Academic freedom outside/inside prison walls

For some time now, we have been creating a poetry-sequence – when poetry is read aloud, line by line by individuals in a group, in their distinct voices, accents and intonations, somehow managing to communicate a shared sense of love, loss, beauty or courage.

With Professor G.N. Saibaba’s face beaming at us across the screen, we launched the meeting to celebrate his acquittal while reading out loud the poem he had written in November 2017, while still in jail, titled “When I refused to die”.

The event was attended by a diverse group of people from India and abroad. Among them were soon-to-be lawyers from Oslo’s Human Rights study programme consortium -- SAIH Blindern, Scholars at Risk Norway and University of Oslo (UiO). The students were striving to bridge the two worlds forcibly divided by prison walls – those imprisoned inside and those outside joined with them in solidarity. They had been studying hundreds of pages of legal incongruencies and notes and letters from the students of his works, located in various parts of the world.

The Master’s programme students soon arranged a meeting to discuss the alarming state of academic freedom in India with Professor Saibaba, Professor of Social Anthropology at UiO, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, and InSAF India. In preparation for the talk, I had been trying to understand for myself, what is academic freedom and where and how does academic freedom live. On both occasions, Saibaba talked about the deep desire for education that he saw in several of his fellow inmates in the prison in Nagpur in central India. Also, the deep desire to know the truth, to get to the bottom of things. Clearly, academic freedom still wanted to live even inside prison walls.

We learned from Saibaba how the Dalit Panther movement in the seventies led to broadening of Indian university syllabi. As I heard Saibaba speak about the playground for academic freedom, I clenched the 307 pages of Umar Khalid’s PhD thesis, which I had brought as a gift for the Master’s students. By living in the field, learning and writing about the cartography of the region of Singbhum in central-eastern India, Umar too had participated in people’s struggles. After all, had he also not been arrested for legitimising people’s struggles in the land of the Adivasis, whose history and memory the power structures at the centre were desperately trying to re-write?

Nielsen, who spoke next, often says that he is not an alarmist. His love and concern for India were apparent in his calm but serious tone. He had begun the talk by saying that it gave him no pleasure to acknowledge the shrinking space of academic freedom – and thus the avenues to address social injustices – in the past decade.

This tone continued in InSAF India’s talk as well. It was not possible to talk about academic freedom without going into the political context of India, or in other words, the caste context. Everyone in the room was well acquainted with the hierarchies (race, gender, sexuality, indigeneity) that they found themselves embedded in, in Norway. I introduced a ladder to literally represent the caste hierarchy. The rungs of the ladder explicitly pointed to the vast differences in ways of being, of entitlement, humiliation and presence and absence of social safety nets. Those who challenge the rungs of the ladder are cast away into the prison; as if by locking up their bodies for years and decades, the ideas of social justice will surely fade away.

Towards the end of the talk, we looked at each other with a collective sense of alarm, but a ray of hope shone through the thick pages spanning Umar Khalid’s thesis. Before I handed it over to the students in exchange for Arundhati Roy’s Azadi, which they had brought as a gift for the speakers, I read out the last few lines of the introduction that Umar had written for his thesis, many moons ago but it could have been just yesterday:

‘Every time, they attacked me and my comrades, it only strengthened my resolve to finish this work. As we smiled and fought back their attacks, we were only reminded of the following words of Rumi:

In the slaughter house of love,

they kill only the best,

none of the weak or the deformed.

Don’t run away from this dying,

whoever is not killed for love is already dead meat.’

People’s movements open the mind of the university syllabus, and the university syllabus open’s up the meaning of people’s movements. In that moment, learning, writing and people’s struggles blended and became indistinguishable.

Isha Savani