The Modern School (1920 – 2020): A Century of Schooling in India 9789389648799

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First published by Westland Publications Private Limited in 2020 1st Floor, A Block, East Wing, Plot No. 40, SP Infocity, Dr MGR Salai, Perungudi, Kandanchavadi, Chennai 600096 Westland and the Westland logo are the trademarks of Westland Publications Private Limited, or its affiliates. Copyright © Board of Trustees, Modern School, 2020 ISBN: 9789389648799 The views and opinions expressed in this work are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him, and the publisher is in no way liable for the same. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE MODERN SCHOOL, BARAKHAMBA ROAD LABYRINTHS OF SPACE AND MEMORY CHAPTER TWO EDUCATION, BUSINESS CLASS AND THE IDEA OF ENNOBLEMENT CHAPTER THREE INDEPENDENCE, PARTITION AND THE MODERN SCHOOL CHAPTER FOUR M.N. KAPUR AND THE IDEA OF A PRINCIPAL, 1947–1977 CHAPTER FIVE AT THE CENTRE OF AN EMERGING CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY CHAPTER SIX JUNIORS FIND A NEW ABODE HUMAYUN ROAD, 1961–2020 CHAPTER SEVEN MODERN ENTERS ITS MATURITY 1961– 1977 CHAPTER EIGHT SPORT, GAMES AND PHYSIQUE MODERN AND INDIA’S SPORTING HISTORY CHAPTER NINE MODERN AND THE IDEA OF TECHNOLOGY CHAPTER TEN MSVV A CHILD OF THE NEW INDIA CHAPTER ELEVEN MODERN AND THE NEW ORDER OF THINGS CHAPTER TWELVE THE NEW CENTURY EPILOGUE NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS PHOTOGRAPHS

INTRODUCTION

Delhi’s Modern School, founded in 1920, has been an integral part of the modern history of India’s capital and a significant element of the sociocultural horizon of the nation itself. Any history of the school is therefore also a history of Delhi’s own evolution and, indeed, the growth and development of independent India. I: THE MUTINY AND THE END OF CULTURAL EFFERVESCENCE The revolt of 1857 that began on 10 May in Barrackpore, Bengal, arrived in Delhi on 11 May, when the sepoys reached the city with the intention of proclaiming Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, as their sovereign. Delhi, in the words of the legendary poet Mirza Ghalib, was no longer the same. The Indian soldiers went on the rampage and took control of the city, holding it hostage for almost four months. Their reign ended with the brutal retribution wrought by the British army and its partners. In the measured words of Narayani Gupta, a contemporary historian of Delhi, when the city was regained, ‘all the inhabitants of the city were expelled, many summarily hanged, and the houses of suspects confiscated and looted. The people took refuge in tombs and other rough shelters south of Delhi through the cold winter months, some of the more fortunate escaping to other towns.’1 She further tells us: Only in January I858 were the Hindus allowed to return, and the Muslims not till the end of that year. In December I859 the Viceroy, Lord Canning, permitted the

Muslims to recover their property if they were prepared to pay for it. In the interim two years much of the property belonging to the Muslims of the city had been taken over by the government or demolished.2 The Muslim population was not only expelled, but Muslims were killed with impunity. Hindus and others, too, were not exempted. Many prominent supporters of the Mughals and the sepoys, which included the leading figures of the local merchant community, were publicly hanged. The military court instituted near Kotwali, under the orders of C.T. Metcalfe, executed at least five to six persons each day and in this manner killed about six thousand people. The city was emptied of its Muslim residents, and those who remained were there at the mercy of officials. Anyone found suspicious of a lack of loyalty was summarily executed or made to suffer all kinds of losses. Delhi was almost taken over by the army, which held control and decided every new plan for the city. The redesigned city reduced the original residents to secondary and subservient positions, as was evident when the British decided to take over the Daryaganj area for security reasons and the residents were ordered to move. Though the plan was later dropped, the panic and helplessness of the residents demonstrated their true status —completely helpless and living under the mercy of a foreign government. The status of Daryaganj itself changed drastically, as many of the older nobility left, and the coming of the Civil Lines and other British residential areas showed Indians their inferior place in British eyes. Delhi as it once was—and more specifically, the imperial capital of Shahjahanabad—gradually disappeared into oblivion. The city’s population, which was 160,270 in 1846, remained reduced to 131,709 even after a decade and a half, in 1863.3 But this was not the end. The mark of colonial retribution also lay in the extensive and systematic destruction of the city’s wealth and strength. As historians have pointed out, the city was looted

twice: first, by the army when it entered, and later, systematically, by the commissioned plunder carried out by ‘prize agents’.4 Apart from the large-scale plunder of households and businesses, there was a deliberate and systematic loot of the priceless manuscripts, books and libraries of many, including the Mughal Imperial Library and the rich private libraries of the descendants of Shah Walli Ullah, Mufti Sadruddin Azurda5 and Zahir Dehlavi. Zahir Dehlavi, we are told, lost his entire personal collection, which included ‘twenty very remarkable copies of the holy Quran, including seven copies transcribed by his grandfather which were further recorded by his own father on the expensive paper made at Yazd and Kashan’.6 He lost: … thousands of volumes of other exceptional and precious books on other disciplines, including history which were purchased by his father for him for three hundred rupees named Rauzat us Safa, Tarikh-i-Farishta and Shah Namah.7 There were probably many more libraries lost of which there is no record, in areas where the residents were expelled or killed or people did not complain, possibly because of the fear of being implicated by the colonial authorities. A major loss was the library of Nawab Ziauddin Ahmad Khan of Loharu, which held manuscripts that formed the basis, in the pre-Mutiny period, for Sir Henry Elliot’s eight volumes of translated excerpts on the history of India, edited by John Dowson and published posthumously in the 1860s.8 This loot and plunder was, in some sense, brought to its culmination by the British design to dispossess large sections of people associated with the erstwhile administrative institutions of their wealth, entitlement and status. The worst affected were the educational and cultural institutions. This was linked to British understanding of Delhi’s location in the larger cultural and political world. In their reading, the educational institutions of the city were

the intellectual centre of the Mughal empire, occupying a significant place in the imagination of people. The coined term ‘Persianate’ describes this cultural zone of influence, which extended far and wide—into west and central Asia, and into the east and Deccan in the Indian subcontinent. But the word does not completely capture the richness of the syncretic language and literary traditions and culture of the subcontinent‚ what I choose to refer to as the Indo-Persian traditions. However you term it, for the British, the key to this cultural sphere were the persons of letters, their institutions and the nature of their relationship to the state and society. It is in this context that what the British began in 1820, by systematically undercutting the financial backbone of the emperor, the nobility and the institutions, is of utmost significance. In 1820, the civil commissioner of Delhi was asked to survey the jagirs of Delhi and its environs and submit a report to the Secretary to the government.9 This was also a means to accurately inspect the land held by the royal household so that the British could extract as much revenue as possible. Subsequent to this survey, the British demanded proof of most of the grants that were held in perpetuity or for a long period, and in most cases declared the Mughal farmans or documents as fraudulent and the whole system a corrupt practice which needed to be dismantled. This led to a systematic attack on the autonomous life of educational institutions, as most of them held grants or endowments linked to such grants. Many persons of letters, like Ghalib, also depended on such grants for their livelihood.10 Many leading centres of knowledge and education, particularly the madrasas of Delhi—like Madrasa-i-Ghaziuddin, established by a leading Deccan commander of Asaf Jah I (the first Nizam of Hyderabad), Madrasa-i-Rhimiya (founded by the Islamic scholar Shah Wali Ullah Dehlawi’s father, Shah Abdul Rahim), the madrasa of Husain Buksh, and many others—were supported by the grants, which under the Mughals were known as jagir and madad-i-mash grants.11

The abolition of these grants forced institutions to depend on municipal grants (paid by the people themselves), which almost killed their autonomy, as they were for all practical purposes given diktats by the British officials. It is in this context that the Ghaziuddin madrasa, which became the Delhi College, was given a grant to run. The Delhi College was established after the Delhi Committee of Public Instruction, which included both British officials and local notables, investigated the state of learning in the Mughal capital in early 1813 and reported that ‘many Madrasas which provided education in the city and in the neighbourhood were in a state of disrepair.’12 The madrasa of Ghaziuddin Khan, which was built in the eighteenth century near Ajmeri Gate, was one among these. Maintained out of the Khan’s endowment, its income had declined at the time when the committee discussed its state of health. Renewed with vigour, the revamped madrasa, now called the Delhi College, began teaching mathematics and astronomy in the European pattern while maintaining Arabic and Persian studies in its Oriental section.13 The students and teachers of the college very soon distinguished themselves in different fields of knowledge and public affairs. While the college became the first organised centre where a number of students learnt the newly introduced subjects in English in Delhi, what was extremely significant was its blooming as the most vibrant centre of Urdu language and literature. Many works of science, mathematics and Western literature were translated into Urdu and printed at the Delhi College press, which was known for printing some of Delhi’s Urdu akhbar.14 Master Ramchandra was a teacher in the college and one of the exceptional personalities of the time. An ingenious mathematical mind, he excelled as both a teacher and a writer in Urdu in the rich journalistic milieu of early nineteenth-century Delhi.15 The college, significantly, became a centre of the city’s literary and cultural effervescence, and was a hub for the cultural elite in pre-Mutiny times.16

Though in many senses, it became a centre for new learning, the Delhi College was on a sticky wicket: its finances and administration were in British hands. Ultimately, the renaissance in Delhi College was short lived, and the Mutiny of 1857 stopped even this sham patronage. Even Master Ramchandra became the deputy of the prize agents, and facilitated the plundering of the literary treasures of the city. The demise of the Delhi College after 1857 mirrored the city’s reduction to a mere administrative unit of Punjab, a sign of the new priorities of direct British rule. Notwithstanding efforts by the city’s residents to revive it, the Delhi College could never regain its former prominence. Even after Delhi became the capital of British India, colonial benediction was bestowed upon St Stephen’s College and other such institutions that served British interests. While the colonial masters propped up some institutions, they were unconcerned about the education of the public, with, for instance, permission for the University of Punjab only granted when Indians themselves collected the money and deposited it with the government.17 Thus, all the evidence suggests that the retribution carried out by the British in the aftermath of 1857 also involved concerted efforts to kill the intellectual spirit of the city, destroy the resource bases of its institutions, and completely alter the nature of the relationship of the surviving institutions with the city. The expulsion of the nobility and people of letters and the systematic plunder of libraries further dealt a blow to the intellectual vitality of the city and brought to an end the line of Indo-Persian literati that had flourished over the last few centuries. The post-Mutiny history of Delhi and its institutions is also a history of how British policies played arbiter to the nature and location of the city’s institutions, moulding them in terms of the colonial regime’s needs. This is linked to the manner in which colonialism ruptured the existing connect between knowledge and society in the city. New trends in historical writings, evident in the last couple of decades, often deny the colonial role in this rupture. They highlight, instead, the way locals incorporated Western

culture and codes of morality and civility, to create new registers of a civic universe. However, these writings often dilute the impact of colonial presence and policies, and present a sustained focus on certain apparently fundamental issues that the local societies needed to resolve; the presence of the colonials is seen as incidental to those societal processes. The hunger for education among people was the catalyst for a variety of indigenous institutions, societies and socio-religious reform movements such as the Arya Samaj, the Brahmo Samaj and, in peninsular India, the Prarthana Samaj and the Pune Sarvajanik Sabha. The educational amelioration of the people was the spark for everything from the Kanya Mahavidyalaya in Jalandhar to Gurukul Kangri in Hardwar and Savitribai Phule’s schools for girls in Pune. Community efforts dotted the country, paving the way for the Kayastha pathshalas in Allahabad, Khalsa College in Amritsar, Aligarh Muslim University and, later, the Central Hindu College. The new efforts at institution building by Indians appear to have been aimed at strengthening selfregulating and self-financed institutions and, in turn, were a reflection of their desire for self-rule. The idea of the Modern school, too, as this book will discuss, was a part of this process. II: RETRIEVAL OF SPACE In recent years, several scholars and writers have sought to locate the geopolitical space of Delhi in its proper political and cultural context. One of the key efforts has been to trace the city by documenting its past and its built heritage and constantly remapping its shifting shape, taking account of the changes alongside the continuities.18 This archiving and documentation has become urgent as the rapid marginalisation of people from urban spaces has once again become intense. Examples from across the world reveal the ways in which cities are now planned and habilitated. Highly specialised spaces across the globe are connected to each other, transcending earlier connections to their

hinterland or even national territories, while at the local level there is a rising barricading of public spaces.19 So while on the one hand, there is a formalisation and institutionalisation within national territories, these processes are inextricably linked to a global dynamics, which can be understood as a part of historical processes. Interestingly, while in their organic evolution, cities have tended to allow for diversity as well as communication, creation of enclaves of various sorts—for the rich, the poor, people of colour, religious communities, the state—has fractured and raised barriers within their contours in modern and contemporary times, even while these cities seem replicated in a globally flattening world. At the same time, there is resistance, across the political spectrum, to a disconnection of these spaces, the global cities, from their immediate surroundings, to prevent the conversion of these into financial and technological enclaves connected to similar hubs across the world. There is a growing recognition of the need to re-imagine, historically connect and humanise our urban spaces to allow for a diversity of human and, indeed, non-human life in cities.20 Prominent voices include, in particular, younger writers drawn to exploring the ecological and cultural history of Delhi, who are following a path away from the globalised city’s growing violence and anomie. Oddly enough, these urban histories have by and large failed to consider the significance of institutions, particularly the role of educational institutions, in a city’s life. It seems impossible to build a full picture of Delhi without taking into consideration the presence of the University of Delhi in the north and that of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in the south. No history of Delhi has assessed the impact of new institutions such as Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), which has millions of students enrolled, making it arguably the largest university in the world, or Jamia Milia in the southeast of the city, and the more recent Ambedkar University or Indraprastha University, barely a dozen years old. And this still

leaves Delhi’s schools, admissions into which have become so hot button an annual topic that politicians are compelled to address it. The hundreds of thousands of young people from across the country, South Asia, and even further afield that throng to Delhi in search of an education give the city its energy, its exuberance. How has so large a constituency escaped the notice of urban historians? III: WRITING A HISTORY OF DELHI’S INSTITUTIONS Histories that have tried to capture the life and times of the institutions in Delhi, whether Indraprastha College, Hindu College or Jamia Millia University, show they share a significant trajectory: these institutions came up as a consequence of popular movement and demands.21 The rise of Hindu College as an institution, as well as others across the country, coincided with the rise of the mass-based, nationalist movement under Mahatma Gandhi. Moreover, the founder of Hindu also had a connect with pre-Mutiny Delhi, as his ancestor was hanged by the British for his friendship and collaboration with the Mughal emperor.22 The histories of many institutions that were deemed central universities decades after their founding, like Rabindranath Tagore’s Visva-Bharati, as well as more recent postIndependence ones, like JNU, indicate that their objectives were discussed in Parliament and seen to be connected with the people’s aspirations for centres of excellence.23 The strong demand for separate institutions for women saw the coming of institutions like SNDT in Maharashtra and, as the recent work on Indraprastha College shows, some of these had a strong linkage with the women’s movement in the country.24 The need for alternative schooling since the late nineteenth century as an intellectual current has left a deep philosophical imprint on the institution-making efforts in India. In recent years, some such experiments in schooling have been documented, and these

works provide us significant clues about the evolution of schooling and the philosophies behind such efforts.25 However, there is yet to be detailed work done on mapping educational history as a part of the history of institution making in India. Some educationists have ventured into history writing, but their work results in grand generalisations about history and lacks the serious inputs of the historians’ craft.26 The new genre of institutional history has emerged with its own codes and telos. Its concerns lie more with political and regulatory institutions, as they fall directly under the larger neoliberal rubric that has spawned the neo-institutional framework. There is a circularity of argument that colours some of these writings. In the new framework, the institution is measured by its effectiveness at supporting the new, liberal economic and political arrangements, including democracy.27 Institutions, by their very logic, need to support the designs of governing and the new economic realities of the times, shaped, of course, in the Anglo-American mould. As French philosopher Michel Foucault and those who followed him have argued, the claims of universality by Western knowledge and the Western normative universe are, at best, misplaced, as in their essence they themselves are parochial and centred in their west European locale. Despite this, Western ideas have come to dominate the rest of the world since the eighteenth century, on the back of European colonial supremacy. Notwithstanding the fact that intellectual critique of these institutional frameworks has been of relatively recent origins, since the nineteenth century, Indians have been presenting their own critique of the schooling and the schools that the British brought. The early euphoria that greeted the British and their purportedly modern scientific education tailed off fast, and by the twentieth century, there were strong voices calling for alternative schools and for pedagogy that acknowledged and incorporated non-Western intellectual history—either fully, in pristine form, or, as has been discussed in the Latin American context, in ‘mestizo’ (mixed) spaces, or in the words of Homi Bhabha, the hybrids that

reflected the complexities of colonial and post-independence societies.28 IV: THE MODERN SCHOOL The Modern School, set up in 1920, was an effort at imparting education of a certain type to Indians. An institution that goes back a century lends itself to critical analysis of the premises and ideas that have shaped it and that have shaped institution-making in independent India. The Modern School’s wide sphere of influence requires a deeper excavation than a mere cataloguing of the founder’s ideals and ideas; located in the capital and founded and managed by Indian business interests, the school has been intrinsically involved in the evolution of India’s quest to locate itself in the world. From 1947, when Raghubir Singh and Kamala Bose produced their wonderful book titled Modern School: A Successful Experiment in Education, October 1920–May 1947, there have been some fine efforts to chronicle the school’s history. Particularly memorable was the celebratory anthology edited by former pupils Khushwant Singh and Syeda Hameed, which was brought out in 1995 on the occasion of the school’s platinum jubilee. In 2009, a group of Modernites published a Festschrift to mark the birth centenary of M.N. Kapur, the school’s principal from 1947–1977 and the successor to legendary founder-principal Kamala Bose.29 The Modern School Old Students Association has also brought out a couple of nicely produced works that discuss different aspects of the school. While all of these help to locate the school in a wonderful world of its own, the larger context the school occupies does not enter these otherwise excellent works. This centenary history of the school attempts just that: to place Modern School within the larger matrix of the intellectual and social developments in colonial and post-Independence India. In writing this book, in addition to the works cited above, I have also relied on the Modern School’s splendid magazine,

