The polarising debate on the politics of pronunciation at a recently held Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak lecture on ‘WEB Du Bois and His Vision for Democracy’ at the Jawaharlal Nehru University broke the internet.
Here’s what transpired: Anshul Kumar, a student of Sociology, who described himself as the founding professor and chairperson of the Centre for Brahmin Studies, began to ask a question to Spivak after her lecture when the forum was opened for audience members.
On hearing him mispronounce Du Bois’s name, and him insisting on moving on from what he called 'trivialities' to the actual question, she shot his question down, and skirted past to the next person with a question.
Kumar argues that it’s out of irony and satire that he uses a made-up designation and department where the privileged get studied from the gaze of the underprivileged as opposed the reverse, which is usually the case in academia and how power flows through it.
Ceasing To Be Subaltern
His intended question as per his post on X (formerly Twitter) 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 Ishvar Chandr Vidyasagar, supposed to be middle class?"
This led to seismic shocks through South Asian academic Twitter and WhatsApp Groups dividing students, pedagogues, researchers, and audiences alike on whether she was right in silencing and disallowing him from finishing his question simply because Kumar did not pronounce Du Bois’s name the way he’d insisted it be pronounced.
Given Du Bois’s radical, anti-colonial, and anti-slavery situatedness that informed his politics, he’d preferred the anglicised pronunciation such that it sounds close to ‘Doo Boys’ instead of the French ‘Doo Bwa’.
At a 1939 Chicago Evening Club speaking engagement, he had publicly announced,
“My name is pronounced in the clear English fashion: Du, with u as in Sue; Bois, as in oi in voice. The accent is on the second syllable.”
In doing so, he aimed to derecognise the French colonial linguistic origins of his name and place precedence on his Haitian roots, insisting on pronouncing it the English way.
While Kumar has been criticised for the blatant misogyny underlining his tweet (see here) – and rightfully so – where he expressed his woundedness and hurt, the social media banter calling for him be ‘civilised and polite’ reaffirms the Savarna project of civilising the so-called savages, the dispossessed, the disenfranchised.
One of the many memes that people took to sharing online after the controversy.
(Photo: @kaandikalar/Instagram)
In an interview to The New Indian Express, he calls out the civility expectation saying, “I am a Chamar. My entire caste and my existence is a term of abuse so why is purity of language expected of me?”
In a rebuttal interview with The Hindu, Spivak claimed that since Kumar did not identify himself as Dalit, she mistook him for a Brahminist and her wounded remark of not wanting to hear his question was a gesture of protest.
She went further to delink Subaltern and Dalit as categories that are not interchangeable, arguing that somebody like Kumar ceases to be Subaltern as soon as he enters an elite institution like JNU.
Many Englishes Can Co-Exist Without Any Hierarchy, Then Why This Controversy at All?
Accountability and civility appear arbitrary and lofty ideals to those on the other side of power that in any case ought to be held up by the actor enjoying unquestioned power in this equation of student and teacher.
The pettifogging formalism and purist eggheadedness of Spivak's protest is like the protest Savarna classes engage in when supposedly hurt by the presence of affirmative action in Indian universities and government jobs.
It’s a protest of the shakiest and flimsiest of causes.
Caste, unlike race, is not an epidermically visible marker of identity. The ludicrous and absurd ask that he ought to have identified himself through his caste position exposes leaks and cracks in Spivak’s own project of wanting to dismantle ‘the Subaltern’ as a material-theoretical category to accommodate a universal category of the citizen.
To protest incorrect pronunciation is a dangerous kind of dogmatic politics without a ground to stand on.
Spivak represents the holy cocktail of Savarna power, legitimacy, and authority in global academia.
The moment Spivak polices and gatekeeps who gets to raise questions during her lecture basis how well or not they pronounce a Haitian activist’s name in a polar opposite part of the world in Delhi, she throws out the window her lifelong projects of aesthetic education in the era of globalisation.
The only aesthetic that the contradictions between her performative emancipatory pedagogy and public policing of the spoken word reeks of is bibhatsa rasa of the Natyashastra.
At the heart of her work on education, she writes, “Even a good globalisation (the failed dream of socialism) requires the uniformity which the diversity of mother-tongues must challenge. The tower of Babel is our refuge.”
