Education: New College in New Delhi

India’s youngest college is Nirmala, at New Delhi. Until this summer, Nirmala’s 461 students were one of the city’s big postwar problems. They were mostly refugees—homeless Hindus and Sikhs who have been pouring across the border from Pakistan ever since the partition. The Ministry of Education tried to take care of them by setting up a coeducational college in a Moslem building in one of New Delhi’s noisiest and smelliest bazaars. When the job of running the college became too much for the Ministry’s limited facilities, the government turned it over to a band of U.S. Jesuits. “Already,” said the Hindustan Times last week, “it has begun to look like a college. The boys have begun to conduct themselves with a new sense of dignity . . . The whole place has taken on an air of orderliness.”

Urdu & Economics. Nirmala (Sanskrit for Immaculate Lady) opens promptly at 9, and the students emerge from their wooden shacks and tenements to flock to classes in everything from Urdu and Persian to chemistry and economics. They call the priests topiwalas—those who wear topis (tropical helmets). Topiwala has become a term of fondness and respect.

Nirmala’s students know nothing of big varsity teams, hazing freshmen, fraternities or sororities. They get along without a rupee of pocket money, and live sometimes six and eight in a room. They never go on dates—and they never complain.

In class, where the girls sit on corner benches, students are stiffly formal. They rise when a teacher enters the room, and will not sit down until they are told to. Outside of class, they seldom dare to approach a professor. “They are rather timid,” says one priest sadly. “Whenever I speak to a boy outside of class, he acts as if he were afraid I am angry with him. When he realizes that this is not so, he is flattered—but he is still uneasy.”

Fans & Authors. The priests have done their best to make the students less uneasy. They have opened a canteen for them to eat in, stocked the library, installed the luxury of 40 ceiling fans. And they are making plans to move Nirmala to a better site outside the city and to open a hostel to care for the neediest students. “One of our chief tasks,” says Father Paul F. Smith, “is to bind up the wounds of their terrible past experiences.” Another task is to give their students some idea of life in the U.S. and of the basic tenets of Christianity. On those subjects, the priests have found, Nirmala’s students know little. When one professor asked his class to name 100 famous writers from Britain and the U.S., only one American was named—Longfellow.