New narrative around JNU poses a challenge to intellectual freedom, opportunity
On April 10, the day World QS rankings declared Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University ( JNU) as India’s top-ranked university, JNU’s Narmada hostel lights up at 9 p.m. Dozens of actors are getting ready for the shooting of a web series by lmmaker Sudhir Mishra on students during India’s Emergency.
A group of ve rst-year students from the Centre of Russian Studies walks past the shoot location, but what piques their interest is the activity in the building opposite the hostel — the oce of the university’s student union: JNUSU.
Here, the All India Students Association (AISA) is holding a public hearing on what it believes is the commercialisation of the campus. Sucheta De, CPI (ML) member and former JNUSU president, speaks about how JNU is a “blend of worlds and experiences” and that there are concerted attempts to change what it stands for.
As the students discuss the shooting of the web series, the conversation segues into the new narrative being built around JNU. They talk about how this had almost prevented their families from letting them take admission here. One of them says, “JNU ke baahar jao, toh log antankwadi bulana shuru kar lete hai (When we step out of campus, people start calling us terrorists).”
At the heart of the conict between JNU’s external perception and its internal workings are two Hindi lms the university features in: Bastar: The Naxal Story, which released in March, and JNU: Jahangir National University, set to hit theatres soon.
Bastar was marketed as based on real-life incidents from the Maoist insurgency in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar. In the trailer, actor Adah Sharma, who plays an IPS ocer, states that the massacre of 76 soldiers of the Central Reserve Police Force was celebrated in JNU. The poster for Jahangir National University features the tag line, “Can one educational institution break the nation?”
The student experience
Garwita Gandhi, who hails from Uttar Pradesh’s Jaunpur, says she was “angered” at the depiction of the university as a subversive body in Bastar’s trailer. It was this perception that she had to ght when she secured admission. “My uncle used to think that the campus is meant only for students who want to get into politics.”
Even after her year-long stint here, he still believes that “there is too much violence on campus”. After a pause, she adds, “It took me some time to convince my family to let me come here, to make them understand that this perception is not true.” She says the perception is created when incidents are blown out of proportion on TV channels and such lms are made. Gandhi says she joined JNU for her love for languages and the job prospects that come after such a degree.
Ayush Rawat, Gandhi’s classmate, says, “Whenever there is a protest on campus, there are comments online abusing students, branding them as terrorists. And students reply calmly, explaining
Bastar: The Naxal Story, the cause for their agitation.” These replies stood out for him in the middle of all the rumble, drawing him to the university.
These experiences are not vastly di¥erent from the memories of writer, lmmaker, and oral historian Sohail Hashmi, who was part of the university’s rst MA batch. “There was always music on campus, and we went to our professors’ homes on Holi, Id, and Diwali every year. At the same time, we fought for struggles for freedom all over the world,” he fondly remembers.
“All these years later, students fought during the anti-CAA [Citizenship (Amendment) Act] and farmers’ protests. JNU will be portrayed negatively because nobody wants students to be political, it makes it dicult for their [the ruling party’s] politics to survive,” he says.
The lms in question
Nearly a year before Bastar, the controversial Hindi lm, The Kerala Story, was released by the same team: producer Vipul Shah, director Sudipto Sen, and actor Adah Sharma.
After the release of Bastar’s teaser in February, sections of JNU students protested on campus calling it “hate propaganda”. On X, former JNUSU president Aishe Ghosh had demanded immediate action against the makers for the “open call for genocide of JNU students”.
Despite resistance by the Students’ Federation of India (SFI), student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), JNU’s Rashtriya Kala Manch unit, a wing of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, that aims at promoting art and culture, held a screening of the lm on campus, for which Sen was present.
Responding to questions about the backlash, Shah says, “What we showed was true; we were not taking sides. The protesting students should look within and stop anti-national activity.” The movie, though, had called for the “public execution of leftleaning pseudo-intellectuals” of big cities who “side with Naxals”.
Clarifying, he says, “The character in the lm speaks of two unrelated issues: JNU celebrating the killings, and pseudo-intellectuals who side with Naxals. We did not brand JNU students in any way.”
Jahangir National University revolves around a right-wing student leader, Sourabh Sharma, shows him getting restless with “the activities of left-wing students who are anti-national”, and his ght against them. It also features a character playing a left-wing student leader named Arushi Ghosh.
Aishe, who has not seen the lm, has approached the Delhi High Court over the lm’s content, and the matter is yet to be listed for hearing. Supratik Sarkar, Aishe’s lawyer, says the lm was due for release on April 5. The lm’s director did not respond to The Hindu’s queries.
JNU Vice-Chancellor Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit, who was appointed in February 2022, told The Hindu earlier that she “did not stand for any lm that shows JNU in a bad light”.
Perception shift
Ira Bhaskar, a former professor of Cinema Studies at JNU, says the lms are “propaganda in an election year”. “Ever since the right came to power, there have been di¥erent ways of circulating propaganda against JNU, by portraying it as a hotbed of terrorist activity,” she says.
For Gandhi and her classmates, the university’s appeal is its inclusivity and they say even though they have not joined any parties on campus, “forming ideologies” is inevitable because JNU makes them politically aware. “Is there anything wrong with learning to ght for your rights?” she says.