[This article was written by Sujit Saraf for StopRagging.org in March 2005. He  is a film-maker and playwright who lives in California. He has been associated with IIT Delhi both as a student and an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is author of the novel The Peacock Throne.]

I went to IIT Delhi in the fall of nineteen eighty seven. I had been living in Delhi for two years but I was still a small-town boy from Bihar, intimidated by tall buildings and a steady stream of traffic. Even now, after television and the internet and all that, I meet people in my town who, when told about my college and career, respond- ITI? ek hamaare yahaan bhii hai.

When I arrived at my hostel inside the IIT campus, I found a notice posted in the lobby, saying ‘Ragging is banned in the Institute.’ I had come with horrible stories of ragging in mind, told by friends, relatives and well-wishers. My father, whose knowledge of college life was thirty years out of date, wrote me in a letter that I was to ‘take care to avoid rigging in IIT’. I remember he mis-spelt the word, and he seemed to think my participation was voluntary. I entered the hostel, was given my room, and transferred my luggage into it. I was on my knees ten minutes later with a leash around my neck, announcing my name at the top of my voice and reciting the hostel pledge, which granted every senior the right to fuck me in the arse, then bust it into eight thousand pieces, mash some pieces into a bharta, and feed the rest to the dogs of the hostel warden.

It sounds funny now, even to me. We did many things in that one month that now appear harmless and amusing. We stood on benches in the dining hall and recited the national anthem, we crawled on all fours and barked like dogs, we marched backwards in unison, we wore our clothes inside out, we ranerrands for our seniors, we brought them cigarettes and Campa Cola, wecleaned their rooms and made their beds, we did push-ups in thestreet, we barked and shouted and whispered and lived our livesaccording to the prescriptions of boys barely a year older than us.Finally, we dropped our trousers so they could look at our penises. We held one another’s penises and estimated their lengths, we formed long human trains – each train car holding the penis of the car in front -and whistled our way through hostel corridors at top speed, turning left and right in response to semaphores controlled by our seniors. We formed human pyramids, simulated orgies, stripped naked, then wore our underpants over our pants, turning ourselves into ‘The Phantom’ of comic books.

After so many years, I can list these ‘forms of ragging’ dispassionately, but no one should be misled. When an eighteen year old boy stands naked to be inspected by ten leering animals, he shudders in the bottom of his heart. Brutality and oppression remain just that, no matter the name chosen for them, no matter the circumstances in which they are exercised.

Who were these seniors, and why did they humiliate us so? They seemed powerful then, but they were boys like us, older by a year or two or three. They had endured similar humiliation in their time. Their seniority in the hostel gave them, for the first time in their lives, power over other human beings – power to command fear, subjugate and humiliate.

They exercised this power with abandon, and they had developed countless theories – from the facetious to the philosophical – to support their sadism. Ragging forces you to stay up late, they said, and this is useful when you must prepare for difficult examinations. Ragging breaks the ice between seniors and juniors. Ragging brings the freshman – or the ‘fachchaa’ – into intimate contact with peers and seniors, and this turns the hostel into a home. Ragging helps the freshman break out of his shell and lose his inhibitions. And finally, said our seniors sententiously, ragging teaches you humility. It prepares you for the ‘real’ world.

Presumably, if you have been insulted a sufficient number of times in college, you will have acquired the virtue of patience when your boss insults you in the real world. Like a well trained dog, you will not bark and lose your job. Instead, you will wag your tail, look the other way, and pretend the abuse was meant for someone else. Our seniors proclaimed – and some actually believed – that they had acquired this wisdom through age and experience, and they were now anxious to pass it down to us. Many were genuinely surprised that we were not grateful for this favour.

These arguments did not wash with us, of course. I was supposed to come closer to my peers after our mutual penis-measuring ceremony. Shared humiliation was supposed to draw us close together. Instead it boxed us into shells. It destroyed our first foray into adulthood. It robbed us of valuable moments in our lives. It turned our first month in college into a nightmare.

As our first year passed, so did memories of our humiliation. Life in the hostel became pleasant once we realized we could walk about with our pants on, and did not need to spring to attention whenever a senior passed us. Six months later, ragging was an amusing episode inour past. Twelve months later, most of us firmly believed it was our duty to pass on the wisdom we had acquired through age and experience. We ragged the next class of freshmen ferociously and methodically, and were genuinely surprised that they were not grateful for this favour.

Some people in my batch forced a freshman to sit on a corn-cob and had him smoke a cigarette with the lit end inside his mouth. That incident became a ragging ‘case’, drew much attention, lead to the expulsion of the raggers, and incited a short-lived signature campaign to defend the raggers as boys having fun. I began a ‘stop ragging’ campaign that died quickly when neither my batch-mates, nor the freshmen I was trying to save, appeared enthusiastic. For my batch-mates, the logic of ragging was irrefutable. They now had happy memories of their own initiation into hostel life, and could not remember ever having disliked it.

For freshmen, getting ragged for a month was a rite of passage that would ensure them free books and the patronage of someone powerful. It was easier to ‘get it over with’ than be ostracized (so they were told) for the rest of their stay in the hostel. When they were led on leashes, some had ingratiating smiles on their faces. My seniors were wrong. I never managed to strike a friendship with any of them, unable to forget the moments of humiliation.

