Teach-In: ‘Hindutva and the University’

Wednesday 22nd January, 2020

6:00 pm, QMUL Mile End Campus, ArtsTwo 3.20

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The sustained assaults on universities and schools in Kashmir, the long-standing discrimination against Dalits and minorities at Indian universities, and the recent armed attacks on students and faculty at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University all draw attention to the way in which questions of knowledge—its production and dissemination—are fundamentally, and violently, imbricated with the project of Indian, and particularly Hindu, nationalism.

The assault on public university students is part of the battle over categories such as nation, borders, autonomy, and more recently citizenship. In addition to incursions on institutions of knowledge and their patrons – which range from physical violence to efforts to delegitimize opposing views by constructing them as ‘anti-national’ – Hindutva organisations such as the RSS, as well as its networks and adherents in Western academic contexts, also aim to promote intellectual work and academic knowledge that aligns with their political ideology.

This panel will discuss the role played by pedagogy and knowledge production in the Hindu nationalist project, as well as the forms of learning, knowledge, and organising that are seen as threats to it. In doing so, it will place the recent attacks on Indian universities within a longer history of military occupations and everyday violence against minorities in India.

Chair: Akshi Singh (QMUL)

Speakers: Mehroosh Tak (Kashmir Solidarity Movement); Meena Dhanda (Wolverhampton); Akanksha Mehta (Goldsmiths)  and Rahul Rao (SOAS).

Organised with support from the Leverhulme Trust and the QMUL School of Politics and International Relations. Contact: i.r.birkvad [@] qmul.ac.uk