to the historian, and which her imagination as much as her rationality grasp as parts of a whole. Speaking of the work of the historian contra the work that collective memory does or is made to do, Romila Thapar goes on to say:

We all know that memories are constructed. We choose to remember certain things and forget others. We choose to remember fragments of the past in particular ways and imbue them with meaning that is often only pertinent to the present. And we have reasons for narrating a supposed memory which may not be what actually happened, but is what we would like to think might have happened. …In the case of Somanatha, the supposedly collective memory and the ‘trauma’ was constructed by the British debate in the House of Commons, and subsequently adopted by colonial historians as well as a variety of Indians to serve various political purposes.

The historian’s craft, Romila makes clear values memories as objects of study, not as explanations of the past, and it is only when memories are put alongside other matters to do with the past, and assessed and evaluated does anything like a coherent picture begin to emerge. But even here, much depends on what might be said, inferred, concluded, based on such evidence that we have. We are of course at liberty to read this evidence in various ways, but with this sense: that bits of evidence in themselves do not make sense. They have to be fitted together, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. And the latter is something that we construct, based on what we have, our personal political and ethical inclinations and how we place our own understanding in relation to other such efforts.

The historian is thus a craftsperson than a mythmaker, or a literary enthusiast, though she shares some ground with the latter – for she is equally interested in narrative, in creating a sequence of events, But she does so, through a process of careful assemblage: of material and textual evidence, a reconstruction of the spatial and physical contexts of an act, a thought and event, through maps or images, and this reconstruction is aided by special linguistic and interpretative tools developed over a period of time by fellow historians.

Consider for instance Megasthenes’ description of the seven classes of people he appears to have noticed in India. These passages have been used to point to the persistence of the caste system in India, and to counter claims of an ancient golden age: this was done by the Abbe Dubois, for instance, and repeated by others, including Ambedkar. Romila Thapar works through this categorization in Ashoka, measuring it against other evidence from that period, asking questions about the credibility of certain descriptions, looking for biases, in short, she submits her source material to detailed critique and analysis. To her, Megasthenes’ descriptions are assertions that need to be interrogated before they may be understood, and in order to understand them, she employs a set of tools to assess their meaning; whereas the Abbe and also Ambedkar treat them as accounts of a phenomenon that existed as such and whose meaning is therefore self-evident. While all three are interested in Megasthenes for what he tells us about ancient India and the caste order, for the historian his text has to be accounted for, both in terms of its existence in a moment of time, its relationship to other texts, and its reception over centuries. Also, its relationship to the present has to be established, and may not be assumed: for her, to quote Marc Bloch, ancestry cannot ever be explanation.

This is why it makes sense to speak of the historian’s craft, rather than anything else. We know that following Hayden White, the historian’s vocation was seen as being as much literary as it was scientific, and in this sense all historical narratives, sources as well as studies, came to be viewed as texts which need to be read, as one reads a literary text, attending to words, phrases, similes, metaphors, and to the very form of communication, the resort to rhetoric, repetition, to stock phrases and so on. In this view of things, Romila Thapar’s careful elucidation of Somanatha’s pasts and K M Munshi’s meditations on the need to build the temple are to be considered equally valid reconstructions of the past. I would like to submit that while all historical narratives are ‘constructed’ so to speak, the historian’s narrative is a product of self-conscious labour which draws on tools we have evolved over the years, and which we are committed to refining and rethinking. In other words, the historian, allows her reader into the history workshop where she forges her narrative – and this is no more evident than in her assembling of sources, footnotes, explanations, citations, maps, etc. Whereas, the popular ideologue does not, indeed, there is no workshop to show for his efforts.

In conclusion: The historian’s craft, I submit, is what marks her enterprise to be essentially different from those that might bear a family resemblance to what the historian does, but which are premised less on the craft of history and have to do with the uses of history. For the historian, though, the past is important for other reasons: as Romila Thapar points out, the past cannot be annulled and by the same token, it cannot be casually spoken of, or wrapped into present day needs. The historian’s task then is to assemble the past in and through the protocols that make up her craft, and submit it to a reading that in the final analysis must necessarily be tentative, speculative. For, while the past cannot be changed, knowledge of the past does alter, a transformation that has to do with the moment of inquiry, the tools at our disposal and the state of our investigative techniques at that point in time. The truth of the past, such as it is, rests on the state of our discipline and this in turn is dependent on the collective labour of all that work at deciphering the past.

