THE language rights activist Tove Skutnabb-Kangas once pointed out to me that the category chauvinism labels that get thrown around as buzzwords – sexism, racism, casteism and so on – carefully skirt around a failure of reflexivity. The fact is that the sophisticated, culturally powerful individuals who create these labels are themselves guilty of an exclusivism directed against ordinary mortals objectified by such labelling. She noted that it would be hard even to imagine a label for the labellers that would express this peculiar all-pervasive exclusivism and complacency about knowing who is kosher and who is to be despised. ‘Elitism’ is a word that is already taken. The term ‘intellectualism’ is wielded against ‘intellectuals’; they are not quite the crowd responsible for putting the anti-discriminatory vocabulary in place. Perhaps ‘P-C-ism’ comes close – it does pick out all and only the individuals who have a stake in what has come to be called political correctness. But this term carries backlash connotations, and its intended targets would successfully laugh it out of court.

I am not mentioning this conversation with Skutnabb-Kangas as a prelude to unveiling a solution to her puzzle. She was not asking us all to rack our brains and find a solution: her point was to draw attention to a politically significant lexical gap. Surely we agree, on reflection, that it makes little sense to try to turn the tables on the makers of chauvinism-targeting labels.

First of all, to the (limited) extent that these labels are useful, one shouldn’t blunt their edge. Second, if one wants to encourage productive self-criticism by people who have attained some political sophistication, then targeting them is the wrong strategy. One wants to help, not mock them.

 

How does one actually help them? This article makes some proposals about how to do it in one specific domain. I’m concerned here with the language-laden context of Indian universities. I begin by presenting two imagined instances of what I propose to call ‘meta-verbal harassment’ – first in Bangla, the language in which I’m imagining the incidents, and then in a rough English rendering intended only to convey the kind of harassment involved. Exhibit two involves the targeting of someone’s English; so only the response needs translation. The rest of my text does not turn on the details of these imaginary instances. I wish to emphasize that Ramesh, Somesh, Goju and Balaram are all fictional names. ‘Meta-verbal’ refers to the fact that the harassers are verbally targeting their victim’s verbalizations.

Exhibit One: ‘Tui Balaramke gabet bolli keano? O to bhishon buddhishaali.’

[Everybody bursts out laughing; Ramesh retorts:] ‘Bhaaggish tor mato "buddhishaali" bondhu peyechi aamraa! Tui nirbaacone dnaaraabi kabe re?’

‘Why did you call Balaram dumb? He is really very untelligent.’

[Everybody bursts out laughing; Ramesh retorts:] ‘Thank God we have such an "untelligent" friend as you! When do you plan to contest the elections?’

Exhibit Two: ‘We coming from Baharampur. These sociologist peoples doesn’t understanding the problems in we people’s town. Why you support this rubbish which they talking?’

[The audience bursts out laughing; Somesh comments:] ‘Tor mato sophisticated discourse baaper janmeo shunini aamraa, daarun, daarun! Bnece thaak, Goju, bnece thaak!’

‘Not from our fathers’ time have we ever heard anything like your sophisticated discourse, wonderful, wonderful! Long live Goju!’

 

I begin by invoking the idea of the university, noting that the notion of a ‘campus’ is not available in many cases. Exhorting any one segment to be the core torch-bearers for the idea of the university – despite the typical belief that the teachers are the core of the institution, as if the administration, the logistic staff, the students were optional participants – is a serious misreading of the idea itself. For a community to embody the idea of the university, at least asymptotically everybody has to pitch in.

One does expect the student generation to be particularly enthusiastic about embodying this or any other idea. At their age, however, students only begin to perceive that enthusiasm and the ability to deliver are different phenomena. The university should ideally be a conversation in which everybody perceives more and more clearly the gap between enthusiasm and delivery – and other perennial gaps – even as its conversations gradually cross all barriers, all gaps, all differences. This cross-boundary communicative enterprise articulates a unique thirst for universality of discourse and inquiry. Only a university can optimally express this thirst.

