Mainstream WeeklyDrawing from her experiences as a PhD scholar, the author reflects on the discomfort that often accompanies conversations around privilege within Indian universities. She argues that privilege rarely appears as obvious power and more often presents itself as normality, inherited ease, and institutional familiarity. As marginalized voices increasingly challenge older structures of silence, academic spaces are being transformed through new claims to legitimacy and belonging. The article suggests that the unease surrounding these conversations may not signal social division, but a necessary confrontation with histories of exclusion that have long remained unspoken.
The discomfort around privilege did not arrive in my life through one dramatic confrontation or one politically explosive classroom debate. It accumulated slowly across more than four years of my PhD journey through scattered conversations, seminar discussions, WhatsApp arguments, exhausted PG debates, awkward silences, and passing remarks that stayed in my mind much longer than I initially expected. The realization was gradual, which perhaps made it harder to escape. Nothing spectacular happened. Yet over time, I began noticing how the language of privilege could transform even ordinary academic conversations into emotionally charged encounters.
What unsettled me most was not simply the conversation itself, but my own reaction to it.
I do not come from a particularly marginalized community. At the same time, my life was not built effortlessly. My father worked relentlessly to ensure that I received the best education. He invested years of labor, sacrifice, and emotional commitment into making sure I studied in good institutions and grew up believing that intellectual life belonged naturally within my reach. I grew up around books, English education, academic encouragement, and the assumption that higher education was achievable for me. For years, I experienced these things not as privilege, but simply as life.
That is perhaps how privilege survives most successfully. The most powerful forms of privilege rarely feel like power. They feel like normality.
During my PhD, I repeatedly encountered conversations that forced me to rethink that normality. Sometimes a fellow scholar would speak about how elite institutions reward confidence that is itself socially inherited. Somebody else would talk about how English fluency operates as invisible cultural capital within universities. A peer once admitted that she avoided speaking during seminars for months because she feared people would silently judge her pronunciation. Another peer spoke about how some people arrive in universities already fluent in the hidden language of institutions while others spend years trying to decode the rules everyone else seems to understand instinctively.
The more I listened, the more I realized that universities do not merely evaluate intelligence. They also reward familiarity. They reward inherited ease. They reward people who already know how to belong.
At first, these conversations often made me defensive.
Whenever somebody criticized privilege publicly, I would immediately begin constructing explanations inside my mind. I would think about my father’s struggles. I would think about the emotional difficulties I had experienced privately. I would think about the years of effort I had personally invested into academia. Without even realizing it, I would begin defending myself internally before anybody had directly accused me of anything.
Later, I began asking myself a difficult question. Why did structural conversations feel emotionally personal to me?
Perhaps because privilege becomes hardest to recognize precisely when it stops feeling like advantage and starts feeling like identity.
Most people experience themselves emotionally as individuals, not structures. We understand our lives through the language of effort, suffering, ambition, anxiety, and survival. Very few people wake up every morning consciously thinking of themselves as historically privileged. A student who grew up speaking fluent English experiences classroom confidence as personality rather than educational inheritance. A student familiar with academic culture experiences institutional comfort as intelligence rather than conditioning. A person who has never encountered caste humiliation may quietly mistake the absence of discrimination for neutrality itself.
Privilege is often invisible to those protected by it because comfort rarely needs to explain itself.
At the same time, the assertion of marginalized voices within universities carries enormous historical weight that privileged students often underestimate emotionally. For centuries, entire communities in India were denied not only resources and institutional access, but also intellectual legitimacy. They were excluded from educational spaces, treated as socially inferior, and denied the authority to define society publicly in their own words. Indian academia itself was shaped for generations through upper caste and upper class dominance that frequently presented its own worldview as universal neutrality.
This history matters because marginalized students are no longer willing to remain silent subjects inside somebody else’s analysis. They are speaking for themselves now, often with anger sharpened through generations of exclusion.
That anger did not emerge from abstraction.
The continuing conversations around Rohith Vemula still reveal this painfully. Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD scholar at the University of Hyderabad, died by suicide in 2016 following alleged institutional discrimination, triggering nationwide protests around caste exclusion within Indian universities. Even today, students across institutions continue speaking about experiences of invisibility, humiliation, social alienation, and unequal access to academic dignity.
What many privileged students experience today as uncomfortable conversations are often conversations marginalized communities have carried silently for generations.
