Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-2lccl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T20:35:00.494Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Politics of Our Selves: Left self-fashioning and the production of representative claims in everyday Indian campus politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2020

JEAN-THOMAS MARTELLI Open the ORCID record for JEAN-THOMAS MARTELLI [Opens in a new window]
JEAN-THOMAS MARTELLI*
Affiliation:
Centre de Sciences Humaines (New Delhi) Email: jt.martelli@csh-delhi.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Through engaging with everyday practices among student activists in contemporary Indian campus politics, this ethnographic study examines the breadcrumb trail between the left and self-fashioning. It focuses on a performative modality of political representation in Indian democracy by tracing the formation of biographical reconfigurations that implement subject-oriented techniques. The article charts their relevance in producing political legitimacy. It engages with the way in which personal reconfigurations are mobilized to recruit and appeal to both subaltern and privileged communities, thus generating universalistic representative claims and political efficacy.

The study discusses self-presentations among leading left activists who are members of five contending Marxist student organizations that are active in Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University campus. It shows that reconfigurations are a hallmark of practices of social ‘downlift’ which echo the notion of declassifying, a concept developed by philosopher Jacques Rancière. While embracing secularism and the legacy of political martyrs, the analysis illustrates how self-fashioning attempts to erase signs and habits attached to economic and social privileges through subverting and engaging creatively with sacrificial and ascetic tropes. Conversely, such practices find themselves critically questioned by activists at the bottom of the social ladder who aspire to social upliftment, including members of lower castes and impoverished Muslim communities. I find that the biographical effects of left activism are both long-lasting and renegotiable, shaping campus lives and subsequent professional careers. While such reconfigurations are not inspired by world renouncers of the Hindu mendicant tradition, these practices of the self might exemplify the historical cross-fertilization between long-standing cultural idioms and the Indian Marxist praxis.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 6 , November 2021 , pp. 1972 - 2045
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Acknowledgements: The argument presented in this article has incubated over a number of years and many have contributed to its maturation. First and foremost, I shall convey my appreciation to the students and activists of Jawaharlal Nehru University for their generosity and indefatigable political engagement. In preparing the various versions of the manuscript, I have benefited from the guidance of Christophe Jaffrelot, Louise Tillin, Nicolas Jaoul, Hawon Ku, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Raphael Susewind, Nandini Sundar, Amanda Snellinger, Raphaël Voix, Jules Naudet, Anna Ruddock, Harbans Mukhia, and from the incisive suggestions of the South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal editorial team on an earlier draft. I would like to record my thanks to Norbert Peabody and two anonymous reviewers of Modern Asian Studies for their insightful and supportive comments. I gratefully acknowledge financial backing from the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche through the research project ‘Challenging inequalities: An Indo-European perspective’ (ANR-18-EQUI-0003). For institutional support, I am indebted to the Centre de Sciences Humaines for its warm and conducive research environment. Finally, thanks to Arshima Champa Dost for her critical editing. Note that all pamphlets referred to in this article are from the PaRChA Archive, a collection of 70,000-plus JNU activist materials collected and digitized by the author (see Martelli 2018b, Martelli 2019).

References

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press, Durham.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Altbach, P. (1968). Student politics in Bombay. Asia Publishing House, New York.Google Scholar
Altbach, P. (2006). Student politics: Activism and culture. In Forest, J. and Altbach, P. (eds), International handbook of higher education. Springer, Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Alter, J. (2000). Gandhi's body: Sex, diet, and the politics of nationalism. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
An (in)decent proposal. (15 April 2015). The need to take the mediating character of the bourgeois writing seriously, Pamphlet, PaRChA Archive, ID-72433.Google Scholar
Anjaiah, S. and Kumar, V. (23 August 2011). Oppose manuvadi Anna Hazare-led counter-revolution who is wearing a mask of anti-corruption, AIBSF pamphlet, PaRChA Archive, ID-52070.Google Scholar
Ankersmit, F. (1996). Aesthetic politics: Political philosophy beyond fact and value. Stanford University Press, Stanford.Google Scholar
