(Dr. Shobna Sonpar is a clinical psychologist who worked at the Student Counselling Service of IIT Delhi for 13 years during which she counselled students who were ragged as well as researched the phenomenon. This essay first appeared in the Hindustan Times on 4 January 1992 and has been reprinted by StopRagging.org with permission from the author.)
By Dr. SHOBNA SONPAR
Among the adjustments they are called upon to make, none fill new entrants to college with as much trepidation as having to successfully negotiate the experience of being ragged. Much of ragging may indeed be in the spirit of fun and its popularity may partly be due to its entertainment value and partly because it is a customary ritual.
Yet there are alarming reports every year of outrages perpetrated in the name of ragging. However, the uproar these create soon subsides and beyond repeated resolves to firmly tackle the problem, little is done to understand what it is all about. The reasons typically offered to explain it, such as, the frustration of the youth, the lack of student-teacher interaction, the cult of violence, the decline of moral values, do not enhance our understanding in any major way. These explanations also fail to take into account the curious fact that those students who vehemently condemned the practice as freshers (as new college entrants are called), became its ardent supporters later. While agreeing that the experience was invariably tense, frequently humiliating and frightening, and sometimes traumatic, any discussion around ragging tends to get caught up in a debate as to its merits: that it helps the freshers to “open up”, to feel they belong, to grow up and so on.
The fact that the social outcome of ragging may in many cases be beneficial simply obscures the underlying dynamics of the practice. A group behaviour that persists despite official sanctions against it and widespread public disapproval must be serving some function in the social system where it occurs and it may be useful to reflect upon the systematic patterns that emerge and the psychological significance of these. It must be mentioned that the functional significance of this phenomenon may not be adequately explained by the overt reasons offered by those involved in the practice. It behoves the behavioural scientist to explore the underlying patterns and make some sense of them. In talking to male students in predominantly professional institutions who have experienced ragging both as victims and as perpetrators, a picture emerges of a behavioural phenomenon in which group psychology and individual dynamics interweave in various ways.
The most apparent dynamic is that of a power play, whereby ritual humiliation and aggression are used to maintain the social hierarchy. “The fresher must know who the boss is,” is a comment often heard. Freshers are often told not to act too smart and do as they are told. The cocky fresher is especially given a hard time because he neither knows his place nor how to behave with seniors. The proof of dominance for the senior is when the fresher breaks down. Therefore ragging has to hurt. “The fresher has to be stretched like a rubber band until he snaps,” and that is the point of the exercise according to one student.
This factor may be of special significance in professional institutions where the competition is rife and the establishment of a hierarchy of dominance by seniority helps contain some of the threat to the status quo. That proper respect should be shown to senior students is a clear expectation and students frequently complain in somewhat outraged tones that nowadays freshers do not show proper deference, may not even wish their seniors, or else act too familiar. Also, freshers must be cut down to size because they tend to think too highly of themselves having gained admission through tough competition.
From a social systems point of view this makes sense because any new element in the system is potentially disruptive and must be assimilated to maintain the equilibrium of the system as a whole, which in this case is the college or the hostel. Further, there is an implicit bargain whereby a senior having ragged a fresher is obliged to accept and extend help to the fresher thereafter. Freshers say, “If we don’t get ragged then seniors will not help us.”
The forces maintaining this system are strong since the fresher who participates finds a place in it. Such a place is denied to those who do not participate because either they are too shy or timid, or because they refuse to be deferential. Not only are they excluded by seniors but also by their own batchmates. Some may end up as social isolates, while others, especially those who are socially more adept, often set up their own cliques. Interestingly, most students who defend the practice enthusiastically are those who have a high emotional investment in belonging to the college or the hostel system and equally have a sense of their reciprocal obligations as helpers and befrienders to newcomers. Not that for these students there is no personal thrill. “It is a definite ego-trip,” says one, while another speaks of it as a “heady experience” to hold power over an abject and quaking fresher. And what of those “hard core raggers” who are agreed by all to exceed the limits? These students, usually a very small number, appear to be marginal to the communal life of the hostel or the college. They emerge during the ragging period to lord it over freshers in ways that are often vicious and violent. While there is the thrill of power in all ragging, for these students ragging seems to compensate for some deep-seated personal insecurity. They seem to deprive self-esteem from their tough public images which they then have to live up to. They also differ from the others in that they do not later become friendly with the freshers they have ragged. Not only are individual hang-ups played out in ragging, but also social prejudice and the assertion of group dominance. It is common ragging practice for seniors in a predominantly English-speaking college to mock the speech and manners of those from dissimilar backgrounds and vice-versa. Around the time of the anti-Mandal agitation, ragging students from the reserved quotas took the form of having them repeat as an imposition their entrance examination ranks.
