Higher education in India has largely been an experience of privilege, accessible to few in a country that prides itself on the sheer numbers of its youth. Yet universities and higher-education institutes have had a significant impact on the social, economic and political life of the country – not only by giving young adults greater socio-economic mobility, but also through the production of the future workforce and the consumer base for contemporary neo-liberal service economies. Higher education continues to shape the political life of the country, not only by training young citizens in the tenets of democratic citizenship within a national paradigm, but on rare and triumphant occasions situating the university as a small counterpublic to the dominant national discourse. Drawing a continuum between the political and cultural practices of the campus and the larger public sphere gives us a concrete insight into the efficacy, as well as the shortcomings, of contemporary education in shaping the university space as a political counterpublic.Footnote 1 This essay suggests that the contemporary campus space is a site of radical potential, and puts this position to the test in the context of feminist identity politics. I focus critically on the contested space of the contemporary women's college, in conjunction with the cultural productions that derive from that space.
Women's colleges in India have a specific history, which is intertwined with the social reforms of the colonial elite, particularly their handling of issues such as women's education and their protectionist need to respect gender segregation in accordance with Hindu household practices, Muslim purdah practices and the conservatism of a Victorian state. From the late 1940s, the post-independence women's colleges sought to realize the new aspirations of women. Like so many other public institutions of the era, the colleges were also endowed with the responsibility for training the new citizens of a new nation, who would be representatives of the new modernity.Footnote 2
The most significant change of direction within the post-independence history of women's colleges in the country came during the 1960s, with the consolidation of the feminist movement, and with a section of the progressive women's movement actively dissociating from Nehruvian socialism, and coming to treat the state as a site of contestation.Footnote 3 New solidarities were formed within the women's movement around environmental activism, indigenous struggles, movements for peace and social entrepreneurship. Women's colleges played an active role in educating the generations of women who joined these movements, becoming prominent spaces of feminist activism and discourse.
With a roster of seventy-seven colleges and open schools, the University of Delhi, informally known as Delhi University or DU, admits students from diverse backgrounds and from across India. In spite of having one common student union, which is elected annually, the campus is a deeply agonistic space,Footnote 4 with many colleges not affiliating themselves with the university union. There are twenty-two women's colleges in Delhi University, out of which only six are affiliated with the Delhi University Student Union (DUSU).Footnote 5
These women's colleges are unique spaces with a diverse demography of students and new feminist politics. A protectionist paternalism found in the women's college ethos frames the limits of permissible dissident behaviour in these supposed feminist spaces. It is in this context that a form of contemporary feminist practice is emerging within the women's colleges of the campus. In this essay, I attempt to understand the complex narrative of feminist politics within a contemporary women's college in Delhi University in juxtaposition with the theatre productions coming out of such a space. The two examples I take are a small political strike in a women's college in 2008 and an amateur theatre production produced by a collective of ex-students of several women's colleges within Delhi University. The intent is to examine whether it is possible to draw a continuum between the political impulses of the campus and the cultural practice that originates within the space but is staged outside the campus in larger public spaces.
The limits of dissent
The distance from bodies like the DUSU makes the students’ union elections of the non-affiliated women's colleges a politically ‘safe’ exercise upheld by the college authorities as a routine performance in the practice of democracy in the protected environment. It can, then, be seen as a process to produce the ideal contemporary female citizen: educated, articulate, high-achieving, independent and professional, with a complete devotion to the infallible systems of liberal democracy. However, this construction of the ideal female citizen cannot always be controlled and the limits maintained; the theatre clubs of many women's colleges, I argue, have become spaces rife with subversive potential where the atmosphere of amateurism, informality, ‘unproductive’ work and idle ‘hanging out’ lets the participants briefly escape the aforementioned performance of idealized female citizenship. In contrast, within the paradigm of electoral politics within these colleges, the importance of ‘dialogue’ and decision-making through consensus are values that are inculcated through the processes of these elections. A general sense of discipline and absence of violence during elections within women's colleges result in the electoral processes becoming working models of non-violent, rational democracy being operated through forms of dialogue between the students and the authorities, in the manner of the workings of the civil society, as argued by Partha Chatterjee.Footnote 6 The apparent congeniality of this ‘clean’ politics is buttressed by an emphasis on familial association by figures of authority in order to invoke solidarity – be it in the usage of family as a binding concept for the inmates of the college hostels or of sisterhood as the expression of feminist solidarity within the campus. However, following Monique Wittig's influential work on lesbian society, the counterargument for women being a ‘natural group’ can be extended to women's colleges and familial communities within them, arguing for a more agonistic understanding of these spaces.Footnote 7 The rhetoric of sisterhood or family that regulates these spaces must be understood critically in order to grasp the importance of new kinds of feminist political action emerging from here. The recent ‘Pinjra Tod’ movement is a very good example of a shift from the family-oriented rhetoric of women's hostels within DU. Women's hostels have punishing curfews and complicated permission-granting exercises that women need to follow in order to move freely in the city. Pinjra Tod, literally translating to ‘Break the Cage’, started in 2015 as a group that addressed issues of patriarchal control within women's hostels in Delhi, especially through the rhetoric of family, protection and supervision of young women's lives. However, the rhetoric of sisterhood comes from the established feminist movement within the country.
