Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the theory of subject formation developed by Jacques Rancière, this paper advances the concept of declassing, understood as an embodied language of renunciation and selflessness associated with the acquisition of left activist capital in contemporary Indian student politics.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the public relevance of educated youths’ experiments with politics on Indian campuses, centering specifically on the Marxist-leaning Jawaharlal Nehru University. I survey how reinterpretations of politics circulate from one micro-cohort to the next. Drawing on the theory of subject formation developed by Jacques Rancière, I advance the concept of declassing, understood as an embodied language of renunciation and selflessness associated with the acquisition of left activist capital—which also entails the ability to quickly mobilize and coordinate during social movements. By becoming declassed, activists acknowledge deprived sections of the Indian population and convey political sincerity, thus creating a space for a radical critique of mainstream politics and society.

The presentation explores how left-leaning student politics achieve political representation in conducive educational territories, and how this modality is resisted by those who cannot afford to declass due to their “low” sociological extraction. This tension is useful to characterize the relevance of self-work for the legitimation of political representation in the Indian context. I place the declassing genre within a wider set of practices I term un-bodiments. Un-bodying can be characterized as the operationalization of acquired dispositions and inscribed capitals (-bodying) that revolve around advertised deviations from expected selves (-un), which can be bound to assigned identities, partisan affiliations or ascriptive social makers. I argue that "departures from oneself" are useful to understand the success of contemporary populists in South Asia, which is tied to their departure from tinted political identities associated with corrupt, dynastic and anti-people party politics.