Sandesh, and its predecessor, Adarsh. The latter was produced in English, Urdu and Bengali in addition to Hindi. The quality of the prose published in Adarsh in its golden period in the 1950s and early 1960s would compare favourably with that in any academic journal or general interest magazine today. All of the magazine’s coverage, from school events to national and international issues, was marked by a seriousness of tone and thought. Unsurprisingly, many excellent journalists, intellectuals and public figures of postIndependence India cut their teeth at Adarsh. The school has kept impeccable records, and under the aegis of the present board of trustees, there is an ongoing effort to create and maintain a specialised archive.30 It is natural that most of the young people who have passed through Modern School’s fabled corridors, playgrounds and art rooms hold fast to their image of the institution and of themselves in the institution. The task for the historian is complicated by the existence of hundreds of thousands of Modern Schools, of individual dreams, memories and stories. But what is history other than a collection of stories? My role has been to try to impose some narrative coherence on this multitude, to stand on the shoulders of all those who have already chronicled this extraordinary school’s rich history but to also maintain distance and perspective. How is Modern School adapting to a rapidly changing world and its evolving position among a variety of schools and schooling philosophies? Has it maintained its place in not just Indian society but the Indian imagination? In my study of another iconic institution in Delhi, JNU, I evolved a template that examined the university’s shared academic horizon with world-class institutions on the one hand, while placing it against the larger ethos of nation-building through the creation of excellent institutions in India on the other. This centenary history, too, tries to evolve a model of institution building that sees the school as intimately connected with the changing nature of family, society and nation over the past one hundred years. Dismantling colonial structures and the building of new structures in their place was an imperative

in countries that had thrown off the yokels of colonialism. The Modern School was born before Indian independence, but was already aware of the historical legacy it was to bear in postIndependence India. The founders were influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, who famously declared that he wanted the wide-open windows of his house to bring in the fresh breeze from all sides and yet for his feet to be planted strongly enough that he was not swept away. The journey of the school and its transformation over time find resonance in this evocative statement. Today, the school has three more siblings spread over what is generally called the NCR—the National Capital Region. Any institutional history must attempt an answer to the question of what mark, apart from fostering individual creativity and excellence, a school leaves on its students. What is its distinguishing stamp? The influential American sociologist Willard Waller argued, some ninety years ago, that schools have been goaded into becoming repositories of values that the larger society ignores. Yet, society demands that schools retain these values as both conscience and as a link to the past. Waller has trenchantly described schools as museums of values.31 Schools are supposed to provide a shared normative universe, but in a society riven by class divisions, it takes painstaking effort to create such a collective environment. While the Modern School, like a large number of other institutions, will have witnessed its share of the clash of values between groups of people, classes and generations, it would be in order that we yoke these values to larger socio-economic and cultural processes to understand the directions in which they have been trying to usher society in general and the school in particular. In this sense, the history of Modern School is a history of the society wherein it is located, and yet it also transcends its constrictive cultural boundaries to become universal, become humane and become political in the broadest sense of the term, succeeding in having the autonomy to forge its own path.

CHAPTER ONE MODERN SCHOOL, BARAKHAMBA ROAD LABYRINTHS OF SPACE AND MEMORY

It was a winter morning in Delhi, 4 January 1933, to be precise. The teachers and students of Modern School, Daryaganj marched to their new school premises on Barakhamba Road. The march was only a few kilometres, but it seemed they had been walking an age. I: THAT OLD RED-BRICK STRUCTURE ON BARAKHAMBA ROAD The march from Daryaganj to Barakhamba Road was a historic one for the pupils, the teachers and the city—as if in homage to the one undertaken just three years before by Mahatma Gandhi to reach Dandi in Gujarat. While the march of the Mahatma was a literal and symbolic step towards freedom from servility, the Modern School march was aspirational, an early glimpse of a wide, new horizon. It was a leap from the certainty and comfort of the old city to the uncertainty of the city of the colonial masters. It was an entry into that transient zone where the search for modernity was to encounter the colonial new city. While building the new capital at Delhi, the British had reserved the triangular space between Firozeshah Road and Connaught Place for the University of Delhi. The project was shelved when the authorities realised that it would cost them a huge sum to move the university, and the piece of land was left for private parties to buy and develop. The founder and other

members of the Modern School family seized this opportunity. The school was only a decade old, and it must have taken foresight and gumption to buy such a prominent chunk of land and construct a new building, even though it would have been clear that the school could not, in the long term, continue to operate out of its original premises—a Daryaganj haveli that belonged to Sultan Singh, the father of the Modern School founder, Lala Raghubir Singh. In any case, the lease for the Daryaganj haveli was initially granted for only three years. Discussions around the shift to a new campus had been ongoing. As early as 18 March 1921, a year after the school was started, the trustees had constituted a subcommittee to ‘draw a plan for a new site in Delhi’.1 When the trustees met again on 31 July, they were informed that ‘the chief commissioner had earmarked a site for the Modern School in the new city’,2 but, as Raghubir Singh told the other members of the trust, the ‘government was not able to allot it to the school for some years as the stability and future of the school were not assured’.3 However, the then acting chief commissioner, J.N.G. Johnson, very strongly recommended the school’s application for a piece of land in New Delhi. The negotiations with the government finally concluded in 1930. The lease for the new land was registered on 4 August 1930 and the architects C.G. and F.B. Blomfield, who were among the prominent builders of Lutyens’s Delhi, began to prepare the plans for the new school building. Sir Sobha Singh, who had helped in the construction of a large number of buildings in the new capital, and was a close friend of Sultan Singh—and was now a trustee of the school—was entrusted with supervising the construction of the school building. Eventually, the foundation was laid on 24 April 1931, ‘when the whole of school including the staff, several members of the managing committee assembled at the site, and each one laid a brick on the foundation’.4 Classes were to begin on 1 November 1931 at the new site. Sir Teja Singh Malik, another individual who had been closely involved in building the new capital city, helped organise the tents

and the temporary accommodation needed for the school. In the meantime, the hostellers were brought from Daryaganj ‘by the school bus and brought back till the final move to the new building was made’.5 The western blocks of the building were ready by May 1932, and the Montessori classes were the first to leave the tents. By August 1932, the ground floor of the main building was complete, and on 4 January 1933, the school completed its migration to its new home. Soon, other buildings began to be added to the campus. One of the first was a tool shed built by the students themselves. A gymnasium came up in 1935. A swimming pool was also built with the help of J.C. Chatterjee, the then superintendent of education for Delhi, who granted Rs 10,000 towards its construction. When Sir Kikabhai Premchand, the scion of a leading Bombay business family, entered into a matrimonial alliance with Sultan Singh’s family, he gifted the school a sanatorium, a medical centre.6 Premchand also donated funds for the sports pavilion. Basakha Singh, another of the developers of New Delhi, built the riding school in 1935. Later years saw a grand building block, named after Sobha Singh, come up on the right flank of the campus, while the huge Sir Shankar Lal auditorium dominated the left. Though the early buildings were faithful to the architectural modernism of the twentieth century, they retained colonial influences; the new buildings were more experimental. Over the years, the Barakhamba Road campus has become a fascinating conglomeration, a mishmash of styles that reflect the evolution of the school’s understanding of itself and its role in the city.7 II: ‘THE SCHOOL WITH FIVE GATES’ The mutiny in 1857 changed Delhi, that imperial city of the Mughals, its landscape and its future forever. Initially, the changes largely affected the north, the areas closer to the banks of the Yamuna and the older city. It was in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the British decided to shift their capital to

Delhi, that the city was given an entirely new face. The old city was identified by its seven gates; Lutyens’s Delhi, spread out around Raisina Hill, was marked by its grandeur. The colonial ‘New’ Delhi was to provide a window into the mind of the colonial state, while what increasingly came to be called the ‘old’ city was where the Indians, in all their myriad varieties, lived. Thus, the old and new, the Oriental and the imperial, occupied distinct spaces. The old was increasingly seen in terms of its supposed lack of hygiene and its teeming crowds.8 In contrast, Civil Lines and, later, Lutyens’s Delhi were planned to highlight the luxury of space, of wide roads and spread-out housing. The buildings here represented the strength and the longevity of the empire. Their indistinguishable features—the symmetrical shapes that were the marks of modernity—were the mark of city planning.9 The Modern School, significantly, located itself in the twilight zone of old and new. Barakhamba Road lay between spacious Lutyens’s Delhi and narrow Daryaganj. Steeped in humanistic education, Raghubir Singh thought of the school as a world unto itself, and wanted the buildings to reflect a space where students could find their own path before finding their place in the larger world outside the school. He saw the prevailing system of education as an abject surrender to official diktat and to the examination-linked-to-job pattern of the colonial system. Like other critics of colonial education, he, too, thought that it robbed almost all stakeholders of their freedom and creativity and prepared pupils to be cogs in a machine. He believed that a system of education needed to be developed where teachers and students were empowered to create something new. Teachers were to be given resources and freedom, and students were to be given responsibility. The idea was for teachers and students both to produce something of their own volition and not because the school inspector had to be pleased. Raghubir Singh imagined the Modern School as a day school with the ethos of a boarding school, in that students, teachers and administrators would spend

long hours, whole days, in each other’s company, learning and collaborating in an atmosphere of freedom and responsibility. III: MOVEMENT TO THE MODERN CITY Delhi was a quaint, quiet little capital city in the 1930s, as Nirad C. Chaudhuri, the eminent literary connoisseur, who was working in the All India Radio (AIR) at that time, would observe, as he cycled through its canopied streets, having moved here from Calcutta in 1942. His son Dhruva, a quintessential Dilliwala, became a great chronicler of the city’s growth, in both photographs and prose.10 It was in this staid imperial capital that the Modern School was built as an effort to open provincial minds.11 The ‘Modern’ was a very deliberate appellation, an indication of the founder’s vision for the school as a place where a robust Indian future could begin to make itself known. But the school building on Barakhamba Road, historians of architecture would argue, did not quite reflect the school’s name. Rather than shaking off the cobwebs of colonialism, the building could have been something the colonisers might themselves have made in order to make the colonised look provincial.12 It is this mismatch between the forward-looking name of the school and the colonialstyle main building that would create a productive dynamic tension for the generations of teachers and students who would inhabit the campus. But for passers-by how impressive the Modern School building must have seemed with its imposing facade and spacious surroundings, which together produced an effect of distance—from their own lives in the city of old, as well as the from the lives of those in the newly emerging colonies of refugees in the 1950s and migrants in the 1990s. This sense of distance, created by the difference between the large imperial buildings and the small dwellings in which the residents lived, was heightened with the coming of the new government-school buildings in the rapidly rehabilitating city of the 1940s and 1950s. Historians of school architecture have argued

that many of the post-Second World War government-school buildings, even in developed countries like the United Kingdom, were examples in grotesqueness. The schools in Delhi, and many other states in India, can also testify to the validity of these conclusions, with very few exceptions. The increasing number of public-school buildings that came to be constructed by public works departments appeared to put aesthetic pleasure and friendliness—characteristics pupils arguably most value—at the bottom of their list of essential attributes. The reasons were the same as they were in Britain: there were no consultations between the clients, the users and the architects. Even as recently as in 2008, the education secretary in Britain has pointed out that the best and most sensitive architects do not make school buildings, as there are no profits or incentives in constructing them. The Modern School’s approach to its architecture was, however, more carefully thought out, and can be better understood by placing it in a colonial context. In the late nineteenth century, a large number of buildings were constructed to be used as schools in India by the colonial state. The design of educational institutions in India during this period was marked by a prevailing Orientalist approach, combined with a show of imperial strength. One feature that stood out among these buildings was the deliberate adoption of the local style. Schools in Hyderabad (Sindh), Burma or Triplicane, for example, had very dominant elements of local styles.13 The Lahore School was a queer mix of the local and the colonial. Though local elements, and geographically- and topographicallysuited styles, were introduced, this was token, if necessary—even for schools and colleges, colonial hegemony needed to be absolute. Colonial education was linked to these colonial structures. So when Indians rebelled and wanted their children to go to the institutions that they were building, there were conscious as well as subconscious efforts to build indigenous models, to creatively reconfigure the spatial imaginary of schooling. Tagore, for

instance, would opt for the ‘forest’, Gandhi for the ‘ashrama’ and Swami Shraddhanand for the ‘gurukul’. However, when the schools in Delhi began to be built, it was after a gap of almost fifty years or so, and by then there were new trends in the design of and thinking on schools. In Europe at this time, for example, school buildings began to be invested with new thoughts about children’s well-being. In recent years, historians have studied the way in which school architecture was conceptualised and the ideas that were represented through its architectural design and style. Burke and Grosvenor, for example, have shown how twentieth-century schools began to articulate, in a very substantial manner, that the idea of space that society aspired to was also an element that influenced the design of schools.14 In the case of the Modern School, the colonial influences in its architecture and the association of its design with figures who had built the new capital for the British went against these trends. But this was a deliberate decision: the founders’ overarching desire for the building was that its largeness would also indicate an openness, a sense of space and possibility that would inspire students and enable their independent growth. This resonated with the idea of the open school, rather than the school with enclosed structures, that was growing in popularity across Europe, with new buildings reflecting changing notions. A celebrated architectural move in the Netherlands, for example, was by F.R. Yerbury, who designed open schools and shaped the educational experience of the generation.15 The idea that opening up the school’s facade would also open up the minds of children and encourage them to move beyond their cloistered upbringings, was intrinsic to Raghubir Singh’s educational philosophy. For Raghubir Singh, and for his friends, the design of the Modern School would aid in the widening of a child’s horizons and would be in marked contrast to crowded family life. As with the school’s name, its space too would reflect its ethos: an open invitation to modernity. ‘Change

life!’ wrote the Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space, ‘Change society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space… new social relations demand a new space, and viceversa.’16 IV: VOICES OF THOSE WHO LIVED HERE There often exists in the public sphere a sense of discomfort in the prevailing discrepancy between the way people view institutions and what those institutions actually are. This cognitive dissonance will be familiar to Modernites, though perhaps it would be interesting to study how the perceptions of insiders has been affected by the way those outside the school perceive it. Perceptions have also been altered by the ubiquity of social media, which has collapsed the border between Modernites’ school life and social life. Social media has dismantled the distance between the past and present of the school, and this has helped a mediated perception of the school to emerge in recent years, one in which finance and capital play a very dominant part. It is in this context that the school’s location on Barakhamba Road —coming from Connaught Place and merging on the circle of what is generally referred to as Mandi House, the centre of the city’s cultural landscape—and its sprawling lawns and giant mango, neem and jamun trees, make it seem like an extension of the Lutyens buildings, those elongated, red colonial houses on Hailey Road. The southern part of the school opens into the residential area of Babur Lane, Central Avenue, where, after Independence, a refugee colony gradually sprang up. However, the construction of the New Delhi station and its staff quarters connected the school to a different world altogether. The location, space and design of the main building lend the structure an aura of power and privilege that has not only been experienced by outsiders but has also been internalised by the school’s students. Some students in the 1990s called their school

‘elitist’.17 This internalisation of the outsider’s perception has made it difficult for later Modernites to inherit the foundational antielitist narrative of the school and its contribution to the nationmaking project. In the new digitally suffused and mapped world, the school building serves purposes other than those envisaged by the founders. Modernites who recall the school’s past and its ethos often find that their lived history is at variance with the hypertexts defining their schooling. The Modern School Old Students Association has brought out its own publication—two volumes with exquisite photographs of different parts of the school buildings.21 The biographies of these buildings are vital to our understanding of the school. For different generations, located at different intellectual and social contexts of the school, the structure acts as a medium that equalises and stabilises. The school building mediates the movement of history, allowing the old to renew its bonds with the new. Of course, the assembly of structures on campus has undergone its own changes and evolution. Many buildings, like a block of the teachers’ quarters, have disappeared, and others, like the sanatorium gifted to the school in the 1930s by Sir Kikabhai Premchand, have been repurposed. While an Indian Air Force Hawker Hunter (BA-241) aircraft is still prominently placed at the entrance of the school, old students and teachers alike miss the beautiful garden of Devyani Krishna or the roses in Vinita Chaturvedi’s garden, as these too have departed alongside the beloved teachers who maintained them and other fondly remembered buildings. Some remember how the mother of Sanjay Chopra and Geeta Chopra (students of the school who were brutally murdered in 1979 by the notorious criminals Billa and Ranga) would return to campus and sit under the neem tree, near where Shankar Hall is now located, seeking solace in the faces and noises of the children.22 The tree is no longer there, though it lives on in the memories of others who were. Nostalgia seeps through the school’s walls.