We cannot let this collective labour be held ransom by those who hold the past hostage to their limited, banal and regressive politics of the present.

The PM clearly wished to discredit states where his party did not wield office and power. He was also shooting barbs at Tamil Nadu’s ruling party that had steadfastly refused to give in to the BJP’s vision of a unitary nation and instead insisted on a federal India. He also did not want to countenance Tamil Nadu’s insistence on its civilisational “difference”. Rather than argue his case, he chose meanness as a weapon.

The PM’s paltry imagination belies the image that his worshipful troll industry has created, of a kind, well-meaning, fatherly figure, a statesman who wished no one and no country ill. For, behind this veneer is a political approach that slights, is petty in its criticisms and which seeks to instill and build on a vague resentment that many of his fellow citizens hold within themselves - especially in these times of precarity, anxiety and fear.

K Balagopal noted nearly three decades ago (“Why Did December 6, 1992 Happen?” Economic and Political Weekly, April 24, 1993) when the Hindu Right had begun to makes its presence felt in the polity, that this resentment needs to be understood in the context of what we are, as a society. For, we are a people who relate to each other not as equals. Rather as Dr Ambedkar described it, we are bound to each other in a relationship of ‘graded inequality’ on the one hand, and by ‘untouchability’ on the other. Balagopal pointed out that when the “oppressed and the underprivileged in India’s political universe” began to challenge this social order, demanding parity, equality and justice, it was met with resentment and frustration.

This was not a simple sort of backlash against the oppressed. Given that we are all unequally situated, in relation to each other, each social segment experienced a different measure of anger. For, to quote Balagopal -

“… privileges exist at all levels of society and not just at the top—though not all of them may have an equally determining influence on the social structure—and … therefore there is a little enemy of equality within each one of us, however lowly we may be in relation to the totality. The smallest farmer thinks he is superior to the wage labourer—especially, though not only, if the latter is untouchable—and the lowliest man thinks he is lord of his wife.”

Hindutva appealed to this discomfort with equality and the concomitant resentment it gave rise to. It is therefore to be understood as embodying a fascist concentration of negative traits, already present in our social context.

Today, this appeal to negativity is four-fold, given the economic and social uncertainty of our time. And Hindutva’s appeal is therefore more resonant than ever. Meanwhile our political imagination flounders, and we are unable to challenge what comes easily to those in power as well as to those that power acts upon - that sense of incipient and small-minded indignation that cannot suffer equality or the demands for justice. For we are up against a world view that holds itself to be righteous, and ‘dharmic’:

“The purpose of the dharmic life was said to be eventual moksha, which is an ideological notion, a myth that covers up the real purpose of social stability and orderly existence of hierarchical privileges and exploitation. Today, in modern terms, Hindutva adds to this traditional notion a completely modern (and secular!) patriotism. Apart from eventual moksha to oneself, this dharmic life will bring greatness to the country, which is as wholly secular an ideal as equity, except that it is anti-human and obnoxious.”

This anti-human politics is both ‘normal’, given our social order, and ‘exceptional’, given the specifically perverse nature of Hindutva and clearly one cannot challenge the latter without ceaselessly interrogating the former.

Based on these very exciting and little known texts – little known to us, though not to those Dalit writers and archivists, such as Anbu Ponnoviyam, who had studiously kept faith with Iyothee Thass and his world – we wrote a long piece in 1993 for the “Economic and Political Weekly”. In addition, I wrote an essay on the questions that Thass’ work posed for our understanding of history in the Tamil context.

Even as we worked our way through this new material, we read other things: Annie Beasant’s “New India” in the Theosophical Society Library, under the gaze of Madame Blavatsky. A framed picture on the walls of the quiet reading room made the space appear haunted, especially on grey monsoon mornings. Much of our time though was spent in the library housed in the premises of the party, founded by Periyar, the Dravidar Kazhagam. Seated on rickety steel chairs, we copied out passage after passage from the journals he edited – “Kudi Arasu”, “Puratchi,” “Pagutharivu”…

And then began the task of putting all of this together: our first chapter examined the making of the neo-Brahmin and neo-Brahmanism. Drawing on the ‘Vox Populi’ columns in New India, we pointed to the issues at stake for the modernizing Brahmin, troubled by untouchability, yet unwilling to give up varnadharma, and who could not quite think beyond accommodating Dalits within the varna order, recouping them, as it were, within the ‘shudra’ category. We also took note of the caste-gender conundrum, and how the Brahmin household would not, for instance, countenance post-puberty marriages without a shudder – female sexual and emotional autonomy seemed both unsettling and fearful, for what it would do to Brahmin male selfhood and the caste family.