Lady Shri Ram College for Women, or LSR in common parlance, on which I focus in this essay, is a premier women's college situated in the upper-middle-class residential neighbourhood of Lajpat Nagar in south Delhi. LSR was founded in 1956 by the industrialist Lala Shri Ram, who established the Delhi Cotton Mills, and the governing board of the college continues to be presided over by the principal member of the Ram family. Its unique location as an ‘off-campus’ college, not located in either of the two campuses of Delhi University, results in a sense of geographical and ideological isolation. For example, this sentiment frequently comes up in debates and discussions among students regarding the formal entry of the LSR student union into the fold of the larger university-level DUSU. This dislocated experience of the campus shapes the comparative insularity of the LSR student population.
Around the end of February 2009, a group calling itself TBR, an acronym for Think beyond Rules, started sending out mass emails to LSR student contact lists. The emails expressed discontent at the state of affairs in the college, and at a couple of issues that were angering the students – namely the exorbitant amount of money charged to get a photocopy of an examination answer sheet after the grades were out, and, more crucially, the high price of food in the LSR café. The café prices issue eventually became the rallying point around which a call was given for ‘a friendly protest on Tuesday, 3rd March 2009, during LUNCH in the RUINS outside the cafe’. The protest itself started during lunchtime with a group of students arriving at the concrete seats next to the café, otherwise known as the ‘ruins’. Some came with placards in both English and Hindi, and once a crowd gathered, people started sitting on the seats and occupying the space. Some of the students started singing Hindi film songs with lyrics relevant to the protest – a particularly popular one was ‘Emotional Atyaachaar’ (‘Emotional Torture’) from the Anurag Kashyap hit Dev.D (2009). Members from the campus street theatre group brought along a daphli, a percussive instrument used in campus agit-prop theatre. The daphli was used to keep rhythm and draw the attention of students who were passing by and not joining in. Eventually, the representatives of the student union came to meet the protesters and called for a meeting inside the café. In the meeting, the student union members expressed total shock at the nature of the protest and asked the crowd to disperse, offering to talk to the principal elected representatives. In the course of the debate, the protesters pointed out the ineffective nature of a non-political student union, which remained busy with event management duties for college festivals and cultural programmes. They demanded that the principal come to the café to meet them. The student union was unable to disperse the crowd from the café, and the group eventually grew to at least forty to fifty students. At the end of lunch, they started marching down the corridor leading to the Lower Foyer (the main lobby at the entrance of the college) and the principal's office. While marching, they chanted slogans, and tore posters and charts at random from notice boards. It was communicated to the principal that the protesters wanted to meet her to resolve the issues at hand. The protesters strongly felt that the meeting should take place in the Lower Foyer rather than the formal settings of the principal's office or the auditorium. The meeting eventually took place inside the auditorium, with some students preferring to sit on the floor, the stage and the arms of chairs, rather than in the chairs themselves. Each tiny act of exceptional behaviour was discussed among the protesters as a strategy of dissent during those two to three days of action. Even the way the meeting was conducted was very different from any General Body Meeting held thus far. Students kept shouting and interrupting the principal, who was seated in a chair in front of the stage. There was palpable anger every time the principal or other members of the staff council characterized the protest as anonymous, and therefore irrelevant. The principal's chiding tone and statement of disappointment at the mode of protest contrasted sharply with the inspired excitement and anger of the protesters.
