Ragging has become one of the reasons behind the suicide taking place in our country. Ragging is unsocial in nature. Nowadays ragging has become a common picture in todays college, universities which includes assault, physical harassment, mental torture by the seniors to their juniors which in many extreme cases led to suicide. It has been debated for ages, and preventive measures have been taken to eradicate ragging from the education system of India. This kind of act is not at all acceptable. Many cases of ragging has been reported by the all over the country, and west Bengal is one of them where students humiliated from ragging commit suicide.
Ragging in institutions of higher education is rampant across India. The dictionary describes the word as ‘to engage in rough play, ‘tease’, and ‘play rough jokes on’. Often the rough play is rougher than mere ‘rough’. Negativity is the biggest curse of India. We have young people who are not actually young in spirit and soul. The youth is lack luster. The youth doesn’t have the necessary hope, enthusiasm and positive gush. The youth lacks the very essence of youth.
There are many factors like intoxication, unemployment, and compartmentalization of society responsible for this dull state of Indian youth. Ragging is also one factor affecting potentially bright young people. It’s more tragic because it demoralizes the talented. Ragging generates the cycle of negativity. It robs a young mind of a sense of self-respect. It generates fear psychosis. It produces a cynical, dirty-minded, bitter, and battered youth, eager to take revenge the next year. It’s a perfect system of chain reaction.
The curse of ragging is more serious than it is often visualized to be. President Patil has taken up this cause time and again. Many sober and sensible Governors of various Indian states have also issued strict dictates. But the problem has percolated down the surface. It starts by compelling the fresher to use dirty and abusive language. It goes on to compel the poor fresher to listen to ‘your mother’, ‘your sister’ stuff; then comes obscene gesturing. There are naked parades in the hostels at the dead of the nights. It’s, in fact, quite scary to imagine what our young people go through in order to become graduates.
The Indian society at large is insensitive to this cancer of ragging in our institutions of higher learning. The common Indian often laughs when ragging is mentioned. From nudity, ragging graduates to physical torture, public disgrace and mental torture. I’ve seen many people asking, ‘How many fists?’ It means that how many public slaps have been borne by you in your ragging.
Another boy, son of a colleague reported that in a National Institute of Technology, ten freshers were forced to sleep together in one bed. It indicates to again very horrible trends of forcing behavioral patterns. The horror stories are endless. We’ve all heard of young people committing suicide as a result of ragging. In extreme conditions, when the fresher is unable to protect her/his self-respect, disastrous, irrevocable incidents happen.
Parents, teachers, students and educational administrators need to be educated. Wardens alone can solve 80% of the menace. The dragon in the name of a senior also knows that s/he has secured a place in a professional institute with much labor and s/he cannot afford to lose that admission to a professional institute. I’ve also seen a so called omnipotent senior begging and crying and licking feet of a junior when the junior reported the horror of ragging to watchful administration of a medical college. An FIR had been lodged.
Ragging generates a sense of helplessness in freshers. A hostel means captivity. There is a prevalent sense of fear. ‘Don’t move alone; go in groups; don’t go out after it’s dark; never go when seniors call you to a lonely spot; keep heads down; keep very short hair’ – these are common sentences floating among freshers. This is how we welcome our future generations into colleges; into the dirty world of adulthood. There have been so many champions of noble causes fulfilling their mission; why it doesn’t work for these young and helpless youngsters?
Why a young mind has to be forced to believe that all that was taught in school was wrong? The quotes of Gandhi and Lincoln were wrong. The schoolteacher was wrong. Patriotic and idealistic poems were wrong. The only ‘guru’ is the rascal ‘senior’. Why a fresher can’t be allowed to sleep timely, if s/he wishes to. Why the adult world has to be so cheap, vulgar, drugged, boozed, corrupt and unhealthy? Why can’t someone pray? Why can’t someone be allowed to maintain the good qualities of childhood? Don’t all great people say, ‘Keep the child alive in you’?