Obviously cross-boundary communicating is harder than talking to familiar companions in your usual circles. When communication failures happen – and they do happen – some people get hurt. One fruitful approach takes such a psychological injury itself as a point of departure. Consider some insightful remarks by the poet Sankha Ghosh that bear on the matter. His context was situated outside the university space. But his comments nonetheless bear on our enterprise.

 

A journalist writing in some periodical sets out to hurt Ghosh, and succeeds. The 1978 diary entry in which Ghosh reflects on the problem – published under the heading Aghat (‘injury’) – includes the following passage: ‘The persons who inflict injury, at that moment, see themselves as very powerful (shaktiman). The power (shakti) to not inflict injury is less easy for them to notice. Our most crucial crisis centres around our ego; if we can hurt someone else, if we manage to take the smile off their face, perhaps this gives our ego a temporary boost.’¹

Here Ghosh invites us to put ourselves in the aggressor’s shoes and see with some clarity why we, from such a viewpoint, might feel like committing verbal aggression. Specifically, Ghosh proposes that one gets trapped in a conceptual confusion about power (or ‘strength’; I shall consistently write ‘power’ for his shakti). An act of aggression that we get away with, that succeeds in hurting another person, may strike us, in an ego-boosting mood, as a successful projection of power. Ghosh observes that that mood stops us from noticing that self-control – in this case, the ability to not inflict injury – would have actually exemplified a more durable type of power. The ego focus blinds us to the fact that real power lies in attaining a state where not wanting to injure others comes naturally. So blinded, we end up cultivating a superficial substitute for ‘strength’ or ‘power’.

 

At a university – where young men and women learn about different ideas and viewpoints, acquire skills that debaters need, watch vigorous debates – it becomes important that they get a chance to grasp how all this plays out at the level of healthy practices in one’s personal interaction. Without adequate help, many students confuse debate with verbal aggression. Unaided, they often fail to see that contesting someone’s opinion is fine, but that it is unacceptable to attack them personally – to question their motives for taking a certain stand, or to commit ad hominem aggression against them.

Given their need for help, it is important that a major poet, critic, teacher, guide such as Sankha Ghosh has come out with this statement in favour of the type of strength that manifests itself in the form of restraint. Such statements are not frequent in the public space. For centuries, people have all too often cheered for aggressors using muscle, weapons, money, rank, modernity and other resources to harm their targets. Such cheering has not exactly stopped. But gradually the realization is dawning on many of us that true courage, true strength is manifested not when one attacks someone and gets away with it, but when one is able to control one’s aggressive inclinations.

That more and more people are realizing this is worth celebrating, at the level of their personal growth. However, society is able to articulate the alphabet of cultural courage only when a wider transformation aggregates personal growth trajectories into a public mutation. The present moment is of that sort in principle, but only if we are willing to live up to its potential. The aggression unleashed by forces opposed to serious and critical thought has been doing harm to the universities and to civil society spaces in India.

One of the important tasks is to resist this aggression at the tactical level. Another, related task is to address long-standing irresolutions in our culture where old injuries have been allowed to remain untreated and to fester. If we leave those blind spots unaddressed even now, especially in the case of discrimination against Dalits, Adivasis and other weaker sections of our citizenry, then we are unlikely to ever find the time to do so. Certainly there is much to be done to resist the physical forms of violence or repression – murder, destruction of dwellings, denial of access to water among others. This article addresses cultural violence, which can be hard to perceive and to resist. Obviously there is no implication that other assaults on the rights of the weaker sections are less important.

 

Just which kinds of cultural violence are on our agenda here? Does direct verbal aggression of the kind called ‘abuse’ or the use of ‘rude’ or ‘unparliamentary’ expressions count as the main issue? The passage from Sankha Ghosh highlighted above does respond to verbal violence of that sort (in the written mode). This is a familiar type of aggression. We felt that choosing a familiar starting point might help the cause. In ‘polite society’ it has long been a standard point of the cultural pedagogy that targeting anybody in ‘rude’ language is unacceptable. Until very recently, a ‘gentle upbringing’ included specific instruction in the art of watching one’s language. Perhaps some readers will be quick to assume that we are about to plead for a return to those good old values.

