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Education, said Babasaheb Ambedkar, is the milk of a tigress, and generations of our communities have since invested their full potential to seek education for their empowerment. For my family, this struggle began with my grandparents who worked hard to educate my parents.
It was brought to an abrupt halt when my parents had to prioritize working for a decent living over pursuing higher education.
I joined the University of Hyderabad (UoH) for my MA in History in July 2019. As a first generation student in higher education, I knew about the university through the Rohith (Vemula) movement.
Deterrence of the marginalized is accompanied by deterrence and aspirations. Soon after my admission process was completed, I was informed that the portal facilitating hostel placement was temporarily closed. There was no certainty of getting accommodation in the hostel until the available rooms in the hostel were officially made available. In order to afford to continue my course here, it was extremely important to find a room in the hostel.
Hostels have played a very important role in creating an educated class among the marginalized groups. In July 1924, Babasaheb established the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha to promote education among the depressed classes. The establishment of such hostels for students was one of the main objectives of the Sabha, which opened two such hostels for students from depressed classes.
It was the denial of access to the hostel rooms that prompted Rohith’s Velivada anna and four other students who were socially boycotted along with him in 2016 by the Appa Rao-led university administration.
It has become a daily routine for me to visit the Head Warden’s office to request hostel accommodation. My means of resistance; sitting outside the office to look for accommodation barely eclipsed the apathy of the warden’s office. It was only after a month of humiliation that I approached the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA) for help and was given a hostel room for one night. Both my parents are primary school teachers who brought me up in Ambedkarian thought.
The disdain for working in an anti-caste organization was quite familiar to me. Through accounts in liberal circles, I have come to believe the casteist speculation about the ASA as an organization that is shamefully hyper-masculine and gender-insensitive. I have chosen to disassociate myself from any close association with the ASA. I believed that disconnecting would help me navigate all such experiences of discrimination. However, the interaction of faculty members and the student fraternity continues to be caste-based (caste-based). The performances of my caste-Hindu classmates, whether good or bad, benefited from the guidance of faculty members. While in relation to us, they used broad remarks, calling our answers “objective” and our language unacademic. Our questions in the classroom were met with scornful silence or remarks like “You don’t understand what I’m talking about” or “You should read more.”
75 years of independence have not erased our experience of discrimination in university spaces. By accessing our right to education, we make our way to higher education. But does the mere physical freedom to enter these university spaces guarantee us freedom from discrimination and gatekeeping in higher education? Have these experiences enabled us to access education to develop our human capacity to exist as free people? A few months before I joined the university, Velivada, erected by five Dalit scholars who were denied entry, was demolished by the university administration in the middle of the night.
Although Velivadas in villages across the nation still signify the ghettoization of Dalits, what would be the administration’s intention behind dismantling Velivada in UoH? It was an attempt to erase the history of resistance whose memories would continue to challenge the practice of discrimination. Higher education, which remains monopolized by caste Hindus, will always cause university spaces to support such discriminatory practices.
Under such circumstances, the ASA, like many other young student organizations of the Ambedkars, became a counter-culture space where such humiliation was channeled to build the potential of students coming from marginalized caste backgrounds. Speaking at public gatherings restored the trust that had been lost in classrooms.
ASA’s participation in student elections, small victories in persuading the administration to fill all reserved seats, checking abuses where students from marginalized communities were singled out in interviews, due payment of scholarships, building pressure around cases of harassment by leaders are the result of the invisible work done by the students’ organizations of the Ambedkars for generations. In a sense, these organizations have offered more to the realization of just societies than the claims made in university texts and handbooks.
All spaces are modeled hierarchically. ASA was no exception. Negotiations with administration, decision-making, access to organizational capital are determined by these hierarchies.
The disgust and marginality associated with queerness was reflected in my experiences at ASA. “A man’s worth was reduced to his immediate identity and his nearest opportunity…….. Man was never treated as a mind. Like a glorious thing made of stardust,” Rohit Anna warned us in his latest message. Organizational space shapes individual opinions and worldviews; but the organizational spaces that confine you to your immediate identity cannot treat you as a mind, as a free person. It is in ASA’s commitment to Babasaheb’s emancipatory worldview and confident Self that I see my transformative journey against anti-discrimination and reaffirm my belief in a just future for all.
In the words of Wamandada Kardak, a famous Ambedkarite poet…
Samatecha wahi wahi wa na pilavunkila thara,
Tya nagarichya shodhasathi navya manasapathi
Tanda chalala….
Manus nava ghadavava ha lok ladha ladhvava,
Ekjuticha awaj amacha abhal ata gathi
Where the wind of equality blows (where there is) there is no shelter for exploitation,
To search this city for the new man,
The caravan is moving…
To create a new man (this) human battle must be fought,
Our united voice now reaches the heavens.
(This appeared in print as “The Caravan Moves”)
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