Declassing vs asserting dress code: apologia and critique of left self-fashioning

Once on the JNU campus, the aesthetic array of the left leader is highly identifiable. It comprises an unshaved beard for men, an unwashed, old, drab-coloured kurta, chappals (flip-flops) even in winter, gamcha (thin cotton towel to protect from the sun) in summer, and a jhola (jute shoulder bag) (see Figure 2). When attending rallies with activists, Drumi, a JNU PhD student used to speak sarcastically about their fashion sense: ‘It makes students think that activists are going to work with the masses by bus just after their speech … just as if they were always in movement, busy, so that they have to keep their things always with them.’

Figure 2.

Contact print of different speeches by JNU activists. Source: Photos by author and K. Parkar, 2014.Footnote ⁸

The situated political significance of such activist chic becomes clearer when interrogating activists about the panoply of meaning they attach to the notion of ‘declassing’, which they often referred to as voluntary trajectories of social downlift. Sundar, a former JNU Students’ Union president (2012–13), was unequivocal about what to ascribe to this phenomenon: ‘Is being declassed a relevant question? Obviously yes, the problem of party leadership is that they have lost ground; lost touch with people … declassing is a very important thing, to communicate with people you need to be humble. My father is a factory worker … I do not need to declass that much, but in a sense we are all middle-class’ (Sundar, interview 2014). The following vignette, citing several statements about declassing, shows the pervasiveness of declassing idioms among the left at JNU, while being understood both as a fight against the economic elite and a challenge to the dominant elite.

The centrality of the ‘declassing’ practice among the left on campus was recounted to me by Jitendra, a former activist for ‘Backward Classes’ at JNU (Anjaiah and Kumar Reference Anjaiah and Kumar2011), who had lost faith in the ability of current Indian left politicians to root out their ‘Brahmanical identity’. According to Jitendra, Puchalapalli Sundarayya (born Sundararami Reddy, 1913–85), one of the founder members of the CPI(M) in the state of Andhra Pradesh/Telangana, was the exception that proved the rule, as ‘he renounced his Reddy [upper caste] name, gave up his 5,000 acres [circa 20 square kilometres] of land and decided to castrate himself in order not to have Brahman descent’.

Another critical insight was provided by a senior professor at JNU who claimed that Marxism in India had incorporated the Gandhian visual of self-denial. ‘Well, Marxists are in a way sadhus [religious ascetics] in secular uniforms,’ he stated. This line of argument about the sacrificial leanings of the declassing practice was later substantiated when I encountered Pratap, a former All India Students’ Association campus leader. Pratap was elected in 2007 as president of the Students’ Union and has a deep knowledge of the kinds of frugality that total activist engagement entails.

His account is revealing in two respects. First, it confirms that declassing can be understood as a form of disidentification in which left activists try to divorce their middle-cum-higher-class selves. Second, it argues that the sacrificial modality of left self-fashioning resonates with the broader cultural repertoire of asceticism in India. Pratap's mention of the fakir (Muslim ascetic) also directs attention to Gandhi's austere discipline of non-attachment to material possessions and brahmachariya, understood as self-discipline, chastity, and sacrifice (Devji Reference Devji2010, Chakrabarty and Majumdar Reference Chakrabarty and Majumdar2010, Mehta Reference Mehta2010). I do not wish to claim that Gandhi directly inspires the ‘political technology’ of Marxist declassing. However, in line with Pratap, I want to suggest that Gandhi popularized the idea that intimate practices, especially body practices, expressed sincere alliance with the masses. Gandhi welded together ascetic language and popular politics. This connection was soon reinterpreted by Indian Marxist practitioners, while attracting sharp critique from sections of oppressed communities.

Keeping in mind the fact that declassing is a dominant modality of JNU campus politics, such practice sparks more ambiguous feelings among activists from Muslim and Dalit backgrounds. Because these politicized students fight against the common perception that they rank low in the social ladder, the idea of declassing was seen by them as a reinforcement of their already downgraded social status. In such cases, declassing discourses were complemented—and at times replaced—by assertive claims. Below are examples of how uneasy the compromise is between the politics of recognition and the politics of declassing.

For many activists from deprived sections of the population, to transform one's identification to a humbler social background would appear to contradict their aspirations, so the idea of squandering one's heritage was, in part, a narrative that was difficult to defend. In such cases, through discarding declassing practices, for some left activism became a way to affirm one's marginalized identity and avenge perceived forms of degradation. For example, Sumbul, a female candidate from AISF in the 2014 student elections, would claim on stage to be part of the pasmanda (most marginalized) section of the Muslim community before shouting, ‘Long live revolution … long live social justice’. Alongside declassing claims, assertive leftist claims often involved more personal experiences; for instance, a former JNUSU president would discreetly ascribe part of his activism to a reaction against an experience of perceived humiliation. An activist from the Backward Class category recalls being stopped by a supervisor at an entrance examination for an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) because he could not afford a proper shirt (Venu, interview 2014).

Bearing in mind the emancipatory motto of the Dalit reformist Ambedkar (1891–1956), lower caste activists I encountered did claim that political assertiveness implied breaking the association between poverty and the stigma of inherited caste pollution, and for this reason some rejected the idea of declassing altogether. For instance, Hilsari, a Dalit involved in the CPI(M)-affiliated student organization SFI, was very clear about the inappropriateness of declassing:

This statement underlines the contingent and situated nature of the concept of declassing for left activists: its relevance depends on the social origin of its upholders. Assertiveness instead of declassing is, in the words of many Dalits, a choice rooted into their personal experiences of social humiliation. I was troubled by the large number of examples provided by respondents. Tulsi, an office bearer of the United Dalit Students’ Forum (UDSF), a Dalit cultural organization, mentioned to me an event at which his professor had prevented him—but not his other classmates—from entering his home after he was asked to pick garden flowers.

Another instance of such humiliation was given by Patani, a member of the Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students Association (BAPSA), a Dalit political group. He told me the story of a conflict with his roommate who tried to avoid caste-based pollution by refusing to drink water from the same glass as him. Gradually emerging as the main anti-left platform on campus in 2016, the newly formed BAPSA challenged the assertion that the left was the most legitimate to represent the cause of the oppressed. Labelling left politics on campus as a ‘gallery space to patronize Dalits’ (Tulsi, interview 2015), BAPSA and UDSF challenged declassing politics by invoking an assertive ‘Ambedkarite politics’ (Kumar Reference Kumar2018, Pallikonda Reference Pallikonda2018).

The acceptability of the ‘left declassing’ discourse by the student population varies. With a few notable exceptions,Footnote ⁹ I encountered only a few JNU students who were completely alien to campus politics dominated by the left. While almost half of freshers declare that they do not participate in political activities, this number falls to under 10 per cent after completing five years of study (Martelli and Ari Reference Martelli and Ari2018, Martelli and Parkar Reference Martelli and Parkar2018). The normalization of left political language and its declassing tropes is visible on the night of the JNU Students’ Union election vote counting. Traditional left naras (slogans) are chanted but also parodied, and the ways of the activists are affectionately mocked. Laughter is not only there to express anti-left sentiments, but for one night to deride the seriousness of the dominant ideologies of JNU student politics. The content of the jokes shouted is not anecdotal, for it reveals how rooted the leftist political culture is at JNU. The jokes do not point primarily at a sexual or religious imaginary, they concentrate on the political folklore of the campus and the declassing culture it entails. For instance, two of the parodical tongue-in-cheek slogans take on the self-negligence of left activists by rephrasing two of their slogans: Nahi nahane wale ko ek dhakka aur do (Those who don't take bath, push them once more) and Lifebuoy bhi lal hai (Lifebuoy [India's best-selling red-coloured brand of soap] is also red), uttered after Pura campus lal hai (All campus is red).