To the extent that ‘old values’ are still being imparted in some contexts, they must be doing some good, or at least one would like to believe so. The entirety of Sankha Ghosh’s diary entry quoted above, however, cannot be subsumed under the problematic of a ‘gentle upbringing’. Many families headed by so-called gentlemen, bhadraloks in Bangla, openly support certain forms of discrimination, justifying this support by saying ‘this is just innocent teasing, an everyday and perfectly harmless practice, it becomes a problem if some of you are touchy about it, why don’t you grow up’.

 

That the practices labelled as ‘just innocent teasing’ by mainstream bhadralok families are often forms of discriminatory behaviour amounting to harassment in the technical sense has not exactly escaped notice. However, what is noticed is not publicly acknowledged. That the ethos of ‘Bengalis engaging in adda’ often provides a cover for such ‘harmless teasing’ – and that the problematic nature of this harassment is not discussed in the spaces of such conversation – gives pause. Many participants in such addas who unhesitatingly perpetrate or condone such harassment are self-proclaimed progressives or liberals. They are often anxious to demonstrate serious and consistent cogitation. Some of them may not be familiar with all the relevant forms of social discrimination, but they have heard of sexual harassment and never hesitated to condemn it. One would expect them to eliminate at least this form of harassment from their own practice. Why is this not even a project for them? Why such a gap between word and action? How can it not be obvious to such reflective individuals that their own behaviour includes what any third party would instantly recognize as sexual harassment?

 

These expressions of puzzlement are of course only rhetorical. Obvious sociological coordinates come to mind. ‘Bhadralok’ parents, ‘uncles’, ‘aunts’, other elderly fans, cheer for scholastic achievements across the board. Rooting as they do for brilliant (and prototypically male) students, they never forget that budding brains, to continue to bud, keep their egos intact by pinching or punching lesser neighbours. One must be indulgent towards such practices if one doesn’t want budding talents to start wilting.

This indulgence is bidirectional. Many of these elders seek approval from the young by spouting progressive buzzwords. The endorsement of ‘harmless teasing’ by ‘polite’ families is fortified by these complicities. One would have expected the young to incubate new values; the unhealthy dynamics has been preventing this.

It is true that the persistent efforts of the women’s movement have led to some awareness of the need to identify and address sexual harassment. Many of us understand that sexual harassers use ‘friendly teasing’ as a fig leaf. However, there has been less progress regarding other forms of harassment. Friends do tease each other; politics must not overwhelm this aspect of friendship. How can we respect the need to retain spontaneity among one’s friends and yet move ahead on the micro-political front?

Let us quickly schematize a scenario in which a misunderstanding between friends gets resolved at a purely personal level: X teases Y; Y finds himself/herself unable to take it in their stride; Y’s feelings are hurt; the relationship is damaged; X finally realizes what has happened; X promptly tells Y, ‘I can see I’d gone too far, but I didn’t mean it’; Y accepts X’s explanation; they agree that the issue is resolved.

Now, just when do the rest of us find it easy to regard such a misunderstanding as a purely personal matter, something for the friends to resolve between themselves? Surely the basic answer is – when X and Y belong to the same categories. When they are roughly the same age, when they are of the same gender, speak the same language, come from the same region, etc. Given overall equality between the two friends, everybody readily agrees that it is a personal question how thick or thin somebody’s skin happens to be, how far friendly teasing can go.

 

These criteria deliver an initial answer to the question: ‘When do we feel like declaring the personal is political? When do third parties feel like identifying an incident of teasing counts as harassment?’ The answer is: when the person who feels humiliated and the perpetrator of unacceptable teasing belong to two different categories – when a man teases a woman, or a city dweller teases a villager, or an able-bodied person teases someone disabled, or an adult teases a child, or when an upper caste Hindu teases a dalit or an adivasi, it becomes normal for third parties to dismiss the ‘harmless teasing’ claim and to acknowledge that someone has been socially humiliated.

Experience shows that raising several issues in one intervention makes for unfocused discussion. Thus, in this article, I use the term ‘meta-verbal harassment’ in order to concentrate on verbal humiliation of dalits, adivasis and other marginal members of the community – a form of humiliation that reacts to ways in which their verbalizations differ from the mainstream.