Anonymous (March 2007). A Tribute to Com. BK. People's March, Ernakulam.Google Scholar
Bakshi, S. R. (1993). E. M. S. Namboodiripad. Anmol, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Barkaia, M. (2014). Deciphering dissent and resistance: Student activism and gender in Georgia and India. PhD thesis, Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University.Google Scholar
Barrett, M. (2014). Women's oppression today: The Marxist/feminist encounter. Verso Books, London.Google Scholar
Baruah, A. K. (2013). Student power in North-East India: Understanding student movements. Regency Publications, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Basu, V. and De, S. (2007?). Film screening ek minute ka maun, AISA pamphlet, PaRChA Archive, ID-50145, ID-50146.Google Scholar
Batabyal, R. (2015). JNU: The making of a university. Harper Collins India, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders. Studies in the sociology of deviance. Free Press, New York.Google Scholar
Berenschot, W. (2014). Muzaffarnagar riots: Perils of a patronage democracy. Economic and Political Weekly, 49(12), pp. 15–18.Google Scholar
Bhabha, H. K. (2004). The location of culture. Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Bhasin, V. (2015). Meet the poet Vidrohi: The rebel poet of JNU who lived on the campus and died on it. Scroll.in, 8 December.Google Scholar
Bhattacharyya, D. (2009). Of control and factions: The changing ‘party-society’ in rural West Bengal. Economic and Political Weekly, 44(9), pp. 59–69.Google Scholar
Bhattacharyya, D. (2016). Government as practice: Democratic left in a transforming India. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blechman, M., Chari, A. and Hasan, R. (2005). Of class struggle: An exchange with Jacques Rancière. Historical Materialism, 13(4), pp. 285–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bosi, L., Giugni, M. and Uba, K. (eds) (2016). The consequences of social movements. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bouillier, V. (2015). Itinérance et vie monastique: Les ascètes Naths Yogis en Inde contemporaine. Les Editions de la MSH, Paris.Google Scholar
Brun, S. and Galonnier, J. (2016). Devenir(s) minoritaire(s). La conversion des blanc-he-s à l'Islam en France et aux Etats-Unis comme expérience de la minoration. Tracés, 1, pp. 29–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cefaï, D. (2016). Publics, problèmes publics, arènes publiques … Questions de communication, 2, pp. 25–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Certeau, M. D. (1990). L'invention du quotidien. Arts de faire, 1, pp. 57–63.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, B. (2014). Communism in India: Events, processes and ideologies. Oxford University Press, New York.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chakrabarty, D. and Majumdar, R. (2010). Gandhi's Gita and politics as such. Modern Intellectual History, 7(2), pp. 335–353.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chakravartty, G. (2007). P. C. Joshi: A biography. National Book Trust, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Chandra, U. (2013). Going primitive: The ethics of indigenous rights activism in contemporary Jharkhand. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 7.Google Scholar
Chandra, U. and Majumder, A. (2013). Introduction. Selves and society in postcolonial India. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 7.Google Scholar
Chandrakanthan, A. J. V. (2000). Eelam Tamil nationalism. An inside view. In Wilson, J. A. (ed.), Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism. Its origins and development in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hurst, London, p. 164.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, P. (1986). Nationalist thought and the colonial world: A derivative discourse. Zed Books, London.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, P. (1989). Colonialism, nationalism, and colonialized women: The contest in India. American Ethnologist, 16(4), pp. 622–633.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chatterjee, P. (2012). The movement against politics. Cultural Critique, 81, pp. 117–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chhibber, P. and Verma, R. (2019). The rise of the second dominant party system in India: BJP's new social coalition in 2019. Studies in Indian Politics, 7(2), pp. 131–148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collective [JNU professors and former JNUSU office bearers] (31 August 1997). Chadrashekhar smriti andolan, Invitation pamphlet, PaRChA Archive, ID-40814, ID-40815, ID-40818, ID-40819.Google Scholar
Crossley, J. (2018). Cults, martyrs and Good Samaritans: Religion in contemporary English political discourse. Pluto Press, London.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dasgupta, R. (2005). Rhyming revolution: Marxism and culture in colonial Bengal. Studies in History, 21(1), pp. 79–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dasgupta, R. (2014). The ascetic modality: A critique of communist self-fashioning. In Nigam, A., Menon, N. and Palshikar, S. (eds), Critical studies in politics: Exploring sites, selves, power. Orient Blackswan, Hyderabad.Google Scholar
Davis, O. (2010). Jacques Rancière. Polity, Cambridge.Google Scholar
