Acclaimed scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is in the news for stubbornly correcting a student’s pronunciation of celebrated Black sociologist WEB Du Bois’s name at an event in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. While it might seem like an innocuous occurrence of a teacher correcting a student’s pronunciation, it was far from it. Anshul Kumar, a Dalit student at JNU, intended to ask Spivak how she could claim to be middle-class given her privileged caste and class background, but he could not as he was cut short multiple times by Spivak for pronouncing “Du Bois” wrongly at the beginning of his question.
Following this, Spivak also claimed that she was not a Brahmin either, which left many people shocked and disappointed with her misrepresentation. Popular faces in academic and non-academic circles have called out Kumar for his tenor of posing the question and later engaging in a vulgar verbal spat against Spivak. Others have highlighted the deeply entrenched snobbishness, upper class, and caste hegemony in Indian academia, which continues to rebuke young, first-generation Dalit-Bahujan scholars for not being equipped with advanced English language proficiency, which seems to be a prerequisite to be “taken seriously” in these spaces. Some have claimed that the “real” Gayatri Spivak has now been revealed and that her epistemological violence has been laid bare for everyone’s consideration.
Correct pronunciations and confident English-speaking abilities are a prized cultural capital in India. Lower and middle-class Dalit-Bahujans, especially first-generation scholars, do not possess this capital. This is inherited generationally, like other capitals in this country. This accumulated cultural capital opens many avenues to those with access to elite spaces and solidifies the existing hierarchy in knowledge production. By excluding the voices from the margins in this process, the elites continue to exercise their control over the discourse, even going so far as to dictate what the excluded themselves can feel, speak, or write about. Spivak’s incident is one such example, however, numerous such incidents are buried under the rubble of academic jargon and gibberish.
The fate of the excluded is evident when we look at their presence in the elite institutions of higher education. Scheduled Tribe, Scheduled Caste, and Other Backward Caste quotas for students and teaching positions are almost always never filled. It is important to look at these institutions critically because they churn out graduates who hold powerful positions in law-making, governance, and public policy spaces. Scholars/Professors who work in these spaces also exercise immense power due to their proximity to power. The knowledge produced in these spaces is revered and very rarely challenged. This is why the representation of the marginalised in these spaces matters.
While it is crucial to recognise the significance of representation, it cannot be symbolic or empty. Representation should be intersectional, critical, and self-reflective. It is easy to succumb to the seduction of elite academia and the perks it offers to those who do not challenge the unjust foundations upon which it is built, but barely scratch it from the surface. This surface scratching helps gain access to these spaces/networks and aids in maintaining the status quo. Upward social mobility should not result in being coopted to reinforce classist snobbery. The “othered” should strive to be subversive.
Like Fred Moten and Stephano Harney wrote beautifully in The University and the Undercommons, “After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretences, with bad documents, out of love. Her labour is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.” True representation will lead to the subversion of power structures, not its preservation.
Bindu Natesha Doddahatti is an independent researcher based in Bengaluru. Views expressed here are the author’s own.