For a champion of the plurality of first tongues in a multilingual world, how the English language has come to become the uncrossable, Sisyphean hardened border of upward and lateral class mobility, socio-cultural capital accumulation should have been clear as day.
Language is but the oldest instrument of power and authority. Anybody older than a day in the humanities, the liberal arts, and social sciences is aware of the simultaneity of the Englishes that exist in India.
The canonical works of Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, among others, have all made a case for a non-hierarchical co-existence of the thousands of varieties of Indian English and Hinglish that thrive in South Asia.
Spivak’s dissociative removal from her own work on ‘The Burden of English’, the complexities of the ‘implied reader’, and the ill-equipped teacher of English literature in the colonies and subsequently post-colonial societies that acknowledges that language, culture, and identity are a multilayered puzzle betrays theory-practice continuity.
To Feel Unwelcome, Unquestioning in Savarna Spaces
Generations of Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi voices have spoken/written about feeling unwelcome in Savarna spaces.
In his memoir, Water in a Broken Pot, Yogesh Maitreya writes evocatively about years of feeling lost and unmoored through a series of unmentored educational experiences, academies, and colleges until he discovered the joy of books and the political in literature.
He writes:
‘Everybody has the right
To defend himself
And if necessary, attack.
Hence, I write
But not in my mother tongue.’
Maitreya continues with prose when reflecting on why he taught himself to read and express himself in the English language – a mode of knowledge production that traditionally belonged to the Savarna world – instead of his mother tongue,
“By writing in English, I wanted to tell the Savarna and elite world that I was here, and I would stay here with my story now. I wanted to tell them that the same language in which I was being mocked until now, I had turned into my weapon. By writing my stories in it, not only would I defend myself, but if necessary, attack as well.”
India’s education ecology, including its universities, continue to be a laboratory of alienation, estrangement, and caste-enabled isolation.
Students from the Scheduled Castes, Tribes, and Other Backward Castes, among other dispossessed groups such as Queer folx, those from borderlands, and rural India, who labour their way to central universities with great travails, those from militarised zones, or from schooling systems with vernacular mediums of instruction have multi-fold battles to fight.
Getting through a college or university is but a rite of passage of years of trying to fit into a system designed by and for Savarna India.
With incisive sharpness, Ravikant Kisana argues in his much-read piece, Teaching Like a Savarna,
“One of the core features of Brahminism is its performance of knowledge supremacy. It is historically a myth that Brahmins have been knowledge producers; instead, their main skill has been “performing” knowledge and validating other groups and social actions. This is replicated rather neatly within the premium higher-education classrooms of today.”
Whether Kumar’s question came from a place of informed curiosity, dialectic spirit, biographical interest in Du Bois, or from a garden variety disruptive anarchism is immaterial.
Spivak’s dismissal of his manner and content of speaking is a textbook example of linguistic violence delegitimising not only his right to ask a question, but his very presence in the room.
In an effort to make sense of his public humiliation, a routine experience in Savarna India, Kumar reflects in The Round Table India that her admonishing “reminded me of my Bengali Brahmin teacher in my school days who had made fun of me for choosing Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shallot for an elocution competition. This Bengali Brahmin Teacher of mine made fun of me and mocked me for not knowing English Literature enough and if I was a dimwit that I had chosen Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot.”
At the time, Kumar had only finished his primary schooling, where the medium of instruction was Hindi.
He goes on further to condemn the public spectacle it had become when he writes:
“What was more troubling was the entire crowd present there was giggling and laughing while I was being humiliated by Spivak Madam.
No, they were not laughing at me. They were laughing at my Father who used to shave without shaving gel in order to save enough money to give me quality English education. They were laughing at my grandmother who as widow brought up my father on a meagre pension.
They were laughing at Muthu Krishnan, a Dalit student at JNU from Tamil Nadu who committed suicide. They were laughing at myriads of Dalit students who come to This University with a hope of becoming Professors but all they are given are a Zero in the Viva Voce. They were laughing at Rohith Vemula, for whom they now rally.”
(Chirag Thakkar is a publishing professional, writer, and editor based in Delhi. He tweets @chiraghthakkar. The views expressed here are entirely his own and do not represent that of an organisation nor those of The Quint.)
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