When I was finishing my schooling, I exulted at the thought of attending the University of Delhi, as a whole galaxy of students across India does for the fabled DU (as some sort of a social prestige-conferring El Dorado – the elusive city of gold!).
However, my experience at DU was quite different from my fancies.
The entire three years I spent in my Bachelors doing History Hons. at Ramjas College, DU, was a hard-hitting lesson in the inequities of the society which, for the first time, I was to make sense of on my own – in a much more blatant way than ever before.
While the academic credentials of DU can hardly be questioned as a premier institution of knowledge, I found its social profile highly skewed. Most people who make it here are from middle to upper-class backgrounds and, as caste has a certain relation to one’s class, upper caste. Part of it is structural: it has disproportionately few hostels, and consequently, the avaricious landlords around have reaped a profitable business out of rent harvesting.
Even with the limited number of hostels, they charge many times more than, say, a JNU hostel. Thus, a student, even from the most marginalised background, has to expend atleast a minimum of around Rs. 7-8k per month to survive. In the backdrop of these realities, the survival of a first-generation learner could be pretty daunting here, for example, like me.
Paradoxically, more elitism was prevalent in the humanities departments such as History, English, and Political Science.
Though while I was at DU, the everyday experiences of subtle (and not-so-subtle) social iniquities had bred in me resentments, my experience was more individualised, shared by a few friends of mine. However, new realisations dawned upon me after joining Jawaharlal Nehru University for my Masters (which I found a comparatively more egalitarian space in terms of class experience as compared to DU). There, in my conversations with friends and acquaintances, my experiences got generalised, as almost all of them confirmed the same pattern of a grievous class divide and elitism at DU, from whichever college of DU they belonged.
Let me list the common observations we arrived at.
What Unites DU?
The classroom could be observed to be demarcated into three rows of students which, on the face of it, looked innocuous but had a pattern to it if carefully observed: the students from well-off backgrounds invariably clustered in the first row; the middling ones in the middle row and; the most marginalised ones and others, such as those opting courses in Hindi medium, were to be found in the third row.
I personally found myself either in the second or the third row but rarely in the first. Perhaps I was somewhere in the middle as I was conversant in English but didn’t boast of a privileged social class. As can be anticipated, there was minimal interaction between these three rows (no one wanted to break their comfort zones).
However, what was ironic was the near total apathy of the privileged students towards the less privileged. It felt as if the former was impervious and indifferent to the latter’s presence. If ever, it was always someone from the latter who tried to break the ice by taking the initiative, but never someone from the former.
And what was infuriating was the mutual incompatibility of the progressive ideas many of these privileged students held, in consonance with the intellectual requirements of the university and the faithful adherents of the status quo that they were.
It seemed that all the theories of great thinkers and all the progressive ideals of subaltern alleviation were more of academic fads with these students and rarely about praxis. The dichotomy between the letter and spirit couldn’t be glaring to the eyes more. So, this apathy translated into not just an unofficial demarcation of the physical space in the classroom but ramified into all forms of social relations we shared as classmates (“classmates”, atleast in the official sense of the term).
This incompatibility of ideas and behaviour verged on hypocrisy if analysed by the tenets of those very students who held, atleast in the letter, that it was privileged who had more onus of taking the initiative and integrating the less privileged into the “mainstream”. However, this class repudiated its own ideas in practice when it failed to acknowledge the presence of other social classes in the classroom.
From the foregoing, I do not mean to conclude that all promises of progressivism at DU are a sham, nor do I mean to attack progressive ideas themselves, much less the more positive aspects of DU. However, my criticism comes from my predominant experience at DU from a certain social class.
Hence, I mean to do an “internal criticism”: the class divide at DU is a wide chasm; the privileged classes there have the onus and the responsibility to recognise their class (and, at times, caste) privilege and give space to the less privileged, not just appropriate their voices academically in the name of subaltern/subordinate discourse.
And, at last, a little understanding (if not empathy) can be awakened by recognising the virtues of social egalitarianism in practice. This can only be done by laying down one’s snobbishness – issuing from class privilege – amongst others.