Each year, the Dramatics Society at the University of Delhi holds a competition. Each of the various colleges at the university puts on a play written, directed, and performed by students. Although some of the performances are in Hindi–the most widely spoken of the hundreds of Indian languages–most are in English, a language every Indian university student speaks fluently.
My co-teacher, Joanne, and I learned of this play festival–Concoction–last year when we were in India preparing for the class we are now teaching. The minute we heard about it, we knew we wanted to take our students. Arranging a visit was a challenge. We had to find out whom to contact, and we needed special permission to attend, as the plays are not generally open to the public. But we finally figured out the logistics, were granted permission by the dean, and discovered the location through the help of our tour guide. On Tuesday afternoon, we climbed off the bus at Kamala Das College–a division of the university–to be greeted with the usual Indian graciousness.
The play we saw, The Moment at Hand, was funny, well performed, and charming. The writing was surprisingly crisp and fresh, and it frequently sent the audience into peels of laughter. But what I liked most about the play was that it challenged taboos.
India is a conservative culture. Despite call centers and coffee shops, Bollywood movies and American music, sexuality in India still exists in shadows and whispers. Women are expected to be modest and reserved, and to go to their wedding nights virgins. Dating is not unheard of among the upper classes, but no respectable middle class woman goes out alone with a man. Most marriages are still arranged, and many brides and grooms meet each other only once or twice before marriage, and then only with chaperones. Equality among the sexes might be chatted about in some quarters (and written into the constitution), but walk down the streets of most towns and you see a striking absence of women and girls. Many women still live in the traditional seclusion known as purdah, shielded forever from the eyes of the world. Go into a village in India, and you will see women casting their eyes downward when their husbands or fathers-in-law enter the room. Although the most conservative of traditions have crumbled in urban India where women go to universities and work in professions, underneath that veneer of modernity, tradition clings to Indian culture like a vine.
But not on the stage at Kamala Das University. In The Moment at Hand, written by a male student, women asserted themselves, swore, and stood their ground in arguments with men. Menstruation was openly mentioned in mixed company (not unusual in the West, but shocking in India), and, in a blatant violation of mainstream Indian attitudes, homosexuality was discussed without shame or ridicule.
I loved seeing these Indian students challenging the assumptions of their culture, not because I think tradition is a bad thing in and of itself, and certainly not because I think India should adopt Western values (actually, the thought makes me shudder). I loved it because I believe that, to keep tradition–any tradition–from hardening into oppression, to keep it from becoming a servant to the powerful and privileged, it has to be challenged, strongly and relentlessly. What keeps societies alive is a tension–an in-your-face refusal to accept the status quo pushing against the long, sticky fingers of the past.
The play didn’t show a “better” way of life from that of tradtional India, just a different one. The characters–male and female–smoked, drank, lied, played games with each other’s feelings, and were often shallow and immature. Those are hardly admirable qualities. But the point of the play wasn’t to depict something preferable to traditional India. It was, at least in part, to shock the audience, to challenge their assumptions, to turn the old way on its head and provide a counterbalance to the weight of conservative values.
Some things are vastly different from culture to culture and era to era. And some things are simply the same. Whether they’re in New Delhi or Paris, Addis Ababa or Berkeley, college students are a force for change. They are ready to slap tradition around, to push new ideas forward, to force the world to take notice. To say, as my generation did, the times, they are a-changin’. Youth movements aren’t always right, but they are always important. It’s one of the things I love about being a professor–my students’ willingness to challenge everything. And it’s one of the things I loved seeing about this other group of university students, in another country on the opposite side of the globe.