Today, when one approaches the school to enter its inner recesses, the mediation of photographic albums or pictures on social media via mobile and computer screens, leading to the erosion of chronological distance, quite often impede rather than facilitate such entry. There is now no difference between the older and the newer because of this mediation. Memories more evocatively lead back to the recesses of one’s lived experience in the school, as in this recollection of the time spent in the dance room in the 1950s by Nilima Sheikh, one of India’s leading artists: You climb up those extra flight of steps from the reception area, past the Junior School, you come to it— just after you noticed the sky opening up above you. Sounds of the dholak or manjira, or strains of music, if a performance was coming up, could be heard even before you got to the very top.18 Similarly, the art room, the place from where the process of art education begins in the school, rarely visible in social-media descriptions of Modern, is etched quite vividly in the memory of another leading luminary in the field of art, Geeta Kapur: You could come to the art room from the front of the School as well, walking across the crackling red bajri between the building and the flowering gardens, taking a left from the compound of the great banyan tree. Or you entered it from inside the teaching block, through the dark and slippery corridors—past the class rooms of Ved Vyas, Mr. Awadh Kishore and S.P. Choudhary—edging around the clay work paraphernalia presided over by Mawasi Ram … and then swiftly inside this aromatic haven of the art room.19 Nilima Sheikh even recollects the spatial dimensions of the dance room:

It was a wide room when you entered—20 by 35 feet, approximately (if time has not falsified my sense of dimension) with yellow marble chip flooring. A mural from the life of Buddha, probably painted by Sukumar Bose, faced you from the wall right across. A single wooden chair usually lay on your right, for Sharmaji to rest his foot for support if he was playing the dholak … I believe the room was designed as a meditation hall. It is enshrined today in my girlhood memories as sublimated space.20 Thousands of photographs are available, in varying colours, of the school and life inside it. None can convey the sound of either the dholak of B.C. Sharma in the 1960s or the inviting sounds of the dance room where Narendra Sharma in the 1950s and 1960s may have been preparing something interesting and exciting. The sounds, the smells and the space seem to seamlessly fuse into each other when the memories of the structure, the space and the people are brought in to understand the architectural layout, which is beyond the peopling of the buildings, and includes the ‘sensitivities’ attached to it. A social biography of school buildings, along the lines of Sir John Summerson’s discussion of architecture in Georgian London in 1945, can bring a much richer and more imaginatively layered history of the Modern School.23 How can we infuse the excitement of watching the great play Mother Courage—directed by the legendary playwright Richard Schechener himself—in the school premises, or convey the awe felt while listening to the morning speeches of the inspiring principal M.N. Kapur, or conjure the whistling of the coaches and the hurrahs for swimming pool veterans like Nareswar Dayal, or recall the admirers of Vinod Dikshit’s cricketing marvels in the 1950s and Meera Prasad’s athletic feats in the 1960s? There are sounds of varying kinds and visions such as the shades of the setting sun, seen from the boarding house or the cricket field, that the memories of Modernites convey to us.

One feels the need for such a guide to those sounds and silences, the scenes of light and camaraderie, for the mind is drawn to remember the spaces in their full sensory glory. Geeta Kapur has posed the important question with regard to modernism in the Indian context: ‘Can one retrieve its foundational idea from the layers of its history?’24 ‘When was the modern?’ she provokes us to ponder in the context of Indian art. It is as important for us to interrogate and appreciate what was ‘modern’ about the Modern School.25 Raghubir Singh, who conceptualised the Modern School and had a firm belief in the idea of the modern, was critical of the traditional way many Indian children were brought up. Their homes were often places of darkness, even if the houses themselves were spacious, with children raised to be fearful and cautious. The Modern School was intended as a counter—open, well lit, a place where children could grow without fear.26 Modernites, and those associated with the school, revisit the space of their formative years mostly in a mood of celebration rather than fear. At a time when education is increasingly becoming a fiercely competitive arena, arousing fear in many, the history of the Modern School may provide us with ways to envision education as a celebration of soul, rather than, in the words of Rabindranath Tagore, a close friend of the founder, an all-pervading emptiness.27

CHAPTER TWO EDUCATION, BUSINESS CLASS AND THE IDEA OF ENNOBLEMENT

The Modern School’s first phase was marked by a few constants: its founder’s passion for the school, the dedication of its principal to the cause, and the school’s perpetual budget deficit. When Raghubir Singh decided to start the school, Sultan Singh had allowed his son to use his Daryaganj mansion as school premises, thereby saving considerable overhead costs, but both father and son still had to pay out of their own pockets to cover the school’s running expenses. This drain on his finances didn’t seem to concern Raghubir Singh, whose passion for the project remained undimmed. What kept him and his colleagues going? The question looms large today when so many schools and private education centres are opened solely to maximise profits. Education has never been a completely state-driven enterprise. Evidence suggests that formal education has always involved collaboration between enterprising individuals, local communities, temples and state authorities. In the eighteenth century, the decline of indigenous systems of education in India was in part due to their longstanding inability to synthesise and adapt to new knowledge. But the inadequacy of colonial education —unable to do much more than prepare children for a future serving the coloniser—forced communities and individuals to create alternatives to meet the growing demand for education across India.1 Delhi was a centre for such activity, with colleges such as Hindu, Kirorimal and Ramjas, and schools such as Modern, being founded as a rebuke to colonial antipathy. Even a

cursory perusal of the history of most of these new schools will reveal the extensive involvement of business, either individually or as a class, to fund and maintain centres of learning. Most of these efforts or financial contributions did not accrue solely to any one community or class, indicating a philanthropic rather than parochial interest. The builders of the Modern School belonged predominantly to the business and financial world of Delhi. While Delhi, in the first part of the twentieth century, hardly had industry extensive enough to designate the owners of the means of production as a part of a capitalist class, the designation is still appropriate. Capitalist as a category with a relation to production quite distinct from other classes—labour or peasantry, for instance—crystallised only in the 1960s and 1970s in Delhi, when a qualitatively different industrial regime was set up in the city and its neighbouring areas. Thus, the members of the eminent business and financial families of Old Delhi constituted the capitalist class in a sense which is more heuristic and conventional than representative of any real, contemporary sense of the term: by dint of being businessmen who dealt in financial transactions, the Modern School founders were part of an incipient capitalist class. I: SCHOOL AS A REFLECTION OF SOCIAL POWER? In recent scholarly works, institutions of education have primarily been analysed in terms of power: the power of dominant groups to formulate and control educational ideals, either to perpetuate their hold over society or to create a new model of dominance.2 The ideas of Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire, formulated in the 1970s, have come to inspire generations of scholars and thinkers, as well as others who are engaged with the lives of children and their upbringing. Illich demonstrated how schooling can become a lifesnatching experience, and Paulo Freire showed us that how we teach must be concerned with and sensitised to the world that children, like other sections of oppressed humanity, inhabit, for

otherwise it leads to alienation and reinforces the harsh authoritarianism that made them that way, i.e. oppressed, in the first place. Thus, schooling has been seen from rich existential prisms, and the invocation has been to bring harmony between what we experience in our day-to-day life, its effect on the lives of children, and the way we go about shaping their future.3 There has been much serious thinking about freeing education from the dominance of sectional interests. When Gandhi, for example, talked about new education—fully articulated in his notion of ‘Nai Talim’—he was trying to transform the process of learning from dreary, servile imitation to one centred on inquiry, community and self-sustaining labour. It is in this same vein that the great religious teacher and philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, in later years, would talk about making education spiritual by giving children the space for serene exploration—a quest that one of our leading educational philosophers Avijit Pathak argues is in line with the best of our virtues.4 Earlier, in the 1920s, the Soviet experiment in universalising education and introducing a socialist system of schooling had impressed the world, including many Indian thinkers who were trying to open up education to everyone, regardless of circumstance. Tagore’s excitement about the Soviet approach to education, visible in Rassiar Chithi (Letters from Russia), and Nehru’s exhilaration on his Soviet trip in 1955 are cases in point.5 Tagore, particularly, was inspired by what he saw: They have realised that the only way to make the weak strong is through education: livelihood, health and peace all depend on this. Talk of merely ‘law and order’ neither fills one’s stomach nor one’s mind. On the other hand, one gets bankrupt paying for it.6 Tagore was extremely glad to see the implementation of many of his own ideas in the education system in Russia. Apart from the

exuberance about education itself, education was not divorced from life, and what was more, it was connected with rural life—the farm and agriculture.7 Nehru devoted a whole chapter of his Random Sketches to education: All the world over there is a realisation that only through right education can a better order of society be built up. In Russia the leaders today have no doubt as to what this future order should be and afire with their ideals they have set themselves out to realise it in their own time … They have concentrated their great energy on the training of the youth of the country, and their ablest men and women have been charged with this task.8 These experiences were of the utmost significance in underscoring the importance of widespread education for children and emphasising the idea that in any alternative vision of a future, education would matter most. In India, the period after 1905 was witness to efforts by various individuals and groups to cast off the shackles of the colonial system of education and found institutions of learning that were in tune with India’s emerging national ethos. The new efforts at defining the nation were not solely in the domain of politics and political agitation but also in arts, crafts and music. The Swadeshi schools were the best representation of these efforts, and they flourished for some time, particularly in Bengal and Maharashtra, but their weak organisational structures, among other issues, led to their decline in just a decade or so.9 But during this time, those Indians who had the wherewithal and ability to articulate future needs were immersed in laying out the contents of a common education system for the country and the direction such an education would take. This was not intended to be an exercise in class or group control but a counter to the powerful colonial

system already in place. It was, if you like, the beginning of nationalist education.10 II: SCHOOLING IN THE COLONIAL SCHEME AND ITS CRITIQUE From the 1830s, the East India Company had rapidly asserted its control over India, its confidence growing with victories in central India, Maharashtra and Delhi. By 1835, English had replaced Persian as the medium of official transaction, bringing to an end the debates between the ‘Anglicists’ and the ‘Orientalists’ about the medium of scholastic instruction. The Orientalists, with a strong background of literary work to their credit, including translations of important Sanskrit texts, argued that Oriental languages should be the foundation for instruction and discourse in the colonies. Support for English was mostly focused on it as the language of the exact sciences and muscular modernity, as compared to the ornamental classical languages, which were considered to indicate a rich but largely forgotten past. He was an icon of the group supporting English-language education, its adherents claiming that a science-based education would enable Indians to lift themselves out of social and cultural backwardness, including caste-based marriages and untouchability. Aware of the new tide of nationalism in south-eastern Europe in the wake of the French Revolution, Ram Mohan Roy wrote eloquently on the relationship between caste and the nation.11 So it was not only the English-educated elite but also the educated elite steeped in traditional languages that demanded English language-based education. One, hence, finds sympathy with the social scientist Ernest Gellner, who has criticised Edward Said’s iconic work on Orientalism for starting an academic trend that grossly oversimplifies the west and Oriental conditions in which the Western Orientalist seems to have projected a negative image of the Orient.12 In fact, many in the Orient themselves wanted to change their societies to embark on the more progressive and modern phase that the West was entering.

Among the leading proponents of English education and institutions in India at the time were the members of the Brahmo Samaj, which was founded by Ram Mohan Roy. The Tagore family, active Brahmos, led by example and were in the forefront of institution building, funded by their entry into the hallowed portals of business so well-secured by British interests. Colonial education, as a system, completely supplanted previous systems. It was overwhelmingly new in terms of structure, curriculum and mode of instruction. Old schooling systems in India were not discarded simply because they could not compete with the new schools or because they were no longer fit for purpose, but because the new schools, colleges and universities were tied to a system of credentials that were inseparable from good jobs. Thus, any structure that was not recognised by the colonial government was made redundant under the new dispensation. Institutions like Sanskrit tols, pathshalas and maktabs, which were dependent on community munificence and participation for their survival, were forced to compete with colonial schools and, inevitably, their influence waned.13 Initially, European colonisers attempted to make use of these local structures of schooling and tried to incorporate their schools into the existing order. The Orientalist lobby within the British officer class used the products of these institutions for their own advancement in the understanding of Oriental learning. As late as in the 1860s, the Hungarian-born, British Orientalist Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner was principal of Government College in Lahore, where translations of English texts in Persian, Urdu, Arabic and Sanskrit provoked intense debate.14 The likes of Leitner were invested in knowledge production in Indian languages but colonial policy was to soon make the English language supreme, with the Orientalists becoming figures of fun and suspicion for their interest in Eastern learning. A final blow was dealt to these local centres of learning after the Mutiny. For Indians, particularly in Delhi, the suppression of

the Mutiny resulted in the destruction of local rajas, rais, zamindars and the Muslim upper-middle class, who were the patrons of the older systems of schooling. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who was employed by the East India Company in 1838, was outspoken in his criticism of British actions in 1857, though he also urged Muslims to adapt or risk becoming irrelevant. He began setting up schools and urging the adoption of Westernstyle scientific learning, his efforts culminating in 1875 with the establishment of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College which, in 1920, became the Aligarh Muslim University.15 Its establishment was an acknowledgement that in order to thrive the Muslim upper classes needed to study, understand and engage with the language and knowledge of the new rulers. Fifty years after Sir Syed founded his university, Raghubir Singh envisaged the Modern School as not just a response to prevailing power but preparation for independence. III: THE BUSINESS CLASS AND EDUCATION The economic practices of the British before the revolt of 1857 were characterised by mercantilist trade practices. The mercantilist system was guided by strong merchant companies and dominated by the East India Company, and any competitors, like the Tagores, were attacked viciously and finished off. This system eventually buckled before free trade, which was, as shown by Indian historians in the last fifty years, the leading idea of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.16 Free trade advocated loosening the barriers of taxation on export and import, though in a colonial system like the one in India this was intended to maintain the trade balance in favour of colonial products and revenue flows. Free trade slogans were hollow, and in each meeting of Indian associations since 1885—whether the Indian liberal association, the merchants association, or even the Indian National Congress—the same was argued. Before the Indian

intelligentsia began to voice such an organised critique, the British Liberals had laid all of Ireland to waste with their free trade arguments, justifying corn exports from Ireland even as the Irish famine decimated potato crops, the staple diet of Irish peasants. The Irish famine, the ‘Great Hunger’, lasted from 1845 to 1849— its worst year referred to as Black ’47—and resulted in the deaths of an estimated one million people and the emigration of another million, reducing the population of Ireland by about a quarter, a crowning achievement of Liberals and free trade.17 Indian nationalists attacked this hypocrisy of the free trade argument, which served to strangle the growth of Indian trade and industries.18 Dwarkanath Tagore, known as the prince of traders, lost his businesses and died in such heavy debt that his son, Debendranath (Rabindranath Tagore’s father), spent critical years of his life paying it off, as the historian Blair Kling has revealed in his pioneering book Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India.19 The hardening of the racial stance further entrenched discriminatory economic policies, and most efforts to compete by the Indian business section were marred by official, non-official and sociocultural blockades. It is in this context that the rise of Indian business and modern capitalist classes should be seen, and not as expressions of crude neoliberal ideas, with Indian businesses becoming partners in their own colonisation and the colonial enterprise.20 An Indian capitalist class emerged from among the trading communities, those carrying out speculative commerce and other businesses in the new industrial and commercial centres, and the network of those involved in maritime trade.21 Critical perusal shows how business networks provided communities and individual businessmen strength to survive a regime which, notwithstanding that it provided expansion, put a cap over their expansion.22 Therefore, many new ventures by Indians were started to not only protect themselves but also to open up channels of support beyond their own community. Nationalism was an ennobling catalyst, an ideology that galvanised Indian

