StopRagging.org

By ANIRUDDHA DUTTA

Despite that rather forbidding title, I think I can take the liberty to begin with a personal anecdote. In any case, this is not a sociological report or a research article, and can claim the authority of neither: the piece is far more an attempt to gauge the fuller implications (only dimly sensed then) of some things I went through/saw/heard about in my first few months in college. It is an attempt to somewhat illuminate that very complex and enigmatic phenomenon, sexual ragging — that is, the few forms of it I came across — not diluting its fundamentally inegalitarian and cruel aspect but seeking to ground its role in terms of larger social structures and processes. That, I feel, can not only enhance our understanding of its complex (dys)functionality but inform and hone attempts at counteraction.

In my first day in college, after being duly lodged in my room in the ‘residence’ (in St Stephen’s College, Delhi), I was summoned to interact with a certain senior student of my block (it was a male block, and this story — as the purview of the article — involves ragging within males). He informed me that I would have to become acquainted with the customs and ‘traditions’ of the hostel. Apparently, it was exclusively meant for men who liked others of the same sex — and the rite of initiation was something called ‘lifting’. For those not into ragging parlance, the process entails stripping a junior followed by squirting soap, cream or shaving gel on the genitals, in public. Often, juniors are also asked to dance in couples, pose in sexual positions with each other or seniors, and be even photographed doing so — none of which are strictly speaking ‘lifting’ but which may take place in the same extended session.

For someone who believes in sexual choice and freedom (though not ‘out’ at that stage), this was unexpected behaviour. Here was what seemed to be an overt celebration of something socially tabooed, yet it was not as much the finding of an enabling alternative space/activity, as yet another repressive norm by itself, forced on each unsuspecting fresher.

What I soon discovered was that this was actually very homophobic behaviour, that is, accompanied by a simultaneous and seemingly paradoxical fear and loathing of homosexuality or homosexuals beyond parodical enactment. And as I will try to show, it works to enforce ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, that is, establishing heterosexual as the norm for all, and homosexuality as deviant.

Sexual ragging is also linked to masculine identity formation — one still hears that age-old excuse for ragging, toughening and maturing a ‘boy’ to be a ‘man’ — which actually initiates him into a system of inter-male relations, hierarchical within itself yet privileging men as a whole and excluding/disempowering women2. In this article, I attempt to explicate the precise dynamics of this process as specific to lifting and related sexual ragging.

But lifting, along with the other forms of sexual ragging it often accompanies, is by no measure a unilateral or simple activity — masculine identity formation, homosocial acceptance, social and sexual hierarchies, homosexual fantasy, role-playing, voyeurism, exhibitionism — all inform its dynamics. Above all, it is situated in the anxiety-laden intersection between gender identity and homosocial group formation on one hand, and sexual behaviours/roles, desires/fantasies on the other.

Lifting: its gender/sexuality politics

In keeping with arguments defending other kinds of sexual ragging, lifting is touted as an activity that is essentially fun — it apparently involves defiance and is anti-authority, and thus a part of adolescent self-assertion that is implicitly, therefore, a harmless vent. This makes it appear simultaneously attractively defiant and ultimately not threatening to the establishment (local college authority to the macro-level of patriarchy) in any way.

The activity takes place in closed rooms, supposedly hidden from college authorities, and involves an aura of illicit sexual behaviour. This picture of lifting glosses over the power inequation, as it is presented as fun for all, and not for the seniors at the expense of the juniors.

However, the pleasure in lifting is located not so much in contravening socially acceptable behaviour, as much as making and seeing others break them. Thus, besides being obviously and fundamentally unequal in agency, it does not actually challenge sexual norms as much as use them to victimize and inflict.

To carry over from the point: The conventional discourses of sexuality and sexual behaviour, and in extension, of masculinity, are sustained: breaking the norm makes one vulnerable, and involves exposure and ridicule. Thus, partaking pleasure in this consolidates the seniors’ own position within the norm, not against it. The parody of homosexuality reinforces heterosexual masculinity as normal, thus enforcing uniformity of sexual and gender identity in preparation for the heterosexual adult world all of them are to enter shortly.

