[Reader-list] Neither Positive, Nor Interaction

[Shivam Vij]

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Neither Positive, Nor Interaction

By Shivam Vij

It is astonishing how the practice of ragging, despite
being outlawed by the Supreme Court of India and the
UGC finds so many defenders amongst students, parents,
and academics. Too many people concentrate on what are
their personal views on the subject, without being
aware that ragging is now a punishable crime. But the
law, of course, is an ass — unless it matches your
‘views’.

When a fresher enters a college hostel, he enters a
new, unfamiliar world. Instead of hospitality, s/he
gets hostility. It begins from fetching seniors’
luggage from the college gate to his or her room, to
brutal sexual abuse that has lead to countless
suicides. Yet ragging finds defenders.

They say that ragging makes freshers strong, and yet
the process of getting ragged actually weakens them.
(They compensate for this by becoming raggers from the
next year.) A fresher is ragged not once, and not by a
single senior: s/he is ragged again and again, day and
night, and more in the night. Just when s/he thinks
the worst is over, comes another ragger whose name the
fresher does not know. 

Ragging, even when it is not sexual, can be traumatic
because it operates on the basis of the fear of the
future. ‘Do this or we’ll make you do that...’ is how
every senior behaves. And a senior is not satisfied by
ragging you once: s/he rags you again and again, as
many times as s/he wants, until the ‘official’ ragging
period is over. So even if a fresher is just made to
fetch water, s/he is troubled because s/he doesn’t
know if s/he will be asked to undress yet again when
s/he returns. A college hostel under the curfew of
ragging is a situation other than ‘normalcy’; it is a
situation of a social breakdown.

But popular discourses on ragging never focus on such
trauma, leave alone recognise it as a violation of
human rights. Popular discourses on ragging — be it
newspaper coverage of the issue every year in
July-August or representations of ragging in films
like Munnabhai MBBS (2003) — insist that ragging is
‘fun’. They don’t elaborate that ragging is fun only
for the ragger, not for the ragged. They don’t
elaborate that ragging arises from repressed sexuality
and results in forced homosexuality, or that ragging
is a debasing activity that does not stand any kind of
intellectualisation. Is reciting under duress
limericks composed of incestuous expletives at three
a.m. in the morning ‘fun’? Not to me. But it’s fun for
the ragger to see how he was able to exercise control
over me. Then how did ragging benefit me? The
defenders are not short of answers.

No college hostel calls ragging by its name. The
pseudonyms are phrases like “positive interaction”.
Positive it certainly is not, but it cannot be called
‘interaction’ either. Interaction is a two-way process
that may involve debate and dissent. Ragging, however,
is a series of dramatic monologues where the bullying,
bellowing senior takes it upon himself to “psyche out”
the fresher. The purpose of this exercise is sadistic
pleasure and that only. A senior asked me: “All first
years are dead afraid of me and you say leave me
alone? Either you’re mad or you’ve been sneaking.” Had
it been ‘interaction’, I would have asked: “Why do you
want people to be afraid of you?” I still want to ask
him this question, but we are estranged.

Then there is this thing about ‘introduction’. Every
fresher begins to be ragged afresh by giving his
‘intro’ which consists of, amongst other things, names
of the people who occupied his room before him. The
senior does not even provide his or her name. So whose
introduction is it anyway? The fresher, because s/he
is under duress, does not reveal him or herself
honestly. S/he tries to give an answer that is likely
to please the senior. Introduction? Interaction?

Another myth is that your worst raggers become your
best friends. Not necessarily. But even if s/he does,
why should every friendship in college begin with ‘Oye
fachch! Come here you mother*****’?

That the initial phase of ragging (which may occupy
anywhere between one week to the whole academic year)
contributes to a closely knit hostel community is a
myth. For example, in a college which is supposed to
foster ‘liberal and secular values’ several seniors,
surprisingly, insisted on asking me if I was a
believer. I honestly said I was an atheist, for which
they ragged me all the more, and are still prejudiced
against me for my lack of faith. Had it not been for
ragging, faith or the lack of it could well have
remained a private matter for both of us. But privacy
and ragging are strange bedfellows.