businessmen to reach out across communities. Punjab National Bank and other initiatives by the bank’s founder-chairman, Dyal Singh Majithia, including the Tribune newspaper, as well as Prafulla Chandra Ray’s Bengal Chemicals were prominent examples of such enterprises.23 Nationalist zeal was at its apex during the Swadeshi Movement, from 1905 to 1907, when the call for opening local, indigenous institutions extended to the business arena as well. It was education that seemed to most enthuse the Swadeshi effort. Nationalist schools, like the Tagore family’s in Santiniketan, were non-denominational. Early in the Swadeshi Movement, despite its martial undertone, the approach to education seemed like a desire for Upanishadic understanding, for cultural revival as a response to colonial education in which the English language was served as a redemption from the ills of Indian society. The ethos of an earlier era, when the likes of Ram Mohan Roy or Jyotiba Phule and his wife, Savitribai, had opened schools with the cooperation of the colonial administration, was now being opposed. The new schools focused on shaping and forming a pan-Indian identity and sought distance from the British colonisers. It was a tension that would persist as a feature of India’s body politic for the next century. In the immediate period though, the new approach to schooling caught the imagination of both the India intelligentsia and the nascent business leaders. For the latter, philanthropy was a significant means of contributing to the national cause and the greater good, setting the stage by the 1920s for the founding of an institution such as the Modern School. IV: THE POLITICAL LIFE OF THE BUSINESS CLASS IN DELHI The business community in Delhi in the 1920s differed in character from its counterparts in Madras, Bombay and Calcutta.24 Delhi neither had port-related business nor was it the hub of any large industrial or manufacturing units. Northern India

had some important trading centres, which were historically connected with the Silk Route and later with other north-western centres such as Agra and Mathura.25 For centuries, Delhi had been attractive to Jain traders who were based in different parts of northern India. With growing British control, trade increased with Punjab, but the volatility in the North-West Frontier Province meant trade with central Asia and further afield suffered. The Jains and merchant castes like Agarwals, Khandelwals and others from western Uttar Pradesh—Saharanpur, say, or Bulandshahar or Meerut—gradually found their way to the centre. Many came through their business networks and settled in the city even as they wound up their careers. Matrimonial relations also brought many to the capital. Some maintained their links to their ancestral villages, making frequent visits for festivals and holidays. Ajit Prasad Jain for instance, minister of rehabilitation in Nehru’s cabinet in 1952 in the first Lok Sabha, and a major figure in Uttar Pradesh politics, maintained his family home in Chhutmalpur, a village in the Saharanpur district.26 His son, K.P. Jain, became one of Delhi’s leading doctors. One of the chief characteristics of the business communities in Delhi was their relatively flexible approach to caste. The ease with which castes moved and interacted with other castes and also the ruling elite, be they Mughal courtiers or British officials, was of singular importance. It was this social and political milieu which, in the long run, structured their social and cultural philosophy. This was interlaced with a movement towards modernisation in which the state was a critical presence. Unlike business communities in other metropolitan centres, the business community of Old Delhi was literally within touching distance of the state. For practical purposes, businesses became entwined with the state, so much so that sometimes it was hard to separate the two. The nationalist movement, too, was not very strong in Delhi compared to other parts of the country, perhaps because Delhi had less room to manoeuvre without attracting a direct and instant colonial response. So it was a considerable risk for the

likes of Sultan Singh to openly declare their allegiance to the nationalist movement. Delhi’s economy, till very late, did not allow a substantial capitalist class to emerge. It mostly had business or mercantile communities whose business was often restricted to the region. The increase in state operations in the city since the 1920s began to give these players opportunities to garner state patronage. As Delhi’s importance grew and it became clear that the all-India clerical and bureaucratic staff would descend on Delhi once the capital shifted, the importance of education was increasingly felt among the communities in Delhi. This need was to soon merge with the desire of ennobling the local people and saving them from illiteracy and poverty. As the capital of the Mughals, Delhi had become the centre of an enlightened literati and home to an intellectual effervescence, but this was sorely impacted by the Mutiny and subsequent colonial policies. As we have seen, the story of the rise and decline of the Delhi College was a story of this period itself. When schools came up, they carried the older humanist tradition of emphasis on literature and classics, a tradition the Orientalist British officials in the Punjab province were encouraging through Government Oriental College, Lahore under the directorship of G.W. Leitner. Thus the Anglo Arabic and Anglo Sanskrit Victoria Jubilee School came up with a similar trajectory, foregrounding literary and humanistic education. The business community helped establish a number of other educational institutions, which included Hindu College, Indraprastha College, the Ramjas schools and college, and a range of libraries and public institutions. The prince of Delhi’s business community before 1857 was Ramji Das Gurwale. He was the financial and political supporter of Bahadur Shah Zafar and, hence, lost his entire fortune to the British reprisal after 1857. His scion, Krishan Das Gurwale, nevertheless went on to found both Hindu College and the Delhi Cloth Mills (DCM). He also founded the Anglo Sanskrit Victoria Jubilee Senior Secondary School and Victoria Zanana

Hospital.27 Following his lead, other members of the community began to contribute in various ways. These included Lala Amba Prasad, Rai Sahib Ishri Prasad, Lal Bahadur and Lala Sheo Pershad.28 Amba Prasad, for example, donated Rs 80,000 for the repair of his old school, the Anglo Sanskrit school. Lala Lachman Das, another businessman, set up a public library and dharamashala, known today as Dharamshala Lala Lachman Das, at Nigam Bodh Ghat, and was the head of Harijan Sevak Sangh. Lala Raghu Mal gave Rs 1 lakh to set up the Arya Kanya Mahavidyalaya and later gave his house to the Arya Public Trust. His son-in-law, Lala Hansraj Gupta, was a key figure in many of the institutions that were set up earlier, including the Hindu College. The great grandson of Badri Das, who worked as a treasurer of the British and almost owned half of the Sadar Bazar by 1857, Lala Shri Ram emerged as the fountainhead of the entrepreneurial section of this community by the 1940s. By this time he had consolidated the DCM, and helped by the war boom and by his quick decision to diversify, Lala Shri Ram emerged as a leading industrialist and, in fact, gave a new direction to business enterprise in the city.29 His greatest investment, in terms of the way the city remembers him today, was in educational institutions ranging from primary schools to higher industrial research. With his keen interest in vocation-oriented education, he founded the Commercial Educational Trust in 1920 with an endowment of Rs 2 lakh.30 The trust took over and supported many schools, beginning with the Commercial High School. The high school was raised to the status of an intermediate college in 1926, became a college in 1930 and by 1934, became a postgraduate college under Delhi University.31 In 1949, the governing body of the college decided to associate the name of Lala Shri Ram with the college, but the decision could not be implemented until 1951 due to the opposition of Lala Shri Ram himself. By the time he started Lady Shri Ram College in 1956, his trust was supporting many institutions, including Anglo Sanskrit Victoria Jubilee Primary School, Commercial High

school, Madan Mohan Malviya Shilpi Vidyalaya and Shri Ram College of Commerce. In 1962, the name of the trust was changed to Shri Ram Education Trust. Lala Shri Ram also got closely involved with the management of the Hindu College from the early 1930s and became the chairman of its governing body in 1946. Finally, one of his greatest contributions was to painstakingly build the Shri Ram Institute of Industrial Research.32 Meanwhile, there were others who, though not businessmen, spent all their earnings to set up institutions. Rai Kedar Nath, who set up the Ramjas schools, was one such person. Notwithstanding all such efforts, the completely partisan approach of the colonial state did not allow Delhi to live up to its own image of a lettered city. It was, therefore, left to the local communities with some resources to start and help schools and other institutions. Raghubir Singh’s father, Sultan Singh, was a leading Jain financier. He, too, was interested in education, and was one of the founders of the Indraprastha School in the Jama Masjid area. He was also very closely connected to the Hindu College, and joined the board in 1910. He helped the college acquire Colonel Skinner’s Bungalow, of which he was made the ward by the British. The college functioned from here till it moved to its present place in 1952.33 Sultan Singh enjoyed considerable status within the colonial establishment, having helped the British in certain treasury and financing operations to such an extent that he was given a knighthood. He had advised good investments in both land and business and was in close touch with the British bureaucracy. In the post-1857 period, properties seized from locals in Old Delhi were put under his ward. He was a man of the world, having travelled abroad, and he arranged similar trips to England and the Continent for his son. Inevitably, Raghubir Singh would bring some of that experience to bear on the Modern School, which looked outwards with confidence while remaining rooted in India.

V: THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NEW SCHOOL Sultan Singh’s Daryaganj mansion, with its many rooms, halls and open spaces, became the first premises of the Modern School. The school’s inauguration was delayed by a month ‘on account of a malarial epidemic being prevalent and the preparation having not been completed’, and so it was ‘resolved that the school be started on 1 October instead of 1 September 1920’.34 It was also decided that admissions would begin on that date and classes ‘should begin from 15 October when the opening ceremony should be performed’.35 The first meeting of the school’s management committee took place on 30 August 1920 under the chairmanship of Jaidev Singh, a leading personality in the Civil Lines area. The meeting was attended by Ganesh Prasad and Raghu Nath, who were representatives of the leading business families of Old Delhi, as well as Raghubir Singh and Kamala Bose. The committee decided to invite Mrs Hailey to ‘open the school’.36 Alesandra Hailey (née Balzani) was the wife of Sir Malcolm Hailey, the finance member of the governor general’s council and chief commissioner of Delhi from 1912–1918. Malcolm Hailey, his biographer John Cell suggests, was one of the most distinguished civil servants of the British Empire. His rise from the position of an officer in the Jhelum district to the post of finance member of the governor general’s council speaks volumes for his achievements.37 He could not become governor general himself due to personal issues—both his children died, one in the First World War and the other due to medical issues that also affected his wife quite severely.38 Hailey played a major role in paving the way for the construction of the capital and the organisation of the Delhi Durbar in 1911, attended by George V. That such an establishment figure as Hailey was involved, even tangentially, with the opening of the Modern School suggests the relationship between Indian business and British officialdom was still strong,

despite appearances. The invitation to Mrs Hailey, after all, was sent in 1920, a year or so after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, when the non-cooperation movement had begun to sweep the country, capturing the hearts and imagination of Indians, who were beginning to see an end to colonial fiat. By September 1920, the special session of the Indian National Congress declared noncooperation to be the official credo of the Congress, to be ratified in December 1920 in Nagpur. Even Sultan Singh, someone who had close business and financial interests with the colonial state and had been knighted, was by 1920 conveying his sympathies for the nationalist cause. Delhi, as we have observed, was not a centre of political agitation in the same way that other provinces like Madras, Bengal, Bombay or even Punjab were.39 This may be partly due to the memory of the repression of the mutiny of 1857 and the complete dismemberment of locally established communities. Early leaders of the independence struggle, like Hakim Ajmal Khan, generally came from the Muslim middle class. But the years of 1919 and 1920 were a period of intense ferment. The Rowlatt Act and the agitation in Punjab, followed by the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, roiled Delhi, as it did other parts of the country. Gandhi’s commitment to non-cooperation sealed popular attachment to the Congress and the national movement for independence. In fact, as the writer and activist Lakshmi Chand Jain, who came from a prominent Delhi business family and turned to the nationalist cause at a young age, informs us, there were a number of organisations in Delhi that were working along nationalist lines.40 Sultan Singh’s turn to the nationalist cause, therefore, was not an individual or isolated act of ideological change, but was representative of a whole class of people. VI: ORGANISING THE TEACHING CADRE The colonial curriculum was weighted heavily towards the creation of an educated class that could help the British administer India,

its most able adherents fluent in the political ideologies and debates current in England.41 There was little stress, though, on independent thinking or applying the scientific ideas changing the face of Britain and the Continent. British schooling in the colonies was calibrated for maximum efficiency in achieving administrative goals, rather than preparing students for a life of the mind. Colonial teaching and philosophy produced an education system that latter-day pedagogic thinkers have described as lifeless, eschewing life skills and experiences in favour of rote learning to prepare for exams. Passing British-administered examinations became the only goal of colonial education. This tragedy was exacerbated by local institutions that began by copying British schools and then proceeded to stay the same even after the colonisers left, while the British themselves radically reformed their schools. Even now, in its worst aspects, the Indian education system resembles an outdated version of the British system, one that is shorn of all its progressive elements. Teachers, so intrinsic to and so highly regarded in precolonial education systems, were reduced to servants of the Company, and later the government, in the colonial system of education. Their job was to prepare their students for the needs of the British Empire. Any changes in the form, curriculum and education being imparted in the country were responses to the needs of empire rather than the results of new ideas. The best example was the role of the missionaries, who were quite independently and aggressively carrying out conversion-related activities as a part of education. This was in aid of the larger colonial project of civilising the natives. As the British left, the extent of the damage done to education in India became clear. The Sargent report, commissioned by the colonial government to examine the state of schools in India, was published in 1944 and recommended a restructuring of Indian education to bring about universal literacy in forty years. It was up to independent India to clean up the British mess. India has still not rehabilitated education completely: despite the existence of individual

instances of excellent schools, universally high standards of teaching remain a problem. From the beginning, the teachers at Modern were considered a part of the school family. The board of trustees prepared a code of responsibility for the teachers so that they remained committed to the school: The school desires and makes every effort to provide for every member of the staff conditions that would be conducive to the greatest happiness, contentment and progress. The scales of salary have been fixed, so that every person should receive a living wage, and would therefore not have to worry about any income from work outside the school.42 The board was conscious of the teacher’s needs in every respect. This code assured teachers that for the actual work inside school ‘every facility has been given in the way of equipment, library etc., and any fresh request from any member of the staff is (to be) favourably considered’.43 Since workload was thought to affect the performance of teachers, the code of responsibility also assured ‘them leisure to think out and study their subjects’ and ‘decided to increase the staff from next term’.44 In return, the school wanted the full-time commitment of the teachers. It was expected that teachers would give the school their undivided attention, would ‘further study the subject they are to teach and retain conditions that would lead to the highest efficiency of work —good health, good cheer, freshness and singleness of purpose’.45 Modern also began trying to build quarters for the staff within the school premises, and by the 1950s and 1960s, teachers often lived on school premises. Salaries were good, even if the hours were long. With the gradual rise in the salaries of school teachers in government schools and the opening up of many other professional opportunities, it was becoming important to attract

good teachers with higher pay scales. In the 1960s, Modern School brought in its in-house recommendations for higher pay scales and rules of promotion, including a higher retirement age. The number of government schools in India, as well as in Delhi, only rose after Independence and due to a very rapid expansion, the standards were not uniformly good. Conditions in the government schools were bad: salaries were low, while working hours appeared to stretch. Housing was rarely provided for teachers, though wages had not kept up with rising rents. Increasingly, teachers were working overtime or moonlighting. In some parts, government schoolteachers were also expected to fulfil sundry municipal duties that impinged on the time they could devote to teaching. Modern School came to an early conclusion that teacher retention was vital to success. It committed to being a good employer, and many of the teachers it first appointed—such as Awadh Bihari, K.D. Bharadwaj, Dasrath Ojha, N.K. Bose, Radhe Mohan, G.D. Rajapal and R.D. Goel—went on to enjoy long innings. Some, like Dasrath Ojha, even when they left—in his case to teach at Delhi University—remained steadfast friends of the school. In the big, new school building on Barakhamba Road, each teacher was assigned a room so they did not have to hop from class to class. This was a good practice and helped teachers develop an identity in the minds of pupils. Many Modernites will recall, either with dread or delight, the exact room in which a particular teacher taught a particular subject. One of the critical areas in which the school experimented since the 1930s was the amount of leave granted to teachers. In the school’s earliest days, teachers wore many hats and to grant leave meant to significantly impair the functioning of the school. With the many foreign teachers at the school because of the Montessori system it followed, the consequences of leaves were even more stark. Modern School soon understood it was vital, and cheaper, to have permanent local teachers and to accommodate their ambitions. The school began to grant increasingly long leaves to teachers to take up fellowships and posts abroad, giving

teachers up to a year, or even two, to return to the school. And most did. In some ways, the school’s hand was forced by a government scheme in the post-Independence period that enabled teachers to travel to the United States for training. But the school has maintained its accommodating approach to teachers who request sabbaticals and leaves to take up training opportunities, when other schools have largely prevented their teachers from expanding their skill sets. VII: ORGANISING THE SCHOOL: FINANCES AND EDUCATORS One of the earliest decisions taken regarding the Modern School was to appoint Kamala Bose as the school’s first principal, and it was an excellent one. Over the next twenty-seven years, Ms Bose would serve the school with complete dedication and distinction. She and Raghubir Singh made a good team. Both saw the school as a mission, a calling. Indeed, Ms Bose was so devoted to the school that her salary remained unchanged for years, until the board of trustees thrust a raise upon her. She also put Raghubir Singh in contact with the intellectual circles in Bengal in which she moved, bringing their ideas and passion for debate to the rather more provincial society in Delhi. If Ms Bose was the first and most important jigsaw in the puzzle, Raghubir Singh was equally circumspect when it came to the composition of the school’s board of trustees and the management committee. They comprised an eclectic mix of people: the principal of St Stephen’s College, S.K. Rudra; prominent builders of the empire’s new capital in Delhi, such as Sobha Singh and Basakha Singh; eminent academics, such as N.K. Sen and D.S. Kothari, of Delhi University’s philosophy and physics departments respectively; two of the city’s leading doctors, Rai Bahadur N. Sen and Dr S.K. Sen; and even British civil servants, despite Raghubir Singh’s obvious attachment to the nationalist cause.