I do not suggest any single correspondence between homosexuality and gender identity (we have both gender-conforming and gender-defying discourses of male homosexuality — homosexuals need not necessarily be seen as effeminate.)

But if ragging (among boys) is linked to masculine identity formation, that is, the giving and gaining of a (male’s) position and selfhood in a patriarchal and hierarchical socio-economic system, the notion of masculinity refers centrally to sexuality and sexual behaviors. ‘Masculine’ entails its own appropriate sexual behaviour/role, with corresponding privileges in patriarchy. Sexual roles that invite anxiety are those that involve (or are thought to involve) passivity, vulnerability, lack of control — e.g. the ‘bottom’ role in gender-dissonant discourses of homosexuality (those which construct homosexual(s)/ity as divided into active/passive and parallel this with masculine/feminine.)

However, the category of homosexuality is also vulnerable as a whole, as heterosexual masculinity defines itself as against the homosexual, which becomes a somewhat arbitrarily mapped category of perversion, effeminacy and all the other horrors that cut into the social status, mental normalcy, and physical capability thus conflated with masculinity.

This double anxiety over passivity and deviant sexuality informs the dynamics of lifting. Passivity and exposure, with the ultimate threat of emasculation, are inherent in the very act of getting stripped, and having gel sprayed onto the genitals. The symbolic implications of phallic reduction, so strongly suggested on the physical level of the shriveled, wet penis, are more fully fleshed out in enactments of sexual poses.

The junior, then, is forced into sexually passive and/or ‘deviant’ behaviour (more precisely, enactments of such), which weakens him and strengthens the overseeing seniors’ position in relation to him. One may see seniors posing in ‘superior’ sodomitic poses with juniors, but even more frequent are juniors being made to pose among themselves: thus, both sexual passivity and ‘deviance’ as categories are conflated and relegated to externality (as opposed to possibilities in themselves) by the seniors. Internal or psychic fissures, thus, are projected to be resolved in the external fissured situation that ragging entails.

But it is not only a position of victimhood for the junior, it is also a sort of ‘compulsory opportunity’ that he is confronted with — to hide his embarrassment, endure the exposure, and thus resist the weakened role. Thus a process of recognition and initiation is set up, into the male ‘fraternity’ within the college and the larger patriarchal structure outside: with its corresponding collusion of hierarchy and privilege. Conversely, deviating means not only a denial of such entitlement but also the lack of access to the other viable position within patriarchy, if comparatively powerless: that of women.

The hierarchy is not only between male and female, but within males as well (though preserving their privilege as a group). Homosocial bonding, in larger society but also in college or, is a complex interplay of hierarchy and friendship, subordination and entitlement. One can invoke classic psychoanalytic theory, where such tension is the crux of masculine identity formation, the oedipal tug-of-war between admiration/aspiration and rebellion/rejection in the son-father relationship. I do not suggest that sexual ragging involves an exactly similar hierarchised binary — senior-junior interactions are much too numerous and fleeting for that — but that interactions here are analogous in nature, or perhaps homologous (i.e. part of a chain of pairs, which vary but build upon the same basic structure.)

The binding agent, which permits and perpetuates its existence, is not just the senior’s brute force, but desire on the part of the junior — homosocial desire proceeding from the inferior position to that of the superior — with the junior’s discursive3 acceptance of inter-male hierarchy as part of masculine identity, the admiration of role models, and aspiration to entitlement within the structure. Pleasure, however, is located in the reverse configuration to desire: pleasure deriving from the seniors’ own consolidation of identity using the juniors as foils.

It is easy to ‘gender’ this structure, so to speak: if the senior is masculinised, the junior is correspondingly feminised until, through his endurance of exposure and embarrassment, he is entitled to an equal masculinity. The junior is both a (severely restricted) agent in a discourse of masculine development and growth, and a foil to the seniors’ masculinity. He has to aspire to and enter their alliance. Gender deviance and sexual deviance (homosexual = feminine/effeminate) are usually simply made parallel in such a scenario.

