What is dusrapan: a genealogy, a history, a dichotomy.

This piece is by an author who has chosen to be anonymous. The illustration is by Kajal Jamdare (B.A. LL.B. Batch of 2025).

You encountered this word on the mail threads [1] first, and if you were one of the seemingly few [2] non-Hindi speakers in this college, who stutter mildly aphasic through the language whenever you find yourself compelled to speak it, you assumed it was yet another word you’d have to nod and smile about until you gleaned its meaning from context. Dusrapan. My phone autocorrect stuttered, failed, or started suggesting the names of antacids and household implements every time I tried to type this word, coined by a non-Hindi-speaking first-year at a whim. [3]

Dusrapan was first meant to mean seconding — the favourite word on NLS mail threads used to suck up to opinionated dudebros or an attempt at showing your support for some or the other opinion without putting your neck on the line too much. The way I first understood ‘seconding’ was as a carefully calibrated social ritual. To my first-trimester, naive self, all that seemed to matter was who seconded and when; it mattered what you seconded as well. I would watch entire friend groups second within seconds, and then watch my opinion of them swirl down the drain. In a college where the ‘all’ mail thread is our most functional common space, ‘seconding’ was my first understanding of how loyalties formed.

‘Seconding,’ its double ‘+1’ and its variants by overly clever law students who have always had people laugh at their jokes, such as ‘+1111111’ or ‘+9,’ are of course more sociologically and semiotically complex than this brief summary would suggest. [4] In some way, ‘seconding’ reminds me of my senior walking around with me behind the old acad, because my first law school friend group had torn apart as friend groups do, and I needed to remind myself I was still sane. I said something about the efforts that the socioeconomically privileged members of my batch were making to suck up to their counterparts in other batches, and he said, “It’s like seconding.”

It is like seconding — a consolidation of privilege, a formation of groups based on language or region or gender or who you went to school with, or e-sports. In a sense, ‘seconding’ could not have been translated to Hindi in any other way than dusrapan, othering. For all NLS’ closely-knit [5] friend groups that second each other’s mails and turn a blind eye to their members’ microaggressions and gaslighting of romantic partners, [6] there must necessarily be an out-group — the ones excluded, alienated, turned into the other.

Dusrapan is when I attempt to squeeze into spaces meant for my marginalised identity and am confronted with questions of what I should be rather than what I am — when there is a password to enter and I was not sufficiently updated on Bollywood music and Instagram infographics to claim this identity. Dusrapan is when my notes serve as a ticket to a group that wears H&M and goes to clubs on the weekend, and within five minutes my skin feels too tight for my body. Dusrapan is when my ‘friend’ tells my senior support systems about the ways I fucked up, rather than telling me, and claims that it’s not intended to exclude me.

This last incident was just before Christmas, which was when both the ‘seconding,’ in the sense of classroom demands arising as the endterm panic began, and the dusrapan, in the sense of my isolation, peaked. I was struggling to trust anyone, my ‘friend’ had attacked integral aspects of my identity without which I would never have been the person I am, and piecing myself back together was too hard, because I didn’t know if NLS would accept the person I had been, when so many aspects of him had apparently been impossible to live with.

It was also my first Christmas away from home: a strange, deracinated, Americanised, committee sponsored Christmas, which seemed determined to forget that it was backed by a religion other than consumerism. There was something bothering me, and it took me a while to realise that it was dusrapan too, but of a different kind.

I thought back to an email with text in so many colours that I was instantly dissuaded from picking a fight with the student group that had sent it, back around Diwali. A callously excited mail that celebrated the Brahminical and North Indian idea of Diwali – “it signifies the return of Lord Rama from his exile. To us, it means freedom.” This not only excluded the Narakasura myth that I’d grown up with in a largely South Indian community, but also enforces a myth that has been criticised for justifying Brahminical hegemony. [7] Even if well-intentioned, the idea of coming together to celebrate a festival came across as hegemonic rather than inclusive — we should all celebrate this festival, but footnote 1, we should all celebrate it the way the collective tells us to, footnote 2, the collective would never think of doing that for a minority festival. Dusrapan again: those myths were theirs but not mine.

