This is a photograph of St Stephen's College, Delhi, one of the most contested sites on the educational landscape of India. There are plenty of people around who can deliver extempore speeches on topics such as 'The Wonder That Was St Stephen's', 'St Stephen's, The Timeless Present', and 'St Stephen's, Now And For Ever', and an equal, if not larger, number who can produce sophisticated discourses on subjects like 'Why I Am Not A Stephanian', 'St Stephen's Unmasked', and 'St Stephen's, The Myth and the Reality'. On the basis of my observations during my 'residence' in St Stephen's (1995-1998), here are some colours of Stephanian life into which all of the above voices flow forming one somewhat confused stream.
(a) Second to None : These Stephanians believe that St Stephen's is the axis mundi around which we revolve, or will revolve someday in the not too distant future if the gospel of Stephania were to be thrown into the darkest reaches of this planet. Indeed, if St Stephen's were to be wiped out tomorrow by the bombs of some maverick descendant of Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq (a Stephanian himself), not only India but the entire world will be sent back into the Dark Ages for a thousand years in one fell swoop, and will remain there for another thousand.
(b) Second, But Only To One : Stephanians who talk this way are a bit more hesitant though, perhaps they have picked up on the cool talk going around the campus which gets yet cooler every morning. Like (some) Californians who have suddenly realised that there are other states in the US (not to mention other countries in the world), they too have stumbled over some names, perhaps picked up from their peers or perhaps culled from some esoteric journal. Harvard, for instance. So the story goes : We may be ranked second in this world, but we are second only to Harvard, and, mind you, St Stephen's is the One and the only True gateway to It.
(c) Second, But Getting There : These Stephanians have seen things for what they are and know that Harvard will be Harvard, but they do not lose hope. St Stephen's remains, they declare, the small island of light in the encircling gloom of India's educational system, inviting every one else to come and to partake of the bliss of The Stephanian Enlightenment. Their motto is, to put it crudely : 'So what if we missed out on the European Enlightenment? We shall now invent a new one for ourselves'.
(d) Second to Everyone Else : These Stephanians are collectively the Messiah promised by their distant ancestors Lenin, Mao, and Marx (and some obscure villagers from Bengal). Not that, of course, they have actually ploughed their way through the books and the speeches of these dead figures : for most purposes, a poster of Che Guevara on the room-wall or on the T-shirt does the job perfectly. They burn with an inquenchable zeal for rebellion, and meet once every weekend at McDonald's to discuss their plans for the imminent revolution over a chicken burger and french fries. To bring about this just and transparent future, they intend to subvert the Establishment from within by joining Morgan Stanley or Lehman Brothers as corporate bankers.
(e) The Very Least of Them All : At a polarised extreme to all of them are a rather different kind of Stephanians. These enjoy all the rights and privileges that St Stephen's bestows upon them, take quite an active part in their societies, and claim that they have learnt a lot of this and that from college. However, when their day's work is done, they settle down for a cosy cup of tea in an yellow wicker-chair, listening to others around them munching buttered toast with scrambled eggs and lime juice. And then, shattering the peace of the pigeons cooing in the distance, they shout : 'Do you not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying St Stephen's? Do you not smell this rotting mass - for even St Stephen's putrifies! St Stephen's is dead! St Stephen's remains dead! And you have killed her!' (At which voices can be heard in the background : 'Come on, go get a life', 'Is this Shakespeare Society's new way of punishing us?', 'Oh, we don't need no education in a coffee-house', 'Are you a feminist or some wacko like that?', or 'Erm, what was that about?'. Or something of that sort, but you get the drift by now.)
(f) How Green Was My St Stephen's : Now we come to the huge, silent, repressed, oppressed, supressed, subjugated, dominated, and unspoken underbelt of modernity's St Stephen's, an underbelt which is so paranoid of being categorised that it would be rather distressed at my calling it the 'underbelt'. Scared that they would be pigeon-holed by others (and wishing that they could fly as freely as pigeons), these Stephanians have invented a new label for themselves : 'I remain unlabelled'. Which, for most purposes simply means, 'I/we am/are al/ternative'. So a long and painful process of al/ternativity and/or al/terity gets under way : if the mainstream wears X, you wear Y; if the hoi polloi speak A, you speak A-C+Z; if the folks read writer G, you hunt down some obscure scribbler called H; and if the movie-buffs watch Hollywood, you watch Jellywater (never mind what that is). And, in any case, Stephanians have a world-wide reputation for having absolutely no taste for art, music and theatre, so you perforce have to form societies for New Art, New Music, and New Theatre. By rejecting the perceived or alleged elitism of the High (or the Low?), such Stephanians manage to congratulate themselves on having constructed a new elitism, the elitism of the Low (or the High?).
(g) The Writer Of This Blog : And finally for myself. Looking back at my days in St Stephen's I realise that I had been, at various stages of my time there, into one or more of those 'categories'. I started as someone who thought for a brief while that there could be nothing like St Stephen's in the world until, that is, I heard someone murmuring Harvard one day in the morning assembly. And yet I tenaciously held on to my belief (which I do till this very day) that St Stephen's does not need to become another replica of Harvard. (Though Harvard just might need to become another St Stephen's one of these days : I am 'inclusive' enough to leave this possibility wide open.) The Marxist side of Stephania lives on in me in some ways too; browsing through economic theorists of the red flag in Stephen's sweet-smelling library I was convinced (and remain so today) that their voices must be heard by more and more people. I breezed through three years of my life in St Stephen's like the December wind that howls through the English corridors, picking-and-mixing a bit of whatever suited my fancy, and trying to develop a knack for speaking only that which is politically correct.
And yet. And yet, somehow, I never quite managed to find out what the whole fuss was about. For me, St Stephen's was beautiful not because the colleges around it were hopeless, or the Indian educational 'scene' outside it was helpless, or because non-Stephanians had no taste for music, art and theatre, but simply because in St Stephen's I could sit on Andrew's Court reading a book under the pale wintry sun, stare at the old black-and-white photographs on the bleached walls, amble through the silent corridors in the whispering dusk, talk to some wonderful professors in the science and the art blocks, go out for coffee at two in the morning with anyone who might have been awake (or sleep-walking) at that time, smell the red bricks after the monsoon's first showers, analyse the possibility that college would have a woman President before the US had one, meet a new batch of young people streaming into college every July, wonder why the annual harmonious gathering every autumn splits apart the college into various disharmonious groups, wait eagerly to read the Principal's latest stricture against eating chewing-gum in between classes, smile at the group of smartly dressed men-in-black who would gather every Wednesday for an informal discussion on the ecological issues concerning dam-building in Siberia, and wake up the next morning to have the best breakfast in the world.
So, then, who needs, after all of that, some report in a newspaper or a magazine to remind St Stephen's that it has this rank or that, as if Stephania were a commodity to be pinned down to a dart-board? And yes, if you want the most fabulous breakfast you will eat anywhere, I beg this of you, my gentle reader, please, please, please do not go to the college across the street. (For all other junk-meals, and especially for lunch, however, you can come over to us, if you find this invitation palatable enough.)