Opinion A question from Kolkata: Can a teacher be hot?

This week, it has come to light that an assistant professor at Kolkata’s St Xavier’s University was forced to quit last year for posting pictures of herself in a swimsuit on Instagram. The photos from her account had been accessed by an 18-year-old student, whose father caught him in the act, and complained to the university that it was obscene and improper to see the professor dressed in scanty clothes. The professor was asked to resign and now the university has charged her with a defamation notice of Rs 99 crore.

The image of the female teacher in India, like much else, is a construct of the male fantasy. For decades, teaching — whether in a school, college or university — was seen as an extension of femininity and motherhood, like nursing or caregiving. The teacher is expected to be a role model or a mentor, specifically a nurturing mother, devoid of all sexual appeal or desire. The teacher can be a lot of things, graceful or stylish or refined — but hot, not quite. Like Malhotra attempts, the body of the teacher is regulated under the guise of eliminating distractions. In my brief career as a young academic, it was also routine to hear that teaching was an ideal job for a woman, that it would allow her to “balance” home and career.

Women in STEM and academia gave something wonderful to young girls — the understanding that beauty is irrelevant, that intelligence is interesting. Yet, that very notion of going past our bodily fixations and choosing to turn our gaze at something beyond the perfect face got diluted into a stereotype. American pop culture and its tradition of anti-intellectualism make the female professor into a lonely, sweater-clad nerd, who has cats for company, never dates or is divorced, and whose plants die on her. It’s the price these old maids pay for choosing a career.

Being a teacher is not a seductive proposition, therefore. Unsurprisingly, it has a polar opposite. Hot Teacher, much like Hot Priest, exists as one of those forbidden pleasures of life. In an educational environment, the figure of the Hot Teacher erupts like an anomaly. Again, it’s male fantasy that likes to see gender expressions in dichotomies, and the Hot Teacher puts sex appeal in a space that is intent on stamping it out.

Think of Main Hoon Na (2004). Sushmita Sen plays a new chemistry teacher on campus and there is a whole lot of saris fluttering in the breeze, music in the air and come-hither glances being thrown about. In one song, classroom paraphernalia merges with forests and waterfalls, as Miss Chandni makes some serpentine moves in a shimmering sari. A formula for ethylene ozonide is thrown in the background for good measure.

The Hot Teacher is admissible in fantasy but not reality. Yet, as it turns out, anyone who’s been to college has a story about a Hot Teacher. As a friend says, it’s common to hear men say that their first crush was their nursery or primary school teacher. The problem is when the Hot Teacher knows that she is a Hot Teacher. It’s as inadmissible as a short skirt.

In the case of the forced resignation of the assistant professor from St Xavier’s, the academic posted her photographs on her personal, private account before she took the job — reasons that have been cited as supporting her case. She had filed an FIR with the Kolkata Police claiming that her Instagram account might have been hacked. Yet, should she have chosen to post her swimsuit pictures publicly on social media, for all to see, while on the job, that is also perfectly acceptable. Miss Braganza would have surely approved.

Benita.fernando@expressindia.com