We then examined the emergence of Non-Brahmanism, not as a reaction to the neo-Brahmin, but alongside him and his reasoning – and here we took note of material as well as ideological contexts that shaped the former. I wonder though, in retrospect, if we ought to have done more: one of our earliest readers, the historian Sumit Sarkar suggested that perhaps we ought to have paid more conceptual as well as historical attention to the political economy of caste. In this context, we gave liberalism its due, and rather than measure the achievements and limitations of the Justice party, which called itself ‘Non-Brahmin’, we demonstrated its working – and what it managed to do, but equally could not, or would not do. And here we called attention to the questions raised by its ideologues in at least two instances, to do with the party’s attitude towards Dalits, and the regulations it brought about in the governance of temples. We also noted the troubled relationship that Periyar and his Self-respect movement had with the Justicites: warm in their commendation of its rank and file workers, and unsure about the politics of its leadership.

The most exciting parts of the book, from the point of view of writing, had to do with the Self-respect movement, and the manner it reckoned with caste, class, gender, on the one hand and religion and culture, on the other. For the first time, English readers and, in a sense, Tamil ones as well, got to read a range of voices and expressions, especially by women, and take note of the very wide spectrum of issues and concerns that the Self-respecters addressed, and equally the creative reworking of public and private cultures: new marriage vows, radical songs for every occasion, theatrical productions, advancing the Tamil reader’s knowledge of progressive politics across the world, paying heed to left politics (Kudi Arasu carried the first translation (a part-translation) of the “Communist Manifesto “and sections of Engels’ “Principles of Communism”), and most important, from the 1930s, regular reporting and extending of solidarity to Dr Ambedkar, his movement and his thought – “Annihilation of Caste “was translated almost immediately after its publication in English and serialized in “Kudi Arasu”.

The chapter on the Self-respecters’ views of socialism, and the manner they engaged with it, broke with the polarized politics of class and caste in the Tamil context, and took note of the intermeshing of ideas and struggles, and how this meshing has seldom been accounted for, or even heeded. This led to at least some people on the left reading Periyar more systematically. It also led to sections of the Dravidian movement reckon with its quasi-socialist moments, and reflect on how that legacy ought to be taken ahead.

The chapter on the gender and sexuality questions broke new ground in many ways: for one, it referenced the writings and thoughts of a number of women, and for another, it outlined the rich array of themes that the Self-respecters had addressed: from critiques of chastity to discussions on viable contraceptives; from the uses of reason for women, to the importance of social boycott, of the orthodox and the Brahmanical classes, from women as workers to the sexualisation of attributes….

The book ended on a grave and wistful note – with the anti-Hindu struggles of 1937. It was argued that while this was the beginning of a political critique of what may be called Hindu-Hindi-India, by the same token, it gave rise to a gendered Tamil nationalist project, which, eventually would prove consequential for anti-caste as well as an anti-patriarchal politics.

In retrospect, I see the limitations of the book: while it has two extensive chapters on Iyothee Thass, it did not engage enough with the existing body of writing, in Tamil, on Dalit struggles and pasts.  Today, this writing is extensive, and we have a granular, situated and well-argued account of these latter – in our Tamil book, which has gone into several editions, we have reckoned with this emergent scholarship, and pointed to the limitations of our work. With the only revised English edition (2008), we took on – in our Afterword - other matters, the possibility of horizontal comradeship, which refuses and resists the logic of the caste order, while addressing critically the shudra-Dalit contradiction.

I would like to extract from this Afterword, for this is something that remains central to our understanding of Periyar, his movement, his ideas and legacy:

“(These are) the two major preoccupations of Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: political Non-Brahminism and the critical gendering of social radicalism in the discourses of self-respect. We would like to restate the importance of these ideas. Political Non-Brahminism, both of the Justice party and the Self-Respect movement defined rather ably the contours of social and cultural disability in caste society: both Justicites and Self-Respecters showed, for instance, that economic status and class privilege do not automatically translate into social capital and hegemony. Further, they insisted that the demand for reservation represented an ethical claim made on the common good and government by social classes and castes that played seminal roles in production and the labour process. These arguments appear pertinent even a century later, when the question of reservation and rights appears unsettled and as prone to dismissive criticism. They appear apposite for another reason as well – the political assertion of dalits and the other so-called lower castes is understood mostly in terms of parties and leaders from these communities attaining political power. This rather truncated political imagination has no use for utopian or millenarian thought, which was a staple of all anti-caste discourses in the modern period, or for the rich histories that produced them.

