Mexican and Indian Students’ Embodied Contestations through the Identitarian Politics of ‘Disposable’ Bodies

Abstract

The present paper is an attempt to read the recent students’ movements in Mexico and India along comparable tropes, often from within paradigms of prescriptive neoliberal stances over the dead bodies of some rural Mexican-Indian and Dalit-Indian students. These movements perform embodied counter-narratives under the glare of international mass media and social media to contest and fight against dominant narratives linked to a grammar of undesirability of racial/caste bodies. Public outrage in and around university campuses and city centres have been working towards a globalectics of unsettling discourses imagined through multiple voices of disaccord and disruption. Intellectuals, liberal citizens and students who are at the forefront of supporting their identitarian cause, have been facing the wrath of the police state and their representatives as they distort, disrupt and deny the hidden agendas of race and caste. Can we speak for the subalterns without being patronising and prudish? How do we translate our experiences of activism and engagement as thinking citizens of the planet? How do we posit our alternate mode of thinking as a kind of delinking so that we perform decolonization not only for them but also for ourselves in order to liberate them and ourselves from dehumanisation?