Questions over exchange between Spivak, student at JNU seminar

Controversy at JNU seminar as Dalit student is shut down by Gayatri Spivak, sparking debate on academic engagement.

A video of a Dalit student being interrupted while attempting to ask scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak a question after her talk at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi has raised questions on ways of engaging with students at academic seminars.

The student, who wanted to ask Ms. Spivak about her positioning herself as middle class, could not do so, as she interrupted him over his pronunciation of American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois’ last name and seemingly took issue with him for introducing himself as the “Founding Professor of the Centre for Brahmin Studies”, according to multiple people who attended the talk on Tuesday.

Following the incident, the M.A. (Sociology) student at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, 28-year-old Anshul Kumar, put up a poster in protest outside the auditorium where the talk was held, which read: “If the subaltern can’t speak, he shall abuse!”, with an expletive added to it – a play on one of Ms. Spivak’s most-read essays ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’.

Within 24 hours of the video going viral, criticism of Mr. Kumar on social media has focused on the language he used for Ms. Spivak since the incident. Mr. Kumar has said that the crowd and Ms. Spivak seemed to have missed the point he was trying to make when he introduced himself as he did. The point, he explained, was that there were scores of centres for Dalit studies that had been ‘co-opted’ by upper-caste academics, who then gate-kept the space. “What the subject of interrogations should be, instead, is Brahminism itself,” he said.

On the criticism over the language he has used since the incident, Mr. Kumar told The Hindu, “That is how the subaltern speaks. They should be ready to listen... this tone-policing cannot be done.”

Ms. Spivak has not yet responded to The Hindu’s questions over the incident.

In the hours since the controversy, Mr. Kumar has been using quotes from Du Bois’ works to argue on social media that subaltern voices should not be dismissed because of technicalities of “syntactical obedience”.