The assertion of dominance takes many forms during ragging, a common one in hostels being in having the fresher to be a drudge for the senior, doing menial chores and running errands. This aspect seems similar to the institution of faggery in English public schools.
A variety of means are used to humiliate the fresher of which stripping is very common. Then there is physical intimidation such as slapping and shoving about, which in the “hard-core ragger” becomes sadism. Some of this has the flavour of having the fresher prove that he is no longer a child and can withstand physical punishment like a man. Students agree, however, that for the ragger this can be an intoxicating experience. Also knowing that one can get away with it, certain internal taboos around physical violence are broken and perhaps that is where the excesses start.
The major part of ragging seems to be related to the sexual-emotional area and students report that there is an unmistakable excitement when ragging centres on this. Ragging in this case may serve as means to work through the anxieties and insecurities around sexuality that is common to the age group. In a society where heterosexual contact is frowned upon and sexuality is a taboo subject, being made to ask a stranger girl for a date or to enact a wedding ceremony can provide a delightful frisson. The subject of sex is addressed directly in hostels where an invariable ragging practice is to have a fresher to describe his sexual feelings and experiences, or enact various sexual scenarios, while mocking him for his naïveté and discomfiture. As one senior candidly put it, “It makes you feel better about your own lack of experience and nervousness about sex when you see someone worse-off than you. In fact when the fresher turns out to be more knowledgeable, you end up feeling quite foolish.”
JM Whiting, the psychologically-oriented anthropologist, talks of societies as producing certain conflicts in individuals during their infancy and childhood and of adolescent rituals as being ways in which these conflicts are resolved. Specifically, he notes that societies in which child-rearing practices foster the development of strong emotional dependency between son and mother have harsh adolescent rites of passage which serve to bring about a loosening of ties to maternal attachment figures. Psychologists have noted that the mother figure looms large in the psyche of Indian men and perhaps a distance is created by the ritual sexual objectification and consequent disenchantment or humiliation of such figures. In fact apologists of ragging say that it is important to undergo ragging because it helps a boy to outgrow being a “mama’s boy” and “becoming a man”. Such detachment from maternal ties is therefore seen as important for masculine identity formation. Such identity formation may be further promoted by the introduction of new attachment figures which are male. At the same time ritual aggression instills respect and obedience of male authorities so as to maintain the social hierarchy. In this context some students report that as freshers they did need to have some ideal to look up to and would frequently idolise some senior student. Being ragged by this “hero” would allow access to him and also give them a feeling of being a “cool guy”.
It is common for a good looking fresher to be made to feel that his seniors had designs on him by comments and suggestive invitations. Homosexual nuances are also often present in ragging practices that call for the fresher to bathe and massage a senior.
The psychological interpretations of adolescent rituals give greatest emphasis to their value in allaying personal anxiety. At a time when sexual thoughts and feelings arouse a lot of conflict because they are directed towards incestuous or homosexual objects, as is not uncommon in the adolescent years, it may be ultimately reassuring to have such taboo sexual subjects freely referred to while the manner in which this is done may strengthen the barriers against the expression of such impulses.
It is clear that the practice of ragging warrants in-depth study by behavioural scientists. A mere scratching of the surface yields leads that may be further explored by psychologists and sociologists. An understanding of the psychological significance of the practice as it typically manifests may help in devising measures to prevent its excesses.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Group behaviour, Rites of passage, Shobna Sonpar
I absolutely agree – we need to understand why our young men and women continue to abuse their fellow students and why we, as a society, continue to tolerate it.
Legislation itself is obviously not enough to stamp out this wretched practice, though it is a crucial first step.