To conclude, the Dalit and Muslim discourses on self-fashioning can be very different from those developed by other politically dominant sections among Marxist activists. The accounts presented above are a reminder that declassed meaning-making varies greatly according to one's social background and lived experience. Yet, precisely because it is contested, this form of self-fashioning shows its relevance in contemporary left student politics. It exemplifies how the left uses biographical reconfiguration—whether at substantive or superficial levels—to legitimize the claim that it represents the cause of the Indian underbelly. To map out further such representative claims, the next section delves into the additional everyday practices at the core of left self-fashioning.

The routinization of left self-fashioning: the day-to-day legitimation of representative claims

The decades-long dominance of left politics at JNU is an indication of the political legitimacy activists derive though mobilizing the declassed representative claim. As for many social phenomena, the activists' devotion to this political modality cannot be credible unless the practice of declassing is carried out repeatedly and over an extended period of time. Considering the centrality of day-to-day in situ socialization in the circulation of political attitudes at JNU (Martelli and Ari Reference Martelli and Ari2018, Martelli Reference Martelli2020), the efficacy of left self-fashioning relies on its everyday routinization in a shared living space where such practices are made visible. Thus, below I survey various ways in which declassing practices are made pervasive and are inherent to JNU campus politics. These routinized practices, introduced below, are: space segregation, martyr identification, anger emotionality, and fasting.

Nested within the competitive field of campus activism, these processes of individual fashioning accompany the daily trail of political activities organized on campus. While activists’ collective actions often focus on the general welfare of students and on admission inclusiveness, on other occasions they engage more widely with the socio-economic conditions of India's weaker sections of society, thus making the declassing claims congruent with political actions taken on campus. Thus, engaging and expressing ‘solidarity’ with the issues concerning the deprived inform and legitimize declassing claims.

Such instances are many. They include: calls by left student organizations for a demonstration in support of the workers of the automobile manufacturer Maruti Suzuki; after launching strikes in 2012, which led to the burning-to-death of a manager in Manesar (Haryana), 147 of them were jailed (Nowak Reference Nowak2014). Other cases comprise protests against communal riots that took place in Muzaffarnagar (a district of Uttar Pradesh) in 2013, which led to the displacement of tens of thousands of individuals and to the deaths of 42 Muslims and 20 Hindus (Berenschot Reference Berenschot2014). The Students’ Union sent a ‘fact-finding’ team to collect evidence and to provide assistance to the victims. Additional initiatives include commemoration of the anniversary of the gang rape of Nirbhaya (‘fearless one’), a pseudonym given to the physiotherapy intern who was attacked on a bus in Delhi on 16 December 2012. Support is systematically ‘extended’ after the suicides of members of weaker sections of Indian society, such as Dalits and farmers. For illustrative purposes, below are four JNU pamphlets by four different left student organizations, vividly protesting in support of Dalits, Kashmiris, and poor famers (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Four JNU pamphlets, 2012–2018. Source: Compilation by author.

Top left-corner: SFI congratulating the Kisan (farmer) long march, a large-scale protest organized by a sister organization in the state of Maharashtra (11 March 2018).

Top-right corner: AISA commemorating the denial of justice surrounding the 1996 case of the killing of 21 Dalit labourers in Bathani Tola in Bhojpur, Bihar, by Hindu militia, the Ranvir Sena (14 July 2012).

Bottom-left corner: DSU calling for a protest after the suspension of Kashmiri students who cheered for Pakistan in a cricket match (7 March 2014).

Bottom-right corner: BASO (splinter group of the DSU) protest call against anti-Dalit violence on the commemorative ground of the battle of Bhima Koregaon, Maharashtra (2 January 2018).

While the practice of declassing is tied to participation in political activities in support of the downtrodden, the moral injunctions it entails include refraining from visiting certain places. As indicated in the preceding account of Hilsari, this practice suggests that, along with the focus on visuality, left self-fashioning also involves strong spatial components. During my time on campus, I found that many left activists tended to circumvent commercialized areas and those that are perceived as ‘dirty’ living spaces. JNU Marxists tended to avoid being seen or visiting places where the ownership of costly objects such as a smartphone or a motorbike ‘have to be reflected upon’ (Berhampuri, interview 2014), thus boycotting the settings of ‘shining India’: malls, food chains, and branded coffee shops associated with the triumphant consumerism of the Indian middle class.

As a result, the spatial politics of activists leads to the superimposition of an ideological layer onto the actual map of the city, causing them to redraw territorial hierarchies. Contrary to commercialized areas, select food-stalls (dhabas) within the campus are seen as more compatible with a declassed way of life. One in particular, called Ganga Dhaba, was perceived by Pratap (interview 2015) as a refuge from the areas polluted by consumerism, an opinion he also expressed in an interview with The Indian Express:

In contrast, malls and food chains were the least reputable spaces to be seen by left activists concerned about their political and public reputation. I vividly recall a revealing anecdote that manifested the taboo attached to glittering spaces. The 2015 April heat in Delhi was at its peak and I had promised Arpita, an active member of AISF, to treat her to a pizza as she had craved one during her most recent 10-day-long hunger strike. One evening, I finally convinced her and her comrade-friend Azad to go to a restaurant chain in the fashionable market next to campus. They claimed they had never been there before and accordingly much discussion focused on what they saw from the dining table. They concentrated their indignant comments on overweight customers and on waiters who expressed condescension towards customers ordering too little. As we were finishing our meal, the unexpected happened: three activists from a rival Marxist organization entered Pizza Hut to eat. After a fleeting moment of astonishment and awkward salutations, Hariti, Jitendra, and Priya disappeared from sight and went to eat on the lower floor. Making sure he could not be heard, Azad started laughing, ‘You know what they call me?’ he asked, but before I could respond he was already answering, ‘A revisionist. They are supposed to be real revolutionaries, radical ones. But what I find crazy is that their personal life goes against the principles they claim in public. Their private life is going against their political principles.’

The meeting of five Marxist leaders from two rival organizations at Pizza Hut was a truly incongruous moment: they were witness to each other's political sacrilege at odds with their understanding of the declassing code of conducts. Aside from the comical overtone of the example, it underlines how important the notion of exemplarity—real or claimed—is to the conduct of left politics. As shown here, the political legitimacy of self-fashioning is inseparable from this notion of exemplarity, whether applied directly to the self or when projected onto the commendable life of deceased martyrs.

Focusing on activists’ invocation of shaheeds, I now discuss their instrumental role in providing historical depth to the declassing practice. I suggest that the personification an ideal type of a declassed figure is the consecrated martyr, which facilitates activists’ personal identification with a political movement and the public display of their intimate appropriation of pro-people rationales. Because martyrs are admirable and irreproachable beings, they can—in the case of Indian communism—be ‘good to think with’ as symbols of declassed individuals who commit to their cause until death and enable comrades to show the masses the way forward.