De, S. and Raghib, S. (23 March 2008a). Shahadat Stapah—assert the legacy of Sukhdev, Rajguru, Bhagat Singh, AISA pamphlet, PaRChA Archive, ID-5079.Google Scholar
De, S. and Raghib, S. (31 March 2008b). Chandu tum zinda ho…, AISA pamphlet, PaRChA Archive, ID-5078.Google Scholar
De Souza, R. (2004). Some reflections on democracy and JNUSU. In 30 years in defence of progressive democratic and secular culture. JNUSU office bearers document, p. 25.Google Scholar
Deshpande, S. (2016). The public university after Rohith–Kanhaiya. Economic and Political Weekly, 51(11), pp. 32–34.Google Scholar
Deshpande, S. (2019). The story of my English. The India Forum, 9 June.Google Scholar
Desquesnes, N. (2009). Les organisations révolutionnaires indiennes à l'épreuve du genre, les militantes naxalistes sur le campus de JNU à New Delhi. Master de Sciences Politiques en Politique Comparée, Ecole Doctorale de Sciences Po, Paris.Google Scholar
Devji, F. (2010). Morality in the shadow of politics. Modern Intellectual History, 7(2), pp. 373–390.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dumont, L. (1960). World renunciation in Indian religions. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 4(1).Google Scholar
Dussel, E. (2003). Beyond philosophy: Ethics, history, Marxism, and liberation theology. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Lanham.Google Scholar
Dutoya, V. and Hayat, S. (2016). Prétendre représenter. Revue française de science politique, 66(1), pp. 7–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, H. (2014). Déclassement et hantise du déclassement. Revue française de pédagogie, 3, pp. 87–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernandes, L. (2006). India's new middle class: Democratic politics in an era of economic reform. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.Google Scholar
Fernandez, M. (2018). The new frontier: Merit vs. caste in the Indian IT sector. Oxford University Press, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fillieule, O. and Neveu, E. (2019). Activists forever? Long-term impacts of political activism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, M. (1984). On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress. In Rabinow, P. (ed.), The Foucault reader. Pantheon Books, New York, pp. 340–372.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (1993). About the beginning of the hermeneutics of the self: Two lectures at Dartmouth. Political Theory, 21(2), pp. 198–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, M. (1997). The ethics of the concern for self as a practice of freedom. In Hurley, Robert (trans.) and Rabinow, Paul (ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and truth. Allen Lane, London, pp. 146–165.Google Scholar
Fraisse, G. (2013). Emancipation versus domination. In Oliver Davis (ed.), Rancière now: Current perspectives on Jacques Rancière. Polity, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Freiberger, O. (2006). Asceticism and its critics: Historical accounts and comparative perspectives. Oxford University Press, New York.Google Scholar
Friends of Chandrashekhar (3 April 1997). JNU students take to the streets demanding justice, Pamphlet, PaRChA Archive, ID-40846.Google Scholar
Garalytė, K. (2015). Subaltern autonomy: Dalit students’ identity politics in India. Grupės ir aplinkos, nr. 4, pp. 49–76.Google Scholar
Genel, K. and Deranty, P. (2016). Recognition or disagreement: A critical encounter on the politics of freedom, equality, and identity. Columbia University Press, New York.Google Scholar
Girola, C., Leibovici, M., Murard, N. and Tassin, E. (2014). Présentation. Tumultes, 2, pp. 5–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goblot, E. (2015 [1925]). La barrière et le niveau: étude sociologique sur la bourgeoisie française moderne. Presses universitaires de France, Paris.Google Scholar
Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. Aldine Publications, Chicago.Google Scholar
Goffman, E. (1978). The presentation of self in everyday life. Penguin, Harmondsworth.Google Scholar
Gold, D. (1991). Organized Hinduisms: From Vedic truth to Hindu nation. Fundamentalisms Observed, 1, pp. 531–593.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, S. (1980). Renaissance self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Guha, M. (2018). Sartorially weaving their way through bhodrota (respectability): Georgette sarees, bangles and selling sex in a Kolkata neighbourhood. International Journal of Fashion Studies, 5(2), pp. 399–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guha, R. (1982). Subaltern studies, Vol. 1. Oxford University Press, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Gupta, K. P. (1974). Religious evolution and social change in India: A study of the Ramakrishna mission movement. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 8(1), pp. 25–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hallward, P. (2006). Staging equality: On Rancière's theatrocracy. New Left Review, 1(37), pp. 109–129.Google Scholar
Hausner, S. L. (2007). Wandering with sadhus: Ascetics in the Hindu Himalayas. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.Google Scholar
