Anger appears to be uniting the teaching community in Kolkata these days, with social media posts dominated by demand for action against the St. Xavier’s University, where a female teacher was reportedly “forced” to resign for sharing a picture in swimwear on her Instagram page.
About 13,000 people have already signed the online petition ‘Launch disciplinary action against Felix Raj (Vice-Chancellor of the university) with immediate effect’, and more and more academics are openly questioning how an institution can penalise an employee for their attire outside the campus.
“The incident raises two concerns in my mind. The first, of course, is why should a university dictate how a person behaves in her personal life, outside of the university space, and why should women’s bodies be the target of control and policing,” Samata Biswas, who teaches English at the Sanskrit College and University, told The Hindu.
“I am also concerned about the way social media activity is increasingly being brought under the scanner by employers. India has regularly penalised students for their social media activity and political opinions. In the U.K., a (female) teacher was sacked for her social media photo holding a glass of wine and a beer. As far as I know, universities do not have a code of conduct that regulate social media activity, but such incidents show that it is probably not far behind,” Mr. Biswas said.
It was in October last year that an assistant professor at the St. Xavier’s University, whose identity remains unknown to the public, was said to have been forced by the university administration to quit after they received an email, apparently from an undergraduate student’s father, who complained that he had found his son looking at a bikini-clad picture of the teacher. When she sent a legal notice to the administration, she too was slapped with a legal notice by the university that sought Rs. 99 cr in damages. The V-C did not respond to calls and messages for comment.
Calls, meaning, appear to be growing for his resignation. There are also women posting pictures of themselves in swimwear, with sarcastic captions to the effect that they wouldn’t be able to do so if they were teachers.
“The individual was cornered by the university authorities in the name of spreading obscenity and corrupting young minds. This is outrageous. Institutional moral policing is an antithesis of free thinking. The bizarre demand of the university seeking compensation of ₹99 crore is an attempt of displaying blatant arrogance,” said Prof. Mrinmoy Pramanick, who teaches comparative Indian language and literature at the University of Calcutta.
But there are students who find it ironical that teachers should complain about being policed when they themselves are often regressive about what students wear. “I remember having a homeroom teacher who would check the length of our skirts, and it was never questioned just because it was normalised as the measurement of decency,” said Shreya Datta, an MPhil scholar studying comparative literature and translation.
“Teachers are part of the same society where parents ask daughters how they can go out wearing short clothes, where they judge a random girl on the road for her attire. I have never seen my mother wearing anything but a saree, and if I decide to wear a bikini, I am sure I’ll not get a positive response from her. That’s how our society thinks. If you do a survey outside Facebook, you will know the real numbers,” Ms. Datta said.
