The Indian university, in its modern form, was not built to breed revolutionaries. It was built, at least in theory, to shepherd a civilisation of farmers and craftsmen into the bureaucratic age. Yet the Humanities and Social Sciences departments that occupy the quieter corners of these campuses have spent the last seven decades perfecting a more peculiar craft: the manufacturing of an elite class that despises the very people on whose behalf it claims to speak.
What was once meant to be an institution of national development has transformed into a factory of credentialed resentment, churning out young men and women whose education equips them for little beyond contempt.
There is a great deal of romance in how the liberal arts imagine themselves. Their practitioners like to see their work as a noble vigil against power, a lantern held aloft in a dark age of majoritarian hostility and capitalist greed. But wander into any subsidised central university, and you will not encounter a class of ascetics holding vigil.
You will encounter the children of salaried parents, ensconced in rooms that cost less than a packet of biscuits, performing the rituals of revolution in between café outings and fellowships. They speak of peasants but cannot till the land; they sermonise on labour but cannot weld a joint; they write of caste oppression between sponsored fellowships abroad. They are, in Peter Turchin’s phrase, an experiment gone wrong: the overproduction of aspirant elites.
Credentialism as a Crisis
Every nation produces elites. The real crisis begins when it produces more elites than it can absorb. Turchin predicts instability when the number of degree-holders far exceeds the number of elite positions available to them. India’s humanities sector has perfected this imbalance. The expansion of the university system in the 1990s and 2000s created hundreds of thousands of seats in sociology, political science, English literature, and cultural studies, disciplines whose link to India’s real material economy is so tenuous that the word “misaligned” feels charitable.
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The result is a vast population of educated young people who believe they are entitled to positions of cultural authority but discover, upon graduation, that the world has no use for them. This is not their fault. It is the fault of a system that sold them the illusion of prestige while refusing to acknowledge its own economic irrelevance. Unemployment data confirms this inversion: joblessness is consistently higher among graduates than among the illiterate. The poor, at least, can work; the credentialed poor-at-heart cannot.
The Subsidy Machine
The Indian state indulges this system. JNU, the lodestar of the HSS universe, once charged hostel rents of ten or twenty rupees a month, prices that would amuse even the landlords of Dickensian London. The state poured more than five hundred crore annually into an institution where the price of a semester’s tuition could not buy a decent dinner in South Delhi.
The argument given is that higher education is a public good. But a public good ought to benefit the public. And the public does not benefit from campuses that treat development as a vulgarity, the working class as an anthropological specimen, and the majority religion as an oppressive fossil. The average taxpayer, who earns far less than the average humanities postgraduate, has been told for decades that subsidising these universities is an act of national charity. It is, rather, an act of national self-harm.
The Moral Superiority Complex
There is a particular hatred that emerges from people who have never known the poor except as data points. The humanities elite of India, especially those in centrally funded universities, have mastered this hatred. They speak of “marginalised communities” with reverence but recoil at the conservatism those communities actually practice. They praise the Dalit labourer but mock his religion; they adore the tribal woman but loathe her rituals; they claim to study rural India but despise its moral fabric.
Delhi’s metropolitan cafés are full of young researchers discussing “Brahminical patriarchy,” “Hindu majoritarianism,” or “extractive indigeneity”, phrases crafted in American departments and imported without customs checks. Their gaze never descends to the actual Indian village, except as a site of oppression that validates their citations. Farmers become metaphors; labourers become symbols; rituals become problems. The poor, in the hands of the humanities, are endlessly represented but never truly engaged.
This is the paradox of the “lumpen-intelligentsia”: a class both overeducated and under-skilled, deeply resentful of a society that will not hand it the prestige it was promised. And out of resentment comes ideology, abstract, absolutist, and violently detached from Indian reality.
A Theatre of Imported Revolutions
India’s humanities syllabi are astonishingly globalised, so globalised that they have forgotten their own soil. A student can graduate with a master’s degree in sociology having read more of Fanon than of MN Srinivas, more of Judith Butler than of Dharampal, more on plantation slavery than on the Green Revolution. The American campus, with its obsessions over race, whiteness, and settler colonialism, has become the template for the Indian classroom.
There is nothing inherently wrong with global theory; the problem begins when it becomes the only lens through which students view their world. The result is a generation of young scholars who understand the inner life of the Ivy League better than they understand the country they inhabit.
The strange effect of this is that the poor Indian Hindu becomes the villain of every narrative. His religiosity is backwardness; his festivals are ecological violence; his dietary norms are fascism; his poverty itself is bigotry. The left-academic imagination treats the working class not as a constituency but as an obstacle.
A poor Hindu is forgivable only if he votes correctly, speaks apologetically, and despises his own traditions as much as the campus intelligentsia does.
Radicalism as a Career
The university, faced with its own irrelevance, has learned to weaponise dissent. Being unemployable is no longer a failure; it is a credential. A jobless sociology graduate can claim moral authority over an engineer because the engineer participates in capitalism while the sociologist critiques it. The salary gap between them becomes proof of ideological purity.
This is where “Urban Naxalism” enters, not as propaganda but as a sociological inevitability. Young scholars radicalised by Marxist theory, disconnected from labour, and insulated by subsidies become ideal candidates for recruitment into “front organisations” that speak the language of human rights while supplying the intellectual infrastructure for violent insurgency.
The Bhima Koregaon case exposed this pipeline. So did the conviction of G.N. Saibaba. The purpose here is not to rehearse the legal details but to note the sociological pattern: a class of radicalised, frustrated, credentialed youth who treat rebellion as a career ladder.
It is no coincidence that the epicentres of anti-state activism, JNU, Jadavpur, and HCU, are precisely those campuses with the deepest subsidies and the least market relevance.
The Poor as Spectacle
The final irony is the humanities’ fixation on the poor as academic currency. Conferences on “subalternity” flourish in five-star hotels. Research papers on caste violence win international grants. Professors whose students cannot get jobs build entire careers analysing the economy of suffering.
The poor, meanwhile, continue to work, quietly, invisibly, with dignity. They are too busy living to turn their lives into theory.
But their conservatism, their religiosity, their aspirations, their patriotism, these offend the humanities elite more than structural inequality ever did. The poor threaten them not through protest but through indifference. The working class does not want a revolution; it wants a road, a gas connection, a clinic, a school. And this pragmatism is intolerable to those trained to believe that suffering must always express itself as rebellion.
What Remains
The crisis of Indian humanities is not that it is useless. Uselessness can be harmless. The crisis is that it has become a machine for producing hostility, towards the nation, towards the working class, towards the civilisational ethos of India. It manufactures elites who despise the society that subsidised their rise.
A civilisational state cannot survive indefinitely by funding its own detachment. At some point, taxpayers stop seeing universities as temples of learning and begin seeing them as hostile fortresses. That point, in India, may already have arrived.
