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A victim of campus casteism
This blog is part of various initiatives to institutionalise the memory of Senthil Kumar, a dalit PhD scholar at the School of Physics, University of Hyderabad, who was found dead under suspicious circumstances in his hostel room on 24 February, 2008
Institutionalising the memory of Senthil's death
- Unbroken Silences:
- It is most unfortunate that Univ of Hyd has only been keen on washing its hands of the responsibility of the death of Senthil. Soon after his death, University withheld the post mortem report, which said it was a suicide. The VC ignored Ambedkar Students’ Association’s demand that an immediate relief of Rs 7 lakh be given to the grieved family. He also rejected the SC/ST joint action committee’s demand for an enquiry by a sitting judge. And finally when the report of the committee set up by the University indicated that the prevailing academic conditions at the School of Physics would have led to the death of Senthil, the VC came up with a press statement that Senthil’s death has nothing to do with caste discrimination, and that no action would be taken against anyone in this matter. Though the committee actually absolves the School of Physics of caste discrimination, its report clearly says that many ‘discrepancies and ambiguities’ had crept into the assessment of students in the Department of Physics since 2006, and that Dalit students, in particular, were victims of these discrepancies which in turn led them to believe that the department was ‘casteist.’
Senthil Kumar
A victim of campus casteism
An HCU Dalit drop-out's poem
To Senthil,
I seem to know you so well after you have gone.
Did we not walk the same lonely paths?
Paths strewn with little hurtful insults,
some obvious most not-obvious humiliations
designed to erode our self worth,
with the power to shake our confidencein humanity,
in our thinking, in our love for life and our search for its meaning.
Could we have talked about our shared bewildering experience,
of hearing a system stealthily tell us that
we are not good enough to seek knowledge?
Today, you have chosen to protest
in a way that only intensifies my pursuits more lonely,
or should I believe that you have instead
opened a channel for the rest of us?
To make public what until now,
is our private pain,
pain delivered to us
by systems meant to deliver knowledge
and uplift mankind
From an HCU drop-out Dalit
I did not know you when you lived.
I seem to know you so well after you have gone.
Did we not walk the same lonely paths?
Paths strewn with little hurtful insults,
some obvious most not-obvious humiliations
designed to erode our self worth,
with the power to shake our confidencein humanity,
in our thinking, in our love for life and our search for its meaning.
Could we have talked about our shared bewildering experience,
of hearing a system stealthily tell us that
we are not good enough to seek knowledge?
Today, you have chosen to protest
in a way that only intensifies my pursuits more lonely,
or should I believe that you have instead
opened a channel for the rest of us?
To make public what until now,
is our private pain,
pain delivered to us
by systems meant to deliver knowledge
and uplift mankind
From an HCU drop-out Dalit
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