Risk, Reciprocity, and Academic Pursuit in India

Given the markedly disruptive and subversive tendency of education and the irrefutable political basis of knowledge acquisition and dissemination, scholarship, since the beginning, was meant to be a struggle of a specific kind. However, scholarship as struggle in our times suggests worryingly fresh territories of concern pertaining to the broader operational domain of the academic community. In this piece, we intend to reflect on scholarship as struggle via dwelling on (a) caution and risk‐taking in academia, (b) ‘sanctity’ of code of conduct, and (c) the academic being. Our engagement with these themes is informed by personal experiences both within and outside the academy, and the broad frame of political ethics that informs our scholarship.