On campus, several public celebrations of martyrs are organized annually. Organizations such as DSU and SFI organize memorial lectures in remembrance of the killing of several iconic party workers (Third Comrade Naveen Babu lecture 2014; SFI Central Executive Committee 2016). AISA also holds an annual celebration of the martyrdom of ‘Chandu’, alias Comrade Chandrashekhar (JNUSU president 1994–1996), and screens a homage documentary called Ek Minute Ka Maun (A Minute of Silence) on a JNU lawn (Basu and De Reference Basu and De2007?). Every last week of March, during the commemoration of his assassination,Footnote ¹⁰ Chandrashekhar is presented as a declassed communist who sacrificed his life for the fight against injustice and caste oppression in India. An AISA activist recounts that Chandu ‘led many agitations, he would interest anybody with his speeches … and Chandu could interest through his practice … of his life … declassed life in fact. … He didn't pay attention to what he is wearing … he never minded’ (Akbar, interview 2014). By rival organizations’ own admission, AISA—through constantly reclaiming Chandu's legacy—manages to appear to new students as a sincere, committed, and radical student organization on campus (Gowda, interview 2015).

When it comes to achieving political mobilization, the invocation of Chandrashekhar's sacrificial self is by no means insignificant. Chandu is not only an inspiring figure for activists, but also a political totem instrumental to galvanizing, recruiting, and persuading ordinary students to join protests and participate in political activities. As displayed in the quotes from six AISA pamphlets (see Figure 4), Chandu's martyrdom captures the universe of social suffering that prevails outside of the microcosm of campus. Consequently, his sacrifice enables students to enlarge their political imaginary and locate current student politics within the larger historical framework of anti-class and anti-caste struggles.

Figure 4.

Six concordances of words associated with Martyr Chandrashekhar in JNU pamphlets. Source: Compiled by author.Footnote ¹¹

While the political significance of commemorating martyrs is not entirely encapsulated in the social phenomenon of self-fashioning, the credibility of left activists depends in part on their ability to harness an ideal version of declassing—the one imagined and embodied in the sacrificial lives of left martyrs—in their daily politics. The political ecology of left martyrology is important in building a legitimacy based on sincerity and emotional resonance (Traïni and Terry Reference Traïni and Terry2010), which in turn play an important role in the emergence and decline of student movements.

While not specific to Marxist activism, I envision anger against perceived injustice as a contributing factor to the declassing practices described above, as it entails the practice of emotional association with the suffering classes and castes. In outlining the inequality between the rich and the poor, and the consumerist heartlessness of the ‘bourgeois middle class’, activists regularly find ways to trigger affect, in particular emotions associated with social conflict over land, labour, love, or dignity.

In order to locate such embodied emotionality, I will now refer to the distinctive visual culture of JNU student politics, in particular its poster culture. Every year in summer,Footnote ¹² each student organization mobilizes local artists in their ranks to draw posters several metres long and paste them on the campus's administrative and academic buildings. The result of this process is a saturation of political messages everywhere students look. Most of the 392 posters pasted on campus walls in 2014 were pictorial representations of the social oppression of workers, peasants, and so on. Three poster-making campaigns later, when questioned about the relevance of the display of raped women and massacred Dalits in his posters, Souradeep, an AISA male artist-cum-activist declared that:

The ability to feel the suffering of the oppressed women and Dalits who surround him is crucial to Souradeep, who consequently uses this expressed emotion to ‘criticize himself’ as an elite member of Indian society. Later in the interview, he associates this privilege with his Hindu identity, which contrasts with the marginalized condition of Muslims in contemporary India. In his posters, self-reflexivity is mediated through the depiction of morbid subjects such as women aborting, agonized animals, half-starved farmers, or a couple of murdered valentines massacred by Hindu vigilantes for being engaged in inter-faith love.

The embedded aesthetic of pain on JNU posters is exemplified by the four-metre acrylic poster inspired by Picasso's 1937 Guernica and a 1947 sketch by modernist artist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya (1915–1978) (see Figure 5). It was painted by Souradeep with the assistance of another student and pasted on a wall in front of an academic building. It displays a similar morbid aesthetic to his more recent 10-metre panoramic ink-on-canvas composition (see Figure 5) displayed as a scroll and commissioned for the ‘Memories of Change’ exhibition on student politics (Martelli Reference Martelli2019). The title ‘When nothing works then serious shit happens’ is inspired by a slogan against a 2013 bill regulating land evictions; it reflects on the violence endured by farmers when the state acquires their means of subsistence.

Figure 5.

Two panoramic compositions by student activist artist Souradeep [anonymized], (2014, 2019). Source: Photos by the author.

Many elements representing class oppression can be found in the JNU poster. The dominance of the rich is symbolized by the enormous steamroller/tank. It is mounted by capitalists holding a newspaper with the headline ‘Towards a richer life’. Different categories of oppressed individuals are crushed under the weight of the oppressor class. The man holding the ear of wheat is the Indian peasant and the slender but muscled bodies lying on the floor represent workers’ corpses, contrasting with the fat capitalist. The grievances of the peasant-worker class are written on the sign held by a woman: ‘Fair wages, food, health, education’. The blue colour of the smashed individuals is an indication of their low caste identity. In India, symbols and colours have an acute political meaning, and blue connotes Dalit identity (Jaoul Reference Jaoul2006, Reference Jaoul2016). The ideological interpretation of the picture is provided in the corners of the poster though a verse from the poem ‘Dark Times’ (1937) by the dramatist Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956): ‘When the great powers joined forces against workers … why were the poets silent?’ The sense of this in the context of India is: ‘If Indian society is so unfair and violent, why are you not doing anything about it?’

As indicated by Souradeep, felt emotionality enables the artist to go beyond his privileged experience and join in the suffering of the toiling masses in order to represent them. By unfolding an aesthetic that encapsulates indictment and pleas, Souradeep's pamphleteer and graphic discourses use pathos to denounce, accuse, and incriminate the ‘bad people’ identified with India's crony capitalists, the zamindars (big landowners), imperial forces (the United States), neo-colonizers (Israel), and the corrupt Indian state.

Similarly, a pro-Maoist senior supporter will never miss an opportunity to recall the state of affairs in the country: ‘Don't you see the unbearable exploitation of the masses … see among them there is despair; people have the choice between dying alone or dying fighting’ (Sharad, interview 2015). Through calling upon mimetic grief, the activist allegorically becomes the deprived: he is therefore capable of political empathy. Declassing—the sincere attempt to side with those suffering—is a practice that enables activists to unleash a universe of negative feelings that command indignation and call for action. Such rallying cries are part of a rich set of means that activists have at their disposal to make political claims. Within such a repertoire of contention, one practice strikes me as particularly relevant to the study of left biographical reconfiguration: fasting.

