For a Lost Drachma: Contesting Hindutva Subjectivation in India’s Universities

The aim of this essay is to apply Michel Foucault’s ideas on power and the practice of freedom to the context of India’s increasingly neoliberalized higher education landscape. The essay revisits Foucault’s notion of subjectivation to analyze the cultural politics of the Hindu Right, which, through organized violence and self-disciplinary mechanisms, has attempted to masculinize, privatize, saffronize, and brahmanicize the nation-state (and the public university), erase the othered body from the nation (and campus spaces), and shape how individuals understand themselves, their identities, and their modes of being in relation to savarna-capitalist power and knowledge. This essay will also suggest how universities in India, through transformative pedagogies, can foster, rather than inhibit, agentive, constructive, critical, and self-creating subjectivities that interrupt and transcend Hindutva neoliberal subjectivation.