By Sneha Rajaram
I never went to Bangalore’s Mount Carmel College for women. But this 67-year-old autonomous institution, whose principal is traditionally a Carmelite nun, is one place where I’ve always thought I’d never be bored. The “Mount’s girls” seem to always be up to something.
But all that is about to change.
In March, the college applied for permission to enrol – horror of horrors! – boys in their post-graduate courses. And from the next academic year – blasphemy of blasphemies! – these boys will be Enrolled.
At first glance, this seems to be a non-event. Because the Mount’s PG block is across the road from the main college. But until the college issues a statement addressed to me personally, saying that boys will be chained inside the PG block (and none of these new-fangled plastic handcuffs will do for me either), I will not rest in peace. Because I’ve heard that some PG classes take place inside the main campus too. And that would destroy one of the most famous all-female spaces in this city.
Of course, a nominal number of males has always been on campus. Teachers and things like that. (That’s the vague picture in my head. The few times I’ve been on that campus, I never saw any. And I remember a friend’s father being turned away from the gate when he went to pay his daughter’s fees.) But this is very different. I hope I don’t have to explain.
But I never went to Mount’s. My college days weren’t even in Bangalore. So let’s ask “the people” what they think.
The first thing that comes to mind is a certain phenomenon that N, a former Mount’s student, calls the “force field” around the college. From what she says, I gather that in the late 1990s boys were acutely, painfully aware of being in the vicinity of the college. Cousins, friends and suchlike males who ferried students to and from the college would refuse to drop them beyond a certain point – the rationale being that they’d be “seen” dropping a girl off at Mount’s. These boys were only one type, however. They were the “brusque” ones, as N calls them: the you’ll-have-to-walk-down-to-Palace-Road-if-you-want-a-ride ones.
But a former Mount’s lecturer tells me that young men of her acquaintance would quite gratuitously offer to drop her off and pick her up from work in the 1990s. “Nephews, younger friends: They were certainly very prompt about dropping me to college. I found that the Home Science nursery school had more fathers than mothers coming to pick up and drop off their children,” she laughs. They, it seems, wanted to be inside the force field.
N remembers this second type too. “Yes, of course there were the ones who were dying to get in. For instance the motorcycle desperado who drove up the back drive one afternoon as an act of cool, did a wheelie and fell on his face.”
In order to understand this mysterious force field phenomenon, I spoke to some people of the opposite sex. Benson, a Bangalore resident, recalls that as a student of St. Joseph’s college in the early 1990s, he was one of the select few males allowed into the college. But you needed to carry your Joseph’s ID card. During Cul-Ah, the annual Mount Carmel College festival, a bunch of boys would wait outside the college and offer Josephites money for their ID cards. “We would all be cycling and taking buses,” says Benson, “and these guys would be there with expensive cars and bikes.” How much money was he offered? Rs. 200. Back in the early nineties! “There was this hedge,” says Benson (the cigarette company Benson and Hedges comes irrepressibly to mind), “And when you were done on campus you had to pass your ID card through it.” Anything else? I ask him. “The fear, walking down the back drive of the college on a non-Cul-Ah day, if you weren’t in a group,” he says. “You had to really hold yourself together.”
Joshua, a St. Joseph’s PU College student in the early 2000s, tells me more about this “walking down the drive” business. When told that Mount’s was going to admit boys, his first reaction was, “Sad that men won’t be scrutinized while walking down the driveway during Cul-Ah. You know, like everywhere else men would stare and scrutinize women, but here it was turned on its head. And men were scrutinized precisely because they were immigrants. I’ve seen girls whistling at guys. It was quite funny, I used to love it.” I ask him about his role on this “driveway”. Was he a fly on the wall? No, he says, he saw himself “as part of the girls, that was finding these boys hot too”. He adds, “Of course, women and straight men are never allies. Maybe this will allow some sweet gay boy to go to college with his girlfriends.”