Hazary, S. C. (1987). Student politics in India. Ashish Publishing House, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Hellmann-Rajanayagam, D. (2005). And heroes die: Poetry of the Tamil liberation movement in northern Sri Lanka. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 28(1), pp. 112–153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henry, O. and Ferry, M. (2017). When cracking the jee is not enough. Processes of elimination and differentiation, from entry to placement, in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITS). South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 15.Google Scholar
The Hindu (2015). CPI(M) hunger strike, 12 June.Google Scholar
The Hindu (2018). JNU will not enforce undertaking taken by students on attendance, 4 August.Google Scholar
Hirslund, D. V. (2012). Sacrificing youth: Maoist cadres and political activism in post-war Nepal. PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen.Google Scholar
Iftikhar, F. (2019). JNU students plan a ‘poster drive’ to protest restrictions. Hindustan Times, 22 July.Google Scholar
Iqbal, N. (2016). Kanhaiya's predecessors: Where they are, what they do. The Indian Express, 22 February.Google Scholar
Iyer, L. (2018). JNU Students’ Union elections: Congress-left unity breaks at Jawaharlal Nehru University over the role of Rahul Gandhi's aide Sandeep Singh. Mumbai Mirror, 26 August.Google Scholar
Jaffrelot, C. (1999). The Hindu nationalist movement and Indian politics: 1925 to the 1990s. Strategies of identity-building, implantation and mobilisation (with special reference to central India). Penguin Books India, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Jaffrelot, C. (2011). L'inde, La révolution introuvable? Des révolutionnaires en quête de légitimité au pays de gandhi (1895–1935). In Bataillon, G., Bozarslan, H. and Jaffrelot, C. (eds), Passions révolutionnaires: Amérique latine, Moyen-orient, Inde. Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.Google Scholar
Jaffrelot, C. and Van der Veer, P. (2008). Patterns of middle-class consumption in India and China. SAGE Publications India, New Delhi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jahangir, S., Renuka, A., Srijan, Tripathy, and Saurabh, D. (6 April 1997). n/a. El pueblo unido jamas sara vencido, Free thinkers pamphlet, PaRChA Archive, ID-40596.Google Scholar
Jaoul, N. (2006). Learning the use of symbolic means: Dalits, Ambedkar statues and the state in Uttar Pradesh. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 40(2), pp. 175–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaoul, N. (2008). Chapitre 1: Les Naxalistes du Bihar, Entre les armes et les urnes. In Gayer, L. and Jaffrelot, C. (eds), Milices armées d'Asie du sud. Presses de Sciences Po, FNSP, Paris, pp. 39–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaoul, N. (2011). Manju Devi's martyrdom: Marxist-Leninist politics and the rural poor in Bihar. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 45(3), pp. 347–371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaoul, N. (2016). Citizenship in religious clothing? Navayana Buddhism and Dalit emancipation in late 1990s Uttar Pradesh. Focaal, 76, pp. 46–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jayaram, N. (2003). The fall of the guru: The decline of the academic profession in India. In Altbach, P. (ed.), The decline of the guru: The academic profession in developing and middle-income countries. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 199–230.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jeffrey, C. (2010a). Contradictory youth politics: Student mobilisation in Uttar Pradesh. In Price, P. and Ruud, A. E. (eds), Power and influence in India: Bosses, lords and captains. Routledge, New Delhi, pp. 96–118.Google Scholar
Jeffrey, C. (2010b). Timepass: Youth, class, and the politics of waiting in India. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jeffrey, C. and Dyson, J. (2016). Now: Prefigurative politics through a North Indian lens. Economy and Society, 45(1), pp. 77–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jeffrey, C. and Harriss, J. (2014). Reservations. In Jeffrey, C. and Harriss, J., Keywords for modern India. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 154–155.Google Scholar
Jeffrey, C. and Young, S. (2012). Waiting for change: Youth, caste and politics in India. Economy and Society, 41(4), pp. 638–661.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jeffrey, C. and Young, S. (2014). Jugād: Youth and enterprise in India. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(1), pp. 182–195.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
JNU (2014–15). Annual report. JNU document.Google Scholar
JNU (2018–19). Annual report. JNU document.Google Scholar
JNUSU office bearers (eds) (2004). 30 years in defence of progressive democratic and secular culture. Unpublished, courtesy of Professor Rohit Azad.Google Scholar
Joshi, S. and Josh, B. (2011). Struggle for hegemony in India, three volumes. Sage Publications, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Kaviraj, S. (2005). An outline of a revisionist theory of modernity. European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 46(3), pp. 497–526.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaviraj, S. (2007). The politics of performance: Gandhi's trial read as theatre. In Strauss, J. and O'Brien, D. (eds), Staging politics: Power and performance in Asia and Africa. L. B. Tauris, London.Google Scholar
