The End of Imagination Read Online Free PDF Page B

injustice that follow them into the most modern university campuses, into India’s premier medical and engineering colleges, into their hostels, canteens, and lecture rooms. (About half of all Dalit students drop out of school before they matriculate. Under 3 percent of the Dalit population are graduates.)  They saw Rohith Vemula’s suicide for what it was—a form of institutionalized murder. His suicide—and, it has to be said, the power of his prose—made people stop in their tracks and think and rage about the criminal arrangement known as the caste system, that ancient engine that continues to run modern Indian society.
    The fury over Vemula’s suicide was, and is, an insurrectionary moment for a thus-far marginalized, radical political vision. It saw Ambedkarites, Ambedkarite Marxists, a coalition of Left parties and social movements march together. Alert to the fact that if this configuration was allowed to consolidate it could grow into a serious threat, the BJP moved to defuse it. Its clumsy, outrageous response—claiming that Rohith Vemula was not a Dalit—backfired badly, and pushed the party into what looked like (and could still turn out to be) a tailspin.
    Attention had to be diverted. Another crisis was urgently required. The gunsights swung around. The target had been marked a while ago.
    Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), long known to be a “bastion of the Left,” was the focus of a front-page story in the November 2015 issue of Panchajanya , the RSS’s weekly paper. It described JNU as a den of Naxalites, a “huge anti-national block which has the aim of disintegrating India.” Naxalites had been a long-standing problem for the Sangh Parivar—Enemy Number Three in its written doctrine. But now, evidently, it had another, more worrying enemy, too.
    Over the last few years, the student demography in JNU has changed dramatically. From being in a small minority, students from disadvantaged backgrounds—Dalits, Adivasis, and the many castes and sub-castes that come under the capacious category known as Other Backward Castes (OBC), formerly called Shudras—now make up almost half the student body. This has radically changed campus politics. What troubles the Parivar more than the presence of the Left on the JNU campus, perhaps, are the rising voices of this section of students. They are, for the most part, followers of Ambedkar, of the Adivasi hero Birsa Munda, who fought the British and died in prison in 1900, and of the radical thinker and reformer Jotirao Phule, who was a Shudra and called himself a mali , a gardener. Phule renounced, in fact denounced, Hinduism—most trenchantly in his famous book Gulamgiri (Slavery), published in 1873. In much of his writing and poetry, P hule deconstructs Hindu myths to show how they are really stories grounded in history, and how they glorify the idea of an Aryan conquest of an indigenous, Dravidian culture. Phule writes of how Dravidians were demonized and turned into asuras , while the conquering Aryans were exalted and conferred divinity. In effect, he frames Hinduism as a colonial narrative.
    In 2012, an organization of Dalit and OBC students in JNU began to observe what it calls Mahishasur Martyrdom Day. Mahishasur, Hindus believe, is a mythical half-human, half-demon entity whom the goddess Durga vanquished in battle—a victory that is celebrated every year during Durga Puja. These young intellectuals said that Mahishasur was actually a Dravidian king, beloved of the Asur, Santhal, Gond, and Bhil tribes in West Bengal and Jharkhand. The students declared that they would mourn the day Mahishasur was martyred, not celebrate it. Another group, that called itself the “New Materialists,” began to hold a “free food festival” on Mahishasur Martyrdom Day, at which it served beef and pork, saying these were the traditional foods of the oppressed castes and tribes of India.
    OBCs make up the majority of India’s population and are vitally important to