Social radicalism, especially of the Self-Respect movement was argued not only in the context of the public sphere, but also required and mandated new practices of the self and community. These practices had as much to do with transforming gender relations, issues of conjugality, sexual norms and reproduction as they had to do with rewriting the rules of distance, touch, pollution and untouchability. This history, which shows the importance of making feminist and anti-caste politics speak to each other, is one that should stand us in good stead, in a context when debates around sexuality are more expansive than ever before, and yet are not quite able to engage the matter of caste and caste endogamy with that degree of sophistication or interest, which the subject requires. We would like to end with an invocation of Periyar’s famous description of the nature of the struggle against varnadharma: that it is akin to pulling a mountain down, using a flimsy lock of hair. Since that effort is unlikely to end in this generation or the next, it seems important to keep historical memory alive, and state and re-state what it was like to start pulling the mountain down, in the first place and why all those who were committed to this task imagined that history required them to turn the world upside down, while they did so”.  

Two of his texts provide us the answers. Said’s Reith lectures on ‘Representations of the Intellectual’ make a case for the intellectual’s vocation - clearly Said sees himself as being part of the dissenting civic tradition he upholds and celebrates. This tradition is one that confounds authority with the narratives and histories it rejects and represses. Much like how translations query, extend and renew the meanings of a text, the critic re-presents what has been frozen in discourse and time. Said’s idea of ‘travelling theory’, expounded in The World, the Text and the Critic, suggests that ideas are constitutively hybrid – they travel and acquire their characteristic meanings when given a local habitation and name. Semantic crossovers and dislocations, familiar to translators, are fundamental to the making of meaning – thus, according to Said, critics and intellectuals have to reckon with this traffic between cultures and contexts that seldom halts and if it does, only by design.  

Said’s definitions of the vocation of the intellectual and intellectual work are enormously suggestive. I would like to draw on them to elucidate Said’s own practice – which appears, in this view, a performance of translation. For Said, the intellectual is pre-eminently one who speaks truth to power. But he or she does so in a certain performative sense. Said notes that while much ink has been spilt on defining the intellectual, “not enough stock has been taken of the image, the signature, the actual intervention and performance, all of which taken together constitute the very life blood of every real intellectual” (Said 1993: 13). He recalls Sartre in this regard, and notes that his characteristic manner of exposition and public bearing marked him to be a distinctive dissenting figure. This distinction was embodied, Said goes on to argue, in “the sense of an important personal stake, the sheer effort, risk, will to say things about colonialism that infuriated his opponents and galvanized his friends and perhaps even embarrassed him retrospectively” (Said 1993: 13).

It seems to me that the intellectual, who publicly wrestles with ideas and representations that are forbidden or considered inappropriate, asserts, what Said in another context describes, as the contrapuntal nature of meaning. In a finely argued essay on reading literary texts, he notes that the boundaries of reading ought to be extended to include not merely their immediate contexts, but also a range of worldly institutions to which texts are linked. Thus, one cannot really hope to read Thackeray or Dickens without situating them within the histories and institutions of colonialism in Australia and India, of which both men were acutely aware. This sort of global contrapuntal analysis – that moves between considerations of culture to arguments about imperialism - is not to be modelled on the symphony, as studies of comparative literature usually are. Rather, as Said persuasively argues, such an analysis should aspire to the status of “an atonal ensemble” that is at once complex and uneven (Said 1994: 385-86).

It seems to me that the public critical mode which Said wishes theorists and intellectuals to adopt is one that the translator assiduously pursues in the privacy of her desk: searching for correspondences and resemblances, and having to reckon with partial and incomplete meanings, the translator works hard to make languages that appear alien to speak to each other. In doing so, she strives to get at that aspect of the original, which, as Benjamin noted, comes to life only in a translation. Said’s own work on Palestine is a translation in this sense: it makes known in English – as perhaps it need never be made known in Arabic – the poignant tragedy that is Palestine. Further, the manner in which he juxtaposes his writings on Palestine to the Orientalism that he deconstructs, produces that contrapuntal meaning he desired: the fictions produced by Orientalism stand illumined by the historical tragedy that is Palestine. In more than one sense, then, Said performed translation: in fact, made it into a distinctive vocation.

