Guest post by  Rekha and Rahul (pseudonyms).

Two early-career teachers in private universities in India reflect on what has quietly transformed in their classrooms over the last few years, as they trace the rise of a new norm of ‘silence’. Their reflections ask what it means to teach in the intimate classroom space as it begins to mirror the shrinking democratic space and what forms of care, courage and pedagogy might keep the classroom thinking in these changing times. 

I

In the last half a decade, i’ve felt my classroom in a private Indian university change in ways that are hard to capture through the usual metrics. The checklist  is enviable: i retain full freedom to design courses, assign authors i want and structure electives around questions that matter to me.  And yet, in one of the courses while teaching Margaret Canovan’s piece on ‘Two Faces of Democracy’, i realised what had changed. There is a subtle paradox: the formal freedoms of the private university remain in place, but the informal ecology of the classrooms has altered. 

Canovan theorises two sides to democracy: pragmatic and redemptive, the former tied to processes, compromise and institutional restraints and the latter tied to salvation through popular sovereignty. To ensure that this distinction becomes more than an abstract typology, i decided to screen Newton, a 2017 Hindi movie that follows Newton Kumar (played by Rajkumar Rao), an earnest, rule bound election officer who insists on conducting ‘free and fair’ voting in a makeshift polling station, in a forested, Naxal affected area in Chattisgarh. Set against him is Aatma Singh (played by Pankaj Tripathi), a CRPF assistant commandant tasked with securing the polling process who treats Newton’s rule-bound idealism less as a virtue than a liability.  The film’s deadpan humour in clipped exchanges between Newton and Aatma Singh sharply address the quotidian ways in which the two faces of democracy function, highlighting the tension through the aspiration of democratic processes versus the hardened pragmatics of counter-insurgency.

In the post-screening discussion, the room pivoted abruptly when one student voiced offence at Pankaj Tripathi’s portrayal, saying it was mocking the Indian army. As he put it, ‘army wale ko aisi mazaak light mein dikhaya hai; woh log jaan dete hai’ (they’ve trivialised how the army is represented, they give their lives for the nation). In making that statement, the discussion shifted from interpreting the movie in context of Canovan, on questions of popular sovereignty and procedural mechanisms. What struck me was not just the simple disagreement over portrayal, but the moral charge attached to it, the insistence that certain institutions demand reverence  and must remain beyond humor. I responded with the language i’ve learned when the classroom becomes charged, the movie is a work of fiction, cinema often exaggerates. 

Following this exchange, a long, heavy silence settled over the room. The silence of other students was not tentative, in a way that signals uncertainty, but it was a settled, watchful stillness. Eyes gazing on their laptops, faces neutral, this silence has started to feel like the new norm. It arrives early in class discussions, it lasts longer and it often replaces the messy, imperfect talk through which collective thinking usually happens. As i ended the class with the procedural wrap up, announcements about essay deadlines and readings to be covered next class, i realised the deeper concern was not only the student’s offence, it was the collective withdrawal that followed, the silence that ensued. 

In the pedagogical common sense, silence is often straightforwardly interpreted as deficit- passivity, disengagement and non-participation. However, this doesn’t hold true for a room filled with English speaking, urban educated, MUN enthusiasts, who have learned to perform articulation as competence. That evening, i came home and found myself drawing a Venn diagram in my class journal ( a place to make sense of what i can’t in the classroom in real time), almost instinctively with three circles: apathy, silence and denial. The diagram was a method to think through the different kinds of quiet, what work was quiet doing and how different impulses might have converged in the classroom that day. The first circle was apathy, the easiest pedagogical reflex to interpret a non-response as not caring, and perhaps the most misleading. The third circle was denial, it sounds like students are refusing reality which wasn’t the case in this context. If anything, the student who spoke was insisting on a hyper-real version of reality: a moralised, heightened narrative in which the ‘army’ stands as a sacred emblem of the nation itself and Aatma Singh’s portrayal a  desecration of this reality. The shaded middle was silence, i kept returning to two logics that governed the silence of the class that day: deference and tacit alignment. 