This had been at the end of October. November and December had worn out like my patience with law school, and then came the ‘Christmas celebration,’ a deliberate framing as something institutional that students could choose to participate in, [8] instead of something that anyone might have already participated in by default. The obvious and conscious effort not to homogenise the celebration of a minority festival, or to allow any religious overtones or specific myths to slip in, [9] while no such care was taken with a majority festival, was in itself telling. A part of my dusrapan was not just personal, it had become deeply political.

In NLS, I realised there is an unspoken assumption that almost everyone is like others, in terms of their cultural groundings and references, in terms of their elite backgrounds, and the ways they speak and act. There’s no compulsion, per se, to be like them, but there is a sense of negative feedback and exclusion for every way in which you don’t fit the mold — a sense of dusrapan, if you will. Whether it is personal or political, almost everyone in NLS carries around this sense of being othered and isolated in a connections-hungry institution, where opinions are identities bolstered by the ‘seconding’-dusrapan and actual identities are increasingly fragile and smothered by the alienation-dusrapan.

But we continue ‘seconding,’ don’t we? (Even when opinions are flying, even on the insane day when Hindutva, a marriage proposal and a kitten [10] featured on the mail threads simultaneously.) Sometimes it feels like the only way you can build up a system of people who give a damn about you is to ‘second’ them, to replicate their views and hope they like you, to swallow confrontations and act as much like the others as possible.

‘Seconding’ and other forms of artificial solidarity are a currency, after all, and so you go broke time and again because maybe that is how you will win the favour of that stud senior or emotionally unavailable rank family member. [11] And sometimes even that will fail and leave you floundering in the translation that lies just below the surface — the thick fog of dusrapan, of feeling lost and alienated in a too-busy world.

Maybe this formation of false solidarities and the subsequent sense of isolation are part of social relationships everywhere; maybe it’s my stupid brain telling me that seconding automatically leads to dusrapan, that the translation between the two is more fluent in real life than it is in my head. I will never know. This ending is too abrupt, and I know it will take three Quirk editors’ bureaucracy and lack of creative license to tell me this. To them, all I can say is dusrapan — I agree.

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[1] The author fears that with this reference alone, they have fit snugly into Quirk’s mandate of generating content incomprehensible outside the smug little microcosm of law school. Not something to be proud of.

[2] The Dusrapan Theory of Sociolinguistics is that when everyone in a group is speaking Hindi or nodding and smiling at the Hindi sounds they don't quite understand, every non-Hindi speaker assumes they are the only non-Hindi speaker in the group. This has absolutely no sociological implications other than highlighting how solipsistic and annoying NLS students can be when they start assuming that they’re the only one like them in the world — this is, of course, not a new sociological theory.

[3] I am neither the coiner of the word, nor did I put it on the mail thread. I am also not a friend of any of those individuals: I am merely a cipher. Stop speculating. Start using dusrapan — it’s a fun word.

[4] Just saying, I’d love a full semiotic study of conversations on the mail thread, but I suspect this would have a detrimental effect on the sanity of the brave soul who undertakes it, and there’d be no attendance condonations in recognition of their contributions.

[5] Terms and conditions apply.

[6] This is a true reference. Everyone who reads this is probably thinking of a different red flag. This should highlight the nature of the problem.

[7] See for example the Sura/Asura distinction made in this article, which suggests that the entire point of Brahminical myths around Diwali is to emphasise the victory of Brahmin Suras over Bahujan Asuras.

[8] The fact that the events were so wholesome that I almost stopped emotionally cosplaying Scrooge for a second, is of course very relevant. More cute note-writing sessions, please!

[9] Though I wish someone had made a brief primer on the myths surrounding Christmas, if only for the person I overheard at Ganesh, who, with a tone of great gravity, confused Christmas and Good Friday. I always thought I’d die under a truck in the middle of Jnanabharathi Main Road, not as a result of choking with laughter outside the one relatively sane space on that road.

[10] There was outrage against someone who was working with right-wing Hindutva-linked organisation Think India to offer internships, and simultaneous accusations with regard to the death of Chikku/Chimtu, a kitten who had spent most of her brief life on campus. There was also a man looking for a bride. All this is not to be confused with the mail threads about the attack on Kittu, the Ganga cat, by dogs; that thread, too, took on a nationalist element. See previous remarks about mail threads being utterly insane. Ye correspondent expressed his dusrapan to all possible emails.

[11] For those of us for whom these are the same person: rethink, reconsider, you can do so much better.