The Real Culprit Behind the Death of the Jadavpur University Student is Patriarchy

Unless we are prepared to acknowledge these questions and take institutional steps to answer them, such incidents will continue to take place.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Niladri Chatterjee, The Wire : As many know by now, on August 9, a 17-year-old first semester undergraduate student fell from the second floor of Kolkata’s Jadavpur University Main Hostel, where he had just become a boarder. He died at a hospital the next day. 

We are quick to identify patriarchy as the root cause of any kind of violence only when the act is perpetrated on women by men. What this analysis does is occlude the way not just inter-gender, but also intra-gender violence is an enactment of patriarchy.

As early as 1969, Kate Millett had said that a patriarchal society is a society ‘organised along the principles of men dominating women and older men dominating younger men, with the family being the unit of the patriarchal whole’. The emphasis is mine.

It has now been established beyond reasonable doubt that the undergraduate was the victim of ragging perpetrated on him by boarders who were all older than him. These boarders were not all senior students. A few had long ceased to be students of the university, but had stayed on. 

To understand how patriarchy lies at the heart of the malaise called ragging, one has to understand how patriarchy works. It is a violent structure that constantly renews its acceptability in society by presenting itself as a ‘loving and caring’ one. Thus, ‘loving and caring’ parents force their children to study subjects that are not to the children’s liking, to take up jobs that leave the children unhappy, and to marry a person that makes their marital life one of anguish.

It is the same ‘loving and caring’ patriarchy that seeks to ‘protect’ women by restricting their movements, dictating their clothing, even prescribing the amount of food that is suitable for women (less than the amount allowed for their brothers and husbands, of course). Ragging is one such ‘loving and caring’ activity that hostel seniors enjoy subjecting their juniors to in the name of ‘building their character,’ and ostensibly toughening them up for the big, bad world outside.

Most bizarrely, ragging is justified by the claim that it helps to create an atmosphere of friendship amongst the boarders.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

A few years ago, in one of my morning classes, I was not a little annoyed to see a student struggling to keep his eyes open even though he was sitting on the first bench. I decided not to jump to the usual conclusion that he was insulting me by implying that my class was boring. I asked him why he was so sleepy. He confessed that he had not been able to sleep the previous night. I asked him why. He simply said that he was a hostel boarder. I understood.

My immediate thought was to get him out of the hostel, but I soon realised that he was not the only student of his batch who had been kept awake all night, and that removing one student from the hostel would not solve the problem. I kept checking on him. Eventually he said that the ragging had stopped because now there were newer boarders. I was numbed at the ease with which he said those words. Like numerous other patriarchal systems at work in society, ragging continues because of a general agreement that ‘it is good for you.’

When R.W. Connell theorised ‘hegemonic masculinity’ – a crucial part of what evolved into Masculinity Studies – she also theorised ‘complicit masculinity’ and ‘subordinate masculinity’. All three kinds of masculinity are in constant evidence at boys’ hostels. ‘Hegemonic masculinity’ belongs to the seniors, ‘complicit masculinity’ belongs to all the men associated with the hostel who allow the seniors unfettered freedom to nakedly exhibit their ‘power’, and ‘subordinate masculinity’ belongs to the freshers. The brutal irony is that today’s ‘subordinate masculinity’ can, and often does, become tomorrow’s ‘complicit’ or ‘hegemonic masculinity’.

These men create a micro-patriarchal society in the hostel and effectively become a law unto themselves; so much so that even the police is not allowed entry into the hostel unless the university authority in charge of the concerned hostel allows such an intervention. A sense of impunity encases these boarders and it empowers them even to make lewd remarks at inhabitants of other residential buildings in the locality. It goes without saying that these lewd remarks are essentially patriarchal in nature: objectifying the women in the neighbourhood and shouting salacious suggestions at them are all seen as ‘harmless, high-spirited fun’.

What we forget is that these men eventually get married and bring to the marriage all of the misogyny that they have trained themselves in over all their school, college, and university years. It is these men who, ‘trapped’ in unhappy marriages, flood social media with memes that make fun of married women.

Their ‘love’ for their girlfriends and later wives are of a piece with the ‘loving and caring’ patriarchy that I spoke about earlier. They learn to identify the feminine as the real enemy. They demand ‘true femininity’ from their girlfriends and wives: silence. Therefore, it is only to be expected that boys’ hostels are marked by loud and proud declarations of homophobia (because gay men are regarded by these men as being ‘not quite men’) and transphobia.

According to reports, one of the last words heard from the student who died was a declaration that he is not gay.

It is clear therefore that he was subjected to ragging that was, among other things, homophobic, and it goes without saying that homophobia and transphobia are as patriarchal as misogyny or indeed, misandry.

Why is male homosexuality so threatening to these – presumably 100% heterosexual – men? It is simply because they fear that the male homosexual would objectify them exactly the way they themselves objectify women. They are happy to demean but will not be demeaned themselves.

Tied to the notion of objectification is the idea of the body; the body as the object, the body as a presence that is not human unless society declares it to be so. What is deeply patriarchal about René Descartes’ notorious declaration ‘cogito ergo sum‘ (I think, therefore I am) is that it is thought that gives the body any identity. Therefore, the mind is assigned a superior position with respect to the body. In various cultures across the world, women are denied opportunities to fully develop their minds lest they cease to be purely just bodies. So, in patriarchal culture, mind becomes gendered male, and body, female.

Therefore, the best way to ‘feminise’ and therefore disempower a man is to strip him naked, against his will. We have repeatedly seen visual examples of how groups of men have been stripped naked in order to dehumanise and therefore feminize them: be it the Jews at Nazi concentration camps or the prisoners at Abu Ghraib or indeed Dalit men in India. The student at Jadavpur University hostel was also stripped naked, thereby dehumanising and ‘feminising’ him at one and the same time. So, the nudity thrust upon him was also a patriarchal act.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

While I believe that patriarchy is ultimately responsible for the horrific incident, what we have to understand is that very often, if not always, it is the parents who train their children in patriarchy with much ‘loving care’. How often have we heard a parent tell their son who has come home crying from school because he has been bullied, ‘Don’t cry like a girl! Fight like a boy!’? Boys are taught, often by their parents, that violence is the correct way to solve all problems. Gradually boys learn to be verbally violent – a common form of ragging is to ask a fresher how many swear words he knows – and then to be physically violent. Soon they are also encouraged to be violent to their own body – destroy the lungs by smoking, destroy the liver by drinking, destroy the skull by not wearing a helmet while riding a bike! – and thus consolidate the prized position of being ‘a real man’. 

‘Real men don’t rape!’ 

No, ‘real men’ give rape threats, I presume.

Now, across West Bengal, there’s a rush to install CCTV cameras in all nooks and crannies of college and university hostels. This is a classic example of treating the symptom and not the disease. CCTV cameras can record and monitor the comings and goings along hostel corridors, but how do we record and monitor the widespread encouragement of patriarchal behaviour that is responsible for cases such as the one that has happened?

How do we stop the casual patriarchy that is spouted by college and university teachers inside the classroom? How do we stop the pervasive disparaging of the feminine in a society where the only normal and acceptable is the hegemonic masculine? Unless we are prepared to acknowledge these questions and take institutional steps to answer them, such incidents will continue to take place. We will express our deepest condolences and then return to our deepest patriarchal comfort zones, as if all is well.

Niladri R. Chatterjee is professor at the department of English, University of Kalyani. His latest book is titled Entering the Maze: Queer Fiction of Krishnagopal Mallick.

Courtesy & source- The Wire