The Politics of Our Selves: Left self-fashioning and the production of representative claims in everyday Indian campus politics

Abstract

Through engaging with everyday practices among student activists in contemporary Indian campus politics, this ethnographic study examines the breadcrumb trail between the left and self-fashioning. It focuses on a performative modality of political representation in Indian democracy by tracing the formation of biographical reconfigurations that implement subject-oriented techniques. The article charts their relevance in producing political legitimacy. It engages with the way in which personal reconfigurations are mobilized to recruit and appeal to both subaltern and privileged communities, thus generating universalistic representative claims and political efficacy. The study discusses self-presentations among leading left activists who are members of five contending Marxist student organizations that are active in Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University campus. It shows that reconfigurations are a hallmark of practices of social ‘downlift’ which echo the notion of declassifying, a concept developed by philosopher Jacques Rancière. While embracing secularism and the legacy of political martyrs, the analysis illustrates how self-fashioning attempts to erase signs and habits attached to economic and social privileges through subverting and engaging creatively with sacrificial and ascetic tropes. Conversely, such practices find themselves critically questioned by activists at the bottom of the social ladder who aspire to social upliftment, including members of lower castes and impoverished Muslim communities. I find that the biographical effects of left activism are both long-lasting and renegotiable, shaping campus lives and subsequent professional careers. While such reconfigurations are not inspired by world renouncers of the Hindu mendicant tradition, these practices of the self might exemplify the historical cross-fertilization between long-standing cultural idioms and the Indian Marxist praxis.

Generational Communities: Student Activism and the Politics of Becoming in South Asia

“…We further locate political outcomes of these transformative processes within a generation that is youthful constituencies experiencing differentially social transformations and impactful political events in an identifiable sociocultural location (Mannheim [1928(Mannheim [ ]1952. While advertisements of the self are a defining feature of student politics and do index claims to political representation (Martelli 2019b), their relevance depends on their target "audience," that is, the student community in which representation claims are enshrined. Two popular modalities of youth selffashioning emerge as politically successful.…”

“…Two popular modalities of youth selffashioning emerge as politically successful. One is based on displays of generosity, service and charismatic strength to ensure responsiveness to the downtrodden and one's community (Snellinger 2018;Michelutti et al 2019;Koskimaki 2020); the other is rooted in signs of forfeiting or asserting one's social status to ensure representation of the downtrodden and one's community while powering student agitations (Martelli 2019b). Thus, student politics is characterized by the injunction to craft coherent narratives of the self (Naudet 2011) both morally acceptable and politically successful, for example through giving back (Garalytė 2020) or netaizing (i.e.…”