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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: [email protected]
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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
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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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).

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