An “Elite Institute Team” can take as broad or as narrow a definition according to the requirements and sensibilities of the reader – the phenomena described here are, after all, undercurrents that shape the campus itself. In Institute terms, the “Elite” teams are somewhat intuitively understood as “prestigious”, hard-working teams for which there is a high demand with respect to favourable extra-curricular CV points that high-paying non-core companies tend to favour. These include hierarchies in the student-run organisations and fests here that host Administrative, Event Management, and Sponsorship and PR positions, as well as teams, clubs and “positions of responsibility” of various varieties, all of which hang on a scale – a further hierarchy.
How do questions of caste, class and gender play out between the links of this ‘Great Chain of Being’? If you’ve ever wondered, worry not – an arrogant student opinion piece with sweeping generalisations is coming right your way. In the interest of some vague stab at even-handedness, it becomes incumbent on me to say that there may well be exceptions to the descriptions of these spaces in this article. (Whatever organisation the reader is a part of, is of course, without a doubt, the exception here!)
It is important to mention at the outset that it is something of a luxury to participate in the extra-curricular sphere – it usually takes a certain amount of cultural as well as class capital to make it out of the academic zone, where a lot of barriers exist in any case for students who are not taken into account in its construction. Then come additional expenses and requirements that come with having to perform the work itself, as well as having to socialise in very particular ways which encourage “team-bonding”. This is not yet necessarily an indictment of these spaces (though it might as well be), it’s just that these requirements – an invisible “minimum” – are never acknowledged as such.
Then comes the onboarding onto these teams. Especially on the higher side of this hierarchy, membership in these teams – keeping in mind the changing dynamics and requirements of lucrative job opportunities – more often than not acts as an exclusive, continuing ladder of economic mobility and “networking” for those who are already relatively economically privileged, usually placing themselves plumbly from the metros of the country. In addition to the barriers that are faced in academics, instances of casual class and caste-profiling while onboarding students in processes of interviews and applications overseen by other students is not unusual – mostly in the guise of “soft skills”, “control of language” and “quality preservation” rationalisations. Slurs like “chapri” (recently conveniently shortened to “chap”, as in “Tally Ho, Chaps!”) being used as a casual descriptive marker for students not fitting these “natural” cultural boxes is commonplace – once again, pretty normalised attitudes, applicable to these particular demographics all across India, yet not somehow openly recognised by India’s brightest as a significant hurdle to those being labeled as such.
Through word-of-mouth, perception, and access to official email chains where these spaces advertise themselves, halos come to rest around these positions, and around the “names” of these teams. Of course, multiple strands of complexity do crop up, that make these generalisations a little too simple, such as in the case of cultural spaces where problematic exclusion is encoded in the very nature of the activity itself, along with the rationalisations that go into their construction as spaces themselves. There are some extremely tough questions that have to be asked here, which are not going to be resolved anytime soon.
However, considering the decades of complacency and convenience, and also the sheer deluge of institutionally-backed social-coding that goes into the construction of these edifices, I would argue that a few generalisations are not going to do anyone any particular harm. There are multiple dilemmas to navigate for students here, and multiple complications to take into consideration.
It’s not just questions of class and caste that concern our analysis. Gender complicates things all the more.
Male-dominated cultures often proliferate in these spaces, with crass sexual humour, casual misogyny and outright homophobia very much being the norm rather than the exception. Women are very often made to feel extremely uncomfortable in such “bonding” interactions, and queer folk all but invisibilised. Cases of sexual harassment are not unheard of. Team leaders, themselves likely to be male students, more often than not rarely seriously attempt to intervene in, or establish a conscious safe space, preferring to rely instead on a more comfortable, naturalised “bro culture” of quid pro quo, which is much easier to understand and operate within – a serious failure, considering the responsibilities and hierarchical respect that generally comes with seniority.
The skewed gender ratio at IITs does little to help the situation, with women usually having to be restricted socially to small groups amongst themselves, all while a significant portion of male students view them as “quota fillers”, or simply as “decoration”. Socialising becomes very difficult in these circumstances, and a significant number of women are unable to capitalise on and gain access to common resources and helpful social interactions that are usually readily available to male students; not mentioning the severe mental health consequences that come in as baggage. Malicious rumours and shaming are only some of the hurdles that women here have to deal with if they choose to be visible in some overt capacity. Unwanted advances and stalking by male students who have no idea how to interact with genders other than their own is not uncommon.
Once again, capitalising on the experience of getting to the prestigious wonderland that is an IIT takes a hit. The networks formed on campus, which, in addition to helping with academics and sanity on campus, become an important aspect of career-building later on, exists only for a privileged few – decimated continually through inconvenient membership across caste, class and gender groupings.
Most notoriously with caste, and narratives of “real” merit, the same trends are reflected upwards through the bureaucratic hierarchy, well outside of student-organised areas.
Unfortunately it is only too easy to make the argument that they simply trickle down from the top. Of course, this situation has been documented extensively by major news outlets over and over again, while the little bubble here continues to isolate itself through an aggressively constructed “neutrality”. Famously, IITs have been notorious for flouting quota norms in recruitments, “failing” to fill vacant faculty and PhD seats for SC, ST and OBC candidates. The excuses usually given seem to indicate a line of argumentation which orients itself around “saving face” and “quality preservation” by not hiring Professors for these quotas. These same arguments inexplicably, however, do not seem to consistently apply to Professors being hired from savarna backgrounds. A lot of students on the receiving end of instruction here would agree with me when I say that if “saving face” was honestly and legitimately an unqualified priority, there would be far more vacant faculty posts in the Institute.
These “revelations” are not particularly new or even surprising for a lot of people outside of campus circles. Once again, major news outlets have, over the years, consistently reported on the prevalence of these regressive attitudes as an “unfortunate social reality” within these campuses. For one comfortably inside and occupying relatively privileged circles within campus, however, one would never know. After all, this is a clean, sanitised space – meant only for learning and scholarship. As long as students continue to pull the blanket of helpless ignorance up over their ears wherever it seems most convenient, while refusing to move out of readily-organised chains of convenience in social interaction, things will remain exactly the same.
After all, it flows from sheer convenience that conversations about these topics – however brief – among students just do not happen, and for reasons that are entirely decipherable, considering the circumstances. The word “caste” itself barely appears in official student magazines – like the Institute’s officially sanctioned ‘The Fifth Estate’ and ‘Chennai 36’. When the word does appear, it tends to do so merely as an afterthought. The last time the word opened up a visible discussion was probably a decade ago.
As long as the eerily similar logics of exclusion reinforce each other across the hierarchy here, this piece can only serve as dreary record-keeping for yet another student magazine which fails in just the same way.
Article 19 