The End of Imagination Read Online Free PDF

almost every campus in the country. When, in August, the ASA, quoting Ambedkar’s views on capital punishment, protested the hanging of Yakub Memon—convicted for the 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai that followed the Shiv Sena–led pogrom against Muslims—the ABVP branded them “anti-national.” Following a head-on confrontation between the two groups over the documentary film Muzaffarnagar Baqi Hain (Muzaffarnagar Is Still Standing), which the ASA wanted to screen on campus, five students—all Dalits, and all members of the ASA—were suspended and asked to vacate the hostel. Young Dalits reaching out in solidarity to the Muslim community was not something the Sangh Parivar was going to allow if it could help it.
    These were first-generation students, whose parents had toiled all their lives to scrape together enough money to get their children an education. It’s hard for middle-class people who take the education of their children for granted to imagine what it means to have such painstakingly cultivated hope so callously snuffed out.
    One of the five expelled students was Rohith Vemula, a PhD scholar. He was the son of a poor single mother, and had no means of supporting himself without his scholarship. Driven to despair, on January 17, 2016, he hanged himself. He left behind a suicide note of such extraordinary power and poignancy that—like a piece of great literature should—his words ignited a tinderbox of accumulated fury. Rohith wrote,
    I always wanted to be a writer. A writer of science, like Carl Sagan.
    I loved Science, Stars, Nature, but then I loved people without knowing that people have long since divorced from nature. Our feelings are second handed. Our love is constructed. Our beliefs colored. Our originality valid through artificial art. It has become truly difficult to love without getting hurt.
    The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of star dust. In every field, in studies, in streets, in politics, and in dying and living.
    I am writing this kind of letter for the first time. My first time of a final letter. Forgive me if I fail to make sense.
    Maybe I was wrong, all the while, in understanding [the] world. In understanding love, pain, life, death. . . . My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness. The unappreciated child from my past. 5
    Imagine this. We live in a culture that shunned a man like Rohith Vemula and treated him as an Untouchable. A culture that shut him down and made a mind like his extinguish itself. Rohith was a Dalit, an Ambedkarite, a Marxist (who was disillusioned by the Indian Left), a student of science, an aspiring writer, and a seasoned political activist. But beyond all these identities, he was, like all of us, a unique human being, with a unique set of joys and sorrows. We might never know what that last secret sadness was that made him take his life. Perhaps that’s just as well. We must make do with his farewell letter.
    The things that make it revolutionary might not be immediately obvious. Despite all that was done to him, it contains sorrow but not victimhood. Though everything we know about him tells us that he was ferocious about his identity and his politics, he refuses to box himself in and define himself by the tags that others have given him. Despite bearing the weight of an oppression and cultural conditioning that is centuries old, Rohith gives himself—wrests for himself—the right to be magnificent, to dream of being stardust, of being loved as an equal, as all men and women ought to be.
    Rohith was only the latest of the many Dalit students who end their lives every year. His story resonated with thousands of Dalits in universities across the country—students who had been traumatized by the medieval horrors of the caste system, and the segregation, discrimination, and