Class Struggles in Class Rooms: Conflict, Politics, and the Indian University

Abstract

“Class Struggles in Classrooms” discusses conflict, politics, and the Indian university. In recent years, Indians have woken up in the morning to news of student suicides. There have been much-publicized cases where college or university students from lower caste/lower class background have committed suicide; many of these have happened in elite higher education institutions of the country. What has prompted students from economically depressed and socially marginalized sections of Indian society to commit suicide? What is the deeper malaise in India’s higher education system? Does the malaise stem from and point toward a deep injustice within Indian society? India’s universities and its higher education institutions, especially the ones that are funded by the government, have been founded with the objectives enshrined in Indian Constitution, those of justice, liberty, and equality. The higher education system professes to further the cause of education, of enlightenment, of liberty and freedom, and of justice. In reality, the Indian university is a space where injustice continues, on a number of axes of discrimination. Language, caste, class, gender, urban/rural, and physiological disability all of these provide the sources of discrimination. This chapter details the social and cultural experience of students from margins of society in the sites of higher education; it also looks into the nature of control and of politics in the higher education space. It argues that instead of having a transformative role, in most part, the Indian university plays a key role in reproduction of the inequities of the Indian social system. And, finally, the author points out that this becomes possible because of a poverty of politics in India.