`Stephania' ... clearing the air
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
September 12, 2004

... and the author looks at what it is all about.

R.V. MOORTHY

St. Stephen's College _ "no alien affectation in it".

MY column on Stephanians in Parliament (The Hindu, Magazine, August 1, 2004) has certainly sparked quite a flurry of comment, not all of it polite. ("Rampant elitism" was one of the more printable critiques.) But before I rise to its defence, let me immediately acknowledge one shortcoming in my piece. Instead of being excessively exclusive (the usual Stephanian sin), it seems I was far too inclusive, listing five MPs whose alma mater St. Stephen's apparently was not. My list of 14 Stephanians was relayed to me by a usually reliable classmate, but he seems to have got it from an article in an unreliable weekly. Reshmi Dasgupta of the Economic Times tells me that Manvendra Singh, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasada and Omar Abdullah are mystified to find themselves on the list. On the other side of the ledger, several Stephanians wrote in to say that I had omitted Sandeep Dikshit, son of Delhi CM Sheila, who herself should not have been included.

All I can say — apart from a heartfelt "mea culpa" — is that even if my list should have been 10- strong, not 14, 10 MPs is still a lot more than St. Stephen's has had in any previous Parliament. And that, as my column argued, is a welcome development.

But what of the more visceral objections of non-Stephanians to my piece? It's clear that to them the very name "St. Stephen's" conjures up three overlapping concepts, none of which is meant to be flattering — elitism, Anglophilia and deracination. (I admit that the phrase "dregs of society", which I quoted a distinguished Stephanian using, did not help here.) I may as well confront this stereotype head on.

Whether or not it is a good thing that there are so many Stephanians in Parliament, there is certainly a spirit that can be called Stephanian: I spent three years (1972-75) living in and celebrating it. Stephania was both an ethos and a condition to which we aspired. Elitism was part of it, but by no means the whole. In any case the College's elitism was still elitism in an Indian context, albeit one shaped, like so many Indian insitutions, by a colonial legacy. There is no denying that the aim of the Cambridge Brotherhood in founding St. Stephen's in 1881 was to produce more obedient subjects to serve Her Britannic Majesty; their idea of constructive missionary activity was to bring the intellectual and social atmosphere of Camside to the dry dustplains of Delhi. Improbably enough, they succeeded, and the resultant hybrid outlasted the Raj. St. Stephen's in the early 1970s was an institution whose students sustained a Shakespeare Society and a Criterion Club, staged avant-garde plays and wrote execrable poetry, ran India's only faculty-sanctioned Practical Joke Competition (in memory of P.G. Wodehouse's irrepressible Lord Ickenham), invented the "Winter Festival" of collegiate cultural competition which was imitated at universities across the country, invariably reached the annual inter-college cricket final (and turned up in large numbers to cheer the Stephanian cricketers on to their accustomed victory), maintained a careful distinction between the Junior Common Room and the Senior Combination Room, and allowed the world's only non-Cantabridgian "gyps" to serve their meals and make their beds. And if the punts never came to the Jamuna, the puns flowed on the pages of Kooler Talk and the cyclostyled Spice (whose typing mistakes, under the impish editoriship of Ramu Damodaran, were deliberate, and deliberately hilarious.) And Stephanians wryly acknowledged the charge of disconnection from the masses by organising Union Debates on such subjects as "In the opinion of this House, the opinion of this House does not matter".

This was the St. Stephen's I knew, and none of us who lived and breathed the Stephanian air saw any alien affectation in it. For one thing, St. Stephen's also embraced the Hindi movies at Kamla Nagar, the trips to Sukhiya's dhaba and the chowchow at TibMon (as the Tibetan Monastery was called); the nocturnal Informal Discussion Group saw articulate discussion of political issues, and the Social Service League actually went out and performed social service; and even for the "pseuds", the height of career aspiration was the IAS, not some foreign multinational. The Stephanian could hardly be deracinated and still manage to bloom. It was against Indian targets that the Stephanian set his goals, and by Indian assumptions that he sought to attain them. (Feminists, please do not object to my pronouns: I only knew St. Stephen's before its co-edification.)

What counted was ... .

At the same time St. Stephen's was, astonishingly for a college in Delhi, insulated to a remarkable extent from the prejudices of middle-class Indian life. It mattered little where you were from, which Indian language you spoke at home, what version of religious faith you espoused. When I joined College in 1972 from Calcutta, the son of a Keralite newspaper executive, I did not have to worry about fitting in: we were all minorities at St. Stephen's, and all part of one eclectic polychrome culture. Five of the preceding 10 Student Union Presidents had been non-Delhiite non-Hindus (four Muslims and a Christian), and they had all been fairly elected against candidates from the "majority" community.

But at St. Stephen's, religion and region were not the distinctions that mattered: what counted was whether you were "in residence" or a "dayski" (day-scholar), a "science type" or a "ShakSoc type", a sportsman or a univ topper (or best of all, both). Caste and creed were no bar, but these other categories determined your share of the Stephanian experience.

This blurring of conventional distinctions was a crucial element of Stephania. "Sparing" (or hanging about) with the more congenial of your comrades in residence — though it could leave you with a near-fatal faith in coffee, conversation and crosswords as ends in themselves — was manifestly more important than attending classes. (And in any case, you learned as much from approachable faculty members like David Baker and Mohammed Amin outside the classroom as inside it.) Being ragged outside the back gate of Miranda House, having a late coffee in your block tutor's room, hearing outrageous (and largely apocryphal) tales about recent Stephanians who were no longer around to contradict them, seeing your name punned with in Kooler Talk, were all integral parts of the Stephanian culture, and of the ways in which this culture was transmitted to each successive batch of Stephanians.

... the spirit

Three years is, of course, a small — and decreasing — proportion of my life, and of course I was at St. Stephen's at an age when any experience would have had a lasting effect. But in celebrating Stephania I think of its atmosphere and history, its student body and teaching staff, its sense of itself and how that sense was communicated to each individual character in the Stephanian story. Too many Indian colleges are places for lectures, rote-learning, memorising, regurgitation; St. Stephen's encouraged random reading, individual note-taking, personal tutorials, extra-curricular development. Elsewhere you learned to answer the questions, at College to question the answers. Some of us went further, and questioned the questions. That is the Stephanian spirit, and I am glad to see it well represented in Parliament.