Disclaimer: In order to enable a free-wheeling conversation on the subject, the interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was carried out with the understanding that she would get to approve the direct quotes that would be published. Ms. Spivak was sent the quotes that were to be included but her responses were not received before the first deadline. Therefore, an earlier version of this story has been revised after Ms. Spivak sent us the final version of her responses.
Days after videos showed a Dalit student being shut down by scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak during the question-and-answer (Q&A) session of a talk given at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, Ms. Spivak said in a statement to The Hindu that she never stopped the concerned student from asking his question, and that the student had not identified himself as a Dalit.
Twenty-eight-year-old Anshul Kumar, an M.A. (Sociology) student at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, had attempted to ask Ms. Spivak about her positioning herself as middle-class, at the talk of May 21.
But he was interrupted over his pronunciation of American Sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois’ last name, which was being repeatedly corrected by Ms. Spivak, among the most celebrated scholars in her domain. This led to other audience members breaking out in giggles, many who attended the talk said, adding that Ms. Spivak might have also had an issue with Mr. Kumar identifying himself as the “Founding Professor of the Centre for Brahmin Studies”.
Soon after the altercation, Mr. Kumar put up a poster in protest outside the auditorium where the talk was held, which read: “If the subaltern can’t speak, he shall abuse!” with an expletive added to it. The whole point of introducing himself as part of the “Centre for Brahmin Studies” was to stress the need for interrogating Brahminism as subaltern identities are inquired into, Mr. Kumar had told The Hindu.
Responding to the controversy that has erupted since, Ms. Spivak told The Hindu on Friday, “Anshul Kumar had not identified himself as a Dalit. Therefore I thought he was a Brahminist, since he was saying that he was the founder of a Brahmin Studies Institute. I did not stop Mr. Kumar from asking his question. He was still mispronouncing Du Bois’s name and started to talk to me in a very rude way. As an old female teacher confronting a male student, and especially since I had not been given the information that he was Dalit, my wounded remark that I did not want to hear his question was a gesture of protest.”
She added that “for some reason”, people at the talk were not pronouncing Du Bois’s name correctly – which is the Haitian way. “Since Du Bois was himself a Black ‘Dalit’, I would like to suggest that the correct pronunciation be learned,” she said.
She said that this had been an “extremely instructive experience” for her, adding, “That this kind of public misunderstanding and defamation can be undertaken in contemporary India is deeply disturbing to someone like me and others.”
Further, Ms. Spivak said, “We understand that Mr. Kumar is studying for an M.A. in Sociology at JNU; I did make the point again and again that Du Bois had invented the modern discipline of Sociology with his Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899.”
Ever since videos of the incident have gone viral, criticism of Mr. Kumar has focused on the language he has used for Ms. Spivak since the talk. Mr. Kumar, on the other hand, has maintained that the point he was trying to make by posing his question to Ms. Spivak had been missed by many.
Meanwhile, Mr. Kumar has been using quotes from Du Bois’s works to argue against the dismissal of subaltern voices due to requirements of “syntactical obedience”, even as the incident has pushed some scholars to question if subaltern voices are heard at all when they do speak up – pointing to one of Ms. Spivak’s most-read essays “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Responding to this discourse, Ms. Spivak said, “Subaltern and Dalit are not interchangeable words. The upwardly class-mobile Dalit person – and the academy is an instrument of upward class-mobility – should certainly use his/her new privilege to work for the entire Dalit community, especially the subaltern Dalits, who do not get into elite universities.”
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When asked if one ceases to be subaltern as they start entering elite academic spaces, she said, “Yes, they do, although they certainly don’t stop being people of Dalit origin, who should use their privilege to help the subaltern Dalits. There is a kind of somewhat frightened reverse casteism among politically correct non-Dalits of which the serious activists do not take advantage.”
She continued, “As far as subalternity is concerned: our sustained position has been that subalternity must be destroyed and made more generalizable as citizenship. I do regret that Subaltern Studies, which is a historiographical endeavour, does not seem to acknowledge caste. For the last forty years I have been working for subalterns, running elementary schools, rather than studying them.”
While calling out Mr. Kumar’s use of expletives for being misogynist, several Dalit activists and scholars have also questioned the need for Ms. Spivak to have latched on to the pronunciation of Du Bois’s last name over hearing Mr. Kumar’s question.
Before being interrupted, what Mr. Kumar wanted to ask Ms. Spivak was: “Spivak claims to be middle class. She said in her lecture that Du Bois was an upper-class elite. How is she as a great granddaughter of Bihari Lal Bhaduri, a close friend of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, supposed to be middle class?”
Responding to the question, Ms. Spivak said the question had nothing to do with the subject of the talk “W.E.B. Du Bois’s Vision of Democracy.” She continued, “And I am not Bihari Lal Bhaduri’s great granddaughter. I believe he was the person (I cannot be sure of this) who asked my real great grandfather (at the time a cook hired by a middle-class family) to marry a widow.”
Ms. Spivak added, “Incidentally, I did not say Du Bois was an elite upper-class person. The only thing I said was that he had not been enslaved, and for lacking the experience of slavery he was apologetic.”
In the prepared remarks, Ms. Spivak said that she was not correcting his accent, was also asking more people in the audience to pronounce Du Bois’ name correctly - “in the Haitian rather than the French way. This is because the French had colonised Haiti. Du Bois’s father was Haitian. From all the documentation that I have seen, I believe the ‘Haitian’ was heard as ‘Englishman’.”
