Banaras Hindu University: where ideal bahus are manufactured

On his convocation day address in 1929, Madan Mohan Malviya, the main architect of the Banaras Hindu University, outlined the value of higher education for India’s women. Around the same time he also convinced his close friend, colleague and fellow fund raiser for the BHU, Hari Ram Pande, my great grandfather and my mother Shivani’s grandfather, to send three of his eldest children: two girls and a boy, to Tagore’s Shantiniketan to grow up in a truly emancipatory educational environment as the University they were building settled in the grooves.

To his credit the old man not only sent his grandchildren to far away Bolpur from Uttarakhand, he also nominated his grand daughters by name in his will as co-inheritors with the brothers for the family legacy. My grandmother (at whose wedding he gave her a sari he had spun) used to tell us how when Malviya Jyu(ji) came out of the Arthur Road jail (in 1930) he addressed 50,000 women and told them they should be fearless and capable of guarding themselves. He told my grandfather, at home, yours may be Brahmana Dharma, in the country the only Dharma is the Dharma of freedom, and in the universe it is the Manav Dharma.

That was then. Today, on September 3, 2018, the Kashi Hindu Vishwa Vidyalaya (BHU) of Malviyaji’s and my great grandfather’s dreams, has gone on to inaugurate a three-month training course totally at variance with the values of liberty, equality and fraternity those elders sought to inculcate. At the Vanita Institute of Fashion Design, the IIT department of the University will be teaching a diploma course aimed specifically at training young women into becoming sartorially well turned out, confident and well adjusted daughters-in-law (bahus) who can cope with marriage and their social duties without stress.

According to media reports, Neeraj Srivastava, CEO of Young Skilled India, the company that will be driving the initiative under the banner of, “Daughter’s Pride, Meri Beti, Mera Abhiyan”, said that this course seeks to address a specific need in these socially turbulent times. Banaras we need not remind readers, here is the constitution of the Prime Minister who has repeatedly announced his support for Beti Bachao Beti Padhao. Understandably, the proposed course for ideal daughters in law has his blessings.

In September, two years ago, the young female students of the same university went on a historic Dharna at the gates of the Vice Chancellor’s house to protest against their daily humiliation by age old norms restricting their mobility inside and outside the campus and repeated molestations of hostellers by outsiders who snuck in under cover of darkness. In a tweet, Dr Vivek Tiwari, grandson of one of the elders who helped collect public funds and build this prestigious institute for higher learning a hundred years ago, writes his grandfather would be aghast at this regressive initiative.

The BHU with a student strength of 40,000 is one of the largest residential campuses in Asia. But in the last four years it has repeatedly been in turmoil due to pressures allegedly brought in by right wing ideologues to turn it into a non secular conservative Hindu university. The Magsaysay award winner social activist Sandeep Pandey was expelled for protesting against holding of RSS Shakhas within the campus. Soon restrictions on the girl students followed. They were made to sign affidavits pledging they’d not resort to protests, nor participate in socio cultural activities outside the campus. They can not eat meat (male students can) or wear short dresses and skirts as it is considered against Indian values. Requests for a cyber library were turned down on suspicion that girls could use it to watch porn!

In a campus that has consistently rejected the female students’ own experience of oppressive mores and sexual stereotyping, the University seems to be headed for a new stereotyping in the name of Meri Beti Mera Abhiyan. The female students at BHU are more likely than not to be trained to be fashionably turned out home makers cum earth mothers, through text books and videos thick with greeting card lyricism. In short, perfect crucibles for producing and nurturing good little Hindu boys for Shakhas in the coming decades. As for any daughters that may be produced out of such marriages, hopefully such courses as their mothers were fed into, will always be available.

It was Malviya ji who always told his students, knowledge is one that sets us free, Sa Vidya, ya vimuktaye. What would he say to these young girls graduating from the Vanita Institute of Fashion Design only to step into a husband’s home and become ideal Hindu bahus?