It’s clear to me by now that if you were a boy in college in Bangalore, Mount Carmel was on your mind and no two ways about it. Occasionally you’d meet a weird boy who would state with mystifying pride, “I am a student of Mount Carmel College”. When asked, “Eh what?” they’d say “I studied in Mount Carmel nursery”. And sure enough, the Home Science department’s nursery taught toddlers regardless of gender. I suppose that allows you to tell your envious male friends that you’ve been “in there”.
Then there were the ones who tried to monetize the attractions of the force field straight into Creep Land. In the 2000s, a builder who was advertising swanky new apartments next door to Mount’s had a billboard that read: “You’ll have fantastic neighbours”, with a very recognizable photo of the steps in front of the principal’s office, complete with girls walking down them.
These included the flashers lying in wait outside the college, though. When leaving the campus, there was a particular sound flashers used to make to get your attention, says N, and as a student you’d learn not to turn around when you heard it. But when she came back to Mount’s to teach, she’d forgotten and she turned around while eating a guava. She then proceeded to mystify several auto drivers by throwing the pre-cut segments of guava at a flasher as he rode off on his bike. They hadn’t seen his poor little flasher-penis, you see.
Other rumours include a lathi charge against boys who were trying to scale the college walls en masse, a boy found hiding in the girls’ hostel toilet after Cul-Ah, and plainclothes cops in the vicinity (one knows not why, but assumes “force field” is an all-purpose explanation).
Eshwaran, a Bangalore-based engineer, had practical concerns: “Boys in Mount Carmel College? They’ll have to renovate the toilets,” he says. When his male friends’ college band played in Cul-Ah in the mid-2000s, what exercised his imagination the most was what they’d have done if they’d had to go to the toilet.
I know nothing of men’s toilets on the Mount’s campus. The idea has a Yeti-like quality. But of course there are some. Nithin, a male lecturer at Mount Carmel, says that there’s a girls’ student toilet on most floors, and one toilet shared by the lecturers of every few departments. The few male lecturers (who are in the minority) share these toilets with the female lecturers, unless they prefer to use one of the few exclusively male toilets on campus.
So male students may need their own toilets. If colleges be temples of learning, we can quote PM Modi here: “Pehle shauchalaya, phir devalaya”. Just the thought makes it so real. No ethereal male beings prancing light-footed around campus. They’ll have physical bodies that need to pee too. Even more worrisome, N tells me that the hordes of campus dogs once bit only men. Now what? A corporate gender-sensitization seminar for dogs?
So am I being conservative, shuddering at all this? Shouldn’t I know that co-eds are progressive?
I think not. The women’s college, the women’s hostel – these are very interesting spaces. I’ve only been in a women’s hostel for a week, and that was enough to experience a world in which you are not the Other; you are the subject through whose eyes you see the world. There’s no one to shape you through their gaze as a “woman” rather than a “human”. There’s so much more freedom to just settle down and inhabit your mind comfortably – no need for half of your mind to constantly work on “re-subjectifying” yourself, inverting the gaze that yanks your eyes out of your own head and makes you look at yourself as a “woman”. Like when you visit a foreign country and have to be constantly converting their currency to yours in order to get an idea of the price.
In addition to this, studies suggest that women receive better education in women’s colleges because male students tend to hog attention in classrooms.
A study at Indiana University finds in favour of women’s colleges: compared to women in co-ed institutions, women’s college students showed more progress in areas like academic and intellectual development, academic involvement, intellectual self-confidence, self-perceived academic ability, self-esteem and confidence, and leadership development.
And another one at Harvard finds that:
So far we have isolated four factors which contribute to giving women students less access to discourse than men: their demographic status as members of a minority in the classroom; their inability or unwillingness to compete against men; their vulnerability to interruption; and the fact that men and women talk in runs, which tends to keep female participation low.
When N’s mother first encouraged her to apply to a women’s college, she thought it was for conservative reasons. But her mother said, “It’ll be good for you,” and N is glad she listened. “It was a liberating three years,” she says.
The former Mount’s lecturer I talked to has mixed feelings about the announcement: “It’s sad that that kind of safe space for women won’t be there anymore. But at the same time it’s good that they’re taking on boys. It’ll be like introducing aliens in human society!”