Activists’ self-fashioning on campus is anchored to a daily political routine which involves organizing and participating in many public events.Footnote ¹³ One particular way of protesting—the hunger strike—engages with self-centred corporeal practices in support of the cause of needy students. I describe such practices as important for inserting the question of self-sacrifice into the realm of less political issues that affect students involving mostly infrastructural and administrative shortcomings on campus. Obviously, fasts belong to the wider ‘toolkit’ of South Asian politics (Reddy Reference Reddy2009) and many of them might have little to do with expressing empathy for the depressed classes. Within the left repertoire of contention, some JNU activists even admit favouring gheraos (blockades) over fasts (Desquesnes Reference Desquesnes2009). However, tied to a communist political agenda, fasts can become a fully fledged means of promoting one's selfless personal commitment while addressing the grievances of students, thus claiming effective representation.

Along with being an instrument to satisfy student demands and gain leverage in negotiations with the JNU administration, fasting allows activists to put pressure on decision-makers in the name of distressed people—that is, poor students without on-campus accommodation or students unable to afford living costs. Because fasts demonstrate one's commitment to student welfare, political organizations usually ask future candidates for the Students' Union elections to participate in the hunger strikes organized on campus. A former JNUSU president acknowledges the relevance of hunger strikes in the following way:

As noted by Gowda, participating in hunger strikes is a way to take action and show support for broader issues as well as for the material well-being of the community to be represented—in this case, the most vulnerable sections of the student population. On these occasions activists sit on mats under a covered courtyard in front of the administration building and begin their fast to death, only ingesting non-carbohydrate liquids. The purpose is to demand improvements to student conditions, such as restarting interrupted construction work for new hostels or increasing small research scholarships from Rs 3,000 to Rs 5,000 (40 to 60 euros). After a couple of days, doctors from the JNU health centre come to check the blood pressure and other vital indicators of those fasting. Because of the theatrical and life-endangering leanings of the practice, the fasting ground becomes the epicentre of political life on campus (see Figures 6 and 7), making hunger strikes the centre of gravity of JNU politics. By way of indicating their importance, no less than 4,101 among the 72,424 pamphlets I collected as part of my ethnographic work—covering the period 1973–2015—mention a hunger strike.

Figure 6.

Hunger strike site. (Left) Water dispenser for hunger strikers at JNU Administration Bloc, December 2014. (Right) Poster listing the names of hunger strikers and the number of days of fasting. Source: Photos by author.

Figure 7.

Online social media post, including the text: ‘Hunger strike in JNU day 2. Comrades sitting in hunger strike getting massage by fellow comrades’. Source: Pallavi, 29 April 2016.

The use of the individual body as a tool of contestation brings to the fore a form of self-sacrifice that appeals to different ideological communities in South Asia. The display of corporal sacrifice by left activists relates to somatic self-disciplines used within the pre-independence repertoire of political action. As outlined by Alter (Reference Alter2000: 66), hunger strikes make fasting bodies both political and moral, and such a devotional stance can also be applied to the fasting bodies of JNU left activists. Consequently, their endeavours are expressed through the reappropriation of a language of somatic constraints popularized by freedom fighters from different ideological horizons—Bhagat Singh, Batukeshwar Dutt, Jatindra Nath Das, Jayaprakash Narayan, Mahatma Gandhi, and so on.

Reinterpreted within the left ideological canon, such self-discipline has, at least indirectly, grounding in the declassing tradition. For instance, advertising weight loss, especially during political campaigns, would be an indubitable sign of devotion to activism. After declaring that he had lost five kilograms in a single month, Muzaffar, an AISA activist, restated the committed nature of JNU activism: ‘JNU activists are the most hard-working in India, both physically and mentally.’ The case of Muzaffar confirms how the politics of corporeal self-fashioning serves to legitimize leftist representative claims; this is why left student organizations have in their ranks public figures ready to go on a hunger strike if needed, especially prior to student elections.

References to martyrdom and fasting successfully mobilize aspirations for self-control (Shah Reference Shah2018) and manifest sincerity towards the cause of the deprived, thus strengthening the legitimacy of such practices within the larger left repertoire of contention in South Asia. Beyond the JNU political arena, hunger strikes are routinely called by the entire range of left parties. Examples include the CPI(ML) supporting the landless poor and sugar mill workers in Bihar (Liberation 2017, 2018), the CPI(M) defending rubber producers in Kerala (The Hindu 2015), the CPI(Maoist) protesting against the mistreatment of tribal political prisoners in Jharkhand (The Times of India 2014), and the CPI demanding compensation for farmers after floods in Bihar (Live Hindustan, Reference Hindustan2018).

The thread that underpins the popularity of hunger strikes, martyrs, and certain other declassing idioms among left activists is a certain readiness to foreground self-sacrifice politically. For instance, Bhojpura, an AISA Dalit female activist, declared in 2016 that ‘I sat on hunger strike for 16 long days for social justice and social inclusion. I was fighting to save the deprivation points [system of positive discrimination for the entrance examination] for marginalized caste and class … mainly students from marginalized caste and class were targeted’ (Bhojpura, social media post May 2016). It is mainly because fasting triggers the emotions associated with self-sacrifice that Bhojpura's post led to the accusation by Patani—another aforementioned Dalit activist from BAPSA—that Dalit martyrs and fasters of CPI(ML) endured self-harm in the sole interest of the organization's upper caste leadership.

Here Dalit political sacrifices within left organizations—whether in the form of martyrdom or hunger strikes—are seen by Patani as forms of oppression running against Dalit interests. By reclaiming her agency in the process of committing to a grand political ideal, Bhojpura's answer asserted that through declassing, CPI(ML) can overcome identity politics and represent discriminated groups—including marginalized castes, minorities, women, tribals, workers, labourers, and every other ‘marginalised section’ (Kumari Reference Kumari2016). In her words, this is possible only if the middle-class and upper-caste left leadership can prove that it can transcend its own social status:

Although the performativity of hunger strikes is undeniable, it is not always possible to assess how deeply transformative this occasional activity is. Beyond fasting, the question about the long-term biographical effects of left self-fashioning have as yet not been addressed. Thus, I will now examine to what extent declassed practices endure and evolve beyond the specific time-space of politicized campuses.

The biographical consequences of left self-fashioning: nonconformist career aspirations and induced risks of political disengagement

Scholarship in the West finds that sustained participation in left political movements has durable transformative effects (McAdam Reference McAdam1990; Pagis 2014; Bosi, Giugni and Uba Reference Bosi, Giugni and Uba2016).Footnote ¹⁴ Through engaging with the long-term consequences of self-fashioning, I describe how the practice of left politics on campus restricts JNU activists’ professional choices to secure ‘activist-compatible’ jobs, while not necessarily barring them from accessing established positions. Overcoming this apparent contradiction, the account below shows that left biographical reconfigurations during one's student days lead to the rejection en bloc of corporate jobs and otherwise prestigious civil service positions, while facilitating access to academic posts.Footnote ¹⁵ I argue that such professional choices are informed by the underpinning of a left morality in which declassing practices are grounded. The fact that activists tend not to ‘take up’ certain jobs is an additional sign that left representative claims are legitimate only if their standard-bearers show commitment to the declassed code of conduct.

