Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

In its most recent version of attack on educational institutions, the BJP-led Indian state has targeted the hallowed Jawaharlal Nehru University of India, branding the University as anti-national. The initial round of police attack on the University has been followed up with attacks by RSS and BJP affiliated goons on University students and faculty associated with the University. A section of the mainstream media associated with the agenda of the Hindu Right, Times Now and Zee TV have catalyzed the attacks through the media trials of students and the broader University, repeat-broadcasted through 24/7 cycles and captured in hashtags and sound bytes. At the heart of the recent spate of attacks on the University is an event organized by a group of students on February 9 that raised questions about the legitimacy of the juridical process that led to the hanging of Afzal Guru, alleged to be associated with the attack on the Indian parliament in December, 2001. The media stories ...

The current moment of attack of the Indian State on the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has been catalyzed by an active role of a section of the mainstream Indian media in fanning the flames of nationalism to feed a witch hunt. Police have entered the University to arrest students on charges of sedition, claiming that the students participated in anti-national activities. Students at JNU who had come together to organize a cultural evening to draw attention to the absence of juridical process in the hanging of Afzal Guru, an accused in the Indian parliament attacks of 2001, are in the midst of a national storm that have labeled them as separatists and as anti-national. And the media are key players in this story. Kanhaiya Kumar, President of the JNU Students' Union, has been arrested under the outdated sedition law that was ironically the very instrument used by British colonialists to thwart India's right to self-rule. The mainstream television media hav...

Professor Mukherjee, the head of a department and advisor to student groups when I was once a student, lived a life full of privilege, in the deeply held belief that he was intellectually and culturally superior and therefore, should rightfully command respect from his students. Professor Mukherjee was a special breed of Professors, Professors that came from well-to-do upper caste, upper class Bengali families in Kolkata to the small town.Many of these Professors came from Bengali Zamindari families and they ensured that the town knew of their Zamindari lineage. Professor Mukherjee's sense of superiority was embedded in his long-ingrained sense of Brahminical privilege, mixed in with a sense of ownership of high culture. In the faith that he was the chosen one, that his was the job of protecting the aesthetic aspirations of the academy, Professor Mukherjee made sure that he performed the task of extracting respect from his students. His studied seriousness formed the...

As professors, students, researchers, we live amid incredible privileges. These privileges are products of organizing structures of societies that enable and reward specific forms of participation while simultaneously undermining other forms of participation. One of the outcomes of an identity-based education that is all too ensconced in apolitical identity politics is its inability to interrogate the politics of knowledge production. As a consequence, in many of the classes we teach, we leave un-interrogated our own positions of privilege and the positions of privilege our students occupy. By being in the classroom, our students occupy positions of privilege. Especially so when access to education is a commodity, out of reach for large sections of the population. I am often struck therefore by students who walk into the classroom with the deeply held notion that they are Gifts of God, that they are special. An identity-based education that is propped up on the tools o...