I write this essay not as an activist who champions strict adherence to reservation policies to instantly democratise our universities and clean the absurd Brahminical swamp that it has become, nor as an anti-caste feminist whose work has been canonised in English syllabi. Instead of foregrounding these rabble-rouser personas, I wish to engage in conversation here as a lapsed academic and former English faculty member at an Indian engineering university—drawing on the grit of classroom practice and the rigour of research to share my most practical, philosophical insights forged from the everyday work of teaching.
In doing so, I do not wish to underestimate the urgent need for structural upheaval and systematic change: bringing education back into the State List requires a national-level electoral mandate; forcing institutions to adhere to the reservation policy in faculty recruitment requires a people’s movement; holding out against the National Education Policy requires immense political will.
Even as we wait for such massive changes, we have to learn to leverage our immediate pedagogical spaces and bring about transformation despite the existing constraints. This challenging task before us becomes even more pronounced in the specific context of English language teaching in India, where the classroom is both a site of potential liberation and a mechanism of social reproduction.
Also Read | The great Indian university illusion
The American author and educator bell hooks (1994) imploring practitioners on the vital need to transform education into a practice of freedom was one of the most important guiding principles for me when I worked on my doctoral dissertation 15 years ago. Her work allowed me to reimagine the radical and subversive possibilities that could be unlocked within the college curriculum when I was attempting to find my way around the narrow confines of the mandatory English language syllabus for engineers in Tamil Nadu. It allowed me to call into question everything that had been held sacrosanct, to experiment as a part of my teaching/research practice, and to work within the classroom to ensure that any text could become a launch pad for critical discussion. The syllabus did not include women’s equality or social justice, it did not address caste violence or corporate exploitation, but we found a way to have these discussions in the classroom. Drawing on the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s notion of the “event” as a rupture in normality, small classroom interventions—strategic text choices, open-ended debates on exploitation, or reflective portfolios—can catalyse critical consciousness within a tech-focussed curriculum. These pedagogical events validate students’ lived experiences and model the critical thinking that engineering graduates need as responsible citizens.
Members of the All India Democratic Students Organisation burning an effigy of the then Union Minister Smriti Irani to protest against the derecognition of Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle by IIT Madras, in New Delhi on June 4, 2015. | Photo Credit: Shanker Chakravarty
To me, as a teaching research associate in her early 20s working in the College of Engineering, Guindy, popularly known as Anna University, at that time, the necessity to talk about the pressing issues in the world around us felt like essential work. It was the activist’s impulse within me; critical pedagogy allowed me to ground it within academic frameworks. It was also the shock of encountering a bitter truth, the realisation that engineers were insulated from learning about social systems even as they were learning how to make everything more efficient, streamlined, and inventive. This was counter-intuitive, set up and destined for failure.
Much has been written about the artificial distinction between the sciences and the humanities, which has become ingrained and established within the university, so I will not dwell on this further except to note that such a clean break has to be bridged. The broader disdain for humanities comes with one notable exception: a hankering for English language skills, often considered exclusively within the neoliberal mindset of employability. The role of the English faculty in technical education universities has often been viewed as similar to that of a finishing school, focused on preparing students to transition smoothly from university to industry. This instrumental view of language education directly contradicts the integrative, culturally responsive pedagogy that critical education demands. To break from the mould, I felt resonance and found common ground in the work of the academic Stephanie Vandrick, who points out that being entrusted with students’ education brings with it a responsibility of not only teaching them to be better writers/speakers of English but also helping them become critical thinkers and responsible world citizens. Vandrick’s words: “We must begin where we are and do what we can to make small dents in the injustices perpetuated in societal systems in which there is a vast divide between the privileged and the far less privileged”—became, for me, an affirmation of what the task of teaching English could look like.