Deference is silence offered outward, it is a restraint that signals to others in the class- this is not mine to adjudicate; letting a peer ‘have their opinion/feelings regarding something’ to avoid an escalation. The student who was emotionally charged in making his claim, implicitly raised the costs of disagreement for everyone else. Deference thus becomes a mode of self-placement in the classroom, students position themselves as listeners; as witnesses rather than participants to avoid any friction.  Crucially, deference is often morally saturated (usually on topics around soldiers, nation, death). Tacit alignment, by contrast functions as assent, it is the decision to let a claim stand as the default frame. In the classroom, if no one contests a statement, it begins to operate as the room’s common sense. The vocal student’s interpretation becomes self-evident. Deference can slide into tacit alignment, a student may stay silent out of ‘care’ to not invalidate the feelings of their peers but the silence still does another kind of work: it grants the offended claim interpretive authority. This matters in an authoritarian-populist context, wherein political life is increasingly organised through moral certitude and boundary making rather than argumentation. To disagree with the student’s claim was to be positioned as insufficiently patriotic, failing the affective test of reverence demanded by the army (in this case). Silence thus operates as a new mode of participation, converting a vocal assertion into collective endorsement.  Majoritarian common sense does not always need to be asserted loudly, tacit alignment shows how students can ‘agree’ without agreeing. 

The classroom encounter made evident that silence is increasingly the default posture and i carried a modest, stubborn hope of not resigning to this ‘new normal’. In response, i’ve incorporated two practices into my teaching to work with silence. First, i’ve introduced journaling as a routine. Students maintain a class journal and write their thoughts: this does two things, it lowers the threshold of participation and shifts the classroom away from affective verdicts by giving them space to think. The journal acts as a buffer between feeling and judgement, a record that they can go back to and revise over the course of the semester. Second, i carry out ‘shadow prompts’ activity post any movie screening where students anonymously share i.) a question they are afraid to ask aloud and ii.) an interpretation they suspect might be unpopular. I then read these out loud and invite responses to the sentence (not the person). The activity exposes the pluralism that silence conceals- once we have a cluster of sentences, multiple interpretations appear side by side. None of this is a guarantee, and it is often tiring, unrecognised work. However, holding on to these pedagogical practices is a way of resisting the shrinking of the classroom as a democratic space, even as the world outside continues to do so.

II

Last year, I transitioned from a premier public university to the private university system. Frankly, I never saw myself walking away from serving students who came from heterogenous and vulnerable backgrounds of the country in search for a path to dignity and possibility. As I earned valuable experience to stake a claim on my position, the system constantly reminded me of my precarious position as a ‘guest’. As I grew more unwilling of bearing the cost of my status in the system, I decided to step away even though my students made me feel seen and valued, I increasingly felt invisible within a system that seemed intent on eroding my identity and principles -denying me the very dignity I sought to extend to my students. Moving to a private university was a gut wrenching process, one that made me confront a harsh and sobering  new reality. In the public university system  I experienced  the classroom as a rhizomatic space for learning eschewing hierarchies, sustained by a multiplicity of ever-shifting connections that were being formed, dissolved  and reconfigured , enabling learning to take diverse lines of flight. By contrast, the private university classroom appeared more reticent  marked by quiet acquiescence and an internalized deference to hierarchical authority. At least that’s how it seemed when I first joined. However, a classroom encounter and the events that followed completely shattered this veneer of compliance, exposing instead a far more complicated reality. 

One afternoon, while teaching a course on Foreign Policy as I initiated a conversation on India’s purchase of Russian oil during the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, at first the classroom responded with a marked reluctance to participate. However, after gently but persistently challenging their certainties, recognizing the rigidity of their assumptions, I shifted  my approach to create space for a facilitated classroom discussion. I gave them time to formulate rebuttals and respond to what appeared to be a strong disapproval of my view that : “Presented as essential for energy security, India’s Russian oil imports during the Ukraine conflict chiefly benefited big industry, did little to ease domestic fuel costs, and effectively turned the country into a backdoor refining hub for Russian oil bound for Europe.”

