Hostel Life
A school or college hostel in India is only a clumsy compromise between the true residential hostel and a fifth-rate hotel. A true hostel is an integral part of school or college : an Indian hostel is only an adjunct or appendage. It provides only lodging, and leaves the inmates to make their own arrangements about meals. This is inevitable in a country peopled by races so Widely differing in habits, manners and customs, and by castes among whom interlining is prohibited by religion. The feeling of fellowship that the residents of an Indian hostel feel, is the imagination of dwelling under the same roof; that finer and firmer fellowship that comes from dining at the same table, and which serves to create and establish a kind of brotherhood among other people, never comes to our Indian students, owing to their stringent caste-rules, which enjoin upon every high-born Hindu to cook his own meal and take it aloof from the rest.
Nevertheless, residence in a hostel is far more advantageous for a student than residence at home. The very atmosphere is different. The Indian home is a pretty large group of miscellaneous relatives dwelling in a common ancestral house, under an aged patriarch, who is generally as old in his views and opinions as in his age. There is plenty of refinement, plenty of politeness, plenty of love, but not what is of the west, but of the east. Such an environment does scarcely conduce to produce that stimulus of intellectual companionship which is inseparable from an institution of which every inmate is solely occupied with intellectual pursuits. There are sometimes two or three hundred students in residence in a hostel, and though they differ in so far as they pursue different lines of study, they all agree in so far as they are students, in so far as their ideal is intellectual culture, in so far as they are members of the same institution. Such a life is an education in itself; each student picks up something from each of his fellow-students in the course of friendly conversation, during meals, during games; in fact, at all times; each student also feels a respect and sympathy for the studies of others.
A second distinct advantage of living in a hostel is that a student finds himself aloof from the daily cares and worries of domestic life. A traditional Indian household is a fairly large concern, and it is inevitable that in a family consisting of twenty or thirty members, interests should sometimes clash together, and frictions arise out of trifles. Sickness will also he matter of daily occurrence in a place where so many congregate. And even apart from these, the noise alone will be a sufficient source of annoyance to a student, whose first care is to pursue his studies peacefully. Hostel life frees a student from all such vexations, and gives him just that peace and calm which is so favourable to concentration.
But the chief advantage of the hostel system lies neither in the bringing together of a number of young men to reside in the same house, nor in conferring on them such peace and calm as is essential to good study, but in fostering the growth of corporate life. The members of a hostel, by living together at the same place, under the same laws, and under the same supervision and care, begin to regard themselves as constituting one body, so that whatever affects one of them affects all alike. They feel for one another a brotherly feeling of love—love which is unhinged by any touch of selfishness or jealousy. The success of one means the success of all; the failure of one means the failure of all. The motives which induce them to covet success are not motives of selfish gain, but the desire to maintain and add to the glory of the institution to which they have the honour to belong. The feeling of ‘me’ and ‘mine’ almost dies away, and in its place succeeds a much nobler feeling, that I am part and parcel of that which surrounds me.
All this is very excellent; but hostel life is not an unmixed blessing. There is too much of society at times, —sociality at the expense of study; there is too much of free talk,—talking at the expense of thinking; there is too much of fellowship,—fellowship at the expense of scholarship. There is also a more will have done might be serious. There is no infection that influence checked; and during this interval the mischief that they from evil examples. No one can suppose that in a flock of two or three hundred youthful hostellers there will not be dozen black sheep. Some time will have elapsed before these black sheep are detected, and the spreading of their pernicious influserious risk attending such corporate life,—namely, the danger spreads faster than the influence of evil example; no example is sooner imbibed than that of one’s own companions; and the P contamination works quicker in the case of immature youths than in any other. It is in this way that “fashionable” habits, such as smoking cigarettes, dressing in European style, etc., spread with inconceivable rapidity among the inmates of an Indian hostel. Boys coming from a Mofussil school to a big city like Allahabad, begin to mix immediately with those that are residents of Allahabad itself, and lose no time in aping their .habits and manners, lest their comrades should brand them as rustics. The very first act of city refinement that they adopt, is to get their hair dressed after the proper fashion; the hair is well combed and parted at the side, and the “pig-tail,” after being abbreviated in length, is carefully concealed underneath the cap. The fear of being suspected as a country fellow is greater than the fear of the loss of time and the loss of money that such processes of refinement involve.
The above may be called a moral evil. There is a physical evil also attending on the hosted system, —namely, that students have to make their own arrangements about meals. Mankind have long decided to place the whole department of meals in charge of the female sex-exclusively; and the result of this act of decentralisation is that the male members of the species have lost their ancient fitness and aptitude for the once manly task of hunting and chasing to provide food for them-selves and their dependents. Wherever, therefore, meals have to be arranged for by males, they are invariably ill-managed; and the hostel meals are no exception to the rule.
Among comfort which a hosteler misses, is affectionate nursing in times of sickness. No doubt, the friends of a student do all they can to relieve his sufferings during an illness; but no amount of friendly services can equal the tender care of a mother or a sister which he enjoyed at home. A hostelier has thus to be prepared for little sacrifices on these scores.
There is a third evil also that might result from the hostel,—namely, the growth of a spirit of independence. A young student, accustomed to live on his own account and in his own style in a hostel, aloof from home, and under no other sway than the formal authority of the Superintendent of the Hostel, is apt, ongoing back home, to feel the old restraints under which he lived before, as rather irksome to his nature. The hostel has taught him some independence; it gave him first taste of liberty; he was there master of his own time, and what is more important, master of his own purse; he has felt the giddy pleasures of spending his money after his own mind; and naturally therefore he frets at the domination under which he has to live at home, where perhaps the family has to acknowledge the despotic rule of an old-fashioned patriarch. In the eyes of western people this spirit of independence is a precious virtue which finds warm favour under the name of ‘self-reliance.’ But in the judgment of Indians, those, at any rate, who have not become completely anglicized, the spirit which presides over the Indian household and saves it from disruption and decay, is, not the spirit of independence, but the spirit of meek obedience, the spirit of respectful, unquestioning submission to domestic authority, which rests not on the basis of any modern form of popular election, but on power derived from God. Cases have been heard of educated young men breaking away from the tie of home for no other reason than that they could not sympathize with what they regarded as the primitive ways of their household. Such cases, though happily few and far between, show that there is reason to believe that the present hostel system is not the very acme of perfection.
But there is no system that can claim to be absolutely perfect : perfection is not of this world. With all its faults, the hostel system affords advantages to young men at school and college which they cannot enjoy elsewhere. Home life too has its own advantages, and it is impossible to weigh the one set of gains against the other, so as to determine which possesses the greater weight, because they differ in kind, and not merely in degree. But it may still be safely asserted that, where home life is impossible, as in the case of a Mofussil student coming to join a college in a city hostel life is certainly far superior to living in a rented house in the bazaar, under no care and no supervision of any kind.