What the TBR parcha (a pamphlet, in this case circulated via email) had intended to be ‘fun, loud and happy’ and merely a ‘little hungama [chaos] about the cafe prices’ became an energetic, politically motivated mass, shouting slogans such as ‘LSR jawaab Do’ (‘LSR give answers’) and ‘Tanashahi nahi chalegi’ (‘Autocracy won't work’). While it was certainly not a huge protest, not even involving the entire student population of the college itself, just the act of protesting in this manner, which was so out of place within the political landscape of the college, made this a significant event in the lives of the participants, the authorities and the bystanders. The protest as well as the idea of an anonymous political watchdog group on campus enjoyed a certain afterlife.Footnote 8 The possibility of transgressing the acceptable limits of behaviour within the premises of the college was externalized for the first time in this manner and therefore stayed in the memories of students. This unprecedented development posed an effective threat to the hitherto unquestioned paradigms of ‘dialogue’ and ‘conflict resolution’, charging the apolitical space of the college with what the students considered their rightful language of political activism and that which the institution dismissed for being anonymous or for being too much like ‘trade-unionism’ (as expressed by the principal). This confrontational way of protesting was in sharp contrast to the hitherto common modes of politics such as holding General Body Meetings and petitioning for change through proper channels, such as the student union. In an interview titled ‘Truth and Power’, given to Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino, Foucault mentions a ‘plebeian quality’, ‘something in the social body, in classes, groups and individuals themselves which in some sense escapes relations of power’; that is, a kind of political consciousness beyond that of authority or of proletarian subjectivity.Footnote 9 The strength of the pleb subjectivity comes from a relationship with authority that does not have a set language of engagement, as would be the case in representational, democratic processes.
This ‘inappropriateness’ of the café dharna (sit-in protest) became a site of ‘plebness’ within the student body of the college. Following the public meeting with the principal, the protesters understood the transgressive nature of their protest simply through the elaborate and serious methods of institutional crackdown, in the form of examination card detainment, phone calls to anxious parents and threats about career futures. The disciplinary actions taken invoked the paradigm of a disciplining parent such as scoldings, telephone calls to homes and a clear message that ‘anonymous mails belonged in the dustbin’.Footnote 10
When, on the day of the dharna, women gathered around the fringes of the café, many of the placards were in Hindi. This was surprising, as in LSR practically everyone spoke to each other in English. In fact, within DU as a whole the divide between English-speakers and non-English-speakers is pronounced and very much rooted within divisions of class and cultural capital. For students struggling to deal with widespread perceptions of elitism and political isolation from the rest of the campus, using Hindi as the language of protest could have been strategic, in order to make the dharna appear more inclusive, in tandem with grass-roots politics of the country. The use of Hindi also led to the possibility of bringing Hindi film songs and Hindi slang into the protest culture of an otherwise anglophone campus.
An agitational dharna, which was the first spontaneous and politically motivated act within college by most of the students who took part in it, became a platform for them to identify with performative modes that they were acquainted with, from the larger agit-prop political protests.Footnote 11 The sloganeering started after the crowd moved from the liminal space of the ruins to inside the café, in a spontaneous act of reclamation of space, sitting on the tables, the edges of the walls of the ruins and the floor (and not only on the seats). This part of the protest, heavy on the aforementioned sloganeering, was viewed as offensive to the administration, for whom this political language was nothing but a misplaced adoption of rabble-rouser sensibilities into the uncluttered, familial space of the college. A member of the administration even complained, ‘Yeh kya JNU samajh ke rakha hai?’ (Do you take this place to be JNU?).Footnote 12 Matters escalated further with the charged-up crowd deciding to parade through the corridors of the college and occupy the lower foyer, the decorative space right at the entrance of the college. The agitators found these places, the advertised architectural signs of the institution, useful for the purposes of reclamation of space.
TBR, being an anonymous body that gave a call for a dharna which ultimately took on a life of its own, perhaps attempted to write itself into a political tradition of non-representative people's power, an anarchist position that enables political protest without a specific leadership. While the institution was absolutely incapable of coping with such politics and dismissed TBR because of its anonymity, it was this anonymity that enabled every student who was a part of the protest to claim the protest as her own. Thus one of the most popular slogans to have come out of the protest was ‘TBR kaun hai? Hum sab! Hum sab!’ (‘Who is TBR? All of us! All of us!’). The naturalized feeling of a community engendered by the rhetoric of the family, which had been officially deployed for years by the principal, was suddenly broken by this idea of coming together from different backgrounds and political orientations, into the affective solidarity of an organized mass of students, possibly for the first time, for many of the women.
In terms of the TBR protest in LSR, it is possible to detect an extra-dialogic (external to the ‘dialogue’ paradigm prevalent in the student politics of LSR) ‘plebness’ in the disturbance that the language of the parchas caused. It is in such instances of protest that the language of negotiation with authority breaks out of the mould of problem solving and democratic dialogue, interrupting the citizenship-building project of women's colleges. It is in a moment of transgression of this sort that the campus throws up the possibility of radical feminist politics that shoots through the conventional modes of neoliberal feminist discourse. Gone is the necessity for and relevance of the elected representatives – the student union – and along with it the coded performances of representative democracy and the ideal female citizen. In its place, the protesters prioritized performances of disruptive, impolite politics, marked by specific modes of protest and occupation of space, vandalism and the strategic use of Hindi terms and slogans. The critical expansion of the ambit of permissible behaviour within the college could only be pushed through due to the special nature of this particular protest in contrast to the dominant political ideology within the institution. And it is in such a context-specific ‘small’ act of subversion that it is possible to indicate that there is a new direction of feminist practice within these campuses.