Kennedy, J. and King, L. (2013). Adivasis, Maoists and insurgency in the central Indian tribal belt. European Journal of Sociology, 54(01), pp. 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krishna, A. (2017). The broken ladder: The paradox and potential of India's one-billion. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krishnan, K. (2016). Lal salaam comrade Vidrohi!. Liberation, January.Google Scholar
Krishnan, K. and Tanweer, F. (7 March 1997). On the eve of International Women's Day: A public meeting. Women's rights … to gender equality… to feminism: Shifting terrain of the movement, AISA pamphlet, PaRChA Archive, ID-40753 and ID-40752.Google Scholar
Kumar, A. (9 April 2018). From stigma to assertion: BAPSA in JNU campus. Round Table India, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Kumar, D. (2013). Revolution, meet reality. The Indian Express, 25 August.Google Scholar
Kumar, S. (2014). Privatisation of higher education in India: Hopes and despairs. Social Change, 44(3), pp. 451–458.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kumar, S. (2017). Attitudes, anxieties and aspirations of India's youth. Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Kumar, S., Shastri, S. and Palshikar, S. (eds) (2009). Attitudes, anxieties and aspirations of India's youth: Changing patterns. Centre for the Study Developing Societies, Lokniti.Google Scholar
Kumar, V. and De, S. (31 March 2009). 31 March on the martyrdom day of com. Chandrashekhar, AISA pamphlet, PaRChA Archive, ID-5408, ID-5410.Google Scholar
Kumari, C. (29 May 2016). The Left and the Ambedkarite movements need debate and unity. Round Table India, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Laclau, E. (1996). Why do empty signifiers matter to politics?. Emancipation(s), 36, p. 46.Google Scholar
Laclau, E. (2005). Populism: What's in a name?. In Panizza, F. (ed.), Populism and the mirror of democracy. Verso, London.Google Scholar
Lahiri, B., Bhattacharya, A., Sengupta, A., Aswathi, G., Dharshini, P., Reyaz, A., Saife, R., Bhattacharya, S., Paiker, U. and Khalid, U. (11 January 2016). Revolutionary sexism—A critique of Indian Maoism. Raiot, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Lecomte-Tilouine, M. (2006). ‘Kill one, he becomes one hundred’: Martyrdom as generative sacrifice in the Nepal people's war. Social Analysis, 50(1), pp. 51–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liberation (2017). Two-day hunger strike in Motihari, 5 May.Google Scholar
Liberation (2018). Two-day hunger strike against eviction of people in Patna, 31 July.Google Scholar
Lievens, M. (2014). Contesting representation: Rancière on democracy and representative government. Thesis Eleven, 122(1), pp. 3–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hindustan, Live (2018). CPI's hunger strike in Shamaho, 21 September.Google Scholar
Lochan, K. (1996). JNU, The years: An anthology by the Silver Memoir Committee. Popular Prakashan, Mumbai.Google Scholar
Lockwood, D. (2016). The Communist Party of India and the Indian emergency. SAGE Publications India, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Lukose, R. A. (2009). Liberalization's children: Gender, youth, and consumer citizenship in globalizing India. Duke University Press, Durham.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyngdoh, J. M. (2006). Report of the Lynghdoh Committee. Ministry of Human Resource Development, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Martelli, J-T. (2017). Waiting for the liberal Indian enfant terrible, Asia Dialogue: http://theasiadialogue.com/2017/07/14/waiting-for-the-liberal-enfant-terrible/, [last accessed 20 July 2020].Google Scholar
Martelli, J-T. (2018a). ‘JNU is not just where you go, it's what you become’. Everyday political socialisation and left activism at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. PhD thesis, King's College London.Google Scholar
Martelli, J-T. (2018b). Historicising student activism and their discourses: A textometric analysis’. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Statistical Analysis of Textual Data-JADT, 7–10 June 2016, Nice.Google Scholar
Martelli, J-T. (2019). Pamphlet repository for changing activism [Research repository of Jean-Thomas Martelli] for the exhibition ‘Memories of change’: Open Editions. jtmartelli.com, [accessed 26 August 2020].Google Scholar
Martelli, J-T. (2020). The spillovers of competition: Value-based activism and political cross-fertilization in an Indian campus. SAMAJ: South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 22.Google Scholar
Martelli, J-T. and Ari, B. (2018). From one participant cohort to another: Surveying inter-generational political incubation in an Indian university. India Review, 17(3), pp. 263–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martelli, J-T. and Garalytė, K. (2020a). Generational communities: Student activism and the politics of becoming in South Asia. SAMAJ: South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 22.Google Scholar
