“Humiliation is not merely an event; it is an experience that shapes the very structure of selfhood for the oppressed.”

– Gopal Guru in Cracked Mirror

My life is a spectacle that only begins and it ends only in imagination but in reality it is never lived as if I am a ghost of sysyphus condemned to only begin and never finish.

Begining anything that is worth emancipatory for any society is no easy task and as I embark on a battle to reclaim dignity for myself and my people, it’s not so easy to decide where to begin with my story. As a young boy studying in a jesuit institution, my schooling was quite extraordinary from a large section of Indians. I was privileged to have been a part of this institution. Yet I lacked the social and cultural capital to make the best use of my school. My father, a migrant to Delhi from a nearby village was first generation into higher education and that too in Hindi and taking all the pain and hardship in his meagre income he chose to give me the best education possible, but what can be said of the sore lack of cultural and literary capital in an age where Internet was only begining to take shape in India. That was the time when he took a loan and bought for me a Intel Pentium 4  Personal Computer. During that time Wikipedia was newly launched and I was quick to explore it as a fifth grader. Once my English teacher gave my class an assignment for English elocution competition and asked us to select by our own any English poem which was then to be recited in front of the whole class. Little did I know about literature and its nuances and my curiosity of surfing on the internet, I was quite fascinated by Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson’s, The the Lady of Shallot and learnt it by heart. But I didn’t know that I will be humiliated in from of my whole class by my teacher for choosing such a poem at such a young age without knowing the nuances of literature (How, I would have know all this being the son of a migrant from Hindi speaking belt of India is beyond my comprehension).

It was only later that I would come to know about Literary theory and Literature’s role in class domination and it’s potential as a vehicle of resistance. I was taught Roland Barthes, Pierre Macherey later all by myself and with institutional help from St Xaviers College Autonomous Mumbai.

It was here that I turned my humiliation into a radical rage and wrote a poem Listen Mr Xavier’s Don based on the inspiration I sought from John Agard’s Listen Mr. Oxford Don. It was really fascinating to see my self being structured to turn my pain inside out into expressions of rage and articulation while also suffering from the melancholy of an artist’s fate since my childhood. I always had it difficult for me to make sense of this condition of my mind which made me wander a lot and I realised my fate lies in submitting myself to the study of society and its evils committed on people like me and I dedicated myself to studying Sociology but that melancholy of a wandering artists mind made me suffer more and my Intellectual gift turned into a an existential curse which I was too young to have understood. I battled it none the less and cleared Jawaharlal Nehru University ‘s Master’s Program in Sociology twice and left it midway because of reasons which were beyond my capacity to conquer.

Later I realised my calling is sociology and it not only helps me become a better person, it eases my existential pain stemming out from my Intellectual curiosity as a person of an oppressed identity. As the Society and State chose to ‘Discipline’ and ‘Punish’ me in a Foucauldian sense.

I was first selected in CSSS MA Sociology in 2020 CoVID year and being at home without any laptop made my life worse. At that time I didn’t even have a separate room to attend my classes without distractions especially when in a pandemic everyone is forced to be at home. That was a tough time and I battled through it but my existential curse didn’t let me finish it. At the same time I was also awarded an admission in MA Social Anthropology at SOAS but without any funding. My deepest desires to engage with Sociology through global exposure was shattered. After that I spent my time wandering again aimlessly as if nothing has come out of my efforts. Then with debilitating energy I once again applied to JNU CSSS in 2023 and I tried once again to ease my existential pain but all I got in return from the campus was ridicule, isolation and boycott. At that time around I was also writing on my blog notsomeritorios.co.in and my writing invited lot of backlash especially from the left intellegentsia of the campus. I was always a target because I was working all alone that is to say I was not part of any political party working in the campus. And this was a statement I was making because I had seen very closely all these parties and they had nothing meaningful to offer for a person like me who believes in the praxis of Epistemic warfare. Post Spivak incident My personal troubles only accentuated I fell to my addiction which made things worse for me. One important reason behind my aggression and abusive tongue, I can’t share publically because of various reasons led me into decay and I missed my exams due to the strange state of mind I was in. So much for the mental health support talks and charade at campus. Despite everyone knowing me in the campus no one ever reached out to me while I was being attacked by the ganglords of leftist academia. From being called misogynist to Islamophobic no one let me defend my case. My agency to define myself was robbed off me and I was epistemically silenced while many people in academia used me to further their career writing articles and papers in journals, no one reached out to me and I was left all alone to be fend off by my family. Even my class (CSSS 2023-25) was against me because I was critical of the agency Feminism uses to demonize the lower castes and emasculates them both academically and psychologically.

One of my classmate, SFI CC member even exhorted everyone to file complaint against me and that she will help them in any manner possible to hunt me down. This was what the Left is saying right now about ABVP, isolate, boycott and defeat in plain action.

Even BAPSA never came in full support of me publically and when I inquired they were like since you were not a member of BAPSA we won’t support you. This is what BAPSA’s politics has become. Let me be very straight that this same BAPSA would have made career out of me had I committed suicide.

What can be said about DSF, whose president attenda Coldplay’s concert worth 20,000 rupees of tickets and then demands donations from the JNU populace in the name of political activism against BJP.

In short, I am socially boycotted in JNU campus for a long time and the mental toll it takes me is beyond my capacity to process it and I am having a tough time.

Anshul Kumar
MA Sociology CSSS