During the time allotted for discussion they largely reiterated the stance of the incumbent government which framed its continued purchase of Russian crude oil as a pragmatic decision driven by national interest. However, what proved more unsettling was that despite my providing them alternative “evidence” in the form of statistics, expert testimonies and observable outcomes,  they remained reluctant  and unwilling to concede the fallacies in their arguments. Their responses grew increasingly emotional, marked by little tolerance for my views or dissenting opinions. As I walked away from the classroom that day, in subsequent classes, I saw a gradual shift in the classroom from an active resistance to my teachings to a deafening silence, a mute barrier in response to my efforts to initiate any kind of dialogue in the classroom. In stark contrast to my initial impressions, as the semester unfolded they displayed a steadily narrowing openness to pluralism or disagreement alongside a conspicuous resistance to entertaining viewpoints other than their own. On deeper reflection, I realized that my alternative framing of the state-sanctioned narrative of pragmatism unsettled the discursive compression through which authoritarian regimes render political reality morally unambiguous and cognitively simplified. Students, having internalized this ideological framework as moral certainty, seemed to function less as critical interlocutors and more as compliant subjects. Their self-regulation did not manifest as reasoned engagement with contradictory evidence; instead, moments of challenge intensified their emotional alignment with the state, reinforcing rather than destabilizing prior beliefs.

As I struggled to initiate discussion and encourage participation in the classroom, a student once blurted out, “Hum aapke jitney padhe likhe nahi hain, aur hamein bahut si cheezein nahi aati.” Crudely translated: “We are not as educated as you, and there are many things we don’t know.” I came to understand this not simply as an expression of academic insecurity, but as an admission of shame,  a shame that lay at the heart of their sense of alienation. This shame did not stem from a perceived attack on their personal identities; rather, it emerged from the unsettling of an internalized state ideology that had come to anchor their sense of moral and intellectual certainty. In authoritarian contexts, education is often mobilized as a tool for reshaping young people’s identities, replacing habits of rational inquiry with emotionally embedded ideological loyalties. Indoctrination gradually displaces critical thinking with obedience. Under such conditions, a challenge to state ideology is experienced not as an intellectual disagreement but as a personal affront, producing psychological destabilization. What began as a classroom discussion gradually took on the emotional tenor of collective shame and shared victimhood. This affective shift hardened into a form of group identity, sustained by rumination over perceived injustice, an escalating sense of intractable conflict, and a growing inability to empathize with the person who dared to question their certainties. More than the students, I felt the pain of the interactive silences and saw it as an expression of a lack of intimacy. In such circumstances, it would have been so easy to slip from rational to non-rational means of persuasion in the classroom but I tried to be extremely cognizant of not exerting the wrong kind of influence on the beliefs of my students. 

I’ve always believed as Echart Tolle very eloquently said ‘The unmanifested is present in this world as Silence. All you have to do is pay attention to it.”’ Post the semester, as I dissect the silence of the classroom, I have come to read the silence not as disinterest but as one concealing hidden voices yearning to be fully acknowledged. I have come to interpret the silence as an act of self-preservation, a quiet defence against conflict, as they seek to insulate their imparted beliefs from criticism. Their silence was an attempt at severing ties with an alternative voice and the attempt to stay within their echo chambers. In analysing this silence  within a backdrop of collapsing institutions reframing education as a tool of ideological purification,  I realized that the significance of the epistemic and moral space the state has come to occupy in the subjectivities of these young students. As I reflect on the silence it has compelled me to pay attention to how language reflects ideology and power relations and how silence can simultaneously function as  resistance and  vulnerability.

In observing and grasping the limits imposed by their ideological language  and its underlying cognitive infrastructure, I sensed an affective captivity to the authoritarian systems which dramatically compromises their autonomy, restricting their ability to impartially settle matters of concern through reasoned judgment. They have placed their thinking in a cognitive straightjacket in which their thinking has been pre-programmed. I also sense that, in their interactions with fellow students, prolonged exposure to such indoctrination and the attendant epistemological disorientation will gradually diminish their ability to navigate diverse or pluralistic environments, as their critical thinking skills remain underdeveloped. 

Students are ontologically programmed as regime assets, indoctrinated by a hidden curriculum imbued in a selective version of history, narrowing their capacity to entertain pluralism or dissent, I do believe that pedagogy does enable cognitive agency nurturing inquiry, autonomy, and pluralism. As educators in these times where there is a crisis of certainty, there is an acute need for recasting educational spaces as spaces of liberation and not confinement. A contested space which disrupts the ‘certainty’ of the indoctrinated and fosters a critical consciousness built on unmasking ideological frames and exposing how power circulates through knowledge. As I try to mend my broken relationship with the classroom, I do believe that it is only through nurturing spaces of autonomy that cultivate critical thought and fostering a classroom modelled on pluralism and care can we succeed in preserving dignity based education and intergenerational justice.