Ethnography Under Watch: Field Notes on Student Politics in Indian Universities

In January 2025, it was 2 a.m. at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), a public university where student political life increasingly unfolds under surveillance and administrative scrutiny. Under pale moonlight, a small cluster of Dalit-Ambedkarite and leftist students gathered at Ganga Dhaba, a roadside eatery on campus, to plan a protest march in memory of Rohith Vemula. One activist proposed the banner slogan, “Bhagva Atankwad Murdabad,” meaning down with saffron terror. Before she finished, another muttered, “Be ready to be tagged anti-national again.” She replied, half sarcastic, “For the state we are anti-national by default, and urban Naxals too.” Laughter followed, brittle with fear. Sitting with my diary, I realised that even note-taking could feel like surveillance.

My ethnographic research across JNU and the University of Hyderabad (UoH) follows Dalit-Ambedkarite, leftist, centrist, and right-wing student formations and their everyday negotiations of caste, ideology, and alliance-making. Some evenings I attend study circles where Dalit and left activists debate dignity, representation, the limits of coalition politics, and the democratisation of university space. Other times I drink tea with right-wing student activists who articulate “Samagra Hindutva,” a selective appropriation of Ambedkarite language within broader Hindu nationalist narratives. These encounters reveal contradictions that coexist within the same institutional space.

Student activists across ideological formations are not homogeneous: they come from diverse caste, sub-caste, gender, regional, and class backgrounds. This diversity often produces internal tensions along lines of caste, sub-caste, and region. Although executive committees may formally reflect a mix of these intersecting identities, decision-making spaces often remain male-dominated and shaped by regional hierarchies. Leadership positions are not restricted to students from more privileged class backgrounds; however, differences in class continue to shape patterns of participation, visibility, and vulnerability within these formations. Many participants are first-generation learners navigating acute material precarity.

My presence in these spaces is shaped by intersecting positionalities: as a member of a historically marginalised community, a former student activist, and a male researcher. I entered the field already shaped by the political vocabularies and affective histories under study. Yet my positionality was not read transparently. On several occasions, I was misrecognised as socially dominant despite my own location within a marginalised community. These moments shaped access, trust, and refusal, underscoring that ethnographic proximity does not translate into unproblematic belonging. Access remained relational and contingent, structured by caste, region, gender, and institutional location.

Previously, in August 2024, the Left-Dalit alliance leading the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU), responding to an unsatisfactory response from the Vice-Chancellor after a twelve-day hunger strike demanding increased scholarship amounts, new hostels, fairer admissions, and a caste census, called for a Long March to the Ministry of Education. As the march reached JNU’s main gate, khaki- and camouflage-clad security personnel and Delhi police were already waiting. Slogans that had swelled along the route were met with baton charges. Some protesters were beaten and detained. I watched students scatter toward hostels, running in fear and panic. Amid the chaos, a leftist office bearer told me, “Almost every protest now ends in this ruckus: assaults, detentions, inquiries. Even raising our voices feels criminalised now.” More than the slogans, her fatigue stayed with me, a reminder that activism demands not merely political courage but sustained emotional and bodily labour.

Fieldwork under the current politics of Hindu nationalism requires constant ethical calibration. In practice, this has meant slowing ethnographic writing, anonymising events rather than individuals, delaying documentation of sensitive encounters, and sometimes choosing not to record moments that would ordinarily anchor ethnographic description. I routinely edit fieldnotes late at night, delete photographs of closed meetings when asked, and treat consent as ongoing rather than procedural. Here, discretion is not merely methodological but protective: safeguarding data becomes inseparable from safeguarding people. The public university increasingly functions as an archive of risk.

Yet tenderness persists. After a tense JNUSU meeting, a Dalit student once offered me a butter bun and asked softly whether I regretted doing fieldwork here. On another evening at the UoH campus, after receiving a proctorial enquiry notice, a centrist student activist debated withdrawing from campus politics altogether. My role was not to reassure or advise, but to listen; to hold their fear about suspension, family pressure, and financial precarity without forcing resolution. Such moments foreground the emotional labour of ethnography, where restraint, waiting, and refusal to intervene become methodological practices rather than ethical failures.

This fieldwork raises questions central to anthropology and sociology: how ethnographic practice adapts when research sites are policed; how silence, hesitation, and withdrawal become politically meaningful; and how scholarly labour intersects with solidarity under unequal risk. When campuses are recast as battlegrounds of nationalism, ethnography demands attentiveness not only to what can be made visible, but also to what must remain unsaid. The work of anthropology in such contexts must be both analytic and testimonial: to witness slowly, vulnerably, and with care. Writing from these sites is an ethical act of solidarity with those who continue to argue, reimagine, and demand a public university that equally belongs to all.