Martelli, J-T. and Garalytė, K. (2020b). How campuses mediate a nationwide upsurge against India's communalization. An account from Jamia Millia Islamia and Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi. SAMAJ: South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 22.Google Scholar
Martelli, J-T. and Parkar, K. (2018). JNU promotes diversity, democracy, and dissent across the political spectrum. Economic and Political Weekly, 53(11), pp. 3597–3606.Google Scholar
Mawdsley, E. (1998). After Chipko: From environment to region in Uttaranchal. Journal of Peasant Studies, 25(4), pp. 36–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McAdam, D. (1989). The biographical consequences of activism. American Sociological Review, 54(5), pp. 744–760.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McAdam, D. (1990). Freedom summer. Oxford University Press, New York.Google Scholar
McNay, L. (2014). The misguided search for the political: Social weightlessness in radical democratic theory. Polity Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Mehta, U. S. (2010). Gandhi on democracy, politics and the ethics of everyday life. Modern Intellectual History, 7(02), pp. 355–371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Menon, D. M. (2016). A prehistory of violence? Revolution and martyrs in the making of a political tradition in Kerala. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 39(3), pp. 662–677.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Menon, R. (2007?). Our university, AISA pamphlet, PaRChA Archive, ID-3151, ID-3152.Google Scholar
Miller, D. (2001). The poverty of morality. Journal of Consumer Culture, 1(2), pp. 225–243.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mishra, A. K. and Parmar, V. M. (2017). Changing contours of income stratification and decomposition of income inequality: Evidence from recent longitudinal survey in India. Journal of Quantitative Economics, 5, pp. 395–422.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moffat, C. (2018). Politics and the work of the dead in modern India. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 60(1), pp. 178–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mouffe, C. (2013). Agonistics: Thinking the world politically. Verso Books, London.Google Scholar
Mount, L. (2017). Saris and contemporary Indian womanhood: How middle-class women navigate the tradition/modernity split. Contemporary South Asia, 25(2), pp. 167–181.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nair, J. (2019). Panel discussion: Fifty years of feminism at JNU. Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 25 March.Google Scholar
Natali, C. (2004). Sabbia sugli dèi. pratiche commemorative tra le Tigri Tamil (Sri Lanka). Il Segnalibro, Torino.Google Scholar
Natali, C. (2008). Building cemeteries, constructing identities: Funerary practices and nationalist discourse among the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka. Contemporary South Asia, 16(3), pp. 287–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Natrajan, B. (2018). Cultural identity and beef festivals: Toward a ‘multiculturalism against caste’. Contemporary South Asia, 26(3), pp. 287–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Naudet, J. and Tawa-Lama-Rewal, S. (2018). Où en est la gauche en Inde?. La vie des idées, 12 juin.Google Scholar
Nielsen, K. B. (2012). ‘An activist can't become a politician’: Social activism, leadership and the (un)making of a political career in an Indian state. Contemporary South Asia, 20(4), pp. 435–453.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nisbett, N. (2007). Friendship, consumption, morality: Practising identity, negotiating hierarchy in middle-class Bangalore. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13(4), pp. 935–950.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norval, A. J. (2012). ‘Writing a name in the sky’: Rancière, Cavell, and the possibility of egalitarian inscription. American Political Science Review, 106(4), pp. 810–826.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nowak, J. (2014). March for justice: The protest of India's Maruti Suzuki auto workers against imprisonment and dismissals. Workingusa, 17(4), pp. 579–586.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ong, A. (1996). Cultural citizenship as subject-making: Immigrants negotiate racial and cultural boundaries in the United States. Current Anthropology, 37(5), pp. 737–762.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oommen, T. (1974). Student politics in India: The case of Delhi University. Asian Survey, 14(9), pp. 777–794.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Oxford Dictionary of English (2016). Oxford University Press, Oxford.Google Scholar
Pagis, J. (2015). Mai 68, un pavé dans leur histoire: événements et socialisation politique. Presses de Sciences Po, Paris.Google Scholar
Pallikonda, M. (2018). BAPSA: A challenge to the ABVP and pseudo-left in JNU. Round Table India, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Panopoulos, D. (2006). La permanence de l’éclair. In Cornu, L. and Vermeren, P., La philosophie déplacée: autour de Jacques Rancière. Colloque de Cerisy. Horlieu, Lyon.Google Scholar
