University as a Temple: A Psychoanalytic Reflection on Caste and Education Rituals

When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in a mirror and saw nothing.

Savita1 was a student enrolled in a postgraduate psychology course that I taught at an Indian university. From the very outset of the course, she stood out from her classmates. An outspoken student, confident and spirited, she was often at the forefront of asking critical questions in the classroom, and made a considerable impact on all of us teachers. Her energetic and active presence was a vital sign of her engagement in my course. Equally so, there were times when she made me feel challenged, and the unwavering persistence of her questions could become exasperating and disruptive. These questions were not ordinary. With a single-minded focus, Savita brought up for us, repeatedly and unfailingly, the question of caste.

While Savita exuded a certain forcefulness to her protestations in the classroom, examination situations induced crippling anxiety that made her shrink inward, overwhelming her with immense shame. Before her exams, she would often develop physical symptoms, including headaches, uneasiness, fever, and panic. “I just feel like running away,” she confessed to me. In her I saw the repeated and torturous workings of this anxiety, yet the full meaning of it remained a blind spot for me.

This article is about how I came to reckon with the ways in which the educational space was pulling Savita into an internal place of repeated painful humiliation that obstructed the capacity to learn. I offer some reflections on how this incapacity was linked, in turn, to our—her teachers'—resistance to learn from experience, and to the occlusions that came from our

caste locations. In this quest, it was the psychoanalytic lens that enabled me to think through the complex interplay around the operation of caste within the context of the university.