ABSTRACT
Taking the ‘origin’ of Banaras Hindu University (BHU) as demonstrative of the modes of organizing a ‘radical irrationality’ of tradition, Prasanta Chakravarty charts a political chronicle of the non-metropolitan university in India. Pitting such a case-example of the university’s alignment with material histories of moral ‘calling’ against the Heideggerian-McIntyreian imagination, Chakravarty traces the idiom of a genuine political dissidence that might emerge out of these contexts. He takes recourse to a novella by Kashinath Singh, Apna Morcha – documenting the moral-political effervescence on BHU campus through the bhasha andolan of the 1970s – in order to imagine a vector of transformative passion that runs counter to the spiritual apparatuses of institutionalized ‘calling’. Tying in his analysis of Singh’s fiction with the contemporary realities of aggressive right wing mobilization on university campuses today, Chakravarty articulates the possibility of a left ‘calling’ that might insert the university into the associative life of community.
