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From the Aazadi (Freedom) wall that is a giant pride flag emblazoned with the word freedom in ten of the many, many languages spoken by the people of India, to the Memorial Wall to commemorate and mourn some of the many lives lost to transphobic violence in our country - the queer community turned to the walls of AUD to turn collective joys and sorrows, love as well as violence, into art. October 2019 marked the arrival of AUD's campaign of censorship to these walls that long held the voices of dissenting, marginalized students.
I initiated this project as an attempt to document what I saw as a thriving culture of dissent and student politics through the graffitied walls of the campus.
Far from sustaining a space for engaged, critical scholarship in service of social justice, the university administration has a history of casteism and has left no stone unturned in fostering Brahminical and Hindu-Supremacist ideals in the university. From scuttling affirmative action policies for SC/ST students to coercing sanitation workers to engage in manual scavenging (a caste atrocity and grave human rights violation) to suppressing any criticism of the Indian State, AUD has been an insult to the memory and vision of Babasaheb Ambedkar.
I initiated this project as an attempt to document what I saw as a thriving culture of dissent and student politics through the graffitied walls of the campus.
Ambedkar University is no longer the fairly progressive university space that stood out amongst its counterparts across the country it used to be -- as a space for critical thought and oriented towards social justice. This was because its community - working class, dalit, adivasi, bahujan, queer, disabled, women students, faculty and staff, had fought hard to make it so. As a university that charges an exorbitant fee for a public institution and barely has anti-discrimination policies for marginalized communities, for AUD to lay claim on Ambedkar's radical legacy was already a stretch.
