Tag Archives: Ranabir Samaddar

Bad ideas, Culture, Debates, Education, Identities, Images, Language, Media politics, Metropolis, Mirror Worlds, Movements

Hok Kolorob! A Strange Chatter in the Air – Ranabir Samaddar’s Fictofacts: Anindya Sengupta

3 Comments

This post continues the ongoing debate on Kafila occasioned by the charge made by Prof. Ranabir Samaddar in the DNA Newspaper about what he thinks is the ‘elitist’ character of the students movement that is continuing at Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

Guest Post by Anindya Sengupta

Now Ranabir Samaddar has done it. This charge of elitism – as evident in his article’s title ‘Elitist Protest in Jadavpur’ – is not new; it was in the air right from the onset of the movement, evident in numerous threads of comments in social networks. But when such labelling, as is regularly dished out by a Trinamul Congress backed Bengali daily like Khobor 365 Din, finds an echo in left-wing scholars, it hurts. It was almost a relief that Prof. Samaddar didn’t repeat the accusation that these rebelling students are a doped and debauched lot.

Looking up for the word ‘elite’ in the dictionaries yielded this among many: “A group or class of persons enjoying superior intellectual or social or economic status”.

Continue reading Hok Kolorob! A Strange Chatter in the Air – Ranabir Samaddar’s Fictofacts: Anindya Sengupta →

Debates, Education, Everyday Life, Identities, Language, Mirror Worlds, Movements, Politics

Goodbye Politics, Hello Social Science 
- A Reply to Ranabir Samaddar and Others on Recent Students’ Politics in Jadavpur: Rajarshi Dasgupta

5 Comments

Guest Post by RAJARSHI DASGUPTA

[ This post by Rajarshi Dasgupta continues the debate with Ranabir Samaddar’s piece on the character of the students’ movement that has begun in Jadavpur University which was published recently in DNA, also critiqued in a recent post in Kafila by Uditi Sen ]

Nobody knows why social science routinely condemns the lack of radicalism in society when social scientists with radical pasts so easily dismiss new radicalisms as harmful and shallow. I was attending a meeting on students’ politics in the campus I work on the other night, when some colleagues, who have long been part of progressive politics since their student life, voiced such sentiments. I was struck by the arguments they made against what they saw as merely fancy and passing fashion. They were rather similar to a set of arguments made by an older generation of teachers about my colleagues when they were young and radical students. I think these arguments are worth a little discussion since they show something like a pattern that is predictable to some extent, and which may reveal a more uneasy relationship between social science scholarship and social transformation than we usually care to admit. They also have a deep affinity with the criticisms aired about the recent students’ unrest in Jadavpur university, by Ranabir Samaddar among others. Unlike some who have written in support of the students, there are senior scholars like Samaddar who have expressed profound and serious misgivings that must be tackled head on. I will argue in the following that such misgivings result from a muddle of liberal and leftist understanding of the student’s place and the academy’s role in society. A more clear understanding becomes possible, incidentally, in this case, if one returns to a basic capitalist framing of the university.

Continue reading Goodbye Politics, Hello Social Science 
- A Reply to Ranabir Samaddar and Others on Recent Students’ Politics in Jadavpur: Rajarshi Dasgupta →