Contemporary feminist theatre practice coming out of women's colleges is also engaged in identifying and defying the permissible limits of dissent and transgression that were forged through coded performances of democratic solidarity within women's movements until the recent past. As stated before, the theatre societies within women's colleges give students a unique atmosphere to explore beyond the coded performances of gendered citizenship within a democratic civil society. The affective solidarities created through shared theatre practice and rehearsal experience also go beyond the family-encumbered paradigm of sisterhood, moving towards other registers of solidarity brought forth by the shared proximity of the rehearsal. This is also a clear transgression of the way segregated women's spaces have been conceived within women's colleges. However, this new direction of feminist cultural practice also has its limits, contextualized as it is within the established power dynamics of the campus.
Campus and its continuum: negotiating cultural politics within the college and the city
In March 2014, I was among a group of six women, all ex-students of various women's colleges at Delhi University, who came together to create a performance called Parting Gestures. The production was to be a part of a year-long project of curatorial collaboration between Instituto Cervantes, New Delhi, which is the Spanish Cultural Centre, and Yellow Cat Theatre, a professional theatre outfit based in Delhi. The idea of the project was novel, and the idea of a loose feminist collective that collaborated over shared playtexts was appealing for all the participants. Rehearsals for Parting Gestures were conducted over one month at the Instituto Cervantes auditorium under the direction of Manjari Kaul, who had trained as a performer and director within the dramatics society set-up of Miranda House, DU.Footnote 13 In its access to the diplomatic infrastructure for regular rehearsal space; access to technical resources such as lights, sound systems and performance venues; and publicity support from Instituto Cervantes, Parting Gestures was semi-professional as well as completely open to the public.
The performance was predominantly devised through improvisation sessions, where Manjari would amalgamate the training techniques she had picked up from different theatre workshops and from the collegiate theatre ethos. The actors worked together for free, many coming for rehearsals after a full day's work. The amount of control and autonomy given to each performer in terms of their presence onstage, their gestures and ultimately their complete involvement with blocking was a great change from the collegiate theatre setting, where improvisations would be done within standardized modes of blocking, acting and stage design governed by what was relevant to the intercollegiate competition circuit. That said, the transgressive potentiality of the campus space was forever present, in our interactions, jokes, shared rehearsal time and tea and cigarette breaks, which would act as long criticism and ‘bitching’ sessions about the limits of campus theatre, male mentoring heads of campus societies and other productions coming from male-dominated set-ups, and discussions about other professional theatre set-ups across Delhi.
The rehearsal would begin with the group of women coming together and lying down onstage, getting their thoughts together and acclimatizing to the rehearsal space. This would be followed by a series of warm-up exercises. These exercises would specifically work with ideas of many bodies together in spaces, forming relationships with others as well as groups, becoming comfortable with each other through initiating touch-based games of leading and being led and dancing. After a month-long engagement in physical exercises and active improvisational work with individual characters, their backstories and relationships with others, the performance text of Parting Gestures was created – an amalgamation of three plays by the Spanish playwright Paloma Pedrero.Footnote 14 Pedrero (1957–), a playwright, director and actress located in Madrid, writes short one-scene plays, questioning the nature of individual freedom and focusing on day-to-day life. All the three plays for the performance contained critical gender issues and even subverted gender roles. The selection of the plays and the theatre-making process reverberated with the space of contemporary campus feminism created through memories of the shared practice of campus theatre that shaped the experience generated in the rehearsals.
