Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

DOI

10.3726/PTIHE.012024.0099

Publication Title

Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education

Volume

6

Issue

1

Pages

99-128

Abstract

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.

Rights

© 2024 Bhavika Sicka. The online edition of this publication is available open access. Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0).

Original Publication Citation

Sicka, B. (2024). For a lost drachma: Contesting hindutva subjectivation in India’s universities. Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education, 6(1), 99-128. https://doi.org/10.3726/PTIHE.012024.0099

Download

Share

COinS