Parashar, S. and Shah, J. A. (2016). (En)gendering the Maoist insurgency in India: Between rhetoric and reality. Postcolonial Studies, 19(4), pp. 445–462.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pathania, G. J. (2018). The university as a site of resistance: Identity and student politics. Oxford University Press, New Delhi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pattnaik, S. K. (1982). Student politics and voting behaviour: A case study of Jawaharlal Nehru University. Concept Publishing Company, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Paul, B. (2014). The first Naxal: An authorised biography of Kanu Sanyal. SAGE Publications India, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Phadnis, A. (2016). JNU's ethos is being eroded, dismantled: D. P. Tripathi. Business Standard, 22 February.Google Scholar
Pribiag, I. V. (2019). Politics and its others: Jacques Rancière's figures of alterity. Philosophy Today, 63(2), pp. 447–470.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ram, L. (2016). Martyrdom and democratic politics. The case of the communist movement in North Kerala. Seminar presented at the South Asia International Graduate Conference, Paris, 8–10 June.Google Scholar
Ramirez, P. (2002). La guerre populaire au népal: D'où viennent les maoïstes?. Hérodote, 4, pp. 47–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rancière, J. (1995). On the shores of politics. Verso, London.Google Scholar
Rancière, J. (1998). Aux bords du politique. La Fabrique, Paris.Google Scholar
Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement: Politics and philosophy. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.Google Scholar
Rancière, J. (2004). The Janus-face of politicized art. Jacques Rancière in interview with Gabriel Rockhill. In Rancière, J., The politics of aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible. Continuum, London and New York.Google Scholar
Rancière, J. (2005). La haine de la démocratie. La fabrique éditions, Paris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rancière, J. (2008). What does it mean to be un?. Continuum, 21(4), pp. 559–569.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ranjan, R. and Awadhesh, (31 March 2005). Breaking the barriers, AISA pamphlet, PaRChA Archive, ID-43549.Google Scholar
Reddy, C. R. (2009). A century of political fasting. Economic and Political Weekly, 44(52), p. 7.Google Scholar
Roberts, M. (2005). Tamil Tiger ‘martyrs’: Regenerating divine potency?. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 28(6), pp. 493–514.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, C. J. (1983). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press, Totowa.Google Scholar
Roy, M. S. (2009). Magic moments of struggle: Women's memory of the Naxalbari Movement in West Bengal, India (1967–75). Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 16(2), pp. 205–232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, S. (2006). Revolutionary marriage: On the politics of sexual stories in Naxalbari. Feminist Review, 83(1), pp. 99–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, S. (2007). The everyday life of the revolution: Gender, violence and memory. South Asia Research, 27(2), pp. 187–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, S. (2012). Remembering revolution: Gender, violence, and subjectivity in India's Naxalbari movement. Oxford University Press, New Delhi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salton-Cox, G. (2013). Literary praxis beyond the melodramas of commitment: Edward Upward, Soviet aesthetics, and leftist self-fashioning. Comparative Literature, 65(4), pp. 408–428.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Savory Fuller, R. (2018). Embodying ‘new India’ through remixed global performance: Flash mobs redefined in contemporary urban India, 2003–15. PhD thesis, University of Exeter.Google Scholar
Saward, M. (2006). The representative claim. Contemporary Political Theory, 5(3), pp. 297–318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scroll.in (2016). How the sedition drama has rejuvenated campus politics at JNU, 3 March.Google Scholar
Sehran, S. (2018). I will campaign against Modi for 2019 elections, says Shehla. India Today, 7 June.Google Scholar
Shah, A. (2012). Eco-incarceration? ‘Walking with the comrades’. Economic and Political Weekly, 47(21), pp. 32–34.Google Scholar
Shah, A. (2014). ‘The muck of the past’: Revolution, social transformation, and the Maoists in India. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20(2), pp. 337–356.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shah, A. (2018). Nightmarch: Among the guerrillas of India's revolutionary movement. Hurst, London.Google Scholar
Shah, A. and Pettigrew, J. (2009). Windows into a revolution: Ethnographies of Maoism in South Asia. Dialectical Anthropology, 33(3–4), p. 225.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shah, F. (2012). The rebel poet of JNU. The Kashmir Walla, 2(5).Google Scholar
Shalk, P. (1997). The revival of martyr cults among Ilavar. Temenos, 33, p. 160.Google Scholar
Shipurkar, T. (2016). Gender on campus: Redefining gender identities at Jawaharlal Nehru University. An ethnographic study on the transformations in gendered identities of young women in India as they shift across contexts of home and university. Master's thesis, Leiden University.Google Scholar