The school, he knew, would be essential to an independent India because its mission was to enable its students to confront and perhaps even answer for themselves the question of identity for the modern Indian. How must the modern Indian be educated; what must he know and understand? Gandhiji was to the point when he commented in the school guest book about the school’s quest for modernity and his own concerns about it: I have only one fear. If in the flush of the Modern the ancient is lost it would greatly harm the young girls and boys. I take the liberty of saying this because I see the purity of the motive of the inception of the school and I want this institution to progress.46 Of course, whatever the ideals of the school’s founder, the Modern School had to also be a going concern. Profit was not the motive, but the school, despite Sultan Singh’s largesse, would have to pay for its keep. Groups of businessmen and builders bought generous subscriptions, with which the school was able to begin operations. Sultan Singh took many of the initial costs of the school on himself. He knew that the fees alone would not cover the costs of the school, which also offered boarding facilities. While more subscriptions were requested and forthcoming, he had already made up his mind to cover deficits, apart from making regular contributions, which included paying for half of the school’s annual telephone charges for its first three years in operation.47 Whatever the budgetary constraints, the school’s trustees refused to skimp on essentials such as teacher salaries; this ensured quality from the start. The permission to use Sultan Singh’s Daryaganj haveli for three years saved the school what would have been its most significant cost—suitable premises. The school was also a beneficiary of the enhanced prosperity of the trading class in India after the First World War and the spirit of the grand new capital.

By the mid-1920s, however, a global economic slump impacted businesses in India, as did the growing momentum behind the nationalist cause—the bid to gain independence from British rule. Expenses were not helped by the Modern School’s ambitious summer plans. In keeping with the habits of the upper-middle classes in Delhi and Punjab, the school planned a summer retreat to continue lessons in a clement climate, free of the city’s oppressive heat. In 1921, the school’s summer holidays lasted from 8 August to 12 October, after Dussera.48 An old Modernite has reported that the school decamped for at least two summers in the hills.49 The management committee, in its November 1920 meeting, had resolved ‘emphatically’ that the school should migrate to the hills every year. Shimla was ‘the preferred location and failing which Kasauli’.50 Sardar Ram Singh Kohli’s house in Kasauli, Derwood Lodge, was to serve as the school’s summer campus, with a suggested rent of about Rs 3000.51 Eventually though, the financial implications forced the school to postpone the decision.52 The school accumulated a deficit of about Rs 6000 in the first year itself, but this did not deter Raghubir Singh from persisting in pursuing his ideal of a boarding school. The straitened finances and the cost of upkeep made the issue of boarding facilities contentious. Boarders necessarily required more pastoral care than day scholars, with Raghubir Singh and Kamala Bose often caring for ill pupils themselves. As the school expanded, there were difficulties in recruiting properly qualified wardens, with an adequate knowledge of health and hygiene. There were also problems in finding a north Indian cook within the stipulated caste restrictions. And then there were the occasional examples of wayward behaviour, including the time a boy vanished from the school only to be found a day later, requiring the sort of disciplinary action that conflicted with the school’s ethos. But once the school was over its teething problems, it began to flourish in a period of growing political radicalisation, and the subject of a new building became impossible to ignore. A

campaign was begun with a tea party at the house of Sardar Sobha Singh. Twenty-five people were present on 7 August 1927, including Sultan Singh, Lala Shri Ram, Lala Dewan Chand, Basakha Singh, Hukum Singh Sodi, Amba Prasad, Nanak Chand and Teja Singh Malik, all prominent burghers. Donations were promised, with Sultan Singh pledging Rs 20,000 and Sobha Singh Rs 10,000, and by 7 March 1929, the board formally accepted the offer of a lease on the land on Barakhamba Road. Even after a decade of operation, the school accounts were still in deficit. In 1930, while the school’s expenses had gone up to Rs 37,800, the income from all sources was still short by almost Rs 11,000. The school was the recipient of a grant of Rs 4,200 from the municipal corporation, which was stopped in 1929, complicating the situation further.53 When requested to continue the maintenance grant to the school, the chief commissioner’s office replied that ‘for lack of funds it has not been possible to make good to the high schools and colleges the grants withdrawn by the Municipal Committee, Delhi’.54 However, the grant was resumed the next year.55 The deficit, however, kept on growing, and by the time the school began the construction of the new building at Barakhamba Road, which too needed finances, Raghubir Singh had already forwarded an accumulated sum of Rs 142,796, 5 anna and 3 paise to the school.56 He knew that in such a precarious financial condition, many of those whom he would have loved to have on the management committee or the school’s trust, would not like to be associated with the school for fear of sharing in the liabilities. He therefore declared that he would not, at any moment, embarrass either the members of the management committee or the trust by demanding back his loan. He requested the school board to pass a resolution recognising ‘the liabilities of the school for the payment of the above mentioned debts’.57 The board acquiesced to his request and confirmed that the Rs 188,257 that had been advanced by him to the school up to 31 December 1934 was just a loan.58 Raghubir Singh was also clear

that this loan did not include the subscriptions or donations given by either him or his father.59 The board also resolved that the said amount would be charged on the movable and immovable properties, which helped reassure members about the fixed liabilities.60 This allowed the school to maintain a clean financial standing. Now the school could take off, though its philosophy, its openness, remained intact from its small beginnings in Sultan Singh’s Daryaganj haveli. VIII: IDEA OF ENNOBLEMENT After the Second World War, a now legendary group of eight industrialists made a proposition, popularly referred to as the Bombay Plan, in which the newly independent Indian state would intervene aggressively in the economy to steer it towards growth. Private enterprise would play a supporting, complementary role.61 Raghubir Singh and the Modern School trustees extended this idea to schooling, inviting the principal of a government school in Gurgaon to inspect their institution and prepare a report. Sociologist Liah Greenfeld has written about how nationalism ennobled people, how it granted all members of a nation dignity and so paved the path for economic growth in countries as far afield as the United States, France and Japan.62 She has argued that nationalism drives the modern capitalist economy’s orientation towards growth. In India’s national movement, and even after Independence, there was a battle for control between the forces that argued for capitalism and those that championed socialism of different variants. The capitalist class, as historian Aditya Mukherjee has shown in his work, used its resources to play a prominent role in the nationalist movement.63 The Modern School was emblematic of this class’ hopes for the new nation. In the context of the school, the idea of ennoblement was pursued by improving the lives of teachers and focusing on the well-being of students, giving them the facilities and experiences to become confident leaders of their society. Private enterprise, according to

capitalists of Raghubir Singh’s bent, was in aid of the greater public good, a means to improve everyone’s standard of living. It wasn’t until later decades, which saw the collapse of this collective understanding, that private enterprise in the field of education in India increasingly came to be associated with selfaggrandisement. The concept of the private school, for instance, is increasingly seen as a means to advance individual interests alone. Even the Modern School has not been immune from the confusion, muddying its own philosophy. Is it now a private school for the private good of a private elite? Or does it retain its once pristine nationalist ideal of helping to create Indian leaders and socially responsible citizens—a public elite?

CHAPTER THREE INDEPENDENCE, PARTITION AND THE MODERN SCHOOL

The twin processes of Independence and Partition changed the face of modern South Asia. The impact on Delhi, which had just become the new capital of free India, was seismic.1 Millions were uprooted. Refugees flooded into Delhi from the western part of Punjab and the north-western provinces. For the first time in its history, Delhi became a haven for refugees, a destination for displaced peoples who had no home left. Demographically, the city was transformed and, naturally, so were institutions integral to city life, such as the Modern School. With Muslim residents leaving en masse for Pakistan, Old Delhi and its entrepreneurial class came face to face with an entirely new group of people trying to find a foothold in the city. For the founders of the Modern School, the city’s syncretic culture and social mix, which defined the school’s character, its heritage, had been upturned. The school, which began as a response to colonial schooling and was committed to a certain vision of Delhi as a heterogenous society, had to adjust itself, recalibrate to a new reality.2 Old Delhi had, for a century, been in dire need of a facelift.3 Its main spaces were crowded, the drainage was old and it had all the symptoms of a city unable to pull along much longer with its rickety infrastructure. The Modern School, when it was founded, appeared as an island of modernity in an ancient sea. The construction of the new capital city, while it had expanded the city to the south, had

not provided much by way of development or amenities to the older city, where the bulk of the population still lived.4 Partition refugees poured into India’s capital and discovered that it was not prepared for them. Initially, the city remained calm. Delhi residents even opened up their homes to the refugees: the leading business family of Amba Prasad, for instance, gave up two hundred acres of family farmland in the Karol Bagh area to the government to resettle refugees, and refused to take any compensation.5 Apprehensions about the fact that the city was not yet prepared to host such large numbers made the authorities make preparations to move people from the outskirts of Delhi to other parts of India like Panipat, Kurukshetra, Jalandhar, Kanpur, Gwalior, Bhopal—anywhere land was plentiful and there was urban infrastructure. But the refugees couldn’t be kept out of the city, and the simmering anger and resentment exploded into communal clashes, primarily against the local Muslims. The situation became so violent that both Nehru and Gandhi intervened, the latter postponing his trip to troubled Noakhali in Bengal to stay in Delhi. I: EDUCATIONAL RESETTLEMENT Along with the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of refugees, Delhi also faced the responsibility of educating large numbers of children. New schools were of the essence.6 There was a great rush for places in the the 1948-1949 school year. The number of school-going children had increased almost tenfold in a city without the resources to cope. Thousands of extra students meant there was a need for increased physical infrastructure as well as trained teachers and staff. There was tremendous suffering among the school-going children who accompanied their families across the new international borders. A large number of children had to discontinue their studies due to the change in the financial condition of their parents and guardians. In many cities where refugees arrived, large sections of the student population quickly

took to the streets, selling cigarettes, newspapers, eatables and other things to support their families and themselves. Delhi was no exception. So in most places the authorities also had to come up with plans to provide financial assistance to the students. Other cities had tried to find ways to support students, and Delhi, too, followed suit. The director of public instructions (DPI) in Punjab, G.C. Chatterjee, reinvented the volunteer services, implementing a scheme under which students who worked for three months as volunteers in the refugee camps were allowed to earn their degree without any examination.7 The lack of school facilities exacerbated the tragedy. East Punjab, neighbouring Delhi, where the refugees first entered, was flooded with teachers who had left their home and work places. The institutional development in Punjab in the preceding hundred years had been phenomenal, and major credit for this was due to the initiatives of individuals and religious and community trusts, with government initiative in some places. The Partition, however, meant that most of the physical structures that had been built were now located in West Punjab. Thus, while the teachers who migrated from the east to the west got both jobs and buildings to work in, the same fate did not await those who came to the east. For instance, of the 1,933 Muslim teachers who migrated from East Punjab to West Punjab, 1,878 were already employed by November 1947.8 On the other hand, on the eastern side there were very few buildings adequate enough to start operations; West Punjab was too dangerous to return to. The government later on assured the All India Refugee Teachers Association that the provincial government would absorb teachers whose names were registered in the employment register and that 25 per cent of future appointments would be reserved for refugee teachers, with full consideration to their pay and status.9 By 1949, 3,916 teachers were absorbed in local-body schools and 654 in the private, recognised schools in East Punjab.10 In Delhi, too, the students and teachers who came to the city were far too many to be accommodated immediately in the existing

structures and facilities: the influx of students from West Punjab far outnumbered the Muslim students leaving Delhi for West Punjab. Thus, there was a pressing need for new school structures, and in almost every new satellite township rapidly being constructed for the displaced people, schools were a priority. By the end of 1966, two decades later, Delhi was able to settle one of the largest number of refugees a city had ever received, a rare feat in resettlement operations anywhere in the world. The officials who were involved in this massive operation were some of the most creative and energetic personalities of Indian politics and bureaucracy, and included Ajit Prasad Jain (minister for rehabilitation, 1952–1954), Mehr Chand Khanna (minister for rehabilitation, 1954–1962) and M.S. Randhawa (an Indian Civil Services officer, who became the deputy commissioner of Delhi and was put in charge of the entire resettlement operation in the city). There was also close cooperation with other states, which meant the officials in Delhi benefited from the insights of the exceptionally dynamic and brilliant Tarlok Singh, the directorgeneral of rehabilitation in Punjab. Together, they worked out a model of refugee rehabilitation that paid close attention to schooling facilities. Schools were incorporated as a part of most of the twentyeight planned refugee colonies with 41,366 housing units. All prePartition educational trusts as well as newly established ones and community groups were allowed a piece of land and financial assistance to start their schools.11 The increase in the number of schools began slowly but eventually picked up pace: there were 5 new schools in 1948, 169 in 1949, 221 in 1950, 420 in 1951, and in 1952, the number peaked, with 720 new schools built. In 1953, this number came down by almost 500 schools. By 1956-1957 the number of new schools had come down by almost a 1000 from the peak in 1951-1952 (see table I). The reasons for this slowdown in ‘school making’ are yet to be researched. No wonder, then, that it is exactly at this time that the member of Parliament from Delhi, Naval Prabhakar, was asking in Parliament ‘whether the number of schools is sufficient for meeting the need of the population’.12

Apart from these indicators, the emphasis placed on building education infrastructure was also visible in the increased Budget outlay for the same, which went from a sum of Rs 3,819,844 in 1946-1947 to Rs 26,263,058 in 1955-1956.13 Notwithstanding these increases, schooling remained an area where problems remained. TABLE I: NUMBER OF SCHOOLS IN DELHI, 1946–195614

To accommodate students in schools, the government’s rehabilitation department worked in tandem with the education department. Under the circumstances, permissions were rushed through for older schools, like the Raisina Bengali School, to expand their grounds.15 Finding land and adequate places for schools aside, administrative problems included the lack of paperwork among refugees, who had sometimes fled with little

more than the clothes on their backs. Cross-border authorities were frequently slow, obdurate and uncooperative when it came to releasing certificates and marksheets. Since there were more people than the authorities could create structures, double shifts were run in the existing schools, and children were even put in makeshift tents for classes. In Kalkaji, where a satellite township came up, a school that could house five hundred students was constructed. However when Sushila Nayar, the MLA for the area, visited the school for inspection, there were seven hundred students in the school, of which two hundred girl students were taught in tents.16 The student enrolment increased by 5,565 in 1948, 29,515 in 1949, 38,658 in 1950 and 28,166 in 1951, and reached its peak when, in 1955-1956, the numbers went up to 298,532. If we take the pre-Independence and pre-Partition enrolment figure of 74,817 as a bench mark, then the increase to about 2 lakh plus in just 8 years was remarkable. Even so, these efforts still fell short as the number of people demanding enrolment was much higher. A glimpse of the results of these endeavours to increase enrolment can be seen in table II. TABLE II: NUMBER OF STUDENTS IN THE SCHOOLS OF DELHI, 1947–195617

In pre-Independence Delhi, education was considered a community project, and individual initiative only served to sharpen

that edge: even when Raghubir Singh set up the Modern School’s trust, he invited and involved a community of people imbued with a similar bent of social service and philanthropy. The rehabilitation efforts, too, saw similar sentiments among various groups of people, including many Old Delhi residents. DLF, Shri Ram and many other trading and financial companies came forward to help with cheap and affordable housing. They also helped the trusts setting up schools. The Modern School also tried to solve the problem of numbers by immediately increasing its intake of both students and teachers. As far as the school was concerned, it had been facing the issue of falling numbers: in 1946, it had been forced to close down the junior boarding house (for under seven years), as the dwindled numbers made it a big drain on resources.18 The influx of such a large population helped the school solve this problem permanently. For a short while, however, this caused concern regarding quality. Some of the urgently recruited teachers, for example, did not have the basic qualifications needed. In its 1948 meeting, the school’s management committee observed that ‘many teachers appointed in 1947–48 and also earlier were not adequately qualified’.19 It was resolved that the new principal would ‘take such action as he may deem necessary in such cases’. While this was a major step in building the case for the autonomy of the principal, the earlier mode of appointing a suitable person to teach at the school became a casualty as the school fixed ‘the minimum qualification of BA, BT’.20 There was also a limit to which Modern could accommodate additional students. This, again, was to do with its structural capacity. Modern might have appeared to be sprawling, but it had a composite school building, and in terms of actual space for classrooms, it was not as big as it seemed from the outside. This composite character also prevented it from augmenting its number arbitrarily where the issue of boarding was involved. Thus, despite the sympathies of the trust and the principal, the school could do only so much. Its real contribution at this moment was to serve as a pillar of stability and assist the Government of India in

restructuring the education system. It tried to facilitate the government’s attempts to make the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) a model all-India set up, thus removing the foreign structures that still shaped examinations. At this time, there were ideas of ‘model’ and ‘multipurpose’ schooling, which combined features of both vocational and non-vocational schools from the beginning to give education a more practical and rooted nature. M.N. Kapur, the school’s principal at the time, became one of the committed proponents of the idea. Rehabilitation would take decades.21 But relatively quickly, the refugees transformed the industrial profile of the city, turning Delhi from a slumbering city to one that bustled with energy. The zeitgeist became one of hustle. Asok Mitra, who served as census commissioner for the decade between 1958 to 1968, wrote admiringly of the refugees, saying that notwithstanding the crassness and greed they were said to have introduced to the culture of the city, they had turned Delhi into one of the world’s great capital cities by sheer effort and will. The courtly Persian and Urdu culture had faded, he recognised, to be replaced by ‘a strenuous life full of new challenges each day.’22 ‘If’, he wrote, ‘the moment had arrived in 1947, so had the man’: Steeled in adversity, clinging to life, venturesome, adaptable, resilient, refusing to take defeat. There was always someone willing to make the most of an opportunity, whether in home washing or laundering, or fetching and vending of greengrocery, construction or the building trade, petty services and repairs, erection and running of factories, willingness to do three jobs in place of one, eagerness to stretch a 24 hours a day beyond limits. To this was added the new resolve to make the capital worthy of a great people and a great republic, an upsurge of popular pride matched by an equal pride in government effort.23