Said, it must be noted here, did not really see himself as ‘representing’ an authentic Palestine in the face of those inauthentic others produced by Orientalism and Zionism. He was most emphatic in his refusal of what he described as a ‘nativist’ position that committed him to defending, in an unqualified fashion, a national or even nationalist point of view. He did not wish to be entirely at home in a world that it could claim him for its own: just as how a translator is both at home and not in her own language, and is both disaffected as well as passionately loyal to the words she inhabits, the intellectual that Said upholds is one who is aware of the anxieties of the hour, the responsibilities of history and suffused with a passionate sense of space. Yet, she retains a measure of skepticism and irony about all of these.

The question of course is how does one inhabit one’s chosen land and language differently, rather how may one re-inhabit these, so that one does not repeat and constantly rehearse older habits of belonging and remain bound by loyalties that do not brook questioning? I would like to digress here to refer to how this was done in the Tamil historical context. E V Ramasamy Periyar, founder of the anti-caste self-respect movement in Tamil Nadu, thought through alien ideas – republicanism, atheism, socialism – in the vernacular. In doing so he re-shaped the Tamil language in such a manner that it appeared not only a repository of literary and metaphysical memory, but also a secular tongue that could respond to the modern moment with ease and vigour. Likewise, he re-imagined the world of the Tamils as a rationalist utopia, a world that would abolish caste differences and patriarchy and resists the lures of atavism and nostalgia.

Said too sought to inhabit the English language differently, in fact he vernacularised it, first by robbing it of its universal aura, and secondly by situating it in the context of a history that linked it to other languages and cultures, especially the ones that it colonised. He thus rendered English culture and literature unstable and partial subjects, and susceptible to, in fact informed by a politics they had long resisted and even refused: the politics of imperialism. By demonstrating that English studies was haunted by the geography of empire, he showed how the ‘original’, in this case, the English literary canon, came to be shadowed by its translation, by cultural expressions from the colonies that both mimicked and mocked the canon. “The reader and writer of literature … no longer need to be tied to an image of the poet or scholar in isolation, secure, stable, national in identity, class, gender or profession but can think and experience with Genet in Palestine or Algeria, with Tayib Salih as a Black Man in London, with Jamaica Kincaid in the white world, with Rushdie in India and Britain and so on” (Said 1994: 384-85)

Said’s model here is Frantz Fanon, who refused nativism, in fact railed against it. For Fanon, nationalism, if it merely sought the expulsion of the colonizer and desired to walk in the path laid out by the latter, was destined to fail, and worse, be as oppressive. He refused therefore, in Said’s words, the linear narrative of liberation and instead hinted at another political process which he did not make explicit but attempted to capture in his intense and dizzying prose: “In passages of an incandescent power, Fanon resorts to poetry and drama, to Rene Char and Keita Fodeba. Liberation is consciousness of self, ‘not the closing of a door to communication’, but a never-ending process of ‘discovery and encouragement’ leading to true national self-liberation and universalism” (Said 1994: 330). It is significant that Fanon conjures up his utopia in and through textual references that are promiscuous, partaking of diverse languages and that occupies, as translated texts do, the spaces in between them.  

Said rehearses Fanon’s call to liberation in his attempts to construct the identity that was most dear to him – an identity that was linked to and inseparable from Palestine. Speaking for it as only an exile could, from the margins of loss and pathos and yet refusing to surrender to sentimentality; naming Palestine in its Arabness, distilling from the many texts that claimed its illegitimacy, a humanity denied or compromised by Zionism and American imperialism: Said translated Palestine to represent one of the great moral causes of our times. I would like to refer here to that beautiful book, After the Last Sky, which translates Palestine for us through a series of images and stories, meditative recollections and ascribed meanings.

He also drew for us a map of Arab intellectual life, configuring the larger cultural context within which Palestine could be spoken of. Mahmud Darwish, Elias Khoury, Adonis, Abedlrahman Munif, Albert Hourani, Anwar Abdel Malek – through a constant recall of the great names and creators of Arab modernity he restored the Arab world and Palestine to a historical context that was as much theirs, as it was of their Anglo-American and European counterparts. He also sought an engagement with Islamic world views. Even as American planes pounded Iraq, denouncing Islamic radicalism, he wrote eloquently of the tradition of ijtihaad, or the right to interpret scripture as one deems it necessary and just. And later on, he did not desist from criticizing the PLO and its leadership in the wake of the Oslo Accords and later too, when they set up government in the occupied territories and the Gaza Strip.

