Delhi: Famous feminist scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has found herself in hot water for repeatedly correcting a young scholar’s pronunciation of W.E.B Du Bois’s name at a public lecture at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Tuesday.
A routine Q&A between the stalwart Spivak and a JNU student turned into a firestorm of class, snobbery and intolerance. The question Spivak asked in her seminal 1988 essay — ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ — still stands. After the unseemly spat, she may as well be asking, ‘Can the subaltern at least pronounce?’
Anshul Kumar, who introduced himself as the founding professor of a centre for Brahmin studies, was going to ask Spivak about how she can consider herself middle-class, given her background, but never got the chance. Instead, she interrupted him and corrected his pronunciation of American intellectual Du Bois’s name.
Those who attended Spivak’s lecture, ‘W.E.B Du Bois and his vision of democracy’, said that Kumar was the second scholar to pose a question, right after a scholar from Azim Premji University, who had also mispronounced Du Bois’s name and been corrected by Spivak.
Kumar mispronounced Du Bois twice in his question. Spivak interrupted him, corrected him, and said he should take the trouble to learn how Du Bois — who, according to Spivak, is arguably the best historian and sociologist of the last century —pronounced his name.
“If this triviality is over, can I move on to the question?” asked Kumar in response and went on to repeat the question twice more.
Spivak responded by telling him not to be rude. “I’m an 82-year-old woman in public at your institution, and you are rude to me,” she said.
Kumar tried to continue with his question, once again mispronouncing Du Bois. Spivak again cut him off and corrected him, implying that deliberately mispronouncing Du Bois’s name is a behaviour associated with upper castes and he, as someone doing Brahmin studies, should know better.
“But, you are one,” responded Kumar.
Spivak said that she was not a Brahmin, and then the moderator cut the interaction short and moved on to the next question.
A video clip of the exchange has gone viral on X, with many criticising Spivak and the elitism associated with academia.
Speaking to ThePrint, Dilip Mandal, writer and former managing editor of India Today Hindi magazine, said, “The scholar who asked the question made his point without saying much.”
“She would never dare to do this in the West or correct a foreigner speaking broken or mispronounced English. Here, in JNU, we see the real Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, with all her epistemological violence,” he added.
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Pronunciation policing
Correcting pronunciation is often seen as a way to assert power and dominance over those who do not have the same socio-cultural capital. Language has always been a tool to control knowledge and gatekeep it — this is why the optics of Spivak, a stalwart scholar based in New York City, correcting an Indian man’s pronunciation of a Haitian name, has struck such a chord.
“The nuances of pronunciation and the power to speak forcefully — all of this is accumulated capital passed on through generations,” said Mandal, explaining what made the incident demeaning.
But, at the same time, Du Bois was a Black scholar of Haitian origin who insisted on the pronunciation of his name as spelt in English — like “do boys” — and not the French way — like “do bwah”. Du Bois has both written and spoken about the language politics around his name, publicly insisting on the correct pronunciation of his name.
Regardless of whether Kumar knew of the racial politics of Du Bois’ personal preference, many have raised the question if it was right for Spivak to berate him as she did publicly.
“Bullying someone over their pronunciation is just not done. You slip in the right pronunciation, gracefully, when you repeat the same thing, move on, and focus on the content of what is being said. That’s what a committed, dedicated teacher does,” wrote poet Meena Kandasamy on X. “To snub someone over their pronunciation, in a hall filled to the brim with people, shows insecurity, pettiness, and the unwillingness to be magnanimous.”
Spivak was at JNU to deliver a lecture on Du Bois and democracy, starting around 10 am till around noon. People who attended described the lecture as insightful and said it was enlightening to hear a literary critic talk about political history. They also said Spivak had noted the particulars of pronouncing Du Bois’s name before Kumar asked his question.
“This was the first time I was listening to her in person — I had a feeling she might be quite distant. There’s a certain sense of elitism that surrounds academia that I personally find suffocating,” said M. Sakshi, an independent researcher who attended the lecture. “I was actually happily surprised because Spivak was fun and engaging. She was constantly joking and poking fun at herself too.”
As the lecture continued, Spivak referenced the spat with Kumar in jokes she made at multiple points. When one woman asked a question softly, Spivak encouraged her to speak up and said that men in the audience are always loud, to which people reportedly laughed. At another point, when there were no questions, she jokingly asked the audience if she had scared them off.
“The lecture was the first time I learned how to pronounce Du Bois correctly, and I am sure many others in the audience also encountered this for the first time,” said Sakshi. “After I left, I kept thinking about the incident. I could tell it (Kumar’s) was not a constructive question. I think it could have been posed in a respectful and polite way.”
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Switching the gaze
Kumar, who asked the question, is the chairman and founding professor of a centre for Brahmin studies, which, according to a post on X, aims to subvert traditional academic scholarship that focuses on people at the bottom of the caste and class hierarchy.
“He’s doing the right thing by studying the elites — gaze is very important in social science,” said Mandal, who also founded a centre for Brahmin studies. “The scholar is now studying the problem. Dalits and OBCs are not the problem — they are the victims. Let that centre thrive because studying the elites is important.”
When Kumar introduced himself as a founder of the centre, Spivak responded with “good” as seen in the video clip of the exchange. Kumar, it seemed from the video, wanted to ask Spivak about her caste and class privilege.
The question he intended to ask, said his post on X, was: “Spivak claims to be middle class. She said in her lecture that Du Bois was an upper-class elite. How is she as a great granddaughter of Bihari Lal Bhaduri, a close friend of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, supposed to be middle class?”
Kumar has since gone on to call Spivak names on X and has doubled down on outlining the clear power differential between them.
During her lecture, Spivak distanced herself from both the terms ‘Brahmin’ and ‘bourgeois’, which did strike some in the audience as unnecessary, given her background.
“I found it odd when she said — ‘I’m not a Brahmin’. What do you mean by that?” asked George Chakma, a second-year PhD scholar at JNU’s School of International Studies.
“It’s a general caste critique of superstar academics, not just her. There seems to be no reflexivity towards their own sense of positionality,” he said. “It seems like an exchange between two problematic people.”
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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Prof Kumar was rude and dismissive to Prof Spivak who was being true to Du Bois who “has both written and spoken about the language politics around his name, publicly insisting on the correct pronunciation of his name.”
When Prof Spivak had corrected the questioner before Kumar for mispronunciation, as well as Kumar, why did Kumar persist in mispronouncing?