This critical engagement and self-reflexivity were not directly born out of academic aspirations to theorise the Indian classroom/caste-room, or any saviour complex when encountering marginalised students making their way through a system that was designed to make them fail, falter, and fall short. My father, a first-generation learner from a nomadic tribe community who made it as a faculty member of classical Tamil in the University of Madras, found out after more than a decade that he was a “guest lecturer” and that he would never secure a permanent position. People like him were ad hoc, disposable, meant to be exploited for their labour and then thrown out without pension, insurance, or a future. My mother, a woman from a backward caste who taught pure mathematics, took IIT Madras to court in 1996 alleging discrimination and seeking implementation of Mandal Commission recommendations in faculty appointments. At that time, it was sacrilege: how could a lower caste woman demand reservation in the rarefied world of so-called merit, how dare she stand up against an institution of so-called eminence. I was the first-born daughter of this couple; I witnessed everything first-hand. I spent my after-school hours writing memorandums to parliamentarians or taking notes for my mother’s affidavits-in-progress from lawyers. In the 1990s, I could reel off the statistics of how many SC/ST/OBC faculty were employed in IIT Madras (they were all single digit numbers); 30 years later, the stats of how the IITs continue to flout the reservation policy remain equally shameful. Across 23 IITs employing 6,043 teaching staff, only 9 per cent were either SC/ST/OBC: only 149 faculty members were SC (2.5 per cent) and only 21 (0.34 per cent) were from the ST category, according to the data tabled in Lok Sabha in 2019 by the then Education Minister, Ramesh Pokhriyal.
IITs lobbying for exemption
Enjoying absolute impunity, the leadership of the IITs continues to lobby for their exemption from the constitutional social justice policy of reservation (using the buzzwords of excellence, national importance, and eminence) while investing massively in public relations and spin factories to keep up this carefully curated image. Laundering historical privilege into modern capital and meritocracy has always been a tale as old as time.
The narrow, exclusionary definition of “merit” that underpins the IITs’ elite brand is the same force that drives their outdated pedagogical methods and sustains a hostile environment for marginalised communities. The fact that student suicides (institutional murders) have doubled in the last decade should expose how alarming it is. To reform education here is not a matter of updating a syllabus; it requires a fundamental deconstruction of the myth of merit and a radical reimagining of the engineer’s role in society. Instead, we have been informed that the IITs are going to work out a gurukul-to-IIT pipeline; the guard rails are off, Brahminism does not even have to pretend about the face value of entrance examinations any more. This closed loop of social and intellectual reproduction will remain fortified and incredibly difficult to break.
Students demanding justice for Rohith Vemula in front of the University of Hyderabad campus on May 4, 2024. | Photo Credit: NAGARA GOPAL
The sharp focus on the IITs in discourses around the democratisation of education arises from two urgent compulsions: one, the IITs receive a fifth of the Union government’s total budget for higher education; two, positioned as role models, the IITs’ disdain for reservation and social justice, their depoliticisation and corporate hankering set a trend for educational institutions and universities around the country. The entrenched Brahminical supremacy of the IITs has exported a virus: the rest of us are plagued by the pandemic it has set in motion.
No replacement for collective resistance
In aspiring to emulate the IIT model, institutions everywhere place the so-called notion of merit on a pedestal and pay little heed to the injustices that exist inside and outside their pretty gated compounds. Teaching inside any college classroom in India and not acknowledging or addressing the elephants in the room—caste discrimination, gatekeeping, sexual harassment—is detrimental to the idea of education itself. Yet, such a sanitised approach is often the norm. Silence is deathly hypocrisy when we insulate ourselves against learning/teaching how broken we are as a society. We need to abandon what the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire labelled the banking model of education; we need to envision a fundamental shift in the classroom, from a site of passive reception to a dynamic space of critical inquiry and collaborative creation.
Trying to fix centuries of intellectual gatekeeping by radical teaching sounds like repairing a breach in a flooded dam with Band-Aid; I am sceptical of individual solutions to broader social problems, and they are no replacement for a collective resistance that would herald change. I am aware of the absolute limits of what change teachers alone can bring about. Yet, when I remember going into my classroom, I always believed that those 45 minutes were a time when I could at least convince the young students of the need for change, for a social revolution that dismantles caste hierarchies, for letting them know the transformative and historical necessity of the reservation policy.
Also Read | Higher education in peril
In closing, I want to cite bell hooks on the classroom, a space that “gives us the opportunity to labour for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress”.
The responsibility for transforming this idea of transgression into concrete, real-world pedagogical practices ultimately resides with individual faculty members. They possess the nuanced understanding required to navigate their students’ diverse linguistic, cultural, and economic contexts. It is precisely these change-oriented language instructors who must embrace the notion of a “pedagogical insurgency”, wielding their classroom authority with strategic intention to carve out spaces for critical dialogue even as they fulfil institutional requirements. In the interim—before any sweeping educational revolution materialises—these deliberate, radical interventions will nevertheless leave an indelible mark on students’ learning and on the broader culture of higher education. This is essential work that cannot wait.
Meena Kandasamy is a feminist poet and writer. Her latest published work is Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You, a collection of political poetry written over the last decade.
COMMents
SHARE