I think this realization slowly altered the way I understood my own discomfort. My defensiveness did not disappear entirely. Even today, when privilege is discussed publicly in morally charged ways, I sometimes feel the instinctive urge to explain myself immediately. But somewhere during these years, I began recognizing that discomfort differently. I began understanding that the discomfort was not necessarily proof that the conversation itself was unfair. Sometimes discomfort simply meant that structures I once experienced as natural were finally becoming visible to me.
Perhaps this is the real transformation taking place inside Indian universities today. Marginalized students often enter institutions already conscious of caste, class, exclusion, and social location because structures visibly shape their lives from childhood itself. Privileged students frequently encounter structural self awareness much later, often only after becoming subjects of critique themselves. The oppressed usually learn sociology through survival long before the privileged encounter it through theory.
That encounter can feel destabilizing because it interrupts innocence. It complicates the comforting belief that institutions function equally for everyone. It forces people to confront the possibility that merit itself does not emerge inside a social vacuum. Some students begin the race carrying generations of educational familiarity while others arrive carrying generations of exclusion, humiliation, and institutional suspicion.
This does not mean individual effort is meaningless. My father’s sacrifices remain real. My labor remains real. But structural privilege and personal struggle are not opposites. A person can suffer deeply while still benefiting from systems designed more comfortably around their existence. Modern discourse often collapses because it cannot hold these two truths simultaneously without turning every conversation either into moral accusation or defensive denial.
Social media has made this even worse. Conversations around privilege increasingly collapse into performance where some people display guilt publicly while others display outrage defensively. Reflection disappears beneath spectacle. Structural critique becomes reduced to identity theater rather than becoming an opportunity for deeper political understanding.
Yet avoiding these conversations altogether would simply preserve older silences more comfortably.
Perhaps the discomfort surrounding privilege reveals something much larger than individual insecurity. Perhaps it reveals that Indian academic spaces are undergoing a redistribution not only of opportunity, but also of voice, legitimacy, and interpretation. People who were historically spoken about are now speaking for themselves. People who once experienced themselves as socially neutral are being forced to recognize their historical location. That transition was never going to feel emotionally smooth.
While struggling with the conclusion of this article, I discussed these thoughts with a fellow scholar, Naveen Kumar Paswan. I told him that despite years of thinking about privilege, I still found myself emotionally conflicted within these conversations. I told him that I understood the structural reality of privilege intellectually, yet I still sometimes felt defensive when privilege was discussed publicly. I also told him that I could not arrive at a neat moral conclusion because the conversation itself felt emotionally unresolved.
What he said stayed with me.
He said that perhaps privilege itself cannot always be understood through rigid binaries of “privileged” and “underprivileged.” Every person, in one way or another, occupies both positions simultaneously depending upon context, location, caste, language, gender, region, education, social capital, or economic condition. Some people inherit educational privilege but not economic security. Some possess caste privilege but remain socially marginalized in other ways. Some inherit institutional confidence while others carry forms of vulnerability invisible to public discourse.
The point, however, is not to dissolve structural inequality into abstract relativism. Structural oppression remains historically real and materially unequal. But perhaps the purpose of conversations around privilege is not to decide who deserves permanent moral innocence and who deserves permanent moral guilt.
Perhaps the purpose is something much more difficult.
Perhaps the purpose is to ensure that privilege never becomes powerful enough to silence a voice, suppress a voice, delegitimize a voice, or automatically make one voice more worthy of being heard than another within intellectual spaces.
That distinction felt important to me because academia often reproduces inequality not only through institutional structures, but also through everyday confidence, social familiarity, language, and assumptions around legitimacy. Some voices enter rooms already carrying authority while others enter carrying hesitation. Some people speak knowing they will be heard seriously while others speak anticipating interruption, doubt, or invisibility.
Maybe this is why conversations around privilege continue feeling emotionally unresolved to me even now. Because the discussion is not merely about guilt or defensiveness. It is ultimately about voice. It is about who gets heard comfortably, who gets questioned immediately, who gets interrupted casually, and who gets treated as naturally legitimate inside academic spaces.
I still do not think I have a perfectly resolved answer to this dilemma. I still occasionally feel conflicted during these discussions. But maybe unresolved discomfort is itself politically important. Maybe democratic spaces cannot emerge without unsettling the emotional comfort of those historically centered within them.
And perhaps the real question is not why conversations around privilege feel uncomfortable today. Perhaps the real question is why silence felt so comfortable for so long.
(Author: Disha is a Ph.D. Scholar and Senior Research Fellow at Dr. K. R. Narayanan Centre for Dalit and Minorities Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She is also an independent commentator, writing on a wide range of themes that move between scholarship and everyday life. (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-7124-9438 | LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/dishapranita))