What did your classrooms feel and look like at the university where you taught before your five-year-long incarceration?

I was teaching a much smaller group in Hyderabad before I came to Delhi in 2008. DU was a lot more diverse in comparison. However, I could immediately discern a big divide among students. Some students easily felt at home in the university space, taking to it like a fish to water. These students had someone at home speaking the same language as that of the academic spaces. On the other hand, there were students from marginalised groups, mostly first-generation, who struggled to cope with the world around them. One of the first things I had to do as a teacher, therefore, was to formulate ways to bridge this gap.

This reminds me of an essay, 'Crying Time', by black scholar bell hooks, in which she points out that many times in her own mixed classroom, during the discussion about racism, accounts of discrimination faced by black students would often evoke some kind of emotion in the white students. Were there any similar events in your classrooms? As a teacher how did you approach it?

Because of the subject I teach, which is mostly linguistics, my classrooms don't directly become a place for exchange of personal experiences. There are different scenarios in the context of my teaching. I have students in my classroom who come from families where the so-called standard languages are spoken. When I talk about the issues of standard language and dialect, I talk about this division between the two which actually is completely an artificial one. It is a politically driven divide rather than in terms of linguistic merits or aesthetics.

You have said that much of your ongoing research materials simply vanished. When the police came to your home five years ago, they seized your computer devices as well as your academic work. Were you able to get back research materials that you lost in that process?

I have not been able to get them back, but I plan to revive them. One particular project I want to look at is the National Education Policy (NEP) language policy and the constitutional framework. It's not as simple as promoting Hindi and other regional languages instead of English. That's actually easier.

English here is a tool that opens many kinds of avenues, especially for the students from the marginalised communities.

Definitely. Annadurai, the Tamil Dravidian politician, once said, "If you have two dogs, you don't need to build a bigger door and a smaller door for both of them to come out. If you have a bigger door, then both the big dog and the small dog can come out." Any standard regional language will be like a small door, and English is the bigger door.

You have spoken about your experience of teaching English to fellow prisoners, and learning about your "inadequacy as an adult educator." What was your learning?

I was talking about a personal kind of handicap. As a teacher, when you teach at the university level, you have a particular mode of teaching, right? You are talking to adults already quipped with the ability to receive learning.

How can prisons bring education to those deprived of it in their lives?

If conducted in an organised manner, it's not difficult for the prison administration to find teachers or educators who will do this. If you talk about Maharashtra prisons, they are reform or correctional homes now. I think the onus is on the state to have these kind of programmes.

You talk about the access of prison library itself viewed as scrutiny in some sense. Were you able to continue your own personal exercise of reading and writing in prison? Has it changed or transformed in any way since?

Initially, books that my co-accused or fellow prisoners brought helped sustain my reading because the library in the prison was quite ill-equipped. Obviously, I don't expect a prison library to be well-stocked in that sense, but I'm talking about even English books, for instance. There were Marathi books, a few in Hindi, and no books at all in English.

Were you allowed to get any books from those who would visit you?

The material I had was given by friends and relatives from outside, not just for myself but my then co-accused too. Without that, the prison would have been like a really dreadful place. The only thing that kept us afloat was being able to read, and I read quite a lot. Whoever got bail in our case, like, those who left two years ago, once said, "We don't get that much time to read and things like that" (laughs) .

When can your students at DU expect you back in the classroom? What would that process be like for you?

I see that as a long struggle, although, technically, there shouldn't be any. First, the university has to revoke the suspension. Second, the court has to allow me to go out of Maharashtra. Even with that restriction, the university could allow me to teach virtually. That's also possible. I don't know, I haven't made up my mind as to how I should go about this. I would definitely want to do something so that I can get back to my life as a teacher. The territorial restriction that I have right now makes it all the more complicated. Even if the university says, "Okay, come and join," without the court's permission, I can't go. I have to maybe consult my lawyer and the university to find out how one should best move.

How have these years of incarceration impacted your perspective of things of the world, the state, about oneself, and about education or academia?

It has made me more sensitive to the kind of inequalities and injustice around us. I think I should perhaps be more sensitive and more proactive, and try to not just understand the problems, but try to intervene in a more proactive manner. That is the only way one can combat injustice. If one leads a comfortable life within academia, one tends to get insulated from the world.

'Teaching Inmates Taught Me About Myself': Hany Babu on Jail, Justice, Freedom

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Professor Hany Babu has for years been a fount of a certain pedagogy of hope within the Indian academia, especially for students from the Dalit-Bahujan communities. An Associate Professor teaching in the English Department at University of Delhi from 2008 until his arrest by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in July 2020 in connection with the Elgar Parishad case, Babu uses a distinct methodology of teaching to question the dominant ways of knowledge-building.

Far from being just an academician, he is also an activist whose scholarship on the relationship between caste and linguistics critically analyses the systemic flaws within India’s national language policies.

After five years of incarceration, Babu was released on 4 December 2025 on the grounds of “prolonged incarceration”. In an exclusive interview with The Quint, he speaks candidly on the need for egalitarian classrooms, the politics of language, and English as a skill for opportunities.

He also recounts the solidarities he built with his fellow inmates in prison through acts of conscious and intentional use of his knowledge.

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'Teaching Inmates Taught Me About Myself': Hany Babu on Jail, Justice, Freedom

In an exclusive chat, prof Hany Babu shares his philosophy as a teacher and the need for egalitarian classrooms.

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