Though little appreciated at the time, this so-called ‘refugee’ population did indeed give the city its vitality, its vigour. The new population did disturb Delhi’s evolved tenor and occupational structures, its cultural mores, but also, as Mitra observed, made significant contributions: The new spirit was evident not so much among the population that survived the cataclysm and continued to live in Delhi but among those who newly arrived. The astounding virility of what was at bottom sturdy Jat stock, whether Hindu, Sikh, Muslim or Jain came into play. There were astounding examples of occupational mobility, cutting up and down and across caste and social hierarchies, compelled by what was in the beginning a fierce animal urge for survival.24 The refugee population brought a whole range of professional expertise with them as well as the tenacity to learn new trades in order to make it in their new city. The technologically and educationally inclined entrepreneurial class among the newcomers also provided support to the capital available in the old hands of the city. When P.N. Dhar, then a young professor at the fledgling Delhi School of Economics, did a detailed survey of the city in 1957-1958, he found a radical shift in the economy of the city and the engagement of its occupational and shareholding pattern.25 II: THE CHANGE OF GUARD AT MODERN SCHOOL At Modern School, as if to signal the start of a new era for the school as well as the country, the long-serving Kamala Bose, the first principal of the school, stepped down and was replaced by M.N. Kapur, who had been a teacher at Mayo College, the venerable British-style public boarding school. On many counts, M.N. Kapur’s arrival at the school was fortuitous. As a Punjabi from Lahore, and having studied in Government College in that city, he was steeped in the knowledge of the Punjabi elite, a significant

tranche of whom now made their home in Delhi. He was equipped to navigate Modern through this new city and its radically altered demography. Until 1947, the school had depended on the shrinking manpower of a quiescent city, supplemented by the odd migrant from Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. The Partition gave the school the opportunity to hire from the new pool of highly qualified teachers displaced from Punjab (including Ved Vyas, who later went on to establish and lead the school’s Vasant Vihar branch). Perhaps more important than the larger roster of qualified teachers the school could choose from, was the exponential growth in the city’s population, which meant a similar acceleration in the number of pupils applying for places.26 The numbers in table III tell the story. TABLE III: NUMBER OF STUDENTS ENROLLED IN MODERN SCHOOL, 1945–1947 1944-1945 1945-1946 1946-1947 1947-1948

Nursery 165 204 256 293

Primary 80 82 91 143

Main 88 93 118 152

In a way, the refugees fleeing to Delhi saved Modern School. Until then, despite the vast, impressive grounds, student enrolments were low enough to make some senior classes unviable, and the school continued to be a drag on its founder’s finances. The expansion of the government of independent India also meant government colonies were being built outside Lutyens’s Delhi and there was, as table IV indicates, the coming of a large section of government employees who needed schooling for their children. TABLE IV: NUMBER OF GOVERNMENT OFFICES IN DELHI STATE, 1956, 1961, 196627

# Source: Employment in the Public Sector, National Employment Service, Ministry of Labour and Employment (DGRE), New Delhi, November 1959. @ Source: Employment Review, 1961–1966, DGE&T, Ministry of Labour, Employment and Rehabilitation. It was already clear that Modern School would have a big part to play in educating India, if you like. In 1944, John Sargent, the educational advisor to the Government of India, had suggested to Raghubir Singh that he expand the school’s intake of pupils and separate the nursery from the main school.28 While the school had agreed with the recommendation, it had lacked the wherewithal to do so.29 The influx into the city after Partition changed all that. It was in the midst of all this upheaval that the Modern School began the process to replace the iconic Ms Bose. After two decades of service, she had decided to retire, to leave Delhi for Calcutta. Raghubir Singh persuaded her to stay until a suitable successor was found, while he consulted far and wide for a replacement, even taking the advice of John Sargent. The school received two hundred applicants in response to its job advertisement. The committee of trustees constituted to select the principal included Lala Shri Ram, Shiv Narain, Rai Bahadur Devi Singh, H. Gupta, Sita Sen, N.K. Sen and Raghubir Singh. While Lala Shri Ram, the chairman of the DCM, had been active on the Modern School board in the 1930s, Raghubir Singh now also brought in Rai Bahadur Devi Singh, who was one of the brightest engineers in India and had been a part of the construction of the new capital at Delhi. Shiv Narain was one of the leading business minds of the city, and Hansraj Gupta was a rising

business and philanthropic name, who would, in later years, play a crucial role in the institutional and political life of the city. Sita Sen was acknowledged as one of the leading gynaecologists in Delhi and was also married to a prominent doctor, S.K. Sen. As a child, too, Sita had been exposed to the Indian public life at her home in Lahore, where her father N.R. Dharamvir was host to many Indian political and public personalities, including Subhas Chandra Bose.30 N.K. Sen, the remaining committee member, was a leading medical practitioner in Delhi at the time. A subcommittee was also formed to winnow down the list of suitable candidates. Sita Sen’s presence on both committees suggests that Raghubir Singh was tipping the scales in favour of M.N. Kapur, who had been personally recommended by her husband, Dr S.K. Sen, who knew M.N. Kapur from Lahore. Under ordinary circumstances, Kapur’s relative youth might have disqualified him for such a substantial role. Given Ms Bose’s influence over the school, it would have been taking an enormous risk: her successor couldn’t be seen as callow or inexperienced. The woman Kapur was replacing was formidable. Kamala Bose was born in Barisal district in present-day Bangladesh, and came from a highly educated family. East Bengal was arguably the centre of anti-British political activities when Ms Bose was a student. She herself, though, was part of the establishment and a well-respected figure, both for her own educational attainments and her work in the sector. As the founder-principal at Modern School, she had imbued the school with her style, which was at once demanding and disciplinarian but profoundly involved in the lives of her students. Many who remember her English classes can still recite the poetry she made them learn by heart. Bhawani Shankar, who graduated from the Modern School in 1949, recalls how memorising poems was intrinsic to Ms Bose’s class and no one was allowed to shirk the task.31 There has been talk of Kamala Bose being strict and a disciplinarian, but Shankar points out that she never caned or hit a child, despite both forms of punishment being standard at the time. A single reproving look was often enough. No one wanted to disappoint Ms Bose.32 The fact

that she also looked after the children who lived in the hostel indicates the level of her commitment to the school—she must have devoted an extraordinary number of hours to the institution every day. Ms Bose’s house, near the school, was also a draw for students, most of whom would visit just to catch a glimpse of her pet crane. She died soon after her retirement, as if life without the school had lost some of its meaning. The board of trustees passed a very nice resolution to be sent to her family members. There was also a resolution passed to develop a suitable memorial to her in the school.33 III: IN SEARCH OF A NEW HORIZON Having taught at Mayo College, M.N. Kapur, Kamala Bose’s successor, drew the Modern School, set up as an anti-colonial project in some ways, close to the British-style elite of independent India. In Parliament, members were asking uncomfortable questions about why government funds should continue to go to ‘public’ schools such as Mayo, or Lawrence in Sanawar, or Lovedale or Rajkumar School in Raipur. These schools relied on state money but were built seemingly exclusively to educate the ruling elite—the children of erstwhile royals, landlords, army officers and British civil servants. The Modern School was something of an outlier in this company, though, with schooling in Delhi largely the preserve of private operators rather than the state. Indeed, between 1920 and 1947, the colonial authorities did as much to impede the development of schools in Delhi as to encourage it.34 If in the first half of the twentieth century Delhi boasted good schools, it was almost entirely thanks to local enterprise and entrepreneurship. Unlike the elite public schools, replicas of their British models, the Modern School was not reliant on state funding. It was those schools that now had to fight to preserve their traditional privileges in the new order. The Indian Public Schools’ Conference was revived as a source of unity and organisation for elite schools. Schools

understood that in order to protect their access to public funds, which were already stretched, they needed to act in concert. Despite its quite separate structure and ethos, the Modern School joined the Public Schools’ Conference in 1950 in Hyderabad, and M.N. Kapur was made the joint secretary.35 The school felt the need to be part of an organisation and to have backup. Moreover, it had also just hired a principal who had experience with the elite public school system and who believed that both he and Modern belonged in that company. So the Modern School began to identify with and be identified with the elite when, at its core, it was nationalist and academic, while the other schools were established and structured to produce loyal British subjects or, at best, army officers to serve the Royal Indian Army. These public schools served the establishment, and so funding from the establishment was standard quid pro quo, but Modern was privately funded, with ties to ideals rather than the state. The Modern School was a republican, democratic project; it didn’t rely on its public school status for legitimacy, unlike, say, Mayo College or Doon School. Their interests didn’t seem aligned. And yet, in later years, the Modern School’s prestige, too, became inextricable from its status, its reputation for being the stomping grounds of the elite, of the future establishment, a place for the children of rich to bond and build networks. If some of the ‘poshness’ of the Public Schools’ Conference rubbed off on Modern School, some of the latter’s nationalist credibility and progressive kudos were enjoyed by institutions that were otherwise inherently colonial. For instance, while other schools that were part of the conference debated the value of Indian students taking exams that were conducted by Cambridge University and externally addressed, as opposed to taking national examinations based upon a national syllabus, the Modern School had long been contributing towards the development of a national curriculum. This was soon reflected in a bill to regularise the Delhi school year, exams and syllabus.36 The Modern School assisted the government for the two years (1948–1950) it took for it to come up with the rudiments of the plan for an Indian school syllabus. It

wasn’t until 1952, though, when the CBSE was allowed to grow out of its Ajmer-Merwara and Vindhya Pradesh jurisdiction, where it conducted examinations, that real progress was made. The Indian Council for Secondary Education (ICSE), which was established in 1952, also decided to go ahead with examination reforms, and there was a week-long seminar in Bhopal on the patterns and modes of examination. CBSE, which did not have expertise in certain areas, relied on the Modern School for help in setting up its curriculum and examination system. The school’s location in Delhi and its openness to inquiry made it an ideal partner for the central government on education. True to its mission of modernity, the school also collaborated in the creation of a new science programme for the Indian syllabus. In 1953, the Government of India entered into an international agreement to enhance its science curricula and train its teachers in the new techniques of science teaching. This project became so UNESCO-led that India and Indians seemed almost incidental. The government turned to the Modern School teachers, among others, for help in making the curricula accessible. By then, the Modern School had already had over a decade’s worth of experience sending teachers abroad for training having signed agreements, in particular, with educational bodies in the United States. The school was also sending its teachers to England for training, and even to Japan, where B.N. Mukherjee, an art teacher, went on a fellowship to study the country’s art. As a result, the school’s humanities and science teaching were arguably of the highest standard in India. The republican moment was also the beginning of India’s commitment to its poorest and most oppressed humanity. Thus, provisions for affirmative actions were brought in through reservations for the scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs) in the areas of education and government services. In the early years, few students from ‘reserved’ categories had access to the exclusive ‘public’ schools. In 1956, when I. Eacharan, a member of Parliament from Kerala, raised a question in the Parliament about the number of public schools and the number of SC and ST students admitted therein, it was a real crisis moment

for the schools, as none of them had bothered to keep any such records. Modern had two such students on its rolls.37 The government, with the help of receptive schools, introduced scholarships to enable a multiplicity of Indians to enjoy the benefits of the facilities and educational philosophies of schools like Modern. The school was, despite the seismic changes to Delhi’s demography and culture, a link to the original anti-colonial idealism and zeal of the country, which informed the school’s ethos. This was a school that, despite its trappings of power, believed in undermining hierarchies, and felt keenly the republican spirit of the times.

CHAPTER FOUR M.N. KAPUR AND THE IDEA OF A PRINCIPAL, 1947–1977

One morning, Dasrath Ojha, among the most senior teachers at the Modern School, introduced a stranger to the class five pupils as their new principal. Reminiscing years later, Jagdish Kishore, one of the children in that classroom, said that he had thought that the ‘tall, handsome and strong-looking person’ standing before them would ‘help them against the British Might’.1 The British might had, of course, by then dissipated, with the erstwhile colonial rulers packing their bags just as M.N. Kapur succeeded the veteran founder-principal Kamala Bose. Principal since the school’s inception, Kamala Bose was to retire and return to Calcutta. She had been in the north for decades, and as Bengal was convulsed by another partition, she must have wanted to go home and reaffirm her links to her native place. I: MODERN GETS A NEW PRINCIPAL As seen in the previous chapter, the list of applicants for the post of principal was overwhelming, but M.N. Kapur was the recommendation of the influential trustee Dr S.K. Sen. Despite his relative youth, Kapur’s experience at Mayo College and his commanding presence were impressive. Kapur took over Kamala Bose’s red-brick house and lasted even longer than she did in the post. Ms Bose died in 1948, the grief-stricken school erecting a memorial in her name. Both principals, who spent over half a century combined in the service of the school, had lost their

homes to Partition, one to East Pakistan and the other to West. Their having to adjust to the loss of home may explain, at least partially, why Modern School was never parochial, why it looked outward without fear. Born in Gujranwala in West Punjab, Mahendra Nath Kapur— MNK to many, and later Don—was an ubiquitous, charismatic presence on the school grounds. He did brilliantly in swimming (he was an excellent diver) and boxing in Lahore in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the city was enjoying a sporting renaissance.2 He graduated from Government College in Lahore in 1932, at a time when the institution was growing in stature and influence. He must have witnessed from close quarters, and participated in, the emerging cultural life of the city. Lahore was a hotbed of activity, particularly theatre, with the likes of Guru Dutt Sondhi, the first Indian principal at Government College, directing plays and preparing the likes of Balraj Sahni and I.S. Johar for major theatrical careers. Sondhi also held important positions in sports administration, managing the Indian Olympic team at three separate Games before Partition and continuing his distinguished career on the Indian side of the border after it. It was sport that led MNK to Mayo College shortly after he graduated from Lahore. For the next fourteen years, he said, he barely had time to think of anything else. The school, he noted, did not have much ‘of an academic atmosphere anyway’. He went to England in 1936 and spent a year acquiring what he believed was ‘the education of his lifetime’, the education that, he said, persuaded him ‘to be a teacher’.3 Certainly, it required some fortitude for the still young man to head an institution accustomed to the administrative style of one principal for its twenty-sevenyear lifespan. He also felt slightly out of place as a young, firsttime Punjabi principal heading a school community composed primarily of Kayastha and Bengali teachers responsible for the children of professionals, bureaucrats and businessmen, rather than the princelings and aristocrats he was used to at Mayo.