Shneiderman, S. (2015). Rituals of ethnicity: Thangmi identities between Nepal and India. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singh, A. (2015). A student who never left campus and a revolutionary poet: A tribute to JNU's Vidrohi. Youth Ki Awaaz.Google Scholar
Singh, M. and Dasgupta, R. (2019). Exceptionalising democratic dissent: A study of the JNU event and its representations. Postcolonial Studies, 22(1), pp. 59–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singh Bal, , H. (2019). The takeover: How the RSS is infiltrating India's intellectual spaces. The Caravan, 11(4), pp. 22–32.Google Scholar
Sitapati, V. (2011). What Anna Hazare's movement and India's new middle classes say about each other. Economic and Political Weekly, 46(30), pp. 39–44.Google Scholar
Snellinger, A. (2012). The young political generation today. Five years later. Himalaya, The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 31(1), p. 15.Google Scholar
Snellinger, A. (2018). Making new Nepal: From student activism to mainstream politics. University of Washington Press, Washington.Google Scholar
Sorensen, D. (2007). Che Guevara and the construction of the new man. In Sorensen, D., A turbulent decade remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties. Stanford University Press, California, pp. 24–42.Google Scholar
Souvenirs of the Alumni Association of JNU (2008–2010). Souvenirs. Unpublished, courtesy of Professor Anand Kumar.Google Scholar
Spivak, G. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (eds), Marxism and the interpretation of culture. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, pp. 66–111.Google Scholar
Students’ Federation of India (SFI) Central Executive Committee (2016). Martyrs: http://www.sficec.org/organisation/martyrs, [last accessed 22 July 2020].Google Scholar
Subramanian, A. (2015). Making merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the social life of caste. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 57(02), pp. 291–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sundar, N. (2019). The burning forest: India's war against the Maoists. Verso, London.Google Scholar
Tassin, É. (2014). Subjectivation versus sujet politique. Tumultes, 2, pp. 157–173.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lama-Rewal, Tawa, S. (2016). Political representation in India: Enlarging the perspective. India Review, 15(2), pp. 163–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Teltumbde, A. (2019). The university as passivity? The role of students’ politics activism. In Bhattacharya, D. (ed.), The idea of the university: Histories and contexts. Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Thapar, R. (2016). Targeting institutions of higher education: Fear of the intellectual. Economic and Political Weekly, 51(10), pp. 19–21.Google Scholar
Third comrade Naveen Babu lecture (24 February 2014). DSU pamphlet, PaRChA Archive, ID-58567.Google Scholar
The Times of India (1998). Not much left of the left, 1 November.Google Scholar
The Times of India (2014). Jailed Maoists to go on one-day hunger strike, 10 December.Google Scholar
Traïni, C. and Terry, J. (2010). From feelings to emotions (and back again). Revue française de science politique, 60(2), pp. 335–358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tromly, B. (2012). Intelligentsia self-fashioning in the postwar Soviet Union: Revol't Pimenov's political struggle, 1949–57. Kritika, 13(1), pp. 151–176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ullekh, N. P. (2018). Kannur: Inside India's bloodiest revenge politics. Penguin India, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Vaidik, A. (2013). History of a renegade revolutionary: Revolutionism and betrayal in colonial India. Postcolonial Studies, 16(2), pp. 216–229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van der Veer, P. (1989). The power of detachment: Disciplines of body and mind in the Ramanandi order. American Ethnologist, 16(3), pp. 458–470.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Dyke, V. (2002). Religious mobilisation and Sadhus in politics: The idealized versus realpolitik. In Paul, R. and Vanaik, A. (eds), Competing nationalism in South Asia. Orient Longman, Hyderabad, pp. 144–162.Google Scholar
Vanaik, A. (1986). The Indian Left. New Left Review, 159, p. 49.Google Scholar
Veeser, H. (2013). The new historicism. Routledge, London.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verdery, K. (2013). The political lives of dead bodies: Reburial and post-socialist change. Columbia University Press, New York.Google Scholar
Wagner, R. (1995). If you have the advertisement you don't need the product. In Battaglia, D. (ed.), Rhetorics of self-making. University of California Press, Oakland, pp. 60–77.Google Scholar
Xaxa, A. (2011). I am not your data [Poem]. The Shared Mirror, 19 July.Google Scholar
Youth Ki Awaaz (2016). Out on bail, Umar and Anirban raise the cry for struggle for freedom at JNU, 19 March.Google Scholar
Zharkevich, I. (2009). A new way of being young in Nepal: The idea of Maoist youth and dreams of a new man. Studies in Nepali History and Society, 14(1), pp. 67–105.Google Scholar
Žižek, S. (2000). The ticklish subject: The absent centre of political ontology. Verso, London.Google Scholar