Indian Student Politics as Political Communities: A Subalternist Reading

Presenter:

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Abstract

This contribution builds on subalternist readings of the community to conceptualise the democratic relevance of student politics in contemporary India. Its ambition is to revisit Partha Chatterjee’s notion of ‘mediation’ between elite and subaltern modalities of political participation. I argue that select student communities – and not only individual political brokers – emerging from flagship public university spaces reformulate popular aspirations of political society into the language of representative politics. Within such institutional premises, youth from deprived backgrounds – who benefit from reservation policies – are socialised in a transformative environment in which political stands by student organisations progressively reconfigure affiliations based on class, caste, gender, religion and social upbringing. While fuelling upward social mobility, political self-change in these universities enables the constitution of a campus community as a public sphere, through channelling critical claims over the functioning and the orientations of the Indian state. I engage with archives of activist material at Jawaharlal Nehru University since the 1970s, and show that student pamphleteering operationalises textual and social expressions of ‘mediation’ between elites and the subaltern. Because pamphlets, both as material objects and rhetoric style claim political truth, they operationalise ‘bourgeois’ forms of association free from the state. Agonistic and vituperative, calls for action of pamphleteers make politics a public concern, equip politically the disenfranchised on campus, and nurture a democratic space targeted by the governmental aspirations of the state.