When the hostel goes missing from the imagination of education

That hostel life is part of the academic experience is tacit common knowledge, but it is seldom articulated. The same university or college can mean very different things to the same batch of students, depending on who lived in the hostel and who dealt with the realities of a rented room. I am not talking of the nostalgia that hostel memories inevitably carry. Nor am I referring to matters like exclusion and discrimination — all too common in Indian higher education. The matter calls for a different kind of inquiry.

Gwyer Hall, Delhi University’s prestigious hostel for men, can be a suitable starting point for this excavation. I have never lived there; only passed by it, except on two occasions when I went in. As a passerby, walking towards the Delhi Ridge, you feel as if the architectural grandeur of a quiet building is staring at you, inviting you. If you go inside, rows of palm trees and gracefully laid-out corridors around generous lawns invite you to devote at least a part of the day to reading a book. Lucky are the young men who get accommodation here. Others who find their names among those admitted to the adjoining Jubilee Hall are also lucky. The vast majority must accept living in the rough worlds of the neighbouring nagars surrounding Delhi University’s North Campus. The accommodation these youth hubs offer may be congested, but Satya Niketan is a different world.

Looking at Praveen Khanna’s photograph of this habitation, published in this newspaper a few days ago, one is reminded of the saying: A picture is worth a thousand words. You just can’t describe what you see, except by using stock phrases like narrow lanes and tangled wires. It takes a courageous mind and a positive spirit to imagine a student living in a Satya Niketan lane. You shudder while bringing into focus this student’s hopes and perseverance nurtured, perhaps in a village, and applied to the heroic form-filling required for the Common University Entrance Test.

This mode of admission has been introduced to encourage trans-regional mobility. Several other steps have also been taken in recent years to promote geographical mobility so that nation-building can continue in the digital age. You wonder how the idea of purposeful mobility was not accompanied by a plan to build hostels. Perhaps it was a problem of money, or more likely a gap in imagination. Satya Niketan has brought to life a satya that will haunt Indian higher education for a while.

There are universities and colleges in countries where admission to first year compels a student to live in a hostel. Such a policy represents the recognition of the hostel as a means of induction, not just introduction, into a community of knowledge. Gracing the initial year of undergraduate education with such epithets sounds strange: It is, in fact, alien to a scenario like ours where the first-year student spends long humid afternoons standing in queues outside windows serving the newly arrived with suspicious glances. I once met a mother crying in the corridor. The verification clerk had noticed that the English spelling of her daughter’s name in a document did not match older certificates. The originals had been issued in Hindi; the daughter had created the English spelling to fill in the digital application form. I suppose this story is a bit dated, given that a young person can now lose her vote on account of spelling discrepancies.

Owners of private rooms available on rent don’t impose elaborate procedures. They just want the rent on time. Nor are they responsible for the width of the lane outside. And a bookshelf is not a recognised necessity, nor is a table lamp. Colleges are equally indifferent to their students’ out-of-class, daily life experience. Only three of the seven colleges in the vicinity of Satya Niketan have hostels — small ones that accommodate just a fraction of the total strength. And teachers are also not expected to distinguish the hostellers from the day scholars — an old term that doesn’t distinguish between commuters and occupiers of fragile buildings.

The writer is former director, NCERT