Spivak at JNU, May 2024: the name was corrected, the question went unanswered

On the morning of Tuesday 21 May 2024, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak gave a lecture at Jawaharlal Nehru University on "W. E. B. Du Bois and his vision of democracy". The SAA Auditorium was full. Before the questions began she had explained, more than once, that the name is said doo-BOYS and not the French Du Bwah, and why the difference mattered to her. Then a sociology student, Anshul Kumar, had his turn. He introduced himself as founding professor of a "Centre for Brahmin Studies", began a question about her claim to be middle class, and said "Du Bois" the French way.

Spivak stopped him to correct it, and then again. He called the correction a triviality and asked to get on with his question. By one report she answered that she was an 82-year-old woman, in public, at his own institution, and that he was being rude to her. She also told him she was not a Brahmin. The moderator moved to the next questioner. Kumar's question was never answered, and he walked out.

"What's in a name?" Juliet asks in Capulet's orchard, and decides the answer is nothing: a rose would smell as sweet by any other. Du Bois did not agree. He chose how his name was to be said and put it in writing, so on that point Spivak was right. The hall was wrong about the question. Correcting a name takes a minute; hearing a question takes patience, and that Tuesday morning the hall found the minute and not the patience.

What each of them said afterwards

Kumar, a Dalit MA student who was 28 at the time, posted the clip on X. His caption carried two slurs about her, at least one of them plainly misogynist, and the title of her best-known essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988), thrown back at her. The clip spread, and for more than two weeks the argument ran through the press, in India and abroad. In a later interview Kumar put his case in words that are hard to forget: "I am a Chamar. My entire caste and my existence is a term of abuse so why is purity of language expected of me?" He says the audience laughed while he was being corrected.

Spivak's reply came in an interview to The Hindu, published on 25 May 2024. "Anshul Kumar had not identified himself as a Dalit," she said. "Therefore, I thought he was a Brahminist, since he was saying that he was the founder of a Brahmin Studies Institute." She called her remark "a gesture of protest" by "an old female teacher confronting a male student". She had not been correcting his accent, she said, but asking the audience to say the name properly, because "the French had colonised Haiti. Du Bois's father was Haitian." She denied calling Du Bois an elite: "The only thing I said was that he had not been enslaved." And she added that "Subaltern and Dalit are not interchangeable words."

Look again at the first step of that defence. She did not know he was Dalit, so she took him for a Brahminist. Does a student's caste decide how patiently a professor hears him? Had he been a Brahmin, would cutting him short have been fine? It would not. A question does not earn its hearing from the birth of the person who asks it.

Her own sentences also pull against each other. "I did not stop Kumar from asking his question," she said, and in the same interview she described "my wounded remark that I did not want to hear his question". Wounded is her word, and I believe it.

She was hurt, and he was not heard.

His words deserve the same close reading. A Dalit student's anger has a long history behind it, and a sexist insult to a woman of 82 is still a sexist insult. One wrong does not cancel the other.

Others weighed both sides. Ajay Gudavarthy wrote in an opinion piece that her "gendered correction turned out to be casteist snobbery" and that the student's "caste assertion took a misogynist turn". George Chakma, a JNU doctoral researcher who was in the hall, called it "an exchange between two problematic people". The poet Meena Kandasamy put the rule simply: "Bullying someone over their pronunciation is just not done. You slip in the right pronunciation, gracefully." Brinda Bose, who was in the audience, wrote that the outrage came "precipitously by many not present there". Academics, writers and journalists carried the argument. No statement from a political party or student union was reported.

The name Du Bois chose

Du Bois settled the pronunciation himself. The Du Bois scholar Aldon Morris quotes his reply of 1939 to a speaking invitation from the Chicago Sunday Evening Club: "My name is pronounced in the clear English fashion: Du, with u as in Sue; Bois, as in oi in voice. The accent is on the second syllable." The French look of the name came down his father's line, from a great-grandfather, James Du Bois, a French-American of Huguenot origin. His father was born in Haiti.

Spivak's larger point, that he was a Black "Dalit", was not a strange bridge to build. Du Bois himself had looked beyond America in 1903. In The Souls of Black Folk he called the problem of the twentieth century the problem of the colour line, "the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea". Asia is in his own sentence.

So the correction was accurate, and the politics behind it were serious. Was it needed a second time, in the middle of a student's question? Whose purpose did it serve at that moment: Du Bois's, the audience's, or the speaker's? And what did it cost the question waiting behind it?

Kumar says he learnt the French sound at St Xavier's in Mumbai, from a French-speaking teacher. So the "wrong" sound had come from a teacher too.

The question under the question

Here is what Kumar meant to ask, as he later posted it: "How is she as a great granddaughter of Bihari Lal Bhaduri, a close friend of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, supposed to be middle class?" It was framed as a jibe. Take the jibe away and a real question is left, about class and lineage and nineteenth-century Calcutta.

The family tree is disputed. "I am not Bihari Lal Bhaduri's great granddaughter," Spivak told The Hindu. Her Wikipedia biography calls Bhaduri, a physician who advocated homeopathy and a close friend of Vidyasagar, her great-great-grandfather. The generations do not line up across these accounts, and none of them settles the matter.

