India's Old Schools

From “The West Australian”, Tuesday, November 28, 2004
“Snob appeal fails to save India’s old school ties..”
By Julian West, in Darjeeling

The once great British public schools, founded during the Raj to produce a new generation of empire builders and their "brown sahib" heirs, are dying 50 years after India gained independence. Many are simply crumbling away. Others, which schooled the likes of the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, are the victims of failing standards and poor English.
Almost all have suffered from a decline of what old boys remember as "the public school spirit", instilled by dedicated British bachelors and spinsters who "stayed on" after 1947 to educate the next generation of Indian schoolboys.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Darjeeling, the home of India's oldest British public schools. Before the capital of British India moved from Calcutta to Delhi, this Victorian toy-town, 6.000 ft up in the Himalayas, was the summer playground and schoolroom of the Raj.
Darjeeling is still a school town, its hillsides thick with small boys and girls in maroon and blue uniforms. But, like the once elegant hill station with its potholed promenades and collapsing colonial facades, most of the schools have seen better days.
Dow Hill and Victoria schools, 1,000ft above Kurseong, a tumbledown tea town that was formerly a pony halt en route to Darjeeling, embodied the grand colonial tradition. Their register, which first records the admission in 1898 of "Winifred Roake, of good character", recalls an era of copperplate handwriting and upstanding Victorian values.
Victoria was founded in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year by British merchants in Calcutta to provide the future backbone of the empire. But now its paint is peeling and most of the windows are broken. A sign says: "Keep off the gardens". But there are no gardens, only a dusty, unswept yard.
The academic standards of its sister school, Dow Hill, have declined so far in the last decade that where up to 70 per cent of pupils went on to higher education, now the figure is barely 10 per cent.
Discipline has all but collapsed and many children hardly speak English. Worse, for schools that once prided themselves on character building, the esprit de corps, as the deputy headmaster Sunith Battarcharjee put it, "has gone".
Mr. Battarcharjee, a biology master who has spent 27 of his 53 years at Victoria, attributes this partly to "corruption in admission procedures", a common practice in India whereby parents pay to get their dim children into schools.
"Old boys and girls from all over the world used to visit us. They knew every word of the old school, song," said Radhika Pradhan, the headmistress of Dow Hill who describes herself as "the last of the old lot".
She added: "Now they don't love the school like they used to. We just can't mould them anymore."
One old boy at least, Kalyan Mukheriee, 42, a filmmaker-who spent his kindergarten years at Dow Hill, views his school with nostalgia. "I had an English teacher, Miss Lavia. She taught me there were beautiful things in life that were not about money," he said. "The English in their own way set a standard. Culture was more important than cash."
The centenary albums of Darjeeling's six best-known British public schools evoke a bygone era of quaint language and stiff upper lip. But, in reality, only one has remained faithful to its original ethos.
St Paul's, sited loftily above Darjeeling, founded in 1823 by Calcutta "boxwallahs" to provide "an upper-class public school education" for their sons, has been described as "the Eton of the East” and still remains a very Victorian institution.
The school still draws its 750 pupils mainly from wealthy Indian families. Alone among Darjeeling's schools, it preserves a formality long lost in equivalent British institutions in England.
Meals at St Paul's are rather grand, with Anglican grace and turbaned bearers carrying platters of steaming rice. "We are the last outpost of the older tradition and, yes, we're slightly ivory-towered," said David Howard, the Anglo-Indian headmaster. "Our philosophy is, “You have to be street-smart, but there's a certain level below which a Paulite will not sink'."
India's 55 public schools still hold considerable snob appeal for the country's ruling elite. The most talked about is the Doon School (founded in the 1950s), the country's first solely Indian public school, in Dehra Dun, a hill station north of Delhi. Although not one of the old British schools (in any sense), Doon saw a rush of parents desperate to admit their children after one of its old boys, Rajiv Gandhi, became prime minister in 1984. However, it is the very cachet attached to schools such as Doon that has, in the opinion of one former master, caused their decline. The poor standards of discipline, etiquette and spoken English at the Doon School are typical of what passes for a public school education in India today.
"Parents who had money but didn't believe in the public school system started sending their children to these schools for status and connections," said Sumesh Singh. who has also taught at Gordonstoun. "Earlier there was a spirit of community service and idealism. Now everyone's out for himself".

Julian West is an international reporter for the “West Australian” based in Perth, Australia.