Review: Gaurav J. Pathania, ‘The University as a Site of Resistance’
Review of Gaurav J. Pathania’s The University as a Site of Resistance: Identity and Student Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018), 236 pages.
Abstract
Gaurav Pathania’s The University as a Site Of Resistance: Identity and Student Politics makes an important contribution to the discourse of resistance in South Asia. The focus of the book is confined to how marginalized communities in higher education redefine the politics of space by enacting multiple strategies of resistance to deconstruct the fixated notions of Identity, Caste and Cultural politics. In doing that, it adopts ethnography by investigating the Telangana movement to explore some of the crucial questions that define the students' politics in India. The book particularly looks into how campus spaces serve as an important political space in the larger framework of social movements. How do bodies become the sites of resistance, marginalization and political mobilization? How do students reimagine politics in contemporary India? In mapping out the dynamics of these questions by examining the ebbs and flows of social movements the book offers an important glimpse into the role of resistance in carving out the space for social justice.
Reviewed by Ruhail Andrabi
We are living in an era of resistance. From the Arab Spring to Occupy Movement, from the anti-rape to #MeToo, and from Azadi movement to the Shaheen Bagh protests, India has emerged as a site of global and local resistance movements that have changed our socio-political consciousness and our political engagement in recent years. University students and youth have been instrumental in bringing about shifts in social consciousness by democratizing the existing political and cultural spaces inside and outside university campuses. Such activism is defined as “New Social Movements” in the literature of social movements. These movements have gained ample attention in media discourses and social media landscapes; yet there is a dearth of literature on these studies. In this context, Gaurav J. Pathania’s ethnographic study, The University as a Site of Resistance: Identity and Student Politics, adds to our understanding of contemporary student activism.
What is the role of university education and university space in a student’s life? What makes that student an activist in the social laboratory of the campus, and how does that student become part of a larger social movement? How can we situate campus life in the changing socio-political context of India? What are political fractures that students address through protest and social movements? How does resistance take different shapes, and how do new forms of protest that challenge existing hierarchies and power structures unfold within the spatial context of the campus? Taking up these questions, this volume provides the first ethnography of India’s longest ongoing student movement, i.e. movements for the separate statehood for Telangana. Addressing this gap in existing literatures, Pathania provides a deeper understanding of how campus politics shape collective identities, networks, and social movements, and how the university campus as a “social space” intersects with diverse political imaginations which lead us to understand the resistance trajectory of Osmania students’ activism and significant analysis of the formation of separate Telangana statehood. In the past six decades, scholars have understood the problem of Telangana as political or economical. This volume steps out of these existing epistemological binaries and locates Telangana within the spectrum of cultural marginalization.
The author demonstrates how subaltern bodies are treated in spaces of higher education and why their counter-politics shape new activist discourses within campus spaces. The volume raises a debate about whether the formation of new radical politics poses a threat to the freedom of thought and expression in Indian universities in recent years. Specifically, Pathania discusses the Indian universities where a new activism cum discourse on identity politics is shaping up through the contours of ethnicity, language, and caste. This further strengthens understanding of how marginalized communities deconstruct dominant narratives and the hegemonic culture of universities while gaining access to education and communicating through new subtle modes of resistance, “which offers a new epistemic understanding of the existing hegemony of a particular belief system” (p. 19). By demonstrating how the fusion of students' politics into new social movements take shape in relation to larger cultural productions, the volume shows us how this new language of resistance reflects multiple political and social imaginaries and contributes in understanding resistance discourses in new ways. The author builds up a new paradigm that analyzes the Telangana movement through the lens of cultural resistance, which is often missing in existing literature on the Telangana movement. Specifically, the book maps out the discrimination and subjugation against the Telangana people that has resulted in cultural disharmony . This discrimination is resisted by students in Osmania University who devised counter-strategies to tackle it - from food politics to the celebration of festivals by asserting their own identity and subsequently breaking the interpellation of Andhra’s domination is an important liminal position that this volume captures. Similarly, the volume shows the systematically structured discrimination of Telangana’ites by Seemandhar people and the role of Telangana activists in countering this institutional as well as cultural marginalization by adopting diverse cultural strategies such as celebrating Telangana culture, festivals, folk, food, heritage, language, music, and tradition.
By focusing on the university’s social geography, which has entailed the production of many micro spaces in the campus since 1969, Pathania shows how campuses have served as spaces of dissent and critical dialogue while weaving a web of intellectuals who helped in the circulation of political ideas by making the movement intellectually oriented. As John Law and Kevin Hetherington remind us, “spatial phenomena encompass materials which are embedded within space, but can also generate spatial effects” (2000, p. 36). Similarly, campus spaces are reflections of political realities that are materially embodied. There, mobile bodies play an important role in political mobilization within specific locations, carrying memories and class meanings that form the basis of social movements. This volume offers a nuanced observation of the role of Osmania intellectuals and activists within the campus in producing academic scholarship in indigenous language (Telugu) and in developing new cultural strategies that enabled the development of political consciousness around a separate Telangana statehood among the masses. The author provides an analytical understanding of campus activism by highlighting the role of Diasporas, caste-based networks, and mobilization beyond the anthropology of the classroom. By looking into the space of the campus through power dynamics which served as a laboratory of micro-politics where diverse groups have used strategies for the incubation of the Telangana movement, this scholarship offers a new understanding of the university where its role intersects with the binaries of dissent and politics.
