Social alienation and suicide of Dalit students: Everyday reality of Indian Higher Education

Indian context ‘social alienation’ is derived from the cultural communities or ethnic groups that interact and negotiate with cultural boundaries of domination vs. dominated. The context where, ‘culture’ and ‘social groups of caste’ are intertwined to define the relation of exclusion with relating suicidal death of Dalits in the present higher education system. Therefore, this study looks at the cultural hegemony of superiority over inferiority both at the societal and educational level taking the inferences from everyday life of Dalits in Indian higher education. Going deeper into the context, this study also looks at how caste domination transmits from social to academic sphere within the classroom interaction in the teaching-learning process between teacher and students, among the students themselves; and, between the students and academic facilitators. This significantly allowed the study to examine alienation processes and cultural interaction within the communities in a classroom setting. It analyses how social exclusion and alienation leads, selfharm, suicidal tendencies in higher educational setting. Further it examines the cultural repression of a particular group of students contesting their other fronts. Keeping these realities of Indian context this study will reflect on the teaching pedagogies adapted and practised to handle differential equations in a classroom. For this case study and narrative analysis are used to problematise and then re-capitulate the issues of a classroom and ways it was addressed in the framework of ‘everyday social’ (Guru and Sarukkai 2019) and ‘mental stress process’ of Pearlin et al. (1981) in explaining discrimination and exclusion which gives bitter experiences of ‘social alienation’ , ‘humiliation’ and ‘self-harm’ or suicidal tendencies in negotiating experiences of Dalit students in Indian higher education.