In 2014–15, the current and former Marxist activists I interviewed clamoured to reject what many termed ‘job opportunism’. One of the founders of the SFI unit at JNU recalls: ‘I remember at the time preparing UPSC exams [civil service examination for administrative positions at the central level] for a comrade was just unthinkable. It was a shame’ (Suneet, interview 2014). While government jobs are still the favourite occupational preference of India's youth, despite the furthering of the country's liberalization (Kumar Reference Kumar2017), such prestigious positions are seen by most left activists as a form of selfishness, moral dishonesty, and political disavowal. By giving their workforce to the state machinery, controlled by rival political forces and corrupt elites, they would have to repudiate their own ideals. When asked in an interview if the aspirations of JNU activists were similar to those of the youth of their generation, pro-CPI(M) and JNU Emeritus Professor C. P. Bhambri answered in the negative: ‘The communist men on campus are deviant from the dominant socio-political system and will remain that way. In fact, these qualities make them stand out in the crowd’ (Times of India, 1 November 1998). Whether sociologically accurate or not, such self-perceived deviancy echoes the various understandings of declassing, as they all reject the tenets of middle-class careerism and consumerist social aspirations.

The few students who had decided to continue into full-time left political activism after their studies were likely to refer to their declassed identity. Some of them remain unmarried—or were married to a comrade—and relied on meagre allowances that their party puts at their disposal. In March 2014, during a field visit to a Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe (SC/ST)Footnote ¹⁶ student residence in Bhojpur district in the state of Bihar, Arathi (in his mid-thirties) confessed to the difficulty of being a full-time member. As national vice-president of AISA, he had embraced the ascetic activist framework. But,

Several individuals who had become full-timer workers in their parent communist party (after their time on campus) told me they had abandoned the comfort zone of a stable and properly paid job that would otherwise be their due as JNU graduates. Arathi admitted that declassing Marxist student leaders have few prospects: political careers at a national level are nearly impossible to attain, they do not aspire to ‘capitalist-based’ office jobs or exploitative businesses, and work in public administration is regarded as political treason. As shown in the case of Arathi, I would like to emphasize that many left activists find that their professional aspirations are in conflict with the expectations of at least some of their relatives and wider Indian society. The continuation of declassing practices after university thus often leads to what sociologists Goffman (Reference Goffman1961) and Becker (Reference Becker1963) have termed ‘deviant professional careers’.

Not only was employment in government and private companies demonized among the left JNU activists I interviewed, but so was involvement in mainstream politics. I often heard them making the following semantic distinction: the selfless political activist is different from the politician who seeks a career in a national apparatus such as the Indian National Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party. One such example was given by Ronald De Souza, a former JNUSU office bearer, who differentiates between the bad public figure seeking ‘self-gain’ and ‘personal aggrandizement’ and the good public figure who acquires ‘heightened or radical consciousness through ideological engagement and praxis in order to transform aspects of society through the political process’ (De Souza Reference De Souza2004). I found that members of more mainstream student organizations could be more ambitious, preparing for public service exams and looking for the highly paid careers that come with hierarchical positions of power (Bharat, interview 2014; Gyan, interview 2014; Saharsi, interview 2015; Kashif, interview 2015). This required espousing mainstream values recognized by the family and the wider socioprofessional environment.

However, the declared willingness to embrace declassed careers was not always concretized among left activists. First, in the history of JNU student activism, a few—but important—left leaders have quit their organization in the past couple of years to join hands with the Indian National Congress or other national ‘mainstream parties’,Footnote ¹⁷ causing much dismay among activists (Martelli Reference Martelli2018a). Although these individuals are often labelled as political opportunists, political turncoating might also exemplify the difficulty of sustaining declassing claims in the long run. Second, as of 2020, a significant section of former left activists hold teaching positions at public and private universities both in India and abroad. My account of the 105 former office bearers (1971–2018) of JNU Students’ Union who are not currently students (see Figure 1) shows that they ended up working in academia (49 per cent), professional politics (19 per cent), and journalism (11 per cent) (Martelli and Ari Reference Martelli and Ari2018). Nearly 6 per cent of office holders are social workers and 15 per cent have other types of professional roles.

The social prestige attached to professorship is undeniable (Jayaram Reference Jayaram and Altbach2003) and in India securing an academic position is regarded as an enviable professional outcome. Thus, the reluctance of student activists to take up certain positions does not necessarily lead to professional disqualification and the rejection of ‘establishment’ occupations. This suggests a form of professional and moral bargaining on the part of many activists. While not engaging in ‘corrupting professions’, the majority does not renounce the opportunity to secure job security and a stable income, especially if that enables them to sustain a certain degree of political commitment after graduation.

Professor Samuel Divekar, former CPI all-timerFootnote ¹⁸ and JNUSU vice-president office bearer (1978–79), describes the transition between student activism and teaching activism as natural: ‘Those of us who wore jeans as students, wear them as professors.’ A prominent figure of JNU activism, former Students’ Union president (1974–75) and Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man's Party) Lok Sabha candidate in 2014, Professor J. P. Kashi, told me that the consequence of his time on campus was that he had remained politically active throughout his life (interview 2015). Professor Amarendra Mishra, another former president (twice, 2002–04), tried to be a full-timer for three years before becoming a JNU professor in economics. However, he did not see this shift as a renunciation of his activism: ‘that doesn't mean the politics has disappeared … the kind of things I teach, the kinds of things I write … are all political’. Even as they wear two hats, some scholars still distinguish between the role of politician and academic: for example, Zach Murti, JNUSU general-secretary 2001–02 and former Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, who maintains, ‘Before I was 50 percent politician, 50 percent academic … but it is impossible to keep both when you are campaigning on campus.’ In contrast with Zach's statement, many professors and senior activists did not see any discontinuity between the fields of politics and academia. For them, one informed the other and, when not constrained by administrative and other department-related responsibilities, the two could be conducted hand-in-hand.

The discrepancy between the declassing declarations of activists and the privileges they enjoy in terms of access to certain teaching positions—which are granted by their intellectual status and their ties with activist-academics—is spectacular. The paradox is deepened by the fact that while on campus, committed student activists are required to prioritize politics rather than their studies. The self-development of the activist profile involves regularly participating in protests and fewer opportunities for diligent academic research. Student activism at JNU appears to be, on the one hand, a form of sacrifice, while, on the other, it can be a professional advantage, as such behaviour facilitates activists’ access to sections of Indian academia in which left staff members are still influential. Left self-fashioning therefore shapes both career aspirations and representative claims but, as outlined below, such outstanding ‘politics of the self’ is not always consistent and continuous over time.

Though examining left activism from the perspective of political disengagement within the JNU campus space, I emphasize the versatility in the long run of left self-fashioning among youth during their intellectually formative years. The difficulty of sustaining declassing practices over time is an indication that the individual repercussions for such activism are fluctuating and lodge at an intimate level. The fact that the declassing modality is sometimes renounced or renegotiated by its exponents—independently from the rest of the student group—stresses that left self-fashioning is more than just a mechanical strategy for achieving political representation. Involving both material costs and moral rewards, for individual activists it also constitutes a central identity marker that is at stake when shifting political attitudes.

On campus, I met ‘declassed activists’ who, in the course of my fieldwork, were in the process of disengaging themselves from active politics, thus ‘turning passive’. Among them was the aforementioned Akbar, a 23-year-old AISA activist who had been elected joint-secretary of the Students’ Union the previous year. In January 2015, after confessing his confusion to me, he had stopped working for the organization and acknowledged he was compromising certain ideals he had previously professed. Below I display quotes from two interviews conducted eight months apart.

