Reading as Resistance: Study Circles and Changing Contours of Student Movements in Indian Universities

Abstract

In the last decade, Indian universities have been central to charged ideological confrontations. Since the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party-led government came to power in 2014, liberal institutions of higher education such as Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi University (DU), Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI), and others have encountered severe state surveillance and suppression of academic freedom. The majority of progressive student collectives and activists have been either banned or restricted on campuses by university administration. In such a politically contested landscape of Indian universities, study circles have emerged as a new space for student resistance. The increasing number of study circles, particularly those based on Marxist and Ambedkarite ideologies, have produced new modes of protests on campuses by organising reading sessions. In reading sessions, student collectives come together to read texts that considerably challenge the state’s authoritarian nature. Such public reading activities on campus often undergo surveillance or are denied permission to organise inside the university campus. By ethnographic mapping of reading circles, this paper contributes to the existing theorisation of student movements on university campuses. It also attempts to explore how study circles change the contours of student movements, how the modus operandi of organising reading-based protests differs from that of traditional student protests, and how study circles help students navigate everyday socio-political boundaries on campuses. The paper is based on a year-long ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews of selected participants associated with various study circles at Delhi University, such as Ambedkar Reading Circle, Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle, Hundred Flowers Marxist Study Group, National Bahujan Student Movement, Krantikari Yuva Sangathan, and Satyashodhak Study Circle.