The Justice for Rohith Movement: Performance and Performativity of Dalit Student Politics in India

Abstract

This thesis analyses the everyday performance of Dalit politics and Dalit student protests, focusing on the protests which erupted after Rohith Vemula, a Dalit doctoral student, died by suicide in his hostel room at Hyderabad Central University (in Hyderabad, India) on January 17, 2016. Rohith’s death sparked national and international outrage and led to the shutdown of the university for over a month and gave rise to the ‘Justice for Rohith movement’, which continued for over a year. Rohith’s death became a symbolic representation of other Dalit deaths due to systemic caste violence; the symbolism of his death expanded to include other marginalised groups who have faced systemic violence historically. The protesting students at Hyderabad Central University embarked on a wide range of creative and performative interventions such as paintings, graffiti, installations, posters, songs, banners, marches, rallies, seminars, and lectures, as part of the Justice for Rohith movement (JFRM). In performing these creative acts, the students transformed various spaces in the University into sites of resistance to challenge discriminatory practices against Dalits. The thesis analyses the everyday performance of politics and protests and how, for Dalits, the distinction between the personal and political is blurred as the very act of resistance is carried forward as embodied memory. I examine how the participants in the JFRM performed and wrote songs about Rohith, drawing upon earlier regional, national, and global movement cultures. The thesis also explores the resistant objects produced by the students using Rohith’s images and quotations from his final letter, which transformed Rohith into an iconic figure within the genealogy of Dalit protest culture. The acts of resistance and the aesthetics of the objects produced by the protesting students drew upon larger debates around caste as well as Dalit political culture. Analysing Dalit political culture from a performance studies lens will highlight how Dalits, and Dalit students in particular, perform their political identity through various acts of resistance. Paying specific attention to the performance and performativity of these acts of resistance shows how the activists of the Justice for Rohith movement performed Dalit political identity as an everyday performance of politics and protest.