A carefully spaced gap runs through the middle of most college classrooms in Kerala, dividing the seats into a section for the female students and another for the male students. The thought of seating queer students in a third section must not have yet crossed the minds of whoever designs these peculiar arrangements even in 2023. Seating arrangements may be the least of concerns of students, given the plethora of segregation and sexist rules that are still so rampant in Kerala’s colleges. Unbelievably barbaric accounts of moral policing in colleges have come tumbling out in the past few days, following student protests after the suicide of 20-year-old Sradha Satheesh at the Amal Jyothi College of Engineering in Kottayam.
In Sradha’s case, the college authorities allegedly harassed her mentally before she attempted death by suicide. In the days that followed, students came out in hundreds, protesting the alleged dictatorial behavior of the college. Many former students too shared stories of how their phones were taken away, their privacy was not valued, and how hostel wardens slut-shamed female students in filthy language. They were even told off for smiling after a certain time in the evening, students told TNM.
Watch: Amal Jyothi students speak to TNM
The sad part is that Amal Jyothi is not an exception. Colleges across Kerala have always been known for their moral policing stands including frowning at interactions between male and female students, yelling at or singling out students they think are “lost to the folly of college relationships”, and playing the role of watchdogs to catch the slightest hint of romance blossoming, among others.
The UC College in Aluva once went to the extent of chopping off a beautiful green lawn in front of the main building after a male and a female student were spotted together there, a student told us. This is the college where a MeToo movement began against a professor in 2020, after which he was removed as Head of a Department. In another college in nearby Irinjalakuda, teachers were tasked with monitoring students in front of the stairs, gates and even the toilets to make sure the ‘boys and girls did no talk too much’, a student says. Apparently a diary was kept for this.
Phone bans in college hostels are also not uncommon. Amal Jyothi students and alumni shared many shocking stories about mobile phone policing after Sradha’s death. One former student recalled how he missed learning about his grandfather’s passing because he was not allowed to use a phone. When he finally got to his phone, there were 90 missed calls. His family told him that they had informed the college, but the authorities denied this. He also told TNM how his phone was confiscated in the first year and even though his mother spoke to the college, they refused to return it until his final year. When he went to get it back in the final year, his phone was no longer there, but he found a number of phones locked -- those which were taken from students, some of them dating back to many years before he had even joined.
An alumnus of the Amrita Institute in Kochi said that her hostel was no better. Not only were they not allowed to use phones, but were forcefully made to attend morning prayers and evening bhajans. Another Amrita alumni said that phones were kept away and the students had to wait at 8 pm by the landline for their parents to call. Incoming calls would be transferred to them after someone verified that it was indeed a parent who had called.
Like in Amrita, prayer sessions were also strict for hostelers at the an institute in Kollam, said a 2021 graduate of the college. Electricity would be cut off at 7 in the evening when it was rosary time, which everyone was expected to attend. At another engineering college in Thrissur, hostelers had to attend five prayers a day, an alumnus said. Once, when she and a few others had missed a Sunday prayer, they were locked up in the prayer room till 11 pm, she alleged.
Phones in all these hostels would either be banned or given to students for an hour or two a day.
All these rules take a stricter tone when it comes to women. Curfews are fixed between 6 to 7 in the evening for women, while they go on for several more hours for men. Women students in many college hostels are also not allowed to wear shorts or casual clothes even inside the hostels and are sometimes compelled to cover their upper garments with dupattas. This is also because certain hostels have cameras within the hostel, and some are under the supervision of male authorities or priests, so they expect the women to be covered from head to toe all the time. A non-binary student at a college in Kozhikode was so humiliated that the student had to leave the college due to mental stress, an alumnus said.
Students have come out with major protests to try to bring changes to some of the more patriarchal restrictions in colleges. Women students of the Thiruvananthapuram College of Engineering famously had the Break The Curfew protest in 2015, the same year as the Pinjra Tod movement in Delhi, which fought against discrimination of female students and for affordable education. Students of the Sree Kerala Varma College in Thrissur won their fight to extend their curfew to 8.30 pm after a week-long protest in 2019. Last November, there was a furore when a government order of 2019 was dug up to issue strict curfews to female students of the Kozhikode Medical College hostel.
One of the most cheeky protests came in July last year when students of the Thiruvananthapuram College of Engineering decided to sit on each other’s laps as a response to miscreants cutting up a long bench so male and female students wouldn’t sit together.
Not all protests win. There have been emotional posts by former students about how in their time, a big protest was crushed because the parents joined sides with the colleges or else it somehow withered away. Still, it is heartening to see the young of every generation raise their voice, risking their studies and future.
Watch: A college classroom Sexist rules and moral policing: Reality of many Indian colleges