Shohini Sengupta is a Teaching Fellow and a PhD candidate at the UNSW Faculty of Law & Justice and an Associate Professor at the Jindal School of Banking & Finance in India. In this post she reflects on her experiences prior to academia, commencing teaching in India in 2020 and the solidarities being built among the HDR cohort at UNSW Law & Justice.

Tell us about your experience prior to becoming an academic. How do your previous experiences inform your teaching and pedagogy in the university?

Starting out, I worked with the (Indian) Government, both as a legal officer in a public sector company, and later in the (Union) Ministry in a policy capacity. Then I moved to a legal policy not-for-profit, working in the field of legislative policymaking, which meant that I was sitting with bureaucrats and regulators, in Parliamentary committees and helping them draft laws, and policies. It gave me a portal to look at the process of law-making, the material practices of it – how files are marked and moved from department to department, what language is employed to draft laws, and how chits of paper become amendments. This was a sort of early training into thinking very deeply about the intersection of politics with the law or policy.

So, when I began teaching, the essential training of thinking and researching and writing on or about the law was a skill that was easily transposable from policy to academia. But, what was interesting was that unlike most of my other friends who were in legal practice in courts, law firms, or in an advisory capacity, I was forced to think about laws that either did not exist, or rethink what the law should be and how it would be processed through a governmental or bureaucratic machine that was massive, and undergoing phenomenal change under a new Government that was also rapidly becoming centralised and highly technologized.

In Indian legal education, we were taught to hold on to and defend a core idea of ‘the law’. So pedagogically as well this early training in my career allowed me to break out of an essentialist mode of thinking about the law. This was helpful because from the very beginning I was teaching both at the school of banking & finance and the law school, and not holding onto a sacrosanct essence of the law helped me speak to students who were both training in law, and those that were not.  

You commenced teaching at a university in 2020, a time of upheaval in Indian national politics. How did that shape what you do as an academic?

I came to academia because I was running away from a world of policy that was increasingly constricted and under surveillance.  The year 2019 was when Narendra Modi was re-elected, where the BJP gained a majority in Parliament. So much of the legal policy and drafting work that we were doing was undergoing little scrutiny in Parliament, so in that sense there was tremendously galvanized law-making – tons of laws getting made and passed with lightning speed in the country, particularly on technology, censorship, media and content regulation, and fiscal federalism. This was also a time when there was increased scrutiny and funding cuts in independent research organisations and NGOs.

The second big thing that happened at the cusp of 2019 and early 2020 were the citizenship protests in India – possibly one of the largest mass movements spontaneously organised across the country since independence in 1947 against the proposed citizenship amendment law in the country that people, quite rightly, attacked for being unconstitutional and specifically anti-Muslim. Many of us scholars at that time were moving from protest site to protest site, learning about teach-ins, and seeing how young people and mostly students were using these protests as sites of resistance and re-education and learning about constitutional history, political process, and resistance.

The other thing that was happening at this time was the systematic and brutal crackdown by the Government and Hindutva forces on student protests in Indian universities. Two weeks before I started teaching at Jindal, I remember the attacks by Hindutva groups that happened in two very prestigious left progressive universities in Delhi while the police lodged reports and warrants against academics who stood up to them. A month later, we had the Delhi pogrom, where entire Muslim neighbourhoods in North-East Delhi were set ablaze, again with no intervention by the administration for days.

So for those of us scholars who began a career in teaching in that moment, all these things really did inform not just the way we navigated the classroom, but also the way we conceived of the university – particularly reminding us where the moral fabric of the university lay. So, from that moment we learnt not just how to mark and curate courses and teach, but also how to hold space in a highly charged environment of anti-intellectualism and conservatism. We were also surrounded by highly erudite, and motivated scholars – both academics and students. Despite teaching spaces being under heavy surveillance, they also became subversive spaces where there was an increased rather than reduced imaginative exchange of ideas, and skills, breaking through the idea that education must be unidimensional exchanges of customers and services.

When I began teaching in India, it did feel like an exceptional moment because of how fractured and divisive the country seemed then. But now of course more than ever, one can begin to see those same lines of fissure running across the globe, and there is an osmosis between international and national politics such that the conditions in which we teach and learn across the world are starting to converge, and perhaps what is happening in places like the US have been endured by us in India and we are trained in navigating or subverting some of these things better than our counterparts in more developed countries. 

I do think the discontent of the times in which I began teaching and the role students in particular have played, almost exclusively in producing modern, liberal, sometimes radical university spaces in India are always at the front and centre of my being in academia. It is a reminder that I did start from this dissonance, and that it is incredible student activism that has allowed me to retain my position and hopefully that will continue to inform both the research and teaching and policy work I do.

All major upheavals within and across countries continue, and we need to be aware of the way this impacts the HDR cohort, but also Australia’s relationship to the region and our response. Not least of these was the war between India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers, which for now has been averted. What is your experience of being at UNSW and among the HDR cohort? What are the possibilities for solidarity and building understanding between and among people of different backgrounds in the cohort, despite the tensions of national and regional politics?

I think the HDR cohort here is a rare example of critical solidarity in action, which of course has deep and abiding impacts on both our research and pedagogy. This solidarity, I think, is of two kinds. The first one is a more articulated version of solidarity as care, where you think of others as not just nodes in a network, to be utilized for contacts and opportunities, but developing actual friendships. The HDR room, for instance, is a visceral, physical reminder that the anti-intellectual and hostile milieu in which we live and work is not the only reality we need to engage with, and that university spaces, even tiny ones like the HDR room, become places where we can learn critical discourse and use friendship, and even frivolity as “social justice activism” as V Katju says. The HDRs care for each other in ways no one else does – just the everyday practice of seeing each other, eating together, playing badminton, or turning up here to support one other – you learn how to collectivise and create space in times where you feel brown and black bodies are not welcome, especially in elite academic places.

The second, more important version of solidarity for me personally is ‘solidarity despite’. In India, we are often called upon in the name of the University to be loyal to the institution, sometimes conflated with loyalty to the nation. Solidarity despite teaches us to look at the university as a consort of people – students, teachers, even the public at large; and forces us into a counter culture of care, even if there are political or ideological differences.   

Solidarity despite allows us to view the HDR space as a real place that I can touch and feel and see, which is also a dialogical space where people are separated from their governments, a space we have co-constituted and a social culture that can pay forwards. It is, I think a way for us to learn how to endure the world, a space for collective ignorance as much as for knowledge. It is here that we learn about ideological politics, and learn to expand our sensibilities, from my tragedy to our tragedies – it dislocates us in a useful way.

This means that you learn to care for those you have been taught to hate and be productive and being better colleagues and friends. For instance, in India, I am not the marginalised one, so how do I learn to care for my Muslim, Kashmiri, Dalit colleagues and friends who are at the forefront of the violence. The HDR community is what brought me to UNSW and it sustains me here, while offering a vision of a world that perhaps does not exist anymore in many places.

Image: PhD candidates in the HDR room at the UNSW Faculty of Law and Justice, February 2024.