Disclaimer: This op-ed is written by Ms. Divya Sharma, President, Hall 4. The views presented below are the author’s own and are not in any manner representative of the views of Vox Populi as a body or IIT Kanpur in general.
A few months back, when I first stepped into my Hall, just when it was getting dark outside, I remember being greeted by a beautiful peacock perched on a tree branch. This place was going to be my home for the next few years, and the realization of it was indescribably delicious. Every night for the next few days, I spent time understanding the space, its corridors, windows, lawns, trees, and people inhabiting what was going to be my House. In his book titled The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes, “For our house is the corner of our world…it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.” Which is why it came as a shock when I was constantly made to realize that the house I am inhabiting is, in fact, an encroachment on others’ space.
Legacy: Oblivious of & Excluded from
The word ‘Legacy’ is derived from the Latin word Legatus which means “ambassador, envoy, deputy.” Traditionally the concept of legacy is understood only from a patriarchal inheritance passed from one man to the next. Women were not privy to legacy. Instead, they were given asylum within the domesticities of the house. The idea of ownership has long been assimilated within our cultures as a privilege that only men can have access to.
Hall 04, I am told, has a legacy that could be traced back to the recent past when it was converted into a girl’s hostel. Before the encroachment – by me and my kind – the Hall was filled with laughter, joy, a sense of freedom and independence that now could only be conjured up through nostalgia. It was the place with the strongest HEC, and their decisions were novel and harbinger of change on the campus. While I understand how challenging and unimaginably difficult it must be for the male residents of this place to move elsewhere and create a home again, the unsettling aspect of this nostalgic story lies in the accusation of tampering with the legacy of the Hall by the girls living here.
Women have often been seen as an extension of the creative, cultural, literary, and scientific genius which invariably stems from men2. These extensions are dispensable, a charity extended by the community of patriarchal ideologues masquerading as feminist sympathizers. We, the residents of Hall 04, believe that even spaces, like humans, have a definitive end. We have settled in this place which now is rightfully and unapologetically ours. Any legacy or carriers of legacy that make us feel unwelcome within these premises, owing to our gender, need to answer to their conscience as to why they think that women cannot work as thinkers and change-makers at par with men.
Narratives around Gendered Spaces
After I moved to the campus, my male friends, in the middle of a banter, informed me of how lucky I must feel to have ‘taken over’ the legacy of Hall 04. Other men within the campus were dutiful in conveying that the reason they do not visit my Hall anymore is because of the vigilance established outside the Hall gate. They felt threatened because now the space is wrongfully given away to girls whose ‘safety’ is inversely proportional to men’s independence within the Institute. Some men who are in the habit of quoting statistics as a marker of their genius parroted that the canteen workers are unhappy with the turnout of students every day and that some are even considering moving to work at the men’s hostels. Others, remaining honest bunch, proclaimed rather proudly that ‘we’ women have tarnished the reputation of everything the Hall stood for – Freedom, Liberty, and Fraternity, perhaps?
It makes me wonder how narratives, just like our pronouncements of judgements, facilitate in the process of creation and destruction of a space. These narratives are passed on from one ear to another through stories. Based on such stories – that keep changing each time one utters it – women are expected to carry forward the ‘legacy’ established by the masculine idea of success. Essentially, women’s space is formed on the foundation of claims that men see fit. The unmaking of such a legacy is the primary aim both as a President and an inhabitant of Hall 04. In our tenure here, we desire and aim to leave behind a system that believes in the process of (re)creation without making claims that make the future boarders feel guilty of encroachment. In a world that is inching each day towards progress, as a woman, I understand and sternly believe that in order to steer clear of propagandas, we need to make a room of our own. Mine is within the margins of Hall 04; where is yours?
1The title is borrowed from a poem with the same name written by Maria Wislawa Anna Szymborska.
2 This can be traced to Aristotle’s Flower-pot Theory as understood by feminist thinkers.
Written by: Divya Sharma (President, Hall 04)
Edited by: Sugandhaa Pandey
