In defence of Nivedita Menon
In times when education has been reduced to ranks and cut-offs, and channelled towards jobs and salary "packages", thankfully there are teachers who give education a much-needed social expanse and salvage its true purpose. They sustain the university as a space of critical exploration, not churn out employable, obedient workers for the job-market. They help students think beyond themselves, develop a social consciousness, engage with the uncomfortable, look the provocative in the eye, dissect the normative with reason, debate handed-down concepts, learn the etiquette of disagreement, and speak up against injusticealthough not only when it is done to oneself or one's mata.
In the current Indian political regime as critical thought suffers possibly its worst blows, it is tragic that such teachers are being attacked by fanatics. These ill-informed so-called "nationalists" deploy education for sectarian and divisive agendas, eerily reminiscent of the hounding of one of our most celebrated artists MF Hussain.
As young scholars and women who have been inspired by their teacher's philosophy, conduct and work, this piece stands in defence of one such teacher. She is widely known as professor Nivedita Menon and perhaps better known now through selectively circulated videos meant to malign her credentials.
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| Since the malice against Nivi has surpassed the issue she raised, so must her defence. |
Among some of us who have had the privilege and honour of knowing her closely, Nivi (as she is fondly called among her students, colleagues and comrades) is better known for progressive values she has consistently embodied as a scholar and an activistin her decades of rich work. Now that she has achieved "national stature" (like Pratik Kanjilal wrote in his recent piece in The Indian Express), we think the nation and its parivar should also get to know her better.
As you may know by now, police complaints have been filed against Nivi. As a reflexive teacher at a "teach-in" lecture titled "Rashtra Ek Rozaana Raishumari: Rashtravaad par kuch khayal" ("The nation is a daily plebiscite: thoughts on nationalism"), she merely lay down the discontents in Kashmir, underscoring the historically contentious politics and the plurality of international positions which are in contradiction to the official stance of the Indian State.
For one, many individuals in India and all over the world have long engaged with the politics of/in Kashmir; many speak about its political status in the Indian State explicitly while others may mince their words. As a citizen of this "free" country, she is as entitled to her views just as those who disagree with her are. Indian tradition is known for its centuries of conflicting ideas and ideologies.
In fact Bharat Mata herself stands for diversity of thought, unless of course "diversity" is only a feel-good word meant for use in songs that whip up patriotic fervour?
But since the malice against Nivi has surpassed the issue she raised, so must her defence.
Her life and work exemplifies an extraordinary range of political and social movements that champion equality, justice and rights. In all her body of work, Nivi does not shy away from inconvenient ideas; as a thinker, it is her duty to do so. Hers has been a prominent voice in the anti-nuclear campaigns: "Peaceful harnessing of nuclear power is nothing but a garb".
Her contributions to debates about the intersections of law, feminist politics and the State have been much read and followed. Her words have acted as a steady reminder against the essentialisms that cling to political debates, the politics of identity and representation. Arguing that gender is one among many markers of individual identity like caste and class, she has urged the women's movement to be reflexive about the "quota within quota" demand in the Women's Reservation Bill debates.
Among her other enlightening correctives, she has stressed about how "woman" is not a natural category of individuals but one that has to be (in her words) "brought into being by political practice. There are no pre-existing 'women'…rather, there are 'people' who may respond to different kinds of political challenges", as "'Dalit' or 'Muslim' or as women".
In her immensely readable and engrossing work, Seeing like a Feminist, Nivi writes lucidly and with her signature humour for the general reader who often navigates through questions of supposedly Indian and Western values, of "moral" rights and wrongs that police our lives and of the thoroughly gendered worlds we imagine as "natural". Her thoughts on an array of themes such as women's reservations, the Uniform Civil Code (which she renames as gender-just civil code), sexual violence, gender, sexuality, feminism, sex selection, abortion, pornography, among others have influenced her community of readers to sit up and rethink. It is remarkable how over the years she has made a constant endeavour to push the horizons of thought and move a step further in her scholarship.
As a teacher, scholar, political theorist, activist, writer and translator, Nivi effortlessly weaves these roles together in a way to enrich each of those. Accessible and friendly, Nivi's classes in the university or her lectures in public fora often go jam-packed because they are not dull reiterations of what scholars and thinkers have argued but eye-opening investigations that connect with our immediate environments and its debates. Just as any good educator should, she invests generously in her students' work, always keen to pry open difficult conceptual issues with clarity of thought, warnings against lazy thinking and emphasis on intellectual rigour and depth.
Given the diverse student profile at public universities such as Jawaharlal Nehru University, many students are comfortable in their vernacular languages and not as proficient in English. Nivi has always gone an extra mile to bring those students into the conversation. She reminds her students about how engaging with political philosophy is meant to make sense of the arguments being put forth.
In her attempts to reach out to this large section of students, she has also been a part of initiatives in the University of Delhi to generate textbooks in Hindi: she has co-edited a much useful and much read textbook in Hindi on the women's movement in India.
Even at the JNU lecture which brought the wrath of Hindutva forces upon her, she spoke in Hindi. She chose Hindi not because it is the "national language", she said during the lecture, but because it is the local language of the area where the university is located. Her point: we must all try and establish conversations in multiple languages and not just English or our mother tongue.
As a teacher, like many of her colleagues at JNU, students have had the space and ease to walk in to her office for chats without scheduled appointments. There is often a queue by her office door that keeps those waiting outside humoured with the cartoon strips and postcards that are glued to it. The teacher-scholar synthesis is prominent in her work; she is not just a teacher or only a scholar, but wears both the hats in a way that makes the move from one to the other look seamless.
India has been shamed enough globally for its deplorable treatment of its brightest writers, thinkers, scholars and artists. Maybe the "imaginary" figure of Bharat Mata will be pleased if we were to respect our "real" and brave citizens, especially the guru? Salaams in solidarity.
(The authors are research scholars.)