MNK’s first impression of the school was that it was performing under par, retaining fewer students at the senior levels than it admitted to its primary school. Only eighty students were enrolled in the higher classes because parents would often move their children to other schools after the early Montessori years. Without students, the salaries of teachers stayed low, though their hours were long, so teacher retention, too, was often difficult. The school, in a nutshell, had a big, imposing campus and building but not enough students for it to be sustainable. The students that did attend were mostly from well-connected families in Old Delhi and Civil Lines, many of whom now watched with horror as the placid city they knew changed beyond recognition. MNK’s physical dynamism and desire to add discipline and vigour to the school initially rubbed students the wrong way, rekindling an ‘anti-colonial groundswell’, and they revolted.4 He was a quick learner, however, and he adjusted his pace, taking his cues from a senior teacher, Awadh Kishore, who was appointed with the task of ensuring student discipline. It soon became clear to MNK that a school principal needed to be something of a ‘symphony conductor’. He understood that his role was to keep all parts of the orchestra in tune, which meant listening to everyone and giving teachers their autonomy, but knowing he was responsible for the whole picture. He evolved his methods so that students, too, could come to him with their concerns— about individual teachers as well the school in general—a novel approach for the time. The students’ feedback was presented to teachers as an opportunity to improve their craft. This culture of open-mindedness to constructive criticism improved standards across the school. It also enabled specialist teachers in mathematics, sciences, English, Hindi and other subjects to excel in their respective disciplines. The approach MNK developed towards arts teaching was even more hands-off: he was willing to permit teachers to indulge their own idiosyncrasies and artistic practices. The famous painter Kanwal Krishna, for example, would never take a bill from the

shops where he bought material, causing much misery for the school accountant who needed receipts—not that Kanwal’s failure to provide receipts stopped him from complaining bitterly about the school when payments were delayed. But MNK knew to give Kanwal free reign, and understood that requiring him to maintain strict records was a lost cause. In the words of Geeta Kapur, MNK’s daughter and a student of Kanwal Krishna: The anarchy of Krishna’s art room/studio was something to which my father took some time to reconcile; he always teased Kanwal Krishna asking if he would ever be able to get a relevant school document released from the mountainous pile of paper and other objects on his desk. He did reconcile to all this and more, given Krishna’s sheer stubbornness about routine school chores. He (the latter) actually opposed these if they came in the way of his freedom as an artist while judiciously maintaining his dignity as a teacher. 5 As Geeta Kapur has suggested, ‘there were between the two … this benign and good-humoured struggle of equals’. The terms of the contest, though, she added, were not based on some ‘narrow notion of discipline but on a humanised plane of responsibility’, which needed to include a good deal of what she would call the ‘anarchy that Kanwal Krishna held in his mystic Mountain spirit’.6 Her father, Geeta Kapur evocatively observed, also ‘knew a great deal about the utopian possibilities in human nature and knew how to hearken to the call of freedom from other shores, such as the ones to which his friend Kanwal Krishna belonged’.7 It was this response to diversity that characterised MNK’s normative horizons and gradually also came to form the school’s horizons. In this broad-minded approach, MNK found the trustees and many of the friends of the school to be close allies. He also had staunch support from Raghubir Singh, who saw him

as a man to be trusted and admired, a safe, sure hand who would lead the school to scale ever greater heights. II: COMING OF THE NEW TEACHERS Soon after Independence, many radical changes began taking place in the field of school education, and it initially seemed as if MNK would miss the boat, and would fail to move Modern along with the times. But Modern and its new principal caught up quickly, and the years from 1948 to 1955 were a time of ferment and experiment for school and nation. Many of the prominent figures from both private and government schools in these years —Prem Kirpal, L.R. Sethi and Ashfaq Hussain, among others— moved in the same circles as MNK, and he was also a part of the Lahore old boys’ club with Guru Dutt Sondhi its paterfamilias. Principals like Rev. J.D. Tytler, the founder of the Delhi Public School, who later on became the principal of the Summer Fields School and then founded the J.D. Tytler School; Kamala Bhatia, one of the most dynamic principals in Delhi, who headed the Multipurpose Girls School; and Kamala Sengupta, to name just a few, had a substantial influence on the developing education culture. So did, of course, central government ministers, including the erudite and sophisticated Abul Kalam Azad, his advisor and deputy, Humayun Kabir, and Dr Zakir Hussain, an educationist. K.G. Saiyidain, brought in as advisor to the ministry, had German training, a humanist bent and was full of good ideas for the future of Indian education. The capital buzzed with hope and expectation about the effects of the impending structural changes and the promise of a progressive education that would serve the needs of the nation, rather than those of distant colonial masters. Young bureaucrats like Prem Kirpal and G.K. Chandramani brought a spirited energy to their work of executing the various programmes chalked out by academic and political leaders. A brand new educational system was being developed at what seemed like breakneck speed.

With Modern in the midst of this frenetic activity, teachers were easier to recruit, and the school capitalised on the opportunity, hiring stalwarts like Ved Vyas, S.P. Choudhary, Richard Bartholomew, B.C. Bathla, H.L. Batra, I.B. Dutt, Kanwar Juneja, G.L. Juneja, O.P. Goyal, M.R. Mendiratta, S. Jogindra, I.S. Chawla, P.A. Char, E.R.R. Menon, A.K. Chaturvedi, and Renuka Khanna, who went on to build the school into an academic powerhouse. For junior pupils, too, the school put together an expanded, talented roster of teaching staff, including Kamala Nigam, P. Mohindra, A. Sengupta, Padma Khera and K. Vaid. Some of the Modern School’s most beloved nursery teachers through the years were already in place, such as S. Chandra, Kamala Nag, R.D. Roberts, H.B. Cutler and Lajja Malhotra. MNK’s sister Uma Sahai and, later on, Geeta Dudeja, his wife’s niece, also joined the junior school and turned out to both be fine teachers and, as headmistresses, compassionate administrators. Among M.N. Kapur’s great successes was his skill at putting together a richly varied faculty. He brought Richard Bartholomew, for instance, to the school. Bartholomew, a Burmese refugee who came to India in 1942 to escape Japanese occupation, studied English at St Stephen’s and taught at the Modern School from 1951–1958 before going on to become one of the country’s most celebrated art critics. Among Bartholomew’s subjects were the works of his Modern colleagues Kanwal and Devyani Krishna, resident painters and art teachers at the school. Similarly, MNK invited Narendra Sharma, a pioneering dancer and choreographer, to teach at the school. The quality of the arts faculty made Modern School a centre of burgeoning progressive culture. The sculptor, painter and poet Amarnath Sehgal also taught briefly at the school when he moved to Delhi from New York. His wife taught at the junior school. Artists Riten Majumdar and M.R. Choudhury and musician A.K. Khastagir were also part of the faculty at various points. In later years, alumni of the National School of Drama, including Om and Sudha Shivpuri and Ram Gopal Bajaj, found a congenial home at Modern for their first jobs. This was the sort of starry faculty that would not have

disgraced a top-level university department, and it indicates just how seriously the arts were taken at Modern. Sport was equally close to MNK’s heart—naturally, given his own prowess. He recruited some of the finest coaches and sports teachers, many of whom would go on to become leading sports administrators in the country. L.N. Khurana, for instance, helped establish the Indian Gymnastic Association. Many of the teachers employed at the school had sporting pasts. When P.C. Chowdhry applied for a job at the school, he had the recommendation of the president of the Uttar Pradesh Cricket Association, Raja (K.C.) Pant, as he was a regular player for the state’s Ranji Trophy team. Similarly, Abhay Kant Chaturvedi was a brilliant hockey player with the police team, and had joined St Columba’s as its hockey coach before being poached by MNK for Modern. Chaturvedi later became a much-lauded radio commentator on the sport. And if the teachers weren’t active athletes, they had, like I.S. Chawla, experienced the physical rigours of a spell with the National Cadet Corps (NCC). After the death of Raghubir Singh in 1959, his son Brigadier Virendra Singh (he would finish his army career as a Major General) began to look after the Modern School trust. The prominent builder Sobha Singh, father of Bhagwant and Khushwant Singh, who had known Virendra since his childhood, was the senior voice on the board. Virendra also asked Bhagwant to join the trustees. Modern School’s earliest students were now becoming managers of the school’s future. And in MNK they had a dependable, inspiring leader. With the leadership in place, finding teachers became an urgent priority. For MNK, hiring a teacher was akin to choosing someone to become part of his family. Neelam Puri, for example, was a good science student and was keen to go to Punjab University to study for a master’s degree in chemistry. But her father was unwilling to let her leave Delhi. A chance meeting with MNK led her to a career teaching chemistry. He took the time to persuade her parents personally to encourage her to accept the offer. She went on to become the

headmistress at Barakhamba Road and to become director of two new branches of the school in Faridabad and Sonepat.8 MNK worked hard to maintain warm relationships with his teachers, to keep them motivated, enthused and content to stay at the school. Relationships were formed, he believed, when people broke bread together. He invited both teachers and students to lunch at his house, and the friendships forged at those meals remained for life. His wife, Amrita, was known for being approachable and sympathetic. When students and teachers were working hard at rehearsals for school performances and functions, the Kapurs—bearing sandwiches and a flask of tea— were a familiar sight. ‘Isko bhi kha lena,’ MNK would reply when the teachers and students would say they would seek sustenance at a Bengali Market dhaba. He was not a patriarch but a senior member of the family. Anyone who worked closely with MNK testifies that he was a benign presence at meetings, content to permit teachers and students relative autonomy while not hesitating to step in if fairness demanded his intervention. A central place was crafted for students at Modern School. Whether classroom interactions, in the sporting arena, or during lessons, house events and annual functions, the message that the well-being of students was always the first imperative was drummed into teachers. This was not to pamper students or pander to every whim and fancy because many came from privileged backgrounds. Rather, the school’s pedagogical and cultural philosophy was to inculcate a sense of responsibility in their students and encourage them to engage with society in a meaningful way. M.N. Kapur’s vision was to make students the centre of the school’s universe while ensuring that the students felt the weight and responsibility of that privilege, thus creating a dynamic tension that vibrated through the students, often throughout their lifetimes. Students and teachers were both stakeholders in this system, so complaints weren’t treated as criticism so much as opportunities to strengthen and evolve the system. For MNK, a student’s education required emotional

engagement, so it was not unusual that in a student’s trajectory from nursery school to marriage, their teachers and their principal were recurring figures, present at every stage. In contemporary India, two parallel perspectives have come to dominate the way students from marginalised backgrounds are treated in educational institutions. The idea that dealing with a child and her challenges requires familiarity with the social background of the child has become generally accepted. But this remains a bone of contention in cases in which the child belongs to a caste that has been historically discriminated against. Familiarity with the child’s background, activists have argued, inevitably attracts discrimination, both latent and open, from privileged castes.9 The argument is that one should be either neutral or blissfully ignorant as far as the caste of the child is concerned. However, evidence has mounted that upper-caste groups in positions of power are better off acknowledging biases rather than pretending they are or can be caste-blind. Debates on this issue have exposed how wilfully blind urban, educated Indians are to the inequities and iniquities that exist on the periphery of the metropolitan imagination. This remains a broad criticism of the veil of ignorance that one privileges in one’s liberal discourse—the inability to confront and rectify systemic discrimination and the tendency to hide behind platitudes. Republican India was very sensitive to these issues, and while very few children outside the upper castes reached the portals of Modern School, its students were expected to question their caste privileges and ideological assumptions. MNK’s own ideological convictions were influenced by the Arya Samaj. The Arya Samaj gurukul in Kangri (Haridwar) is well known, but its parallel gurukul was founded by MNK’s maternal grandfather in Gujranwala in West Punjab, which became part of Pakistan after Partition.10 The gurukul movement emphasised teaching in Sanskrit and adopted the guru-shishya model of teaching-learning traditions in ancient India. The Gujranwala gurukul, MNK has said, began in his grandfather’s house. So his own early learning took

place in surroundings imbued with the radical social- and religious-reforms agenda of the Arya Samaj, for which castebased discrimination was an anathema. The Arya Samaj movement in Punjab was strongly in favour of girls’ education and contributed significantly in spreading girls’ education in the region, including Dev Raj and Munshi Ram’s initiative to found the first girls’ college, Kanya Mahavidyalaya, in Jalandhar in 1886.11 These influences on MNK’s ideas about society were reflected daily in the school prayer and in the atmosphere of the school, no doubt making a powerful impression on young minds and perhaps convincing some of them of the need to eliminate caste as a factor in Indian public and private life. III: HEART OF DISCIPLINE MNK’s notion of his school as an expanded family extended to his views on discipline. Schools are infamously recalled as sites where children are disciplined and moulded to become cogs in the machine: good corporate servants and stolid law-abiding citizens. In its early years, as we have seen, the Modern School did not have a large student body. Day scholars came from wellestablished local families, and boarders were generally kept extremely busy with schooling and activities. Most disciplinary problems were solved with a genial rebuke from Raghubir Singh and Kamala Bose. The latter was a harsher disciplinarian than the former, though the rumour that she would cane students who angered her is untrue: she was stern but not a believer in hitting schoolchildren. MNK, though, had been trained at Mayo and was dealing with a significantly larger student body. Disciplining students in school (and through school, as some would say) remains a hotly debated issue in India, as it is elsewhere. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Indian context was complicated by the presence of a ‘colonial structure’ above the already existing structures of authority in society. How students and their inability to conform to institutional norms are

treated at school is an extension of how other institutions, family, for example, treat these same students.12 Modes of punishing children, whether at home or in school, often enjoy social sanction, even in the case of corporal punishment.13 The postSecond World War reforms in Europe included mass schooling, where the schools were now entrusted with extending the frontiers of the idea of democratic citizenship. This was also the period when industrialisation was extended to the parts that were not touched by it earlier. Both these processes brought forward the notion of equality as a central idea in schooling. Post-war mass schooling in Europe was able to instil students with a belief in democratic citizenship through such a stress on equality. MNK was able to synthesise these ideas on equality as well as discipline and punishment with what he had learned from his own upbringing in a gurukul, the training he had in post-Victorian England and the larger nationalist movement’s discourse on freedom and equality. MNK’s idea of discipline was to insist, without compromise, on a code of conduct. School was not a prison and discipline was not a matter of enforcement but of habit. Just as knowledge was acquired and shared collectively, regardless of a student’s background and financial means, so was everyone expected to take pride in their appearance and behaviour; students were not only to be treated as equals no matter what their actual social position, they had to be seen as equals. Awadh Kishore was the head of the discipline committee, but MNK was the final arbiter. It was up to the house masters to inspect the students for polished shoes and neatly trimmed hair and nails each morning. Punishment for infringements was sharp and instant. Modernite Sundar Hemrajani recalls his efforts once to distract his house master from his dirty shoes by extending a hand with neatly cut nails, only to be rewarded with a slap. The sound of which, he says, still reverberates. There are hundreds of such stories. MNK’s code of conduct extended to private cars, which were not allowed inside the school. As long as MNK was principal, he

personally ensured that there was no violation of this rule. The parents, barring a few exceptions, came to respect this norm. Even when many of the former students returned as chief guests at school functions, they would leave their vehicles well away from the school gates in deference to their training and to the memory of their principal. For MNK, schooling and discipline were always about mutual respect and responsibility. Students who were sent to MNK’s office to be punished were expected to meet his eyes and make their case. It could not have been easy: a trained boxer, MNK was known, when the student’s misdemeanour was particularly ugly and the student showed no signs of contrition or understanding, to use his hands. In hindsight, it was a sort of military discipline to which MNK himself had been exposed; certainly, it would not be permitted today. Scholars and policymakers have come to the consensus that corporal punishment is a form of physical aggression ‘regardless of the level of severity, its intended or interpreted meaning, or whether it is administered as a form of discipline or in anger’.14 It has the effect of damaging both the physical and emotional development of the child. Because such punishments have long been permissible in our culture, they are handed down from generation to generation as a standard, even essential, part of parenting and educating children. Taking their cue from international discussion and reform, Indian activists, institutions such as the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, and courts have been able, to an extent, to change rules, norms and social behaviour over the last two decades. When we see the difference in generations that have not uniformly been exposed to earlier punitive processes, we can imagine how much more liberating an education at a progressive school like Modern could have been. On the other hand, there were in the past, even at schools, agents who would help children sidestep, escape and undermine structures of authority—a sympathetic mother, relative, or teacher, for instance, whose

kindness was a saving grace.15 In contemporary imagination, the guru exists as an example of a counter to institutional inflexibility and violence. And for many, MNK, despite his physical dominance and his occasional use of corporal punishment, was a guru-like guide rather than an oppressive institutional figurehead, a principal to dread. If MNK was sometimes hard on students, it was because he expected the highest standards from them, and they came to expect these standards of themselves. He was forgiving of even very serious mistakes, as long as a genuine effort was made to learn from them and correct oneself. In the early 1960s, for instance, a housemaster returned drunk to the hostel and used abusive language in the presence of the boarders for whom he was responsible. At the same time, the housemaster was too permissive, taking little note when students escaped for late-night shows at the cinema when they should have been in their rooms. But MNK gave even such errant staff the opportunity to improve. While he was an exaggeratedly masculine presence, using masculine disciplinary methods, his wife, Amrita, helped fill the void left by the loss of Kamala Bose. The two were only recently married when MNK became the principal of the Modern School. Their first daughter, Geeta, studied at the school at this time, becoming one of the very few girls on campus and perhaps helping to persuade prospective parents to send their daughters to the school. By living close to the school, the Kapurs became a model of family life for the students. Amrita Kapur herself would be the first on campus between six and seven in the morning to ensure the school was spotless before the students arrived. Her dedication to the school was beyond reproach. Likewise, her husband led by example. Order was best maintained when the lines of communication were open. He encouraged teachers, for instance, to drink tea in the open with all the other teachers rather than sequester themselves in staff rooms, with select friends, where ‘gossip overwhelms all good chat’. He instituted a daily meeting at 4.15 p.m., at which teachers would drink tea with the

principal and have informal discussions about the syllabus, students and the running of the school. IV: PRINCIPAL AS A LEADER The Chinese say a good leader possesses three qualities at the same time: magnanimity, courage and loyalty. MNK had all three in abundance. He was hugely invested in his teachers, ensuring they weren’t distracted from their tasks and were able to live and work in appropriate conditions and with dignity. The son of a teacher himself, he married into a family of teachers and inspired others to become teachers. The acquiring and passing on of knowledge was, he insisted, the source of any society’s strength. MNK’s longstanding contribution to Indian public life was to raise the dignity and standing of teachers at a time when the republic was finding its roots in free India. Education in citizenship depended upon teachers to spread the ideal of equality in an essentially unequal world. MNK told the teachers that Modern School students often came from rich and powerful families and that the teachers would have to command respect for themselves and their families, that they had to assert their dignity and selfworth. This was a regular refrain. He would become angry if he learned of teachers accepting gifts or favours from the families of students. MNK also insisted that parents come to school to meet the teachers and never the other way around. In return for teachers doing things his way, MNK was supportive of their ambitions, helping swimming coach Virender Pahuja, for instance, attain the necessary degrees to teach academic subjects. Much like Raghubir Singh, MNK believed in giving teachers opportunities. He set up an exchange programme which saw Awadh Kishore become the first teacher from Modern School to travel to the United States for training. He required Kishore to write regular accounts of his time in the US—of the innovations he had observed and the materials and methods being used there that MNK could replicate at Modern. The second

