The Many Faces of Academic Freedom

Dunu Roy | April 2026

I may be wrong, but isn’t the role of academia to advance society through the creation, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge? Thus, within the ambit of academic freedom, do we seek to protect independent analysis and debate, only through research and teaching, or also through public service? It is this third element which I hope to highlight before you today.

Being in and out of Bombay and Shahdol district of Madhya Pradesh, for about three decades, exposed me to many upheavals (in urban transport & textiles, railways & mining, education & corruption, plantations & agriculture) as also the varied state response of suppression, or sometimes, accommodation.

Seeking a way to understand these events (like others of my generation) led me, through several pathways, to the town of Wigan in northern England, midway between Manchester and Liverpool, and a major mill town within a large coal mining district during the Industrial Revolution.

Close to Wigan is the city of Salford where Friedrich Engels came to manage his father’s textile mills. In 1884, Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England. He described how workers were forced to earn less, live in deplorable conditions, and die earlier. He also convinced Karl Marx that “A knowledge of proletarian conditions is absolutely necessary to be able to provide solid ground for socialist theories”. This was my first encounter with a face of academic freedom.

Fifty years later, in 1937, the novelist George Orwell (son of a civil servant) wrote his fifth book, The Road to Wigan Pier. His description of the bleak working and living conditions in the Wigan region was vivid and extraordinarily impactful. He also confessed why, in spite of his antipathy towards “fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist”, he was in favour of socialism. That would be a second face of freedom.

Another forty years on, in 1984, Beatrix Campbell (journalist, author, working-class activist), retraced Orwell’s route, and wrote Wigan Pier Revisited: Poverty and Politics in the 1980s. As she documented the voices of women as workers and wives, they questioned her right back with, “What’s your book about then? What’s in it for us?” She concluded with a passionate plea for a “genuine socialism, informed by feminism and responding to people's real needs”; yet another face.

More recently, the Wigan Local History and Heritage Society has emerged as an archive of working people’s tools, processes and memories. One of the ditties in the archive goes: “Its Poverty poverty knocks, me loom is saying all day; poverty poverty knocks, the gaffer’s too skinny to pay.” Another begins with, “Now our stockings are all full of holes, and our clogs they are losing their soles”. Both expose a much darker face of freedom’s epiphany.

These pathways also depict levels of freedom. Engels’ work is cited in well over 20,000 research publications; Orwell is cited in the hundreds; Campbell’s is in the scores; while the Heritage Society’s work is barely known outside Wigan.

Perhaps another pathway could thread these four together. In 1977, severe cutbacks in public spending forced Lucas Aerospace at Burnley, very near Wigan, to reduce production and retrench workers. Members of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science assisted the workers to respond with an alternative proposal - to retool certain sections of the factory and to produce items of ‘social use’, such as heat pumps and gas turbines for hybrid vehicles.

In the brief time remaining to me let me present three quick stories to illustrate how these faces of freedom have emerged in my, and my colleagues’, work in India.

In 2019, we were discussing the Delhi Master Plan with a group of workers in a Delhi University classroom. One of them asked, “Do you know this classroom was built by us? Why doesn’t the history of Delhi include us as builders?” Another began singing Gorakh Pande’s “बड़े बड़े लोगन के बंगला दो बंगला, अउर भइया झूमर अलग से. कहब त लग जाई धक् से”. That led to a flurry of meetings with historians; and two students were assigned to interview workers. A year later, two dissertations were completed, but the worker’s question about history has remained hanging in the air.

When the Bhilai Steel Plant expanded in the 1980s, it was decided to mechanise the Dalli iron ore mines to meet demand. Instead, the Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh proposed semi-mechanisation and invited me to prepare an economic analysis. I involved three bright JNU students, who worked hard but could not come up with a viable proposition. My minor contribution was to suggest that they include environmental costs. Their final report was extensively used by CMSS for negotiation. Sadly, protocol attributed the report to me as I had helped to get the grant from ICSSR.

In 1990 two young men accosted us. How could their villages in the Auranga valley be submerged by a proposed dam, when the lower ones were not? We travelled to Barkadih; and trained 19 young people how to measure heights, flows and siltation. As we packed for departure, the youngsters were outraged, “You taught us how to fight a war, but take away the weapon!” They gave us money collected overnight, saying, “Here, go buy yourself a set of measuring tools and leave these!” They then measured water, land and silt; made us analyse and prepare reports in Hindi and English; and used their new skills to stop the dam, as well as construct a hundred local water storage projects.

To conclude, I offer three questions that trouble me about academic freedom, especially in today’s globalised, but individualistic, context:

1.    Can public service be performed as part of free academic function?

2.    What is the role of the public in contributing to research and teaching?

3.    How does the unfree public claim entitlement to academic knowledge?

Freedom, to me, has many faces. Which one is of the essence is something we all perhaps need to collectively think about.

[1000 words]

Presented at The State of Academic Freedom in India, Dy Speaker’s Hall, Constitution Club, New Delhi, April 11, 2026. Organised by the India Academic Freedom Network.