The psychological impact of ragging is far too deep for us to gauge normally. It creates an evil adult. It inculcates distrust. It teaches suspicion. It kills innocence.
Sports facilities, openness, psychological help centers, aware administrators, and informed parents can eliminate this artificially created tragedy in our society. Even caste angles have been reported. One boy in an engineering college was brutally beaten. With each thrash, the words came, ‘How are you feeling, Thakur saab? How it goes, Zamindaar Saab?’ In fact, seniors of the reserved categories were doing social justice to a young, poor fresher! These are very true, very real and alas! very common incidents.
Crime has no caste, no category. Ragging should be put at par with rape in the book of law. Speedy and exemplary punishment can solve the issue for ever. We need sensitive leaders who understand psychological trauma of confused, pained, roaming, restless, young minds. The silver lining is that it is not an incurable disease. There are oases in the desert where dynamic institutional heads have kept this curse away from their boundaries.
Rooting Out Ragging
Terrible stories of murder, abuse, violence, and trauma in the name of ragging have been reported from educational institutions all over the country once again. In recent years, ragging has been banned in many universities. In May 2001, the Supreme Court held that "if an institution fails to curb ragging, the UGC/Funding Agency may consider stoppage of financial assistance to such an institution till such time as it achieves the same. An University may consider disaffiliating a college or institution failing to curb ragging."
This judgement was the result of a public interest litigation that pointed out the ill-effects of ragging on students and argued that ragging is not part of Indian culture. Rather than thinking of ragging as a practice that is "alien" to our culture, it is important to re-think about ragging, and look at it as part of a culture that pervades Indian educational institutions. We need to examine how and why students imitate, adopt or innovate techniques of violence found in other social contexts, and why these forms of violence are not named as injurious when inflicted in the context of ragging.
The origins of ragging have been traced back to an institutional form of sociality that has been described variously as "a rite of passage", "fun" and "subversive". As a rite of passage, ragging has been seen to mark the transition of schoolchildren to college students, and from children to adults. It has been seen as liminal time during which formal admission to the college does not automatically secure one the status of an undergraduate student. Also, we are often told that ragging is subversive of existent social and administrative hierarchies.
However, to be anti-structure, students must possess a critical awareness of the techniques of power through which social and academic identities may be subverted.
It can be argued further that since educational institutions also operate as regimes of discipline and surveillance to make students docile so that they do not threaten existent academic hierarchies, ragging marks a temporal span in which students are allowed breach of discipline. Hence, existent social and academic hierarchies align with permissive institutional norms in a way that ragging becomes a site where trauma is visited.
We know that ragging that denigrates, humiliates, injures and/or is violent leads to high rates of dropouts and even suicides, rape or murder. The term "ragging" has made the routine harassment and violence that new students face into something normal. Such that while we may have laws that ban ragging, somewhere the idea that ragging is merely fun and mischief still dominates the way the issue is treated. The form ragging very often takes ranges from the "benign" forms - performing servile tasks for seniors - to extreme forms of sexual abuse such as stripping, public parading, sexual molestation and rape.
Forms of ragging that aim to sexually denigrate are premised on the idea that hierarchy between students is sexualized, that sexual humiliation is the normative mode of exerting power and that freshmen are available for sexual violence. The fresher is seen as lacking in power, autonomy or dignity, hence her or his body is up for grabs. In extreme forms of ragging, a violent exertion of power and sexual indignity seems to be combined in macabre ways. Why is it that surviving sexual abuse becomes a test - to prove a gendered identity, and the capacity of being an adult?
The trauma is then carried over to the following academic year - to be inflicted on the next batch of freshmen. The idea built into this cycle of wounding is that the cost can be exacted after another year by repetition. And this assures the continuity of ragging as a dominant form of student sociality each year.
In cases of brutalization, the promise of the transformation of the victim to the perpetrator is deferred over a temporal span of the academic calendar. It is this period - between the end of first semester of an academic year and the beginning of the first semester of the following academic year - that lies forgotten in the indulgent bureaucratic reckoning of ragging as a disciplinary problem. For, bureaucracies see this period as productive of normalcy. It's almost as if they say - 'back to discipline and forget the effects of ragging as wounding'.