Expressing his desire to make money on his own, Akbar—an OBCFootnote ¹⁹ Muslim student from a modest, semi-rural family of small traders in Jharkhand—had broken with the imaginary of the full-time party worker while retaining an attachment to the idea of benevolence. He declared that he wanted to accumulate wealth, not for its own sake but in order to redistribute it among progressive activists. An interpretation of this could be that for cash-starved Akbar sacrificial duties had been partly replaced by a fantasized desire for generosity and largesse. Reasons for this move away from the declassing mould were many and involved both intimate conflicts with former comrades and exhaustion over the limited prospects offered by AISA politics.

His appearance now contrasted greatly with that of his activist days. He had replaced a kurta full of holes with a shirt and a hand-woven (khadi) jacket bought in a branded shop in Connaught Place, a place where relatively affluent Delhiites go shopping. Chappals had been replaced with branded shoes, and instead of his gamcha from Jharkhand, he had put on a brand-new shawl. When he and I visited the glittering mall next to the campus, he was relieved because he had shaved his beard and looked clean, and so he would not feel gazed upon when going through the security gate. For the first time he bought a blazer, and complained about the fact that the discount sales came exactly when he had no money left. On the way back to campus in the auto-rickshaw, he chatted on the new iPhone his brother had sent him from Saudi Arabia, where he works as a truck driver.

Akbar's case illustrates that the intensity of declassing behaviour evolves over time but still continues to have an impact on the long-term aspirations of activists. Declassing practices involve significant personal sacrifices, some of which appear difficult to sustain when stepping back from activism. It can be assumed that declassing practices raise the cost of high-level participation for leftist students at JNU and beyond, and therefore create obstacles to prolonged political commitment. When asked about their intention to move to full-time political activism after graduation, several senior leftist campus leaders expressed doubts. The common answer was ‘I don't know’ and may have reflected their hesitation regarding devotional forms of political commitment.

The episodic indecision and fluctuations in terms of commitment might be best exemplified by Gowda Kishore, former JNUSU president (1998–99) and now high-profile joint-secretary of the CPI(M)-led All India Kisan Sabha (Peasant Association). After a decade of teaching in Bangalore, he decided to return to full-time communist politics. After mentioning salary issues and problems related to organizing a decent wedding ceremony for himself, he admitted that the implications of declassing are always on his mind:

This example shows how personal and intimate declassing practices are for the left in India. It exemplifies how one of the main political forces standing in the way of an increasingly dominant Hindu nationalism in the county anchors its representative claim around the notion of social downlift. In a context in which religious forms of self-sacrifice—especially Hindu—are systematically brought forward in the public space, the next section distinguishes the left modality of asceticism from its saffron counterpart. It subsequently summarizes how such specific ‘asceticism in a secular uniform’ uses biographical reconfiguration as a way to put forward universalist representative claims. It also engages with how, for female left activism at JNU, the advertised removal of one's class can be accompanied by another removal: that of one's femininity.

Declassing the women's way: feminist defeminization and its critique

As in most social practices, the experience of declassing is coloured by gendered identities. Indubitably feminist in scope, left activism at JNU aims at female empowerment (Barkaia Reference Barkaia2014, Shipurkar Reference Shipurkar2016). More generally imagined around the lines of a proletariat-cum-peasant ideal and pitched against the many avatars of female exploitation, declassed feminism is envisioned as being anti-elitist in scope. However, I suggest that this praxis also imposes, at times, a burden of conforming on women who are part of left campus activism. Because specific self-practices of defeminization and desexualization are repeatedly mobilized to mark separation from the elite bourgeoise, such fashioning tends to flatten out the multiplicities of female expressions into the uniform framework of the selfless comrade.

Accordingly, many female activists—who in total represent one-third (29.8 per cent) of those affiliated to political organizations on campus (Martelli Reference Martelli2018a)—engage with the notion of sartorial social downlift through rejecting those attributes of femininity attached to varied elitist social symbols—including short hair or lipstick. Barkha, for instance, a former pro-Maoist activist, recalls that at protests she would:

Undeniably, the left commitment to those self-transformations that emulate the aesthetics of popular classes circulate widely across gender divides. Such refashioning by female respondents is mostly emphasized as a resolute political attempt to depart from gendered and patriarchal social representations set by the family and society at large (Pallavi, interview 2014; Panipati, interview 2015).Footnote ²⁰ Through echoing similar left discourses outside campus, female activists at JNU refer to their substantive freedom within activist collectives and express strong aspirations towards emancipation (Roy Reference Roy2009), transformation (Barkaia Reference Barkaia2014), and even wilfulness (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2017).

Nevertheless, on an everyday basis, an empirical tension emerges between individual-based feminist assertiveness and feminist selflessness in the name of the toiling masses. Indeed, while female activists from self-perceived radical sections of the leftFootnote ²¹ tend to perform declassing as a form of desexualization, others prefer to express attachment to the downtrodden through juxtaposing visible attributes of femininity with the popular ethos. For instance, SFI activist and JNUSU office bearer Devika declares:

Through voicing the association of her colourful saree with popular classes, she exemplifies the possibility of asserting one's attachment to ‘the masses’ by subverting the meaning of a precious garment otherwise associated with traditional values of respectability, elegance, and married womanhood, especially in urban Bengal (Mount Reference Mount2017, Guha Reference Guha2018). As a result, not every female activist ascribes to the otherwise dominant aesthetic of defeminization. As a sign of their assertion of a public self that is distinct from that of male comrades, they hesitate less to publicize personal prose, jokes, or insights on their online profiles in a distinctively more intimate and personal manner. Moreover, on festive occasions they might wear earrings, make-up, or a saree, and they also consistently extend solidarities to queer activists wearing feminine attire (Martelli Reference Martelli2020).

Overall, declassed feminism tends to be fashioned not only against patriarchy, but also against feminisms associated with dominant classes, which are labelled as elite, bourgeois, or savarna. The concerns of the latter are portrayed as narrow, because they are blind to the structural violence exerted on female labour, which eventually sustains an ‘oppressive class-divided economy’ (Kavita, interview 2014) as well as an ‘oppressive ideology of beauty’ (Krishnan and Tanweer Reference Krishnan and Tanweer1997).