The third play, on which I would like to focus, A Night in the Subway, was a story about an unemployed working-class man loitering in the subway station and subsequently meeting a female upper-class civil servant with whom he shares an unexpected night of intimacy. While the outcome of the piece was conventionally romantic, the preceding conversations between the two protagonists, Juan and Carmen, were highly ambiguous: at times blatantly misogynistic and akin to sexual harassment and humiliation (from Juan), and at others deeply classist and discriminatory (from Carmen). Power and control within the conversation moved rapidly between the two throughout the play, with Juan being the hypermasculinized, working-class hero with acute class and gender anger against Carmen, and Carmen being the snobbish and affected upper-class woman looking at her companion with disgust. During rehearsals, the performers, Dilpreet Taggar (playing Juan) and Aishwarya Chaudhary (playing Carmen), successfully brought out the ambivalence of the dialogue. Juan constantly expressed his hatred with desire-laced comments on Carmen's silky smooth skin and how soft skin was an attribute of rich people. The performers, with their own class and gender identities, those of belonging to upper-middle-class families of Punjab and Haryana respectively, could respond to and understand Carmen and what it would feel like to be stranded in the lonely subway with an unknown man commenting on one's appearance and skin. On the other hand, Dilpreet brought high levels of understanding to Juan's character, escaping the stereotypical depiction of a predatory male as hypermasculine and overtly aggressive and coming up with a portrayal that brought forth Juan's social disadvantage as a poor person and advantage as a man at the same time. She steered clear of the gestural vocabulary of the aggressive Indian man, typically north Indian and Hindi-speaking, actively breaking from the easily identifiable aggressive male persona in currency within campus theatre. Even her stance onstage was withdrawn, devoid of the male swagger that could easily be deployed here, except for the scene where Juan disrobes to show Carmen his scars from a workplace accident. Even this moment of machismo turned ironic when, at the very end, Carmen realized that Juan had a tattoo of a butterfly on his scar. More often than not, Juan would be sitting, passive, smoking and loitering, completely resigned to or even comfortable in his surroundings, while Carmen would be actively seeking a solution to the problem at hand, coming up with ideas to escape from the locked subway station, and eventually push Juan into action. Thus the production was poised to represent non-normative gender identities in two ways: by casting women as both members of the heterosexual couple, and by refusing gender stereotypes in the characterizations of Carmen and Juan.
However, the day of the show saw a huge number of Dilpreet and Aishwarya's university mates in the audience, prompting them to reshape their onstage performances. Playing to the audience, Dilpreet's Juan became more cynical, a little passive-aggressive and the funny man of the script with his ambivalent banter. His probing questions about Carmen's relationship status and personal life, which would be unacceptable and frightening behaviour in the reality of a desolate subway at night, had been rendered funny by Dilpreet's unconscious overplaying of the male swagger, to the extent that it turned comical. Aishwarya's Carmen, who as a lone woman in a public space at night would realistically be slightly afraid but mostly very reserved and businesslike to avoid human contact and conversation, became a hysterical, fussy lampoon to counter the overplayed Juan. This overplaying reduced a formerly complex relationship to a sappy romantic comedy that elicited loud hooting and cheering during the kissing at the end of the play. Within the environment of the rehearsal room, the campus impulse played out as an empowering tool for the women in Parting Gestures. However, the public performance marked a shift back to regressive gender stereotypes. This points towards a specific attribute of the potentially radical impulse of this particular campus theatre – it can retain its radical potential only ‘in process’ (rehearsal), where the idea of the final production plays a relatively insignificant role, and the pleasure of hanging out together is the main takeaway.
In a women's college environment, which reverberates and replicates neo-liberalism and success is oriented towards ‘product’ – which can range from grades, to high-paying corporate jobs where the theatrical forays are eulogized in the résumé, to the endless reproduction of the image of feminine success – the final day of playing to the gallery for applause had suddenly been prioritized over what I saw hitherto as the non-productive mode of pleasure in solidarity which demonstrated potentialities of becoming a radical practice. In her paradigmatic essay on ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, Adrienne Rich delineates an affective model of female subjectivity and solidarity completely distant from the ways of being prescribed by the structures of patriarchy.Footnote 15 Rich's redefinition of radical female experience within the rubric of the lesbian continuum is an effective frame of reference in the context of the affective solidarities within women's colleges in DU. The student experience is defined by the all-women nature of the campus space and the institutional authority that draws its disciplining power from traditional patriarchal disciplining mechanisms. Within this system, the principle of pleasure is marked by what Sara Ahmed calls ‘the fantasy of being reproductive’, where queer pleasures are only a passing moment within the larger story of heterosexual coupling, with the body being understood as instantly reconvertible towards reproductive heteronormativity.Footnote 16 There is a close relationship between the reproductive impulse of heterosexual sociality and the productive impulse of feminine success, and this relationship is a cornerstone in creating the ideology of the women's college. Thus radical expression of a campus space is only achieved by invoking possibilities of queer pleasure and queer sociality that take place within unproductive spaces of rehearsal and protest. The affective solidarities created in both the above instances transgress the conventional modes of solidarity – be it the naturalized community of heterosexual sisterhood or the politically cohesive community of a representative democracy. The shared practice of theatre produces a form of affective solidarity that has a special significance to the campus space created within these colleges. In the space of the women's college it is possible to glimpse an alternative feminist future that successfully overcomes the ideological ambivalence of gender-segregated education.
