Abuse, Subaltern Speech, and Liberal Hypocrisy: The JNU–Anshul Kumar Controversy Revisited

The controversy around Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Anshul Kumar at JNU is not simply an incident of academic disagreement or personal misconduct; it is a revealing fracture in the moral and political claims of left-liberal academia itself. At its core lies a fundamental question that extends Spivak’s own provocation—Can the subaltern speak?—into a more uncomfortable terrain: what happens when the subaltern speaks in a language that refuses civility, polish, and institutional acceptability? The moment Anshul Kumar was interrupted over pronunciation and denied the ability to complete his question, what unfolded was not just a breakdown of academic decorum but a reenactment of the very epistemic exclusion that subaltern theory claims to critique. His subsequent turn to abuse, widely condemned as excessive and inappropriate, must be read not merely as an individual failure but as a structural symptom—the eruption of a voice that has no sanctioned channel of expression within elite academic discourse.

In platforms like notsomeritorios.com, Anshul Kumar’s position is not framed as a defense of abuse for its own sake, but as a recognition of its function: abuse becomes the last available language of the structurally unheard. When speech is interrupted, corrected, and disciplined into acceptable forms, what remains is rupture. Abuse here is not simply insult; it is a refusal to conform to the linguistic and affective norms that govern elite spaces. It is, in this sense, a form of epistemic disobedience—a breaking of the rules that determine what counts as legitimate knowledge and who gets to produce it. Yet this is precisely where left-liberal academia reveals its contradiction. While it claims to champion marginalized voices, it simultaneously polices the conditions under which those voices can appear. The subaltern is allowed to speak, but only if they speak in a way that is articulate, composed, theoretically legible, and aesthetically pleasing.

This selective acceptance produces what can only be described as the sanitisation and gentrification of Dalit expression. Universities celebrate Dalit literature, cite B. R. Ambedkar, and organize discussions on caste, but what they embrace is a curated version of Dalit life—one stripped of its rawness, its anger, its contradictions. The messy realities of lived experience—abusive language, fractured families, emotional volatility, and the everyday textures of marginalisation—are rendered inappropriate, excessive, or lacking in refinement. What emerges instead is a “good” Dalit subject: critical but not confrontational, expressive but not disruptive, visible but not unsettling. Anshul Kumar’s intervention shattered this template. He did not perform the expected role of the polished subaltern intellectual; he appeared instead as the inconvenient, unfiltered subject whose presence cannot be easily absorbed into liberal discourse.

The reaction from JNU’s left-liberal circles must therefore be understood not as a principled stand against incivility, but as a defense of the politics of comfort. Liberalism, in this context, does not reject dissent outright; it filters it. It demands that critique be delivered in a language that does not destabilize the listener, that anger be moderated into argument, that lived experience be translated into theory. This is why the same spaces that defend slogans, protests, and radical speech turn hostile when confronted with unmediated rage. The contradiction is stark: freedom of speech is celebrated in principle but constrained in practice through the policing of tone. For the subaltern, however, tone is not a stylistic choice; it is shaped by conditions of exclusion, humiliation, and interruption. To demand civility is to demand translation into the language of power, and in doing so, to neutralize the very force of subaltern expression.

The emphasis on pronunciation in the initial exchange is particularly telling. It reveals how academic authority is maintained through seemingly minor acts of correction that reinforce hierarchies of knowledge and legitimacy. The interruption over “proper” articulation becomes a way of asserting control, of signaling that access to discourse is conditional upon adherence to its norms. Anshul Kumar’s critique of academic spaces as circles of sycophancy reflects this experience—where established figures are insulated from challenge, and dissent is tolerated only within predefined limits. When those limits are crossed, the response is swift: condemnation, delegitimization, and, in contemporary terms, cancellation.

This pattern is not unique to JNU or India. Across global contexts, marginalized speech that exceeds the bounds of acceptability is routinely dismissed as anger, hysteria, or irrationality. Black radical voices in the United States, feminist expressions of rage, and working-class forms of articulation have all been subjected to similar forms of regulation. In each case, the underlying logic remains the same: the marginalized are heard only when they conform to dominant expectations of expression. Anything else is rendered unintelligible or unacceptable.

What the Anshul Kumar episode ultimately exposes is the failure of liberal allyship. It reveals a mode of engagement that is comfortable with representing marginality but uncomfortable with encountering it in its unfiltered form. Dalit thought is welcomed as text, as theory, as an object of study—but Dalit anger, especially when it disrupts the decorum of academic space, is treated as a problem to be managed. This is not solidarity; it is a controlled inclusion that maintains the authority of the dominant while appearing progressive.

The deeper theoretical question, then, is no longer whether the subaltern can speak. Anshul Kumar did speak—loudly, disruptively, and in a manner that refused the norms of academic civility. The question is whether the subaltern can be heard when they do not speak in the language that power recognizes as legitimate. The answer, in this case, appears to be negative. They are interrupted, corrected, and ultimately disciplined for the very form of their expression. And in that process, liberalism reveals its limits—not as a space of unrestricted freedom, but as a regime that governs the conditions of acceptable speech.

To insist that the subaltern must be polite in order to be heard is to perpetuate the very structures that silence them. It is to demand that they adapt to the language of those who exclude them, rather than transforming the terms of discourse itself. Anshul Kumar’s intervention, regardless of how one evaluates its form, forces a confrontation with this uncomfortable reality: if only the sanitized subaltern is acceptable, then the subaltern remains unfree.