12 Mar 2009,

PTI / The Times of India

GUNTUR: A student of agriculture engineering attempted to commit suicide after her hostel mates allegedly made her dance
nude as part of ragging today, police said.

The 20-year-old student of the Government Agriculture Engineering College in Baptla town here consumed pesticides after senior girls in the hostel, she was staying with forced her to dance in front of them without clothes, they said.

She was rushed to hospital where she regained consciousness tonight and narrated her tale of woe to her parents and media.

The police have registered a case of ragging.

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.

[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.]

There have been interesting responses to this article: Annie Zaidi | Sunil Deepak | Saurabh Nanda | Jaya Jha