How 'progressive' Kerala doesn't like its boys and girls mingling
Kerala education minister PK Abdu Rabb says he is against girls and boys sharing the same bench in a college. He is okay if they sit in separate chairs though.
The remarks came, last week, in response to the suspension of Dinu K, a student at the Muslim-run Farook College in Kozhikode. Dinu was told to bring his guardians for the crime of sitting next to a girl student in class. His behaviour allegedly violated the decorum of the college. Dinu refused, forcing the management to suspend him.
What the management did or the minister said, should hardly come as a surprise, if you, like me, have lived most of your life in Kerala. Incidents like this happen on and off across the state. For the record, Kerala has a pathological aversion towards any public mixing of sexes. And believe it or not, it begins right from the kindergarten. Like the Farook College incident, the PTA of a government school in Malappuram stalled nursery classes, a few years ago, when children belonging to the opposite sex shared the same bench in class. Gender segregation is a way of life in the state.
It begins from school and continues through college and into public life in the form of segregated seats in buses, separate queues at ticket counters and segregated workout spaces and timings in gyms, making any meaningful interaction with women in public an unpleasant experience.
Bharatmata, a Catholic-run college in Kochi, went to the extent of installing a vertical iron grill as barrier inside its college bus to keep boys away from girls. Mar Ivanios, another Catholic-run institution in Thiruvananthapuram, where I studied, had campus guards who acted more like anti-vice squads chasing away love struck couples looking for a secluded spot inside empty classrooms. (It’s another story that the chief of the squad, a 50 something pot-bellied ex-service man, known by his nickname "romance killer" killed himself after his own daughter ran away with her lover.
Dating, a term synonymous with college campuses in Delhi is an alien concept to most Malayalee teenagers. The only date they are familiar with is of the edible variety. This is not to say that there aren’t any storybook romances happening in campuses. Of course, there are, but not without attracting its share of snide remarks and social opprobrium from people who have absolutely no stake in it.
For many youngsters, a chance to enter in a relationship outside marriage without fear or social shaming exists only when they move out of the state to relatively more liberal cities such as Bengaluru or Delhi. Falling in love was a calculated risk only the brash and the bold took, because the risk factor was not just confined to campuses alone. Outside the gates, there have been occasions when even married couples had to explain their relationship status to rank strangers. One of the first things my father advised when I revealed my plan to go on a honeymoon in Kerala was to carry my marriage certificate with me.
As Sahitya Akademi award winning writer Paul Zacharia says, it is "the wrong religious doctrines and educational system" followed by Christians and Muslims for ages that have paved the way for a moral policing culture in the state. Now, the Hindus, whose doctrines were more liberal, too have started sharing the ideas of Christians and Muslims, he says.
What I have written might ring true for readers from other states as well, including Delhi. Nothing epitomises the capital’s gender segregation than the Delhi Metro. Women passengers will vouch how Metro has turned them into a captive moving feast for the lecherous stares of men by introducing a separate women’s only compartment in the name of safety.
Then why single out Kerala? Because that is the state I call home and grew up listening to marxist intellectuals and economists singing paeans about the so called forward looking "Kerala Model" of development. Little did I realise then that literacy rates and human development indices will not bring about any attitudinal change in characters like Rabb.