Just as how he drew on the traditions of cultural criticism that he had been trained in, to illumine the hidden histories of western culture, of their being haunted at their very core by what they rejected and controlled, he held a critical mirror, furnished by western republican traditions, to the Arab world to both criticize despotism and identify those traditions of dissent and justice that complicated received notions of the despotic ‘Orient’. In both instances he did what translators usually do: make languages and cultures implicated in common though contested histories own up to that inheritance in complex ways

Said’s attempts at translating Palestine brings to mind other and more literal efforts, such as the translations of Mill and Paine into Indian languages in the mid-19th century, and of socialist thought in the 1930s and after. The Indian translations were attempted as part of a dialogue between cultures, on the one hand, and as a concession to modernity, on the other. They were moments in a long and complicated history that sought to secularise debates about the good society, equality and justice. In this sense, these translations universalized the vernaculars, drawing the latter into a larger history and making them own up their incompleteness. In Said’s case, his metaphorical rendering of Palestine lifted it out of its constitutive contexts: in his arguments Palestine became an idea, a cause that tested one’s own moral worth, even as it acquired a global life of its own.

In Said’s own sense of his work, it was his exilic situation that proved germane to the stories he ended up telling: aware of the chilling loneliness of living an exilic life, yet keenly aware of the freedoms it offered the thinker, Said used his experience of dislocation, his sense of being out of place to argue that the intellectual condition is essentially an exilic one: “to be as marginal and as undomesticated as someone in real exile is for an intellectual to be unusually responsive to the traveller rather than to the potentate; to the provisional and risky rather than to the habitual, to innovation and experiment, rather than the authoritatively given status quo” (Said 1993: 64).

The intellectual as exile is, in his working mode, a translator for he or she sees things in twin contexts: “Because the exile sees things both in terms of what has been left behind and what is actual here and now, there is a double perspective that never sees things in isolation. Every scene or situation in the new country necessarily draws on its counterpart in the old country. Intellectually this means that an idea or experience is always counterposed with another, therefore making them both appear in a sometimes new and unpredictable light: from that juxtaposition one gets a better, perhaps even more universal idea of how to think…” (Said 1993: 60)

Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’ O Jerusalem did somewhat better, and offered a historical reading of the establishment of Israel, but here as well, the Palestinians were made to appear part of an undifferentiated ‘horde’ of Arabs, incapable of democracy. The Israeli kibbutz was glorified and the state was praised for having made ‘the desert bloom’.

It was Edward Said who posed the question of Palestine in ways that helped us, at least, me challenge and put aside the Zionist narrative. He also made West Asia and the Maghreb come alive in ways that were unprecedented. It was as if he was offering us a tutorial on contemporary West Asia - recommending books, music, history tales… and directing us to a global politics of anti-imperialism. Today, as neo-liberal capital consolidates its hold in India, with the state an active collaborator, we see how we have become complicit with levels of violence and hurt which we do not wish to acknowledge. In all this, I am glad that in my home city of Chennai, we took to the streets some weeks ago - calling attention to Gaza. Southern India has not yet been called upon to stay local.

As I write in the quiet of my room, I envisage the subject of this monograph, Vasanthi Devi. She bustles around her house, sorting papers, speaking on the phone to sundry persons, active in the field of education. She is roped into attending virtual and offline meetings on this or that aspect of the public school system that requires to be amended, reformed… meanwhile, she keeps abreast of everyday political and social developments, and worries about the state of the nation, and its future.

I have known Vasanthi and her work in the realm of education and women’s rights, for over three decades. She had undertaken this labour in an official capacity – that is, as an appointee of the state. She was the Vice-Chancellor of Manonmaniam Sundaranar (MS) University (1992-98) for two successive terms and chairperson of the Tamil Nadu Women’s Commission (2002-2005). Both appointments were held during the chief ministership of the mercurial J. Jayalalithaa of the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK).

Given Vasanthi’s independent cast of mind, and her feminism, her association with teacher organisations, and her left-grained critique of the Indian state, one would imagine her to have been impatient with government and its ways. But this was not the case. She held these posts with dignity and responsibility and worked the instruments of governance, the law, the administration, and the power and authority vested in her office to fruitful and productive ends. In doing so, she demonstrated how one might work within the limits of imperfect and unwieldy state apparatuses.