Men who indulge in eve-teasing on the street target women without knowing them personally; this is why such behaviour counts as category based harassment and not as interpersonal conduct that has for some reason gone astray. In such cases, civil society finds it easy to diagnose the problem as category related and to condemn it in those impersonal terms. Such condemnation becomes more hesitant in a context where individuals know each other. Hence the need for specific discussion. When university students tease fellow students on account of features of their language or dialect, many bystanders are unwilling to regard such teasing as harassment. The point here is to question this unwillingness; obviously one article is not enough; I am hoping to kick-start a discussion that will continue elsewhere.

 

Civil society recognizes the need to resist racism and sexism. Discussion of harassment that targets physically disabled citizens has not taken off at quite the same level, despite the obviousness of the problem; nor is civil society willing to seriously confront casteism. It is in this context that we need to look at the question of meta-verbal harassment.

The very first question to face is: how do our criteria apply to Exhibits One and Two? If we want to diagnose the social parameters that distinguish the harasser from the victim in those dialogues, how do we go about ascertaining them? Suppose we set aside the category of gender by assuming, for argument’s sake, that there are no women in these scenarios. Even so, consider three factors – (a) rural vs urban, (b) upper caste vs dalit and (c) educated and affluent vs neoliterate and barely above subsistence level – and ask: how much of a role does each of these factors play in the scenarios depicted in exhibits one and two? We are in trouble. We have no basis for answering this question.

There is no doubt that in those dialogues the harasser is coming from a position of social privilege; that the victim occupies a socially subordinate position; that the harasser is exploiting this difference to do his harassing. However, how does one arrive at a more nuanced, sophisticated analysis of these situations?

Serious answers may become conceivable once social analysts deploy state of the art tools and carry out rigorous descriptions. Certain distinctions between caste based harassment and cases of city dwellers targeting villagers will then have a relatively firm basis. Nobody would dream of questioning the need for serious analysis of these issues. However, even before such studies are undertaken, we can and must question their relevance to the real life task of identifying specific parameter motivated types of harassment.

 

My point is that survey style analyses yield elaborate and complex reports. It hardly matters whether such tomes find thirty readers or thirty thousand. Even after considerable analysis, Exhibits One and Two will remain irreducibly obscure. Faced with a social situation of that genre, not a single sociologist present at the scene will be able to swear that a given episode thematizes caste, or the rural-urban divide, or differences of education or wealth. And what is more, even if some magic wand were to deliver those diagnoses, such manna from heaven would not tell us what to do to cure the specific malady. It is not as if urban chauvinism, upper class chauvinism and upper caste chauvinism are known to respond to particular modes of treatment. To summarize, sociological micro-analysis is neither available nor relevant to the problem at hand. We need an effective broad spectrum remedy that does not wait for social scientists to finish their work.

 

Even without enjoying the fruits of rigorous social scientific investigation, we can say with confidence that Exhibits One and Two illustrate forms of humiliation that reflect the pride of the humiliator, who is in an advantageous social position compared to the victim. Pride so expressed can be termed ‘socio-cultural chauvinism’ without fear of contradiction.

I recommend a simple course of action. First, we all need to keep making the perpetrators of such humiliation aware of the fact that they are guilty of acts of harassment out of socio-economic chauvinism. Some of them will pay attention and try to mend their ways. For the others, we go to step two: we tease those teasers so that they realize they have to do something. Note that not all teasing reprehensibly reflects social inequality. If you tease your social equals in the context of mutual acquaintance, then what you are doing falls entirely within the range of acceptable banter.

If I have such a broad spectrum remedy in mind, why mention the option of sophisticated social scientific analysis at all, you may well ask. The point was to see clearly that the absence of such analysis need not stop us from doing what we can, and does not fuel any arguments against putting broad spectrum measures in place.

Recall that the idea of the university is in danger, and that the university’s discursive health depends on the leading conversationalists learning how to clean up their elitist act. An inclusive democracy must take the responsibility for making new entrants into the university space feel welcome. Only those in a position of socio-cultural advantage can modify their personal style in order to make their less fortunate conversation partners feel included in the collective. Such refashioning of the self involves cultural labour; no legislation by the state, no interference by other outsiders, even teachers, can be a surrogate for this, or make this cultural labour happen. The matter is delicate and needs sensitive handling.