Finding in the moral economy of the deprived a counter-model to the liberal commodification of female agency, recurrent left activist discourses at JNU suggest that elite feminism is, in many respects, the accomplice of capitalist exploitation. Those feminists involved exclusively in the eradication of paternalist moral policing (Martelli Reference Martelli2017) are occasionally criticized or silenced, thus triggering public debates. For instance, PhD student Drumi (interview 2015), who argues in favour of co-educational residences as well as the installation of condom dispensers and the possibility of drinking alcohol in public campus spaces, reacted bitterly against left student organizations who decided not to support such agendas, dubbing them as upper-class concerns:

The vilification of stylized upper-class womanhood is at times complemented by an invisibilization of individual grievances by female cadres, especially when those are perceived as ‘dividing’, ‘distracting’, or ‘diluting’ the effort towards strengthening the organization (Nair Reference Nair2019; Amita, interview 2019).Footnote ²² In extreme cases, the ideological targeting of elitist womanhood can even extend to questioning the relevance of women's sexual liberation for the advancement of the revolutionary project. For example, in late 2015, a group of JNU pro-NaxaliteFootnote ²³ activists defending the right of unmarried activist comrades to have live-in relationships (and who were also fighting against their organization's shielding of a case of sexual harassment) were publicly singled out by a sister organization in Allahabad University (Uttar Pradesh) (Lahiri et al. Reference Lahiri, Bhattacharya, Sengupta, Aswathi, Dharshini, Reyaz, Saife, Bhattacharya, Paiker and Khalid2016) and accused of expanding ‘capitalist brothels’:

Grounded in egalitarian principles, the positioning of activists as anti-elite does not eradicate gender-based tensions within left collectives on campus. In fact, activists’ advertisement of selflessness is not experienced solely as a liberation and sometimes constitutes a moral constraint as well. Beyond Barkha's earlier emphasis on the difficulty of adjusting to the declassed modality, others mentioned that attempts to remove one's signs of social status were accompanied by occasional forms of patronization by male activists, who ‘preach about women rights and empowerment … but behave differently with female friends’ (Minu, interview 2014). Following a phase of political demobilization, Draupadi (interviews 2014, 2018) denounced publicly the intimate pressures towards rejecting elitism that were imposed on her by her then boyfriend within the organization:

Peripheral markers of declassing: disowned linguistic elitism and guilt-driven morality

In the previous account, Draupadi's use of English—the medium of instruction at JNU but only one of the languages of everyday conversation—appears to her boyfriend to run contrary to the plebeian mould of left activism on campus. While reflexivity over various aspects of the declassing practice can be privately articulated in any conversant language, since the 1990s the public expression of everyday politics on campus has been predominantly in Hindi (Kavita, interview 2014). Its use signals to activists the need to reach out to the non-cosmopolitan sections of students hailing from North India whose numbers have increased significantly with the progressive implementation of reservations on campus.

This being said, the comradely critique of the inappropriate use of English in everyday life, as well as the overall reluctance of left activists to give public speeches in English (even in the presence of non-Hindi speakers among students), indicates an overall unwillingness to be associated with an urban-based, cultural elite incompatible with the declassing imaginary. Hence, we find the avoidance and disowning of symbols of high status, privilege, distinction, caste-class entitlement, upward social mobility, and ‘anxious aspiration’ (Deshpande Reference Deshpande2019), such as the use of English, in proxies’ attempts to associate exclusively with India's underbelly. For instance, Venu, a Tamilian son of a CPI(M) trade union leader and former JNUSU president, comments on a congratulatory note on his political journey he received after passing his PhD viva: ‘In Tamil Nadu we oppose Hindi like anything. But when I joined JNU I had to learn Hindi real fast, it is the language of politics here, it is the language of common people’ (Venu, interview 2017).

Although JNU is a progressive space not only from the point of view of multilingualism, but also from the perspective of gender inclusiveness, the wider field of politics in South Asia remains the quasi monopoly of men. As female cadres enter the predominantly male field of JNU student politics, tensions between certain individual desires and aspirations towards activist respectability do emerge. Across gender divides, such ambition to be a ‘good’ activist always seemed to be intertwined with moral and ethical considerations. On many occasions, current and previous students appeared to ground their ambition to be politically active in the need to escape a pervasive sense of guilt associated with the enjoyment of social advantages. Criticizing the self-centred motive behind ‘pro-deprived’ politics, the late Xaxa, a JNU tribal activist, wrote once in a poem:

Overall, left activism led by relatively non-discriminated-against sections of the JNU community often emerges as both the inspiration and the instrument to neutralize and subvert such a sense of internalized guilt through actively dissociating with one's lofty origins. Hence, subaltern stances, such as the denunciation of gender discrimination against lower classes and castes, is for some left activists not only the result of an empathetic quest for radical alterity, but a spin-off effect of the rejection of perceived undue privileges attributed to the self. For instance, Rita, a former DSU activist, discusses the centrality of social guilt in building a radical political narrative, while, at the same time, acknowledging how it might result in the disavowal of a genuine feminist critique of popular classes:

The exogenous moral strains experienced by activists in the process of moulding themselves into the declassing paradigm inevitably raise the question of its authenticity: is it a self-driven process or rather an imposed one? Encounters with former cadres and student leaders who displayed forms of ‘reclassification’ after leaving campus seem to reinforce the understanding that left selflessness is more a prescribed posture than a genuine practice of the self. However, turning one's back on active left politics does not necessarily mean that one's previous active declassing ethos was altogether embraced at a superficial level. Some are like former JNU art student Anjali, who aspires to a comfortable life but keeps labelling her current job in a private modern art gallery as a moral betrayal, thus coining herself as a ‘sell-out’. Others are more like Salim. As an erstwhile activist, who first moved to journalism and then commercial advertising, he attempts to soften his ‘capitalist’ commitments and uphold his former ideals by giving time to morally compatible leanings:

Thus, even when veering away from active participation in left politics, former activists find it relevant to position themselves vis-à-vis declassing. This indicates that declassing is not exclusively a contextual, transient, and instrumental projection onto the public realm of a set of rhetorical gimmicks; with varying degrees of intensity, the practice carries an indexical value and continues to inform self-construction beyond left campus activism. Salim's techniques to mitigate and neutralize the contradictions of his ‘reclassed’ social trajectory exemplify the empirical difficulty of viewing declassing as a superficial posture only. Because the sometimes drastic transformations of former activists’ selves away from the ideal of selflessness are cluttered with feelings of continuity, contradiction, guilt, irony, or nostalgia, they paradoxically underline the centrality of the paradigm in the forging of self-representations. A former AISA cadre who has emigrated to teach in South Korea admits: ‘I will always be a JNUite, declassing is an ideal for all of us … in fact I would like to be like martyr Chandu [Chandrashekhar], but I can't … way too hard: even Pratap [aforementioned] couldn't keep on declassing and ended up joining Congress: imagine that! [he repeats that twice]’ (Santosh, interview 2018).

The cases presented complement the argument of Dasgupta (Reference Dasgupta, Nigam, Menon and Palshikar2014), who indicates that ascetic tropes are constitutive of communist self-making. While an active commitment towards left self-styling is transient for many, its life course variability does not completely override the emotional and ethical commitments towards such practices. Amid processes of reclassification, declassed desires and aspirations can continue to inform self-perception as well as understandings of society. Additionally, as examined further below, the declassing claim by the Indian left is inseparable from an instrumental aspiration for political representation. Because the declassing praxis relies on a mimesis of the popular classes, it aims at abolishing the aesthetic distance between the people and their representatives (Ankersmit Reference Ankersmit1996: 25). All-in-all, commitments towards declassing are not only personal understandings of political participation, they are also, more broadly, performative narratives that contribute empirically to the daily legitimation of the left representative claim.

Fostering sincerity, access, and legitimacy through declassing

The argument goes that left self-fashioning and political representation are woven together in a manner that emphasizes the squandering of an activist's privileged credentials. While declassed modality can be labelled as ascetic (if we use the term in a general sense), I suggest that such asceticism should not be assimilated with its political enemy and religious counterpart: Hindu asceticism, embodied and represented by the figure of the sadhu or sannyasi (both Hindu religious ascetics).

