She breaks the glass ceiling.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Delhi University’s St. Stephen’s College breaks a glass ceiling. The new principal will be a woman. Best wishes, Professor Susan Elias! Here are some Stephanian kissa-kahanis to mark this iconic moment.

The college takes its name from Christianity’s first martyr, who was stoned to death outside Jerusalem’s city walls for his faith. Another Delhi University college named after a martyr is Shaheed Bhagat Singh College; Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom of course had a fierce anti-colonial, patriotic intent.

The college traces its origins around our first war of independence of 1857, when even the British must not have realized they would remain in India for the next 90 years. The college started as a school by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, an England-based missionary organisation. Impossible to confirm where exactly the earliest school premises stood.

In 1881, St. Stephen’s became a college, operating out of Sheesh Mahal in Old Delhi’s Katra Khushal Rai street. Today, the musty smelling courtyard there is intensely atmospheric with arched doorways and slinky cats. A large hall is presently home to a tailoring unit. Otherwise much of the mansion has become a patchwork of residences.

10 years later, the college shifted to a bigger premises in Kashmere Gate. 50 years later, it moved to its final red-brick building further north in the city. This building’s architect ended up designing scores of Delhi landmarks, including Regal Cinema. (Don’t you too feel that Lady Irwin College resembles the St. Stephen’s building; fair enough, the same man designed both).

One of the college’s most famous institutions is ShakeSoc, the Shakespeare Society. But the most beloved used to be a samosa stall. It was started in the 1930s by a man named Sukhia. During a visit to his alma mater’s centennial celebrations in 1981, Pakistan’s President General Zia-ul-Haq had famously asked after Sukhia. The stall was later run by his son Rohtas, who died a decade ago. It has to be emphasised that Rohtas’s neembu paani is remembered as fondly as his samosa.

Other colleges have student politics. St. Stephen’s has student pranks. In the 1970s, the college would host a Practical Joke Competition, held in memory of P. G. Wodehouse’s mischievously funny Lord Ickenham, aka Uncle Fred.

The college’s imprint on Delhi survives in the city’s map. Sudhir Bose Marg, the road right outside the college, is named after an alumnus who later became a legendary philosophy professor at the college. Otherwise until 1986, this road was called Imperial Avenue.

The current principal, John Varghese, is the thirteenth to hold the post. The next one is to be the first woman in the role. But consider this context: St. Stephen’s stands directly opposite Hindu College, where the principal and vice-principal are already women. Hindu College in fact appointed its first woman principal in 1998. St. Stephen’s is catching up after 30 years. Even so, it’s never too late.