 

The state has shown the way. Persons who explicitly invoke caste to abuse a dalit are committing a punishable offence, and sometimes (alas, all too rarely, but sometimes) such offenders are indeed punished. As I write this article, the University Grants Commission is even putting in place a raft of new proposals to delegitimize ‘mental harassment’ and to punish its perpetrators. But the police, and other officials responsible for translating such laws and rules into action, are on the whole hostile to dalits, villagers and other subalterns. On the rare occasions when they take action, their heavy-handedness undoes even the minimal good they manage to do. The democratic culture is still weak in our country. Only if informed citizens are brave enough to transform themselves will the culture change. Such citizens need to realize that what requires true courage and manifests true strength is not aggression, but the difficult labour of embracing one’s cultural Others.

Some readers will find a disconnect between the recommendations made here and what the enterprise is trying to achieve. Surely a broad spectrum remedy cannot directly help dalits or adivasis. Why am I proposing that Exhibits One and Two should be diagnosed in terms of ‘socio-cultural chauvinism’? Why not mention the savarna vs dalit axis or the Hindu vs adivasi axis explicitly?

I am suggesting that we kick-start a campaign against this form of socio-cultural discrimination practised by individuals (rather than only against the behaviour of the state or of employers or other institutional actors). Such a campaign, I claim, will strengthen independent efforts being made by and on behalf of dalits, adivasis, OBCs, villagers, and other victims of structural violence. The advantage of launching a broad spectrum campaign is that the message will easily reach individuals who have not yet realized the scale and severity of the agony in which subaltern citizens are compelled to live. Thus, such a campaign has a reasonable chance of succeeding.

 

I need to add a caveat, however. We are talking about the university. In this context, some readers are likely to imagine that the campaign I am proposing might discourage teachers from doing their work as teachers, in the sense that it would reduce their willingness to notice and correct errors of spelling, punctuation and word choice when they look at written work submitted by students from those subaltern categories – or when they are called upon to help those students to improve the standards of their oral presentations.

I am emphatically not proposing that teachers stop providing these services to subaltern students (which is what a ‘hands-off-their-errors’ policy would mean). By all means, they should continue to correct their mistakes. (I only urge them to observe the distinction between correction and public shaming, or even private shaming). The reason I am adding this caveat to the main point of my article is that experience shows that, whenever I talk about the need for students to observe restraint vis-à-vis culturally less privileged fellow students, some of my addressees jump to the conclusion that the points I’m making about these self-appointed ‘pedagogues’ are also directed against formal, institutionally regulated pedagogy. This misunderstanding is perhaps natural – and needs to be warned against.

 

Some of us will be tempted to extend the agenda from face-to-face situations to the task of dealing with trolls on social media. We must firmly resist that temptation. Trolls are a separate issue. Trolling feeds on the general eclipse of the skills of conventional literacy. We are living through a period in which – (a) taking advantage of the ‘digital revolution’, (b) riding piggyback on the unexamined deification of STEM (Science, TEchnology, Mathematics), and (c) invoking spontaneity and immediacy – many forces have been able to unleash a dumbing down that in some contexts masquerades as some kind of new literacy. Reinventing serious literacy is an important global battle, but it should not be conflated with the focus of this article on universities in India.

Recall that we propose mainly to target a subset of educated upper caste male Hindus. Note that it is a subset of this very category that will try to change the subject by mentioning trolls. Resisting any such ploy, we must target those upper echelon individuals first, and focus on their face-to-face conduct first. If our campaign against meta-verbal vices notches a few successes in the face-to-face context, I am sure that the pursuit of virtual virtues will take a leaf out of its book. Notice the choice of the book metaphor. I long for old-fashioned literacy and would love to take the battle to the trolls. Do not forget that I am an upper caste Hindu male myself. Please resist my instincts. You do want to change the socio-cultural order, don’t you? Or is all this a pointless game?

 

Footnote:

1. Sankha Ghosh, Journal [in Bangla]. Dey’s, Kolkata, 1985, pp. 170-171. English translation mine.