Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Times they certainly are a-changing. The final confirmation of this incontrovertible fact has just come in. So prepare to doff the old mortar board as Delhi8217;s most ancient college, St. Stephen8217;s, which traces its antiquity to the Year of Our Lord 1881, unlocks its residential blocks to women.
Now why must one institution8217;s admission norms provoke such excitement among the cognoscenti and hoi polloi alike, when there are thousands and thousands of colleges strewn all over the country? Ah, but St. Stephen8217;s is not just any institution. Arguably, it has produced more civil servants, novelists and editors per square metre of classroom space and per inch of blackboard chalk than all the others put together.
There was also that memorable moment when the late Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq returned to the bosom of his alma mater in celebration of its hundred years of existence, signalling to the world that there are some institutions that can, come what may, never be partitioned.
Unless, that is, it was along lines of gender. St. Stephen8217;s was a largely grey-suited eminence, existing in a predominantly male universe which came, in those good old days before statutory health warnings, with the faintest whiff of fine-cut tobacco and aftershave cologne. Apart from a brief spell in the Forties, its gates remained firmly closed to the female student.
There8217;s nothing to be surprised here. After all it was an era when God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. Women, having had the misfortune of being born of Adam8217;s Rib, would necessarily have to reconcile themselves to lesser institutions of learning.
But time passes, how it passes. Outside the wrought iron gates of this male bastion a great deal was happening, and not just the burning of offensive underwear in distant climes. For one, the country acquired a woman Prime Minister, one who was described as the only man in her cabinet and had little patience with democratic norms, but a woman nevertheless.
In Los Angeles 1984, it was a woman athlete that had the nation on the edge; in Bombay it was a woman doctor who produced the nation8217;s first test tube baby; in the skies there was a woman captaining an Indian Airlines flight. What is more, when the results came out of every school board examination in the country, the girls seemed to be getting better with every passing year.
The writing on the blackboard was clear enough. When the gates of St. Stephen8217;s opened decisively for women students in the early Nineties there may have been many who rued the death of the old order and hoary traditions. They will be even more distressed to learn that the living quarters too are now to be encroached upon. But even 115-year-olds have to keep up with the times or get left out, or so it seems.