The intergenerational infliction of wounds on all new entrants irrespective of the stage at which entry is enacted in the academia is part and parcel of every educational institution. However, the question remains - What is it about the imagination of "institutional space" that normalizes terrible forms of violence by calling it ragging?
It is a fact that such acts of violence in other contexts would be named as murder, rape, torture, riot and abuse. Policy measures cannot grapple with the problem unless it is clear what ragging means, and whether ragging takes on different fields of meanings over time and in different institutional contexts.
Apart from a commitment to redressal mechanisms, we need to institutionalize prevention of abuse that is perpetrated in the name of "ragging", and build in deterrence into the annual calendar rather than merely regulating the effects of "ragging" during the first semester.
We also need to strenuously challenge virtual censorship on complaints of ragging, once complainants go public. In other words, we must ask ourselves how we can institutionalize cultures of care, dignity and respect in spaces of learning, and challenge the pedagogies of ragging which popularize techniques of violence.
Shinning Like a Pole Star...
Ragging can spoil one’s career, but it can make it too… As it did for Subodh Pattanaik, the doyen of Odiya Theatre. Subodh was a student of science when he joined his college. In an instance of ragging, he was severely beaten up by his seniors and in order to take retaliation, he joined a group of gangsters. All this entangled him in a police case.
To escape from the situation, Subodh went under ground by joining a theatre troupe. Destiny made him meet a student studying the course of Drama from Utkal University. Subodh was fascinated to know that its teachers were the top actors of Odiya film industry. He took the challenging decision of joining the course on Drama. His parents did not comply with him but he stood firm and did his intermediate, graduation and post graduation in Drama from Utkal University.
Subodh, being a brilliant student since his childhood secured top position in all his exams. With the assistance of his star teachers, he got an opportunity to act in Odiya movies. His shining career as an actor took a U-turn, when he met with an accident and broke his ribs that did not allow him to bend. So, Subodh shifted to theatre direction. He worked as an Assistant Director for few years. But the harsh realities of glamour world detached him from continuing it. He realized that his artistic skill was not given due prominence.
He found his way into theatre. On 10 Nov. 1986 at an age of 21, he laid down the foundation of Natya Chetana (creating awareness through theatre). His journey to bring social changes commenced.
The first three years were a phase of learning through mistakes. Subodh discovered two new theatre models, ‘Cyco Theatre’ and ‘Intimate Theatre’ which aspires to bring psychological change amongst the rural and urban people respectively.
Subodh entered into a relationship by marrying Mamata in 1989. Mamta is an Ayurvedic doctor who works with international health organizations like UNICEF, UN etc. She also provides financial support to Subodh’s innovation.
He made his first international performance at South Asia Festival in Nepal. Sice then, the world was his and Natya Chetna has been performing on several international stages like that of Belgium, France, Netherland, Hong Kong etc. Subodh has not only rocked international audience but has also broken the silence of National School of Drama, Delhi and Nandikar Theatre Festival, West Bengal.
‘Blue Gold’ was a brilliant innovation by him. It so happened that the theatre artists of Belgium challenged him to direct a multilingual play. Subodh directed a play that was performed by two artists each from Belgium, Africa, Palestine and Odisha. He has also directed several other fusion plays like “No man’s land” which is a conglomeration of Indo-French style. In 2001, the multi talented director got the honor of being appointed as the General Secretary of IDEA (International Drama / Theatre and Education Association).
He has written and directed about 20 long and 35 short plays. He is a hard working man who believes in creativity and commitment. He sleeps on floor, eats with his subordinates, wear ordinary clothes. At the same time, he also travels in aeroplanes, resides in five star hotels and is acquainted with modern technologies. Subodh is a local man with an international repute. At present, he conducts both creative and administrative work of Natya Chetana.
Subodh is a learner who is an inspiration for the learned.
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