First, the Hindu renunciate—in the pursuit of religious truth—is usually required to abandon society by living at its margins (Bouillier Reference Bouillier2015) and therefore can be considered ‘outclassed’ rather than ‘declassed’. Second, while declassed activists and sadhus may share the abandonment of part of their previous lives, their reasons for doing so appear to be in opposition. Indeed, the sadhu apprentice, with the help of a guru (Hausner Reference Hausner2007), pursues self-salvation while the middle-class left activist, with the support of comrades, defends the salvation of the depressed classes, advocating for their collective liberation from oppression.

It clearly appears that the ‘ascetic modality’ used for political purposes by some left activists is devoid of religious feeling and, in that sense, differs greatly from other traditions that call on renunciation, such as that of the pracharaks (preachers) or saints of the Hindu right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, or the National Volunteer Corps). While the RSS—the Hindu nationalist's main flagbearer today—has often called upon pracharaks to become sadhus first (Jaffrelot Reference Jaffrelot1999: 40) and remain celibate, the type of asceticism it promotes also veers away from traditional religious self-salvation, targeting instead the collective salvation of the Hindu nation through social and organizational work (ibid.: 43). Thus, while remaining fundamentally different, ascetic tropes in left and Hindu nationalist practices might have one aspect in common: in their own way they have both adapted and transformed existing socially accepted traditions for their own organizational interests, thus ‘acquiring a sanctity of [their] own’ (Gold Reference Gold1991: 563).

Distinct from other streams of political asceticism, the figure of the declassed left is correctly understood as a strong reaction to the pervasiveness of hierarchy in Indian society and not as an enactment of strictly religious ideas. Because the practice is firmly grounded in the sentiment of class awareness, it is undoubtedly Marxist in character, but also finds inspiration in the revolutionary repertoire of secular icons such as the freedom fighter Bhagat Singh (Jaffrelot Reference Jaffrelot, Bataillon, Bozarslan and Jaffrelot2011: 151–155, Moffat Reference Moffat2018), who is by far the most popular political personage in JNU political pamphlets—he is mentioned in 1,151 pamphlets among those I collected and digitized.

While Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar appear to be role models, Gandhi and the ideology he represents are an enemy for communist student activists. However, through constituting the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of the practice of political asceticism in South Asia, part of the bodily protest repertoire Gandhi advocated has found itself reinterpreted by young left leaders at JNU. They have indirectly inherited his practice of frugality for the sake of representing the poor and challenging the hierarchical stratification of Indian society. I therefore suggest that the self-fashioning described here corresponds to a larger form of ‘subalternism’, in which various political traditions such as workerism, the cult of martyrs, and the selfless generosity of a few comrades (for example, Bankuri, interview 2015; Arathi, interview 2014) take a crucial role.

The declassing practices presented here do qualify as a set of moral postures and the expression of sincere engagement—a ‘commitment towards a particular dream, in which you learn to distinguish between your needs and your desires’ (Berhampuri, interview 2014)—rather than a systematic political strategy. However, the ethnographic material presented in the section above indicates how these postures, though contested, serve as a tool to appear distinguishable from the common student and politically legitimate to all and sundry. For instance, it has been described how a declassed dress code serves as a tool for middle-class and elite activists to embody a popular cause among sections of the JNU population, how the praise of martyrs translates into calls for action, and how the fasting ground becomes a centre of gravity in campus political life.

While relevant for the conduct of contemporary left politics at large, declassing self-fashioning does not everywhere override coexisting forms of activist self-presentations. The declassed modality acquires meaning when confronted with ‘mainstream’ practices of youth politics in India of which the left is also a part. As for other forms of power-centric politics, student activism in areas where the left is a dominant force will more frequently showcase aspiring middle-class leaders who relate only marginally to declassing tropes. In northern India some of them are found busy reproducing their power at the local level, notably by generating revenue streams that involve channelling contracts for businessman and seats for students in private universities (Jeffrey and Young Reference Jeffrey and Young2012). Declassing politics can be perceived as only marginally relevant for those activists, such as AISF activist Dhananjay (interview 2018) who, he admitted, decided to join AISF because it traditionally dominates student politics in his hometown of Begusarai (state of Bihar). At times, selfless cultivation can also be peripheral in the political repertoire of Kerala Marxist student politics (cf. Ullekh Reference Ullekh2018). For instance, Lukose (Reference Lukose2009) notes that the public nature of student activism led by the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) in small colleges attracts young men indulging in masculine sociality, including what one of her informants calls ‘chethu-fying’ (that is, acting like a chethu, a Malayalam word for being fashionable).

Assuming regional and gendered shades, the contrasting ways of being a communist are not necessarily mutually exclusive, yet the designation of such inherent contradictions within left politics informs activists’ notions of political ‘correctness’ and political ‘deviation’ at JNU. For instance, in the words of Devika, self-aggrandisement and careerism among comrades are widespread phenomena that tarnish the authenticity of CPI(M) activism. In her words, such behaviours should be eradicated, thus retaining in the movement only those for whom commitment is driven by genuine political selflessness:

Understood in dialogue with other forms of political practices, the various shades of declassed self-fashioning are crucial as enabling tools of being; appearing as a ‘truthful activist’ thus grants access to campus students beyond inner circles of supporters. Such confined in-groups can be seen by politically active students as mere ‘fan clubs’, a term that Sharad, one of the main pro-Maoist organizers at JNU, used frequently in our late-night discussions. As indicated in the following quote, for him declassing is a way to avoid the danger of being both elitist—which is an obstacle for mass party building—and individualist—which is a danger for the cohesiveness of the organization. When asked how to overcome these obstacles, Sharad gave me the example of a comrade of his, who went empty-handed to settle in a tribal village in a conflict zone and accepted the idea of starving to death in front of a family's house in order to gain the owner's trust. He affirmed that the lady of the house refused to give him food for two days and, although he had a gun, he refused to force her to feed him, accepting the possibility of death by hunger. Sharad concluded the story saying that by setting these standards of commitment, the comrade ultimately won the trust of the household and that even in the face of ‘white terror’, they ultimately decided to feed him. The outcome of such a story—whether authentic or romanticized—illustrated for him the importance of declassing as a tool to gain access and promote one's politics: ‘You have to be part of the suffering of people, withstanding humiliation, and in that process, you show how humane you are. That is how you win over confidence.’ He went on to say:

Sharad summarizes the main argument of this study: left activists do perceive their declassing practices as facilitating their access to to-be-represented Indians from various social strata while also appealing to potential new recruits. Conventional wisdom has it that these are not the only strategies put in place by certain sections of activists in order to gain political ground. In every political movement, individuals routinely use a whole set of means to achieve their goals. Thus, when asked about what makes JNU activists successful, SFI activist Sundar evokes the qualities of hard work, oratory skills, and ‘connection; the ability to relate with people and a [Students’] Union that can reach the majority of students’. Declassing is a legitimizing practice that must be accompanied by a truthful ability to build on a sustained interaction with the people you aim to represent. As for other grassroots movements, political socialization is key to mobilization success and declassing practices are an instrumental aid in achieving political mileage.