Here she was not unlike those who had done so, in other contexts, such as the man she admired a great deal - the late P. S. Krishnan, who was responsible for the drafting and piloting in Parliament, of the Prevention of Atrocities against Scheduled Castes and Tribes Act of 1989. Vasanthi conducted a detailed interview with him on his life and work. One of the questions she posed him was rather telling and perhaps drew from her own time in government:

I find another dimension of your life’s work very interesting. It is your pragmatism, your belief in incrementalism, your readiness to go step by step, your belief that all the great liberating missions in history have only succeeded by taking one step at a time, your abundant patience that helped you chip away the might rock of injustice and discrimination with one chisel stroke after another. Did you develop such a strategy after understanding the system in its intricacies? (Vasanthi Devi, 2017: p.85).

Krishnan responded by making a case for working within the means afforded by the Constitution, which he understood to be comprehensive and “realistic” and which could – and did – produce outcomes that were material and enumerable. He also made it clear that by realizing constitutional goals, a legislator or bureaucrat was only bringing to the attention of unequally situated citizens the rights and entitlements that were theirs by natural law, and pointing out ways of exercising them. In other words, like Babasaheb Ambedkar, from whose writings he often quoted, he visualized constitutional morality as a work in progress, straddling various moments of struggle and resistance and also of waiting, arguing and negotiating with state power and local social authority. This work was unlikely to end, and nor could it be assumed to progress towards a predictable telos – given the trenchant hold that the caste order had on social and economic relationships (Ibid: 85-86).

Vasanthi saw her work in the realms of education and gender justice in similar terms, as labour that was endless, and in process and which had to be undertaken, with an eye on both the present as well as the long and complex history of inequality in the country. Where Krishnan had looked to the Constitution as a defining ideal, she looked to a mix of ideas to do with caste and gender justice, and which informed anti-caste and feminist thought in Tamil Nadu. In this context the work she undertook as Vice-Chancellor deserves close attention. Her work with the Women’s Commission was remarkable as well, but at the time, the Commission had very little authority – the rules that extended its power somewhat came into force after her time – and so the outcomes that she envisaged could not be fitfully realized. Whereas in her capacity as Vice-Chancellor, she acted in consequential ways and essayed major institutional changes. This book is about these changes and the logic and ideas that shaped and guided them.

***

Since the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Indian public university has been subject to reflective and anguished critique. Three things have anchored this latter: Rohit Vemula’s institutional murder in 2016, the circulation of the National Education Policy in 2019, and global concerns about the future lives of academia in the time of neo-liberalism. Several volumes have been published on the subject since then and they examine interrelated concerns: The tightening of state control over universities, particularly with respect to what might be debated or not, within and without classrooms; the marking of students – and teachers - as potentially seditious, should they push the limits of what is viewed as permissible argument; the caveats that are imposed on what might be researched and studied; the impunity with which Hindu right-wing student organisations conduct themselves on and off campuses; and finally, the attempts to divide learning and learners into those who are fit for an expansive arts and science education, and those who are better off, pursuing a vocation or a skill (Apoorvanand [Ed.], 2018; Krishna Kumar [Ed.], 2018; Debaditya Bhattacharya [Ed.], 2019; 2019a; Neeladri Bhattacharya et al., 2020; N. Sukumar, 2023).  

These concerns have been framed by disparate observations and arguments. There are essays marked by a certain reflective nostalgia, such as those that examine the “JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) story” and which quietly and sadly register the changes that have come about, after 2014, on that campus, even as they sketch in the contours of the wide and expansive horizon that defined this university’s emergence and growth. With the Hindu Right government determined to constrain and, in some instances, criminalise JNU’s lively and contentious culture in any number of ways, this set of writings alerts us to the need to remember as well as review institutional histories and practices, at a time when they stand to be overwritten (N. Bhattacharya et al, op. cit.). There are other writings, which express critical anger at this censoring of debate and argument across universities and ponder over the long-term effects of such orchestrated malice (Apoorvanand, op. cit.).

Some writers have examined the neo-liberal moment, and the ways in which it has shaped educational initiatives. Thus, it is argued that at present, education is sought to be aligned to producing a low-paid and exploitable workforce, as demanded by global and local capital. The provisions in the new education policy that suggest school students pursue vocational learning, should they wish to, have been criticized, and viewed as yet another expression of post-independent India’s confused and hesitant pondering over the relationship between education and employability. The questions posed in this context include: How might one understand these decades-long debates on the need for vocational education, or the learning of a skill, given that those who opt for such learning are likely to be from the working class and castes? Further, would not this make for a permanent class of semi-skilled labour, which is then placed at the service of an economy that is unlikely to deliver fair wages or hold out prospects for professional or for that matter social progress? (D. Bhattacharya, 2019, op. cit.)

