CHENNAI: Two weeks ago, an hostel warden in the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras put up in the notice board, among other things, the number of ‘used condoms’ they found in a dustbin in the hostel room of a student. The incident caused much outrage among the student community over what they see as moral policing of the students. When Express spoke to students of many other colleges in the city, the stories students shared were far more regressive. Often, mundane everyday activities of students, particularly female students, comes under scrutiny and starts defining their character.
The students are questioned for speaking to students from the other gender and sometimes sent out of the classrooms when the teacher thinks the dress of a female student is too revealing. Swarna*, a student in a women’s arts college in the heart of the city, says she was reprimanded by her hostel warden once for accidentally dropping a cover with sanitary napkins in front of her hostel room.
“She said that I need to start acting like an adult woman now. How can I be so shameless? The warden said that my character was questionable,” she recalled. Swarna said that day, she saw her roommate carrying a suitcase she had brought from home after holidays, and rushed to help her way through the staircase. “I dropped the cover with the pad outside my room and went to help my friend, when the warden walked through the corridor,” she said. The warden had asked Swarna to enlist the possible outcomes, if a gardener or a another male casual worker in the hostel saw it instead.
It was an all girls college with men doing only small clerical jobs. “The Head of my Department used to go around the campus during the inter-collegiate cultural events we hosted, and take pictures of girls, if they were seen casually chatting with boys,” said Rupal* from the English Literature department of another all-women college in the city. The teacher would allegedly call these girls later and ask them if these boys were their boyfriends and threaten to inform their parents.
One day Samir* was talking to a few female friends on college, when a teacher stopped and allegedly commented, “He’s a Muslim. He can have four wives. That’s why he talks to women.” In Anna University for example, there are no strict restrictions on what girls wear within the hostel, but when they go to the mess for dinner, they should wear full pants as boys would be there. “When hostel girls wear leggings to classes, some teachers ask the girls to go back and change,” said Kavya*, a second-year student from the varsity. MK Surappa, the Vice-Chancellor of the university said that there should be no regulatory mechanism to prevent students from wearing what they want. “Different people have different tastes. It will be retrograde to control them,” he said.
A student from another college in Coimbatore said that her teacher had lined up all the girls who wore leggings to stand out of the class and asked other students what they looked like with such skimpy clothing. In another women’s college in the city, the hostel warden asked a student to explain why she was wearing laced underwear, pointing to her clothes hanging on the laundry line. “I didn’t think any explanation I gave would make sense to her,” said Sneha*.
Discriminatory hostel curfews is another issue. Arts and science colleges across Chennai has women’s hostel curfew at 7 pm, with a few colleges even capping it at 3 pm. However, men do not have any such restriction. Even though colleges have a curfew for men’s hostel on paper, most do not enforce it.
“There were no restrictions on when boys moved in and out of college. But girls were not allowed to go out after 6:30 pm. Let alone leaving the campus, we weren’t even allowed outside the hostel” said Madhu* , a recent political science graduate in an arts and science college in the outskirts of the city. “The warden asks “How will I know what all you do outside?”
“The safety of these students are in our hands. The girls may be bold, but if somebody does something to them outside the college, we are responsible for it. Which is why we have different curfews for girls and boys,” said the warden of one of the girls’ hostel blocks in the college.However, in the same college, a student from the chemistry department was slapped by a male classmate in broad daylight, said Madhu adding that the victim had fallen down injuring her head. “When students asked the college to take action on the boy, the dean of women students had allegedly asked the girl to not only consider his future,” she rued.
While these are only a few examples, girls who wear shorts or sleeveless clothing, hug boys, go out with boys, go for weekend trips, stay on the phone for long or behave friendly with male workers on campus are often treated differently, say students. (Names of all students changed)