Inside a boys’ hostel

Delhi’s 1937 Gwyer Hall contrasts its spacious student rooms with a housing shortage that pushes many students into cramped, sometimes unsafe rentals.

Fireplaces inside the rooms. Outside, facing balconies look out over serene lawns adorned with towering palm trees. This is Gwyer Hall, Delhi University’s oldest hostel for men. A board gives the year of its establishment as 1937.

Inside a boys’ hostel

A hostel room is a luxury for many Delhi University students. With accommodation limited, many are obliged to reside in cramped neighbourhoods outside their academic campuses. In September, a private building housing students in Satya Niketan, near South Campus, collapsed, killing seven young people. The tragedy drew renewed attention to the paucity of university accommodation.

On stepping into the spacious acres inside Gwyer Hall’s red-brick gateway, those crowded neighbourhoods seem distant. The compound is flanked by a row of slender columns with simple mouldings, recalling Roman buildings.

This evening, washed clothes are hanging outside the hostel rooms to dry along the balcony balustrades. Students, some pursuing PhDs, are strolling through pathways in groups of twos and threes; a few no doubt heading to the nearby Pandit Ji Canteen for chai and meetha samosa. A guard is sitting attentively at a desk near one end of a long corridor, a register opened before him; the long corridor’s repeating arches suggesting the endless reflections of facing mirrors.

In the dining hall, long wooden tables stand in rows, with benches on either side. Fans hang from the high ceiling on long rods. Small roshandans are set high in the walls, above the arched glass-panelled doors. The gold light of the 5pm sun is falling beside a framed portrait of Maurice Gwyer. Delhi University’s only British vice chancellor, he helped establish Miranda House, which shared its name with his daughter. Elsewhere in the dining hall, a wall display titled “Martyrs of Pulwama” holds rows of 40 photographs.

In the hostel’s entrance hall, a large board headed “Gwyer Hall Residents” bears room numbers painted in white, each above a small metal frame. Some frames hold name slips. Each name is honoured with a “Mr,” as in Mr. Gangipogu Vijay K., PhD/ Anthropology; Mr. Rajesh Kr. Jena, PhD/East Asian Studies; and so on. A bust of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru stands in a glass-fronted recess.

In these quiet, beautiful surroundings, the city’s interruptions and hostilities seem far away. You imagine students here absorbed in their Keats and Keynes, their minds easy with the assurance of having a room in which to think, study, and sleep. Indeed, every university student coming from outside Delhi deserves access to such accommodation.

One of the hostel pathways is partly blocked by a cat, the animal on the hostel’s emblem.