I have sought to make clear that the process of masculine socialisation, though taking place under lopsided distribution of agency, takes place only on a mutual common ground of discourse. This explains why it is so hard to escape lifting, or to challenge it. Thus sexual ragging is so intractable and enduring for anyone wishing to challenge its hold on the freshers on grounds of violation, cruelty, or abuse. Countering it, therefore, requires countering the very premises it rests upon.

Hierarchy : Solidarity / Fantasy : Ritual

Tackling the uneasy, anxiety-causing overlaps between sanctioned homosocial desire (see previous section) and the dangerous realm of homosexual desire — this is the other problematic that informs the nature and function of sexual ragging. One can fruitfully refer to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s analysis of masculine homosocial bonding as fraught with anxieties and paradoxes, demanding intensity and physicality, aspiration and admiration, but simultaneously targeting any sign of homosexual affiliation, perceived or real.

This gives 19th century England with rise to ‘homosexual panic’, something Sedgwick situates as setting in among men in the psychologisation and secularisation of homosexuality as a category, coupled with much sharper vigilance and punitive retribution, social and legal. This categorisation infiltrated Indian society during colonisation and is still very much extant, even if it has been countered somewhat in the west.

One way of relating lifting to homosexual panic is to interpret it as serving as a manner of purgation for the senior, allowing a camouflage (a cloak, so to say) as well as a vent for impermissible fantasies of desire and arousal. The rigidly enforced hierarchy, then, serves to avert interrogation, and armours against the vulnerability that desire entails, and the anxiety the consciousness of desire produces. In fact, the very possibility of desire is enough cause for uneasiness in the sharply vigilant atmosphere of homophobia.

This uncomfortably close contact that homosociality (as in a hostel) involves is therefore discomfiting for both seniors and juniors, but the hierarchy homosociality entails has different effects. For the junior, it is a strong spur to desire4, but at the same time acts to curb it: along with which come the inevitable subversive tensions of hierarchy, the attraction of rebellion against and displacement of the seniors. For the senior, hierarchy can be both a protection from and a reaction to homophobia, and so enables desire, but in a very different equation. No side, however, is strong enough in position to be ever too far from the “quicksand” of inter-male desire.

Lifting, to me, therefore seems to involve a way to handle homosexual panic by transforming scenarios of desire into ritual: a group ritual of ‘solidarity’ and ‘fraternisation’, that retains the appropriate hierarchy but wards off the threat of homosexual association inherent in that hierarchy (for both seniors/juniors) through the fragile illusion of homosocial bonding.

At this point, it would not be inappropriate to dwell on some of the interesting similarities between lifting and initiation rituals. The maintenance of secrecy, the dichotomy of exclusion from/ inclusion into a group, a set ritual and procedure which is gradually revealed to the initiate, the test of the initiate’s resistance and endurance — these are all archetypal patterns of initiation rituals which are replicated to varying extents in lifting. The process is much more arbitrary, much less structured in case of lifting — and the other aspects discussed previously impinge on it.

Moreover, the aura of initiation rituals is often deliberately (and a trifle bathetically) exuded by seniors in serio-comic intimidation — my hostel had, through its ‘history’, acquired and flaunted the tag of a homosexual association (Allnutt North Gay Men’s Association), and we juniors were told that there were rituals and procedures to be followed to be its members (some, like an annual Feb 14th dinner, had an existence beyond ragging.)

In any case, the aura of subversion, forbidden activity, secrecy — consciously put-on though they may be — effect a delicate balancing of hierarchy and the appearance of solidarity, the maintenance of which is for the vested interests of both sides. With the attractive lure of being anti-authoritarian (against administration/parental expectation etc.), sexual ragging can (simultaneously) assume the aura of subversion, the function of the vent, and the security of hierarchy. (Hierarchy signifies both security and subordination for the juniors as it implicitly portends entitlement and masculine privilege for them.)