When I left IIT, everyone I counted as a friend was someone I had met after the ragging period. After travelling the entire world, working at many jobs in many capacities and passing through many stages in life, I have never found any use for the education my seniors so generously imparted tome. I was never called upon to suffer humiliation in silence, bark like a dog to break the ice with my peers, managers or sub-ordinates, or insult my co-workers to gain their confidence.

But of course, my seniors had no inkling of the real world themselves. They were newly pubescent boys who fancied themselves to be men. After all the pretentious talk of their responsibility to make men out of us, their entire exercise of power came down to the scrutiny of a shrivelled-up penis, of a modest teenager brought up by conservative parents standing naked amidst ten soulless boys, trembling in horror, his pants wrapped about his ankles. Ragging is a case study for Sigmund Freud, nothing more.

I have often wondered why ragging never comes to an end, in spite of all the noise made about it among professors, politicians and the parents of boys who suffer it. IIT had, in my time, a disciplinary committee of professors whose job was to police ragging by making surprise visits to hostels. They drove in a tell-tale white Maruti van, whose arrival was announced by a freshman posted at the entrance long before the professors had time to open the doors, get out of the van and lumber into the hostel.

The wise professors would find a group of seniors giving an intense tutorial to freshmen on academic life in IIT, and go home to sleep in peace. The disciplinary committee – whose very name made it ridiculous, because we called it ‘disco’ – spent its time discussing cases of ragging, fixing proportionate punishment, deciding what was ‘mental ragging’ and what was ‘physical ragging’ over endless cups of chai in somnolent meetings. Like all other committees, its function was to manage ragging – not stop it – and to prevent incidents of ragging from ballooning into ‘cases’.

Like all other committees, it was also inept at its job, so we had one or two ‘cases’ every year which made their way into newspapers, caused much heartburn, and resulted in the expulsion of those who had ‘overstepped the bounds’, after which everyone was satisfied that something had been done.

I do not want to over-simplify the situation. Even if the faculty at colleges were sincere about stopping ragging, and even if they had the support of student representatives, it is unlikely that ragging will completely stop. Educational seminars, sensitization classes and information dissemination may help but, as the all-forgiving cliche insists, boys will be boys. I remember how we sniggered at such lectures, how little respect we had for all attempts to discipline us, and with what ridicule we regarded the notice saying ‘Ragging is banned in the Institute’.

Years later, when I went back to teach in IIT, I asked my students – all freshmen – whether they were being ragged in their hostels, and if I could do anything to help them. We have no such thing nowadays, I was told. Your time is now gone, they said, as are the problems of your time. I knew they were lying, and there was little I could do about it.

Ragging is not an exclusively Indian phenomenon. We have no monopoly on brutality. Hazing rituals are common in the ‘Greek societies’ on American campuses. My room-mate at Berkeley nearly died at an initiation ritual in his fraternity, where he was made to drink many glasses of vodka in a short period of time. There is a very important difference between hazing in Greek societies and ragging in Indian college hostels. Membership to a Greek society is voluntary. Those who study at a university do not have to become members, and most do not. Those who study in IIT must become members of hostels – this may have changed since my days – and suffer the humiliation that comes with it.

Aside from the Greek societies, however, there is little or no raggingin the dormitories on American campuses. At my dormitory in Berkeley, we went on an overnight retreat and had coffee-socials to break the ice between newcomers and old-timers. We ate together, chatted, played racquet ball and squash, watched football games, and these brought us closer.

The very concept of ragging was unknown. I cannot say this with certainty, but this may be because American college students are much closer to adulthood. Many are already in their twenties, most have to earn their way through college or take loans to pay for their education, and almost all are on their own. Their attitude to college is very different from that of Indian boys, who have been dispatched to the campus by loving parents, borne on a cushion of money and support that they did not earn.

A college campus cannot exist completely outside the system that enfolds it. The prevention of ragging through draconian rules may be impossible. You cannot imprison freshmen into a hostel of their own, forbid contact between freshmen and seniors, or electrocute seniors who humiliate a freshman. Many of the frustrations that a student expresses through ragging are really brought by him from the world outside the campus. Given a chance to release those feelings, he will.

The reason there is little or no ragging on American campuses may just be that college students are adults, and are treated as such. They do not spring up with a ‘Sir’ when professors walk in, they are encouraged to argue and protest, they live in relatively free environments where the only restricted activity is that which harms others.

If Indian students were shown the same respect, they may begin to find ragging juvenile. There remains no reason, in the twenty first century, to segregate voting-age adults into unisex dormitories. Boys and girls should live in the same hostel. They should come to their hostels and leave them as they please, with no curfew hours. They should be allowed to mix freely, speak freely, and enjoy every privilege an adult is entitled to. They are eighteen, they can take care of themselves. Should they violate rules or break the law, they should receive proportionate punishment. These ideas may create conditions that make ragging redundant and allow it to wither away.

[This article was written by Sujit Saraf for StopRagging.org in July 2004. He  is a film-maker and playwright who lives in California. He has been associated with IIT Delhi both as a student and an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is author of the novel The Peacock Throne. An abridged version of this essay was published in Tehelka.]

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