
NEW DELHI: Anshul Kumar, 28, a student of sociology at JNU, recently asked Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the doyenne of postcolonialism, a question at a seminar and pronounced American sociologist WEB Du Bois’s name ‘the French way’.
All hell has since broken loose.
It began with a heated exchange and Kumar, after having walked out, put up posts and memes on social media attacking Spivak and spewing expletives. This was followed by the pro-Spivak camp accusing Kumar of an anti-Spivak agenda and misogyny.
Attempts were made by TMS to speak to them and to various members of academia present at the event; they refused to comment on the matter.
Excerpts of a conversation with Kumar, who has been in the midst of a storm ever since, on Spivak, the idea of the university and control over the production of knowledge from a Dalit Bahujan standpoint.
Why did you attend the Spivak event if you were already so critical of Spivak’s scholarship?
I am very interested in scholars I do not agree with. My objections to her are many. By the end of one of her seminal essays, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Professor Spivak, in a manner of speaking, tries to explain Sati away. She says it was the White Man’s attempt to save the Brown woman from the Brown man. And who were the women who were forced into Sati? They were the upper-caste women so she was seeing upper-caste women as subaltern. Ambedkar, on the other hand, had pointed out that Sati and child marriage were means to protect endogamy practised by upper castes and women were at the mercy of such a system. Spivak also quotes Ambedkar’s paper on caste and development but she doesn’t accept caste origins of society and makes it all about gender.
Some of your social media posts show you making misogynist and Islamophobic comments.
I was called a heckler by an Ashraf Muslim despite the video proof available that I never heckled Spivak. It shows how much the Asharf Muslims are in cahoots with upper caste Hindus.
Why was it necessary to call Spivak and the academics who have defended her names?
I am a Chamar. My entire caste and my existence is a term of abuse so why is purity of language expected of me?
Do you think the format of the academic seminar needs to be rethought? There is also an opinion that Spivak was disproportionate in her response on insisting on the correct pronunciation of Du Bois?
In India, the teacher-student relationship is cast in only one grid – that of guru and shishya. But why be so hierarchical, a teacher can also learn from the student. I go to seminars not with any agenda but to ask questions. I certainly didn’t go in that day to create a ruckus. Academic seminars, in Gen Z language, is a stan culture. Scholars are brought in to be placed on the pedestal of a godman or godwoman—and you can’t be critical of them. They are greeted with sycophancy when they take the stage and that tone is maintained throughout. I refuse to play that game.
How are you pronouncing Du Bois now?
It’s Du Boys—I get it, it’s just that my teacher at St Xavier’s Mumbai was conversant with the French language and so maybe that’s why she used to pronounce Du Bois as Du Bwaah and I picked that up from her. Sure, I did not know the colonial context of why Du Bois asserted that he be pronounced the ‘Haitian way’. But I was standing before an audience of a thousand trying to articulate my question and all that everyone was concerned with was pronunciation. If Du Bois would have been alive, he would have forgiven me as a young subaltern lad.
The entire incident reminds me of what American scholar Richard Delgado calls the ‘politics of citation’, his analysis of scholars of civil rights in America, where White scholars cite each other with no reference to Blacks or Black activists. So, here you have Spivak citing Partha Chatterjee with Partha Chatterjee citing Ranajit Guha and the circle goes on, so basically doing the thing Spivak talks against—not letting the subaltern speak, but speaking on their behalf.
Does this also point to other academic crises, the way knowledge is practised and disseminated in classrooms?
In class, a professor’s ‘advice’ is not innocent of prejudice. You are expected to cite only those scholars that your professors want you to cite. But it’s not as if we are told that “cite this otherwise don’t work with me”. Things are more sophisticated than that. The ‘latest’ book from my course is of the 1990s; there is no space for new or emerging scholarship.
Is it far-fetched to say that the university is in crisis? Do students feel that only a certain kind of questioning or knowledge-production is being allowed in the universities?
The amount of romanticism attached to the idea of the university is appalling. The idea is that the university is a repository of all knowledge, it is actually failing the people. There is also the idea that universities, or JNU in particular, are a target of the Hindu Right and so they must be saved. In doing so, they forget that the university has problems too.
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who was of working-class origins, said that universities only preach to the converted. It’s how religions function. If you accept its sovereignty, its hegemonic role, only then will you be taught. But it’s not a place that will brook dissent.