What she said next matters more. "I believe he was the person (I cannot be sure of this) who asked my real great grandfather (at the time a cook hired by a middle-class family) to marry a widow." It is a remarkable sentence to find in a reply to a charge of privilege. Into her family's past it puts a cook in someone else's middle-class house, a widow, and, if she remembers rightly, a friend of Vidyasagar urging him to marry her.

Widow remarriage was Vidyasagar's cause. He was its most prominent campaigner and petitioned the Legislative Council for it. A counter-petition from Radhakanta Deb and the Dharma Sabha carried nearly four times as many signatures, and Lord Dalhousie finalised the bill anyway. It became the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act, Act XV of 1856, passed that July. Spivak gives no date for her great-grandfather's marriage, and none of these accounts ties it to the campaign. But a widow's marriage, urged by a friend of Vidyasagar, is the very thing that campaign was fought for.

Kumar had asked whether she could call herself middle class, and in the hall he got no answer. The cook and the widow were offered as a correction to the family tree, not as a reply on class. Still, they are the nearest thing to an answer he got, and they arrived four days later in a newspaper, with the student nowhere near it.

The history under that sentence has its own edges. Vidyasagar was born into a Bengali Brahmin family. As principal of Sanskrit College from 1851 he admitted students from castes other than Brahmin and Baidya, which was a real opening. Yet in 1854, as his Wikipedia biography records, he objected to admitting a wealthy man of the Subarnabanik, or goldsmith, caste, on the ground that the caste stood very low. In a letter of 1859 he told the Lieutenant-Governor that the Government should "confine itself to the education of the higher classes on a comprehensive scale". The article takes "classes" there to mean caste. Class, or caste? In the reformer's own record the two sit close together, and that is the ground Kumar's question stood on.

Calcutta's reform opened doors, and it chose which ones.

Spivak herself said, in the same interview, "I do regret that Subaltern Studies, which is a historiographical endeavour, does not seem to acknowledge caste." Ranajit Guha edited its first volume in 1982, and she co-edited a selection of it with him in 1988. It is a striking admission from someone inside that project. Kumar's question, rude as it was, pressed close to the same gap.

Older stories in the room

Spivak took her degree in 1959 from Presidency College, which began in 1817 as Hindu College. Henry Derozio taught English literature and history there. He taught his students to doubt what they were handed and argue it out, and in 1828 he led them in forming a debating club, the Academic Association. Conservative Hindu parents objected, and in April 1831 he was forced out. "My resignation is compulsory," he wrote to H. H. Wilson, in a letter printed in Thomas Edwards's 1884 life of Derozio. He died of cholera that December, aged 22. His students came to be called Young Bengal. So the college Spivak graduated from once pushed out a teacher who had taught his students to argue back.

An older story sits closer to the bone. In the Mahabharata, Drona refuses Ekalavya, the son of a Nishada king, "seeing that he was a Nishada who might (in time) excel all his high-born pupils", in Kisari Mohan Ganguli's translation. Ekalavya practises alone before a clay image of Drona, and when Arjuna complains of him, Drona asks for his right thumb as a fee. The text itself speaks of "these cruel words of Drona". In modern India Ekalavya has become a symbol of Dalit and tribal rights.

It would be unfair to cast Spivak as Drona. She asked for no thumb. By her own account she has spent forty years "working for subalterns, running elementary schools", and since 1986 she has taught among landless Dalit communities in western West Bengal. But the story is in the room whenever a senior teacher turns away a Dalit student's question, whatever the teacher intended. She cannot be blamed for that story. She could still have heard the question out.

Then there are the two people themselves. Spivak had told the hall that morning how she borrowed money for her fees and her passage to Cornell. She was 82, facing a full auditorium, and a young man had introduced himself as founding professor of a Brahmin Studies centre and brushed her correction aside. Kumar was 28, a Dalit student in his own university, who says he heard laughter while he was being corrected, with a question about class still waiting behind a name. Afterwards both of them reached for the language of injury: her "wounded remark", his caste as "a term of abuse".

Du Bois, in 1903, wrote of "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others". He was writing about being Black in America, which weighs far more than one bad morning in Delhi. Still, that morning both of them were seen through other eyes: a full hall's, and then, through a clip, the whole country's. I cannot read their two statements side by side and keep a clean side. I do not think a reader should either.

What a question is owed

No statement from JNU's administration was reported, and no inquiry. None was needed. What failed that morning was teaching, and no disciplinary committee rules on that.

What is a public lecture for? It is a promise that the speaker will meet the audience's thinking, including its clumsy, hostile and badly pronounced thinking. The moderator's job is to keep that promise, not to spare the speaker. A student who arrives with a barbed question has still arrived with a question.

Spivak called the whole affair "an extremely instructive experience". It was. It showed how quickly a correct fact, offered from the stage, becomes a lesson in who belongs. It showed, too, how quickly a real grievance, posted in anger, turns into abuse.

So the question worth asking is not how Du Bois said his name; he settled that in 1939. Nor is it whether Spivak is middle class; the cook and the widow in her own telling are worth more than the jibe that drew them out. The question is whether the next student who asks something awkward, in the wrong accent, of the most famous person in the room, will be heard past the first word.

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