Could juniors, then, enjoy it — at least in less severe cases? Most of the boys of my year I came to know claimed that though it was intimidating at first, it would become a lot of fun when one was in it. The solidarity myth acts to counter the tensions of subordination as well, and is the first step to entitlement — to be in the group with so-and-so senior, who has so-and-so as girlfriend, or scored such-and-such in the last examination…

Voyeurism/Exhibitionism

The politics of voyeurism is clear, that of exhibitionism maybe less so. To be the voyeur is usually the privileged position of the senior, and the viewer:viewee relation is an extension of control over the situation, the junior and the junior’s body, in a way similar to that of physical ragging. In another sense, however, juniors can be voyeurs, too — viewing with intent interest the spectacle of other juniors in ragging, reporting and finding out what happened to so-and-so — voyeurs metaphorically even when not literally. Voyeurism here becomes the overt expression of the comparison/competition dynamics fostered in the homosocial system.

In nude photographs, photographs displaying one’s body, or sexual poses — exhibition by seniors may not so much be the confident exaltation of power-in-the-body, as the knowledge that one would not encounter a challenging gaze. But exhibitionism can have interesting subversive implications for juniors. To cite a photo I came across (taking during the ragging period) — it had a group of juniors simulating oral sex with each other, grinning and clearly posing for the camera. Here was the simultaneous humorous flaunting of ‘superior’/active roles, and parodical rejection of ‘inferior’ roles, both hinged on the power of exhibition — the vulnerability of exposure in ragging was thus countered by invoking it but transforming it into display. Unfortunately, I do not know when, where and by whom the photo was taken — that is, what the external conditions under which this happened were.

Carnivalesque After some familiarity had already been established between a particular senior-junior group, especially among those hailing from the same community – as among Bengalis, lifting sometimes took interesting turns. Strictly speaking, this would still be ragging as the seniors would decide time and place and enforce the juniors to come, and the reigns would still be in their hands. However, in such a case the interaction is further complicated by the direct play and negotiation of roles by seniors.

While ALL sexual ragging involves negotiation with accepted discourses of sexuality and their own identity for not only the juniors but also the seniors, here, in particular, the typical confrontational position of senior/junior seems to be broken down somewhat. Even seniors take part in the ‘ritual’ voluntarily. Another recurrent impression is of role-playing becoming game: with people posing as couples in changing sexual configurations, dancing together naked, even playing grabbing/avoiding games.

Do I go too far in detecting elements of the carnivalesque? Sometimes, the senior vacillates between the superior role of the overseer of freshers who enact, and a participator/enactor himself. Thus, we have a mutual and somewhat mobile negotiations of binaries like senior:junior, man(boy):woman(girl), active:passive, homosexual enactor:straight observer, viewer:viewee. All of these are power-relations; the ritual, in this case, proceeds paradoxically through game, play, and destabilisation. It is a play with gender/sexual roles — but one with the eventual result of reinforcing existing ones, once the session was over — in the typical subversion-containment pattern of the carnival.

Conclusion?

What is the utility of this article today, when sexual ragging is said to have declined in Delhi University, or when in any case the correct approach in dealing with ragging is usually thought to be stringent administrative prohibition? A lengthy analysis does not serve much purpose if the attempt is just to stop the overt manifestations of a complex phenomenon through legislation and retribution. I am not suggesting that the college authorities must not punish a senior who, say, strips and traumatises a junior. But if I have listed the various patterns, implications and possibilities within sexual ragging it is to show that these are continuous with social processes and discourses external to the immediate college environment, and thus will never entirely die down — merely change forms — unless counteractive action also works apart from the administration-student system, and tackles broader issues of masculinity, patriarchy and heterosexism among students and in society.

Otherwise, we might just be left with a proteus that retracts or even seemingly disappears in these times of awareness and Supreme Court rulings, but reappears in ever new forms once the vigilance dies down — as it will.