Similarly, the author’s discussion of the student networks and how they expand and structure power relations on campus captures student politics in contemporary India. Employing ethnography as a method, this volume unravels how politics are embedded in the identities of students. Likewise, the mechanization of the student movement within the social landscape of the university, and how that movement’s politics intersect with the Telangana movement, shows the interconnection between campus geographies and resistance movements. By unpacking complex relationships of student organizations and the ways that caste acts as cannon fodder for the formation of new student parties, the author takes into account the hybridity and diversity of student politics in both kind and political leanings. From the hostel to Dhaba, the volume captures the dynamics of different social-political campus spaces and how they act as sites of political mobilization. A pertinent example is the way Dhabas (tea stalls) have been demonstrated as mini social structures where everyday politics are discussed—as Pathania rightly called it, “an activist’s laboratory where the mood of the campus is tested” (p. 135). The reproduction of 1969 activism in the post-2009 agitation through wide campus networks of alumni, employees, masses and student activists indicates the linearity of the struggle for separate Telangana statehood. From a broader perspective, the book captures the fractures, internal schisms, and changing dynamics of new social movements that have adopted new pedagogies of protest to imagine a new state, devising myriad forms of resistance practices to challenge Andhra culture.
Political opportunity structure is an important phase in any social movement. There can be a backdrop for the steering of movement when its purpose becomes merely political carrier like “mainstream politics and how campus politics turns out to be opportunistic” (p. 175). At times, the author observes that social movements can turn out to be political opportunities for activists when their political imaginations intersect with their political careers. Questions such as how students use campus spaces to shape their political career and how they act as foot soldiers to strengthen the political ideologies of mainstream Indian parties are specifically intriguing. These are questions that one would like to see Pathania explore through ethnographic observations based on his in-depth interviews and first-hand experiences in the campus. The discussion of the trajectory of narratives before and after the state formation which centered on multiple socio-cultural issues, shows the fractures in student politics and their power structures. The rigorous analysis of inequality in Telangana and the political boundaries of power remain unchanged when students witnessed betrayal from senior political leaders post–state formation—"a power transfer from Andhra’s feudal Reddy’s to Telangana landowner Velamma” (p. 193). The idea of democratic Telangana still generated resistance even after its independence.
The book pays little attention to understanding pan-Indian student politics. Similarly, the volume does not discuss gender participation in the formation of the Telangana state and the debate on caste-class-religious intersectionalities remains particularly out of the discussion in the volume. The book focuses on explaining cultural resistance but needs further elaboration and conceptual discussion, specifically the theoretical framework on the Anthropology of resistance. Perhaps more significantly, Pathania could have organized his chapter on the politics of scale by blending theoretical contributions with examples from the campus, which would have offered a rich understanding of the contentious politics and how spaces shape the identities, resistance practices, and multiple concerted political collective actions within social movements. Moreover, absent was a discussion of the censorship of the state over campus geography and how it has interspersed the collective struggle of the students’ activism for separate statehood. There are certain pertinent questions that have remained unexplored in the volume such as the global influences on this particular student movement and the role of student activists from other parts of the country in the Telangana movement for separate statehood. Student union elections have been the most popular form of campus activism. In his study, Pathania observed the ideological tumultuousness during the state election when student activists of various party affiliations changed their ideological positions and affiliations overnight for the sake of getting a ticket for assembly or parliamentary election. Pathania contributes a new term, “Ticktivist,” to Indian student movement literature that well explains the reality of Indian student politics where students use any political opportunity.
By establishing the Telangana movement as cultural resistance, the book offers a substantial contribution to the growing body of movement literature. The author provides a robust and meticulous theoretical framework for new social movements. The documentation of the voices from young people and the in-depth interviews with senior Osmania alumni provide an analytical understanding of activism, making it accessible to a general audience while contributing to scholarship on the sociology of social movements, which are interested in newer forms of digital activism such as Clicktivism and Slacktivism. This comprehensive volume will benefit the scholars of politics, social movements, sociology, higher education, and also those who are interested in ethnographic methods.
References
Law, John, and Hetherington, Kevin (2000). Materialities, Spatialities, Globalities. In: Bryson, John; Daniels, Peter; Henry, Nick, and Pollard, Jane (eds.) Knowledge, Space, Economy. London, UK: Routledge, pp. 34–49.
Ruhail Andrabi is currently a junior research fellow based in New Delhi. He had been earlier associated with Coventry University New Wales England as a research assistant. His writings have appeared in caravan, Frontier post, Café Dissensus, and Harper Collins India. His work focuses on the relationship between resistance and youth politics in colonial and post colonial societies with a special focus on issues of citizenship, identity and gender/sexuality.
Twitter: @ruhailandrabi