Defenders of ragging firmly believe in something
called “mild ragging”, which, in short, is asexual
ragging. But any form of ragging involves subjugating
a fresher for he made the fault of having taken birth
one year after the senior. Any kind of subjugation and
domination hurts one’s self-esteem and dignity.
Inability to survive ragging is termed cowardice.
Giving into one demand after another of irrational
seniors is bravery. Freshers who are ragged the most
should be bestowed with the Param Veer Chakra along
with a citation that reads extracts from the Supreme
Court’s anti-ragging law.

Then ragging is justified with that hollow word,
tradition, which might be a synonym for colonial
hangover. Sati too is a tradition. So is hypocrisy. 

This talk of tradition also has to do with alumni
nostalgia. One example. In an essay called “The
Lessons of Rudra Court”, Amitav Ghosh describes how
ragging in St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, brought him
close to a senior called Rukun Advani and a junior
called Mukul Kesavan. Ghosh shows how his association
with the two was germane for his literary career.
Amidst this romanticisation of ragging there is only
one line that gives you a larger picture: that he and
his batchmates often had to sleep in pipelines in
Kamla Nagar to escape ragging.

People tend to forget that pain and remember only how
their friends ragged them as seniors. The pain of
first year is more than compensated in second and
third years, and so the vicious cycle continues. 

Defenders of ragging say it is necessary to go through
this vicious cycle as a rite of passage to manhood.
“Ragging nahi hogi to mard kaisay banogay?” Now who or
what is a ‘mard’? Such notions of gender are highly
problematic. Besides, boys who are day scholars and
never live in a hostel, don’t they ‘become men’?

If a fresher refuses to be ragged and/or complaints to
the college administration, s/he can face anything
ranging from marginalisation from the hostel community
to violent reprisals that may also be sexual. S/he may
be at the receiving end of the classic power strategy
of blaming-the-victim. His local guardians may be told
that your child is seeing ghosts, or that s/he is
hyper-sensitive. An insensitive world sees
hyper-sensitivity as a crime. When people
condescendingly sympathise with him or her as a victim
figure, it hurts his or her self-esteem all the more.
S/he is made to feel that the fault lies with him/her
and not with the system. The system has no exit
clause. 

But ragging does serve one purpose. Walking four
kilometres at dawn to fetch parathas for a senior does
introduce you to popular eateries around the college.
Raggers unwittingly introduce you to all aspects of
college life. This means that elimination of the
practice of ragging will have to be replaced with a
more civilised institution. This should be on the
lines of what many countries follow, and some Indian
institutions like IIT Kanpur, follow it too. This is
the system of student guides, where every fresher, or
a group of freshers, is under the charge of a senior,
who helps these freshers settle down and be at ease
with their new environment.

Thanks to ragging I was afraid of exploring all parts
of my college several weeks after admission. A senior
who hadn’t got the chance to rag me and later became
my friend, asked me to meet him at the back gate in
the evening, but I didn’t know where the back gate
was. He said I was in this pitiable state because I
hadn’t been ragged. He then showed me the way to the
back gate. Now I know that part of the college without
having been sent there by raggers. And the senior who
ultimate took me there is one of my closest friends
now, even though he never ragged me. 

Ragging has been gradually declining across the
country, thanks in part to the Supreme Court judgement
which says that if a college can’t eliminate ragging,
government grants to it can be reduced or stopped
altogether, and the college may even be disaffiliated.
This does not mean that ragging suicides have stopped
taking place. They still do, and find a one-column
space in a local paper. Scenes of freshers dancing in
DU colleges in the middle of July finds lead photos in
all the Delhi papers, with articles that mourn the
decline of ragging.

Seniors invariably tell juniors: this is nothing, we
faced worse. This may be exaggeration in order to
justify ragging, but if it’s true, why are we morning
it? If the perverse practice of ragging has been
tottering to a fall we must assist it to a peaceful
demise. We owe this to countless teenagers who went to
college in another city with hopes of a bright future,
but became a part of the past. If there is no Amitav
Ghosh to write their obituaries, we must fill the gap.

I have tried to indicate in this article that ragging
is not restricted to the male sex. In my involvement
with an anti-ragging NGO I discovered cases of
abhorrent sexual ragging in girls’ hostels.
Heterosexual ragging exists too, but it never gets as
bad because hostels of boys and girls are mutually
exclusive zones in a society that doesn’t trust its
children with their sexuality, but is happy with
homosexual ragging.

shivamvij at hotmail.com


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