[Reader-list] Women's hostels- second posting

[shefali jha]

Hello everyone.
Our monthly posting is a little late and we’re sorry about that. Our search 
for theoretical material on Women’s hostels continues, and if anybody has 
any suggestions on that we’ll be very grateful.
For this month, our round of interviews was begun /continued. One person we 
had a long and extremely interesting and helpful conversation with was a 
lecturer in Political science at Osmania University, who told us about her 
own experience of hostel life and introduced us to some of her students who 
could help us out. She spoke about the time of the Mandal agitation, when 
she was actually warden of the Women’s hostel (the largest in Asia- bet none 
of you knew that! We didn’t !) and helped to bring about some sort of 
harmony in an increasingly polarised community. She also spoke about the 
time they launched an agitation to implement women’s reservation in the 
University, after which the number of women students has increased steadily. 
Another interesting thing she told us was about the experience of living in 
a hostel for the first time,having come from a smaller town and been away 
from the family for the first time, since this is one of the axes of our own 
project. She spoke about managing not only her own life on new terms but 
also taking part in others’ lives as,say, a member of the Mess committee.
The other set of preliminary conversations we conducted were with some 
ex-inmates of the CIEFL Women’s hostel, who told us about the time that they 
had an agitation about changes in hostel rules. This 
coincided,unexpectedly,with a new initiative in this direction,this time 
from a much younger first MA batch, but this time the struggle did not even 
get to the administration, which was the case in the first instance, but was 
carried on mainly within the hostel, with some very interesting debates 
taking place. These were debates that seemed to challenge our ideas about 
binary oppositions like orthodoxy-heterodoxy, the traditional and the modern 
etc. which are the terms such discussions are usually carried out in.
  Thus, although our main focus this month has been on the OU hostel, CIEFL 
has also turned up some very useful discussions which have fed into our 
research this month.And we must thank Sadan and Shilpa, especially 
Shilpa,for their interest and inputs. We’re looking forward to more of 
these.
Regards,
Shefali and Navaneetha.





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