Mere political correctness cannot solve the controversy over denying women students membership of Aligarh Muslim University’s Maulana Azad Library

Like the rest of India, Aligarh is also witnessing a churning of different opinions, dialects and discourses. Gender discourse is a major ingredient in this churning, and political correctness has become a necessity in all public utterances. A positive that has emerged from the rise of a culture of political correctness is a greater sensitivity towards women issues. However, the challenges before feminism in India are also monumental.

The ground reality in India offers a dismal picture. The gap between the ideals and the lived reality is wide. Feminism has to tread with caution in a scenario where riots break out at the slightest provocation, where the bogey of Love Jihad can be easily created, where rape can be used as a weapon of control, and where serious lapses of law and order occur on a regular basis. The recent debate between the secular and the religious has acquired a new turn in which the dominant view is that the hold of religion on the lives of people from all walks of life and following different faiths is too strong. Feminist discourse has had a conflictual relationship with religious and cultural discourse. They follow different orders of logic. Feminism, and for that matter secularism, also faces the threat of being co-opted by the fundamentalists of the other religious views.

Feminism itself can become a fundamentalism. It can lose sight of other sensitivities, both religious and cultural. It can also sometimes be in a great hurry, impatient to effect changes, intolerant of the other view, a sight that we see too often in TV debates.

The recent uproar on the issue of membership of girls to Aligarh Muslim University’s Maulana Azad Library has to be seen in relation to the conflict of feminism with culture. AMU Women’s College started as a school in 1906, became an intermediate college in 1929 and became part of AMU in 1936. It has seen a series of struggles. This institution was opened due to the efforts of Shaikh Abdullah (lovingly called Papa Mian) who came to Aligarh from Kashmir and took to the cause of Muslim women’s education (no relation to the Abdullahs of Kashmir). Today it is one of the constituent colleges of the university, but because of its different history and because of specific cultural reasons, it has an identity of its own. It is located in a separate building approximately three kilometres away from the main university campus. At one time this distance included deserted streets where now we have residential colonies. The college is attached to a cluster of hostels known as Abdullah Hall, for undergraduate students. Though a part of the university, the college has a separate system of governance. Girls attend classes separately; they appear for their exams separately; they have their separate extra-curricular programmes. They also have a separate Students Union elected by the undergraduate girl students. They are taught by a faculty specially appointed. Though it is not required, it is mostly women faculty who teach at Abdullah College.

The college works like an all-female college whereas the undergraduate male students of the university attend their classes in an all-male kind of college. It is only at the postgraduate level and the various professional courses that co-education is the norm. Girls from both conservative and neoconservative families have found their moorings in the study-friendly precincts of AMU Women’s College.

The college has a rich library which has mostly served the needs of its undergraduate students. If needed, books are easily procured by the library authorities from the Maulana Azad Library.

In the last few years a demand has often come from the students of the college that they be permitted membership of Maulana Azad Library. The demand often becomes strident when a new students’ union assumes office. Many media reports and television discussions seem to suggest that it is a case of gender discrimination. Even the HRD Ministry sought a clarification from the university on whether it has a separate policy for boys and girls. The university on its part clarified that it has no policy in any sphere which discriminates between its students on the basis of gender. It has cited the issue of space and the distance of the college from the main campus as an important reason why it cannot accommodate the undergraduate girls. Lack of space is surely a serious issue as the library has to cater to the needs of its 28,000 students.

The opponents of this view ask why space should be the reason to deny girls the membership of the library. A more theoretical question of the visibility of women in public spaces is the concern here. It seems that feminist concerns and administrative pragmatism often do not share the same space. In pure theoretical terms, feminism has had an impressive journey from the idea of generating thinking about women’s rights to creating equal opportunities for women. However, in its journey to achieve complete equality of sexes it has to reckon with even stronger culture and history-specific pressures. Administrative prudence also sometimes requires decisions which go against the idea of complete equality of the sexes. However, it works both ways.

Thus recently, boys of Senior Secondary School Boys (+2) at AMU had a complaint that they are not permitted to come on a scooty/scooter, a luxury permitted to their counterparts in Senior Secondary School Girls. In the same way, the library membership of the students of Boys’ Polytechnic at the University has been withdrawn.

However, another question that can be debated is whether an educational institution can be forced to discard the system of separate education and follow the principle of coeducation. Coeducation is the norm in most educational institutions, but there are any number of all-male and all- female colleges in the country. AMU Women’s College has so far functioned as an all-female college. For historical and cultural reasons also, the college has been an all-female institution. In his letter addressed to the approximately 4000 parents of the girls of Women’s College (10 June 2013), Lt. General Zameer Uddin Shah, AMU vice chancellor, asked their opinion about giving “unrestricted freedom to their children to leave the premises of Women’s College” and “visit the Maulana Azad Library and outside coaching classes”. To his surprise, only one parent wanted him to do so. It is true that the perspective of the adult girl students cannot be ignored, but the VC of the university has to act as an administrator who cannot ignore the ground reality of the place and also as a guardian who has the trust of the parents of the girls to take administrative decisions.

The outcome of this debate is that the university is trying to find ways and means to increase the space in the library. It hopes to get support from the HRD Ministry in this challenging endeavour. However, as and when the membership of the Maulana Azad Library is thrown open to the students of Women’s College — and it should be sooner than later — it will be a historic day. Not because of the solution to the problem of space, but because of the right of girl students to move in public spaces. In other words, to exercise agency.

(The author is is an associate professor of English at Aligarh Muslim University).