In tandem with these reflections, other concerns of a philosophical nature have been voiced: about the meaning, intent and outcome of learning as such, and what that ought to be, or mean, in a society structured by multiple and overlapping inequalities. The relationship between caste, educational privilege and disprivilege has emerged as an important subject for research in this context, and acquired an urgency in view of the events that unfolded in Hyderabad Central University, leading to Rohith Vemula’s death (in particular, [N. Sukumar, op. cit.]). There have been earlier studies as well, in this regard - about institutional failures with regard to underprivileged students, and the pervasive presence of caste prejudice in campuses. These include reviews of the reservation policy, and which underscore its continuing relevance - while pointing to the need to re-define the terms by which we measure historical and social deprivation, so that the most marginal of our population are served well by this measure (S. Deshpande & U. Zacharias [Eds.], 2013).

The conundrum posed by women’s increasing presence in higher education and their decreasing presence in the skilled workforce has also been studied. The continuing relegation of women students to certain disciplines, and the persistence of sexual chauvinism not only amongst students, but the teaching and non-teaching faculty, have been examined. Such studies appear important for other reasons as well, for they warn us of all that might contribute to a degradation of campus life (Krishna Kumar, op. cit.).

Then there is writing that looks at the privatization of higher education and the policies and administrative measures that have rendered it possible, and some of which go back to the first decade of the twenty-first century. The future of public universities, their relevance, and the changes that have taken place in their functioning – these have been addressed not only in view of the Hindu Right’s interventions in education, but in terms of how the Indian state has responded to the demands posed by neo-liberal capitalism (D. Bhattacharya, 2019a, op. cit. 3-5).

Importantly, much of this writing has been occasioned by developments that have unfolded in institutions founded by the federal/central government – notably Jawaharlal Nehru University, Hyderabad Central University, and some of the Indian Institutes of Technology (the exception is Jadavpur university). The arguments urged forth in almost all instances assume a vision of university life drawn from the histories of institutions and the ideas of educationists who may be said to have defined ‘national’ educational priorities and concerns. However, the arguments do not grapple with what might potentially lie beyond and outside these ‘national’ notions. This is the case even with writing that purportedly goes beyond what is viewed as a limited and limiting national vision of education: at best, it invokes Tagore’s capacious and radical ideas of the University (D. Bhattacharya, 2019a, op. cit. 11-21).

This is intriguing since for the last two decades, there has been significant writing on educational thought, with a focus on what the late Sharmila Rege, who taught Women’s Studies at the Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule University at Pune, referred to as ‘Phule-Ambedkarite-Feminist’ pedagogies (S. Rege, 2010). It is not that these writers are unmindful of caste-based inequalities and how they affect educational cultures. For instance, some view the increasing number of Bahujan, Dalit and Adivasi students in higher education classrooms as making for an exciting and vibrant educational culture. Without taking away from the structural constraints and political limits that have come to hedge public education, as such, they have called attention to the democratic and culturally radical possibilities held out by the changed demography of our classrooms. And at least one of them references Rege’s work (S. Deshpande & U. Zacharias, op. cit. 304). Yet, anticaste thought worlds are not viewed as germane to debates on education.

Further, very little attention has been paid to the fact that education is a concurrent subject and that this requires an engagement with the lives and times of not merely federal but also state institutions. This appears an important and consequential oversight for this conceptual elision renders the rocky and imperfect federal unity that is India a given, rather than the contentious unity that it has been. As far as education is concerned, this has meant that the initiatives undertaken in the states with regard to higher education, some of which run counter to federal directives, have remained outside the purview of debate. If we are to take the Southern Indian states, in different ways, all of them have been invested in social justice and implemented reservation policies for several decades now, starting from the late colonial period. They have democratized access to teaching as well, in that university teachers in these states are drawn from several undercastes and from Dalit communities. What has this meant for education, in an ideational, institutional as well as curricular sense? How might these experiences help us leaven our understanding of all that ails Indian higher education?

In view of these absent themes in the debates on higher education and its future, the work undertaken by Vasanthi during her time as Vice-Chancellor in a regional university acquires both empirical as well as conceptual significance, as we shall see.