This is an open letter written by Saitya Brata Das, who teaches English literature and philosophy at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Newslaundry has published the exclusive letter in its entirety.

It is not the question of claiming to secure a specific right through conditional measures, through finite strategies and negotiations; it is rather the question of establishing of justice in the name of the unconditional truth.  This is the stake and this is where we must strive and out which we must speak the truth. It is the oppressed ones in history, those who are vanquished in the triumphal march of history, alone know in the inwardness of their existence, what truth is; they have the sixth sense, that acute sensibility and that painful sensitivity to discern what truth truly is.

It is in the name of the unconditional justice that must I speak today. Barely can it be called “speech”; rather a cry it is, a shattered speech, lucid in its shiver, burning in its lucidity. My tongue is burnt, but I must still cry out!

Born in a “Dalit” family whose parents never attended the University (my mother cannot read English or Hindi), I grew up in a village of utterly impoverished, completely uneducated (I am the second, my elder brother being the first, to have ever graduated in the entire history of this little village) and oppressed people, surrounded by villages of higher castes. I remember having to read judiciously till the middle of each night in kerosene lamps and living without toilet facilities.  I remember having to confront on a daily basis, which was my fate, those impossible insults and derogatory remarks by children of surrounding villages who call me by various names in accordance to “my” caste (is it mine? Or is it thrust upon me by a violence where speech has to fail?); I remember having to see them washing the tube wells after I take bath, for I have made these shared tube wells impure and dirty by touching them. There are innumerable things that hurt a human being at the deepest depth of her inner life. And one carries them, like a thorn in the flesh.

So when I came to Jawaharlal Nehru University as Masters Student, it is huge relief and an immense hope, to be relieved from the savage oppressions of the cast system. It is the only and the unique University, this little dear Island in this immense country, where I am welcomed: here I can read Hegel sitting with another whose caste I don’t know. And it is a prodigious fortune for me that I have come to teach at the same University.

However, I was naïve to hope so: this inhumane, barbaric and systematic caste discrimination has meanwhile only become more refined and subtle, so refined and subtle that it appears almost imperceptible, unless one is endowed with the sixth sense, and thanks to that the oppressed ones are almost always bestowed with the sixth sense. One experiences this refined, sometimes even made “aesthetic”, discrimination almost always on daily basis, even on this little Island which is one of the best higher educational institutions of India: here, even here, younger faculty members from Dalit background can be harassed and bullied by senior and higher caste colleagues in their refined ways under the very guise of patronizing; they are pulled down, in the most intriguing manner possible, so that those who have been in the social hierarchy can always remain on the top, even within the University context, so that the socio-economic hierarchy can easily be transformed into the professional hierarchy ( where the full professors are “revered”, where professors decide on almost everything decisive in the University).

To promote someone as “professor” in the University context, especially if someone is Dalit and who has radical political views and that too if the establishment happens to be politically grounded on a certain ideology that reinforces and reifies this very caste system: this is nearly an impossible situation! Therefore, it is not at all surprising that the authority in place will not find someone good enough to be a professor who is from “Dalit” background, who has some uncompromising political thinking that is critical in nature, even though his academic-intellectual achievement cannot at all be put into question, and even though his accomplishment in many respects may even surpass many of those in position. Thus is the brutal blow delivered: an unreasonable reason, nowhere existing amongst the rules of the book, is invented just on the spot just to stop someone who, from all grounds of academic merit, is difficult to be put down otherwise: the invented rule – that only a faculty member who has PhD researcher awarded under his sole supervision is to be promoted – exists neither in UGC guidelines nor does it exist in the University ordinances. Moreover, this rule, even if it were to exist one day in the future, speaks absolutely nothing about the academic merit of a scholar and a thinker; the objective manifestation of a true scholar is his published work which alone speaks out, loud and clear, the importance of his task. At best, such a rule only speaks about the academic merit of the PhD researcher herself.  And moreover, such a rule, if it were to exist one day – it does not exist now – will be blind to the question of social justice, and hence is unjust and unethical. The University can’t exist on an unjust foundation. This injustice is not politically neutral, according to the rules of the book, but has its substantial ground in the millennium-long ideological-intellectual-social tradition that never ceases reifying these prejudices.

From this, either I can strategically go ahead and claim for my specific right through conditioned measures in the realm of political negotiations, and I get satisfied with it; or, in the name of unconditional justice, I refuse to participate in the realm of strategies: here I speak the truth, in unconditional terms, in the name of social justice, in the name of the larger question in relation to which my-not-being promoted consists not a great significance. I suppose it should be my task to maintain the dignity and nobility of what I do – my philosophical-intellectual existence – without compromise, in the name of justice to those fellow travellers like me who are daily put down and oppressed by the establishment, by those who have power and force, to decide the fate of my bare life.

To cry out, in the name of truth!

[opiniontag]