Modern School teacher who travelled to the United States on the programme was Ajodhya Char, a physical-education teacher who attended courses at the Ohio State University, in keeping with MNK’s focus on sport and fitness as a platform for better academic performance. It’s clear from the letters he wrote to the teachers that MNK cared about them as people and ensured that their families were looked after while they were away. When the fine mathematics teacher I.S. Chawla was at the University of Dakota for a year, MNK regularly corresponded with him to reassure him. ‘My wife and I had a discussion with Mrs Chawla,’ he wrote to Chawla on 11 October 1966: She has written to your mother to come to Delhi in her absence and look after your daughters. I feel she is too old to undertake this responsibility and should not be subjected to undertake this difficult job. Instead a relation of Mrs Chawla’s brother or sister could shift to Modern School and look after the three girls.16 His understanding of Punjabi family dynamics and sensibilities is evident in his tactful advice to Chawla: You may write to your mother about the new proposal, putting the onus of the new suggestion on us, so that your mother may not feel that Mrs Chawla has suggested the change since it is awkward for her anyway. Therefore please take the responsibility of explaining to your mother the situation. I think the main burden of financial help should be borne by Mrs Chawla’s family but if there is additional need I will do whatever I can. I am sure you will do whatever you can and I am sure you will be able to pay back all these debts if you are careful in spending in dollars and save as much as you reasonably can for India. This does not mean that you and Mrs Chawla may not buy anything

which you may fancy from America but only means that careful planning would help you save enough for purchases and repayment of loans.17 Chawla’s own letters to MNK betrayed a childlike wonder at his experiences in the US and the kindness he encountered. MNK’s response was typically sage: As you are a good man yourself you see well in everybody. I am very happy to learn that your principal is kind to you. From what you write about him he must be a thorough gentleman. It is only when we are in another country and are treated well that we realise our responsibilities to foreigners in India.18 Continuing to feel responsible for the happiness of Chawla’s family, MNK wrote again: I have seen your wife and your father in law a couple of times. Your wife is very upset over this separation which she said was the first after your marriage. Mrs Kapur and I have independently asked her to go to the States in a month or two if that is possible.19 He kept the door wide open for further support: ‘If there is anything I can do for Mrs Chawla, including temporary financial help, please do not hesitate to write to me. She is free to ask me for any help.’20 MNK’s backing of his teachers was total. He relished sharing opportunities with them. When the American state department announced a visiting scholars programme, MNK took several teachers with him, including Ved Vyas, Uma Sahai, the head of Junior Modern, and Kanwal Krishna. At other schools, this sort of trip was jealously guarded by those at the top of the hierarchy. Part of MNK’s confidence in his own leadership capabilities was

indicated by his willingness to promote colleagues or recommend them for important jobs. When the retiring principal of Rajkumar College in Raipur, for instance, asked him to suggest names for potential replacements, MNK had no hesitation in recommending N.K. Bose, his long-time colleague and the then serving principal of Junior Modern. Indeed, many principals at Delhi schools were hired because of a kind word from M.N. Kapur. When, in the late 1970s, MNK was approached by the founders of a new, wellresourced residential school near Mount Abu for his counsel, he connected them to Abhay Chaturvedi, who became the school’s new principal. His wife was hired as vice principal.21 MNK had found Chaturvedi coaching hockey at St Columba’s. Impressed with his brilliance in the game, he offered him a post at Modern, where he first became a teacher at the junior school and then at the senior school. Similarly, MNK was instrumental in helping the same Chawla about whose family’s welfare he had been so solicitous, become principal of the Army Public School in Dagshai, even negotiating on his behalf. Sometimes serendipity would have to intervene so that MNK could do what was best by both the school and the teacher. For instance, when the head of the mathematics department, Kanwar Juneja, was made an offer to become the principal of a leading school in Punjab, he wanted to leave, but MNK, mindful of forthcoming exams, refused to let him go. It just so happened that Abhay Chaturvedi’s father was visiting for a day from Agra, at the time. A chance encounter with Chaturvedi and his father solved MNK’s quandary: when he ran into them at the school gate, he found out that Chaturvedi’s father was head of the maths department at Agra, and he pleaded with him for help. MNK said he did not want to prevent Juneja from seizing his opportunity, but he could not leave his students in the lurch. Chaturvedi’s father agreed to step temporarily into the breach, and ended up teaching at Modern for eight years. Not that MNK’s job was always so pleasant. Occasionally, he would have to intervene in disputes between teachers that

resembled those between students. In 1956, for example, two senior teachers, one of whom was in a leadership role, had a shouting match that escalated into one throwing a waste-paper bin at the other. In another case, a temporary teacher made all kinds of allegations and then disappeared. He followed it up with a letter to the principal, threatening to commit suicide. Eventually, this teacher was even reinstated, so firmly did MNK believe in rehabilitation and second chances. His moral positions reflected his Arya Samaj upbringing. If a teacher violated MNK’s code, his first concern was to reassert the code and help the teacher live up to it, rather than seek immediate punitive action. Modern and its principal were, by any standards, including present-day ones, remarkably supportive of teachers, even once they’d retired. Superannuated teachers who needed help were routinely permitted extensions so they could teach a little and earn some necessary money. The families of staff were looked after too. In August 1962, a school accountant suffered heart failure, leaving behind a couple of young children and an older son, Virender Pahuja, from his first wife, who had died. A house was allocated to the family so the children would have a roof over their heads. Pahuja had been admitted to St Stephen’s on the strength of his sporting successes, which included spots on the state water polo and football teams, but had to drop out after his father’s death. MNK got him a job as a library assistant at the Modern School and paid for him to go to evening classes at Zakir Husain College. MNK even arranged for him to be admitted into the swimming programme at the National Institute of Sports in Patiala. But the young man’s travails continued. On 10 October 1963, he wrote to MNK from the institute: A few days ago, Ram Pratap along with his few friends advised the coach to write a note to the Medical Officer that ‘I am suffering from Infectious disease.’ The coach did the same. On the other side he also asked one of his friends to complain against me to the Director.22

According to Pahuja, about ‘a week before the complaint, the doctor had already examined’ him, and had said, ‘I am very happy to know that you do not have anything now.’23 When the medical officer asked Pahuja why the coach was writing to him again after he had already given the all-clear, Pahuja replied, ‘They all want that I should be removed from the course because in Delhi there would be two coaches and Ram Pratap will lose his importance.’24 The young man wrote that his rival coach was ‘trying his level best so that I should be removed from the course’.25 Eventually, he reported to MNK that his antagonist had been ‘missing from the Institute since 6th October’. He had ‘left … without informing anybody … with his family and baggage’. And he closed with a line that will be familiar to anyone who has ever had to deal with student finances: ‘I am enclosing my mess bill of September with this letter.’ Eager to protect his protégé from what he perceived as institutional bullying, MNK wrote to the director, General Sant Singh. The grounds for complaint by the young man’s rivals were a medical report signed off by the Modern School’s doctor, which, MNK wrote, left him a ‘little surprised’.26 He wrote that he had sent the young man again ‘for a medical check-up to Dr Sen, the well-known surgeon’. He informed General Singh that after a thorough examination, ‘Dr Sen issued him a clearance slip’ which he was ‘enclosing in the original’. MNK added: It may not be out of place to mention that Virender Pahuja was a student of the Modern school for several years and was subjected to medical examination twice a year for the last many years and every time was declared fit by the medical board consisting of eminent doctors. I am enclosing School Medical report which gives the names of the doctors comprising the school medical board. In view of all this I shall feel obliged if his case is reconsidered.27

Having had Virender Pahuja re-examined by Dr S.K. Sen, himself a keen swimmer, MNK knew the institute would not be able to justify any case against Pahuja. The institute backed down, and over the next five decades Pahuja excelled as a national awardwinning swimming coach. Once Pahuja was back in Delhi, MNK helped him retain his father’s campus accommodation, which he shared with his mother and siblings, by employing him as a coach. Later, he gave Pahuja the time he needed to complete a BEd degree and then inducted him into the faculty of the junior school. His faith in Pahuja resulted in the production of ace swimmers at Modern, who went on to gain both national and international fame. Perhaps MNK’s most surprising aspect was his deep and abiding appreciation for the arts. He enhanced the Modern School’s reputation as a centre of artistic practice. That reputation had been created by Raghubir Singh and his friends and collaborators, who saw themselves as patrons of Indian culture. M.N. Kapur not only carried on the school’s commitment, he made original contributions in expanding the contours and contents of the school’s aesthetic life. By this, he was also paying homage to the national movement, which counted a quest for a higher aesthetic expression as intrinsic to the ideal of excellence. Anuradha Kapur, MNK’s daughter and one of the foremost scholars, teachers and directors of theatre in India, has noted that MNK not only made art an inalienable part of the school, he also gave students the belief that the arts were a vocation and a legitimate career aspiration. Since the early 1950s, MNK was an active part of the Three Act Theatre, which staged plays at regular intervals in both Delhi and other major Indian cities. With MNK as the chairman, the group achieved enough success to pay its way. It gave MNK a taste for the practical side of theatre, and consequently Modern School students did not harbour illusions that theatre was about actors and directors rather than the audience. Theatre was often the main attraction of house functions at the school, and students would put on as many as a dozen

productions, both long and short, in a single school year. MNK was often involved in the preparations himself, particularly for plays that were performed on Founder’s Day. It was therefore natural, as Anuradha Kapur argues, that he was the medium through which the students of the school and the theatre world of Delhi became quite closely enmeshed.28 One effect of this was the creation of a dedicated, educated audience for plays in Delhi, which, since the 1950s, has emerged as the centre for Indian experimental theatre. MNK’s love for theatre can, of course, be traced back to Government College, Lahore and the influence of Guru Dutt Sondhi, that exemplar of both athletic arena and proscenium. Sondhi provided encouragement and training to many great theatre actors who went on to become leaders of the Indian People’s Theatre Association. The Modern School was steeped in this progressive fervour. Anuradha Kapur has reminisced in print about how it was MNK who was instrumental in persuading Richard Schechner to bring his famous production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children to the Modern School stage.29 MNK was closely connected to not just Sondhi but also the progressives of pre-Partition Lahore, who were later a breath of fresh air and creativity in independent India’s cultural production. The Modern School played host to many of their finest productions and performative peaks. The school employed Ram Gopal Bajaj and Om and Sudha Shivpuri, and in Anuradha Kapur also provided the National School of Drama with one of its most outstanding directors. Other notables associated with the school included the likes of Vinod Nagpal, Amba Sanyal, Feisal Alkazi, Arun Kuckreja, Maya Rao, and MNK’s niece Suhaila, unmistakably some of the finest theatre personalities in the country. As striking as the Modern School’s contribution to Indian theatre remains, Sondhi’s influence was most present in MNK’s devotion to sport. Sondhi was a vital part of India’s Olympic management team and went on to become known as the father of the Asian Games. Hockey was his forte, and he managed the

tremendously successful Indian team before Partition. When he met the Pakistani great Ali Dara—who had been a star player for the Indian team before the rupture—during the London Olympics, he enveloped him in a bear hug. This warmth, even after the violence of Partition, characterised the connections and personal relationships between many Indians and Pakistanis and the presence of a mutual affection that we only rarely encounter nowadays. Given MNK’s sporting abilities, his leadership of the Modern School and his closeness to Sondhi, he was an obvious choice to be part of a national sports council tasked with designing and managing a structure for Indian sports administration. The Modern School became something of a nursery for MNK’s sporting interests. He strove to produce swimmers, boxers, hockey players, footballers and cricketers. After Partition, when the RSS began working among refugees in the capital, its chief mode of engagement was physical-exercise sessions in the city’s many spacious gardens and parks. A new masculine political bravado was demonstrated through such public acts. For all Modern School’s emphasis on sport, it was not used as an excuse to display masculine bravado or for sportsmen to clamour for prizes that they did not deserve. Instead, sport was an opportunity to teach humility and the ability to revel in someone else’s success and demonstrate the hard work necessary to achieve one’s own successes. Almost as soon as MNK became school principal, he began to focus on the school’s teams. The school’s sprawling campus and the desire of the rich families that sent their children here to give them a wholesome education made it an ideal incubator for competitive sport. Cricket and especially football and swimming became calling cards for Modern School, enticing more parents to seek admission for their children. In the early years of MNK’s tenure, there were few girls at the Modern School. But it was made clear that girls, whatever their numbers, were equal participants in the Modern community.30 Within a decade and a half, girl students were leading the community, with a number of them becoming prefects.

In 1961, at least three girls, Meeta Prasad, Nilima Dhanda and Purnima Mehta, were prefects. Prasad and Dhanda were both sports champions. Though an intensive sporting culture at Modern only really took root in the 1950s, the school was producing future Delhi University champions almost immediately. The more success the school enjoyed in the sporting arena, the more magical its name became to all manner of aspirants in Delhi society. The Modern School came to represent the sort of country India hoped it could become—progressive and full of strength and vigour. V: EDUCATION AND NATION Raghubir Singh could not have anticipated how quickly MNK would hit the ground running, how instant his impact would be on a school that had just lost a principal so integral to the school’s founding. By the mid-1960s, MNK was practically a cult figure, his persona shrouded in myth and legend. To get to the root of his intentions at the Modern School, we must return to the progressive role of the Arya Samaj in its earlier years. Often accused of stoking Hindu communal feelings in the already communally charged Punjab of the 1930s and 1940s, the Samaj, in fact, was the force behind much of the contemporary progressive thought in Punjab and north India.31 Arya Samajists like Lala Lajpat Rai, Hans Raj and Munshi Ram (Swami Shraddhanand), among others, played crucial roles in advancing the cause of education.32 The Dayanand Anglo-Vedic education system that they established, named after the founder of the Arya Samaj, was soon followed in hundreds of schools and colleges across the country. Historically, the reform movements in Punjab first emerged when there was a well-established Persianate elite and so there began a popular demand for Arabic and Sanskrit translations of Persian texts.33 A leading role in the educational and language policy debates was played by the Oriental College in Lahore and

this may explain the emphasis placed on Sanskrit by the Hindu revivalists in many parts where there was powerful support from Punjabis in the early nineteenth century.34 In the presidencies of Madras, Bengal and Bombay, Sanskrit learning was an academic concern, with little relevance to jobs. MNK, a Punjabi educated in Lahore, had a deep understanding of Sanskrit learning but did not romanticise it. Though he understood classical Sanskrit texts retained a lot of wisdom, he did not feel knowledge stopped there. In his eyes, there were other great literary and cultural traditions, too, to inspire growth into fine and cultured human beings. His world view was also shaped by his interactions with humanist and democratic teachers in the West, while he had practical experience at the crude Chiefs’ College, attended by the children of aristocrats and bereft of any progressive element or nationalist outlook. Coming from a committed Arya Samaj family, MNK had imbibed its social vision and intended to play an important role in independent India’s effort to become a modern nation. It took until the 1960s, with the growth of the anti-English and anti-Hindi movements in the country and an aggressive communal mobilisation around Aligarh Muslim University and Banaras Hindu University, for there to be an urgency in discussions about the Indian nation, nearly a decade and a half after the national movement had secured India as an independent country. First convened by Nehru in 1961, the National Integration Council doubled its efforts to bring Indians together after the war with China a year later. MNK was invited to a meeting and spoke at length about education and the nation. For him, there was a marked fecklessness about students: Uncertainty about future breeds casualness towards work specially when there is scarcity of jobs. This becomes all the more upsetting in a developing but a poor country like India where education is not yet properly related to the needs of the public or professions. No wonder there is indiscipline, lack of

integrity, casualness and crudeness in a section of the younger generation. It is significant that there are hardly any outbursts of indiscipline in professional colleges preparing students for definite jobs which became available to the students. So it would appear that the only sphere where there has been deterioration of standards is the moral sphere of human personality. Without conscious effort to correct this by the school, parents and teachers, things will go from bad to worse. Always on the lookout for solutions to crises, MNK focused on the emancipatory role of education, arguing that progress lay in ‘proper social and educational progress, and establishment of a more equitable society’.35 When asked, he said that his contribution as a public-school man and a principal would be to ‘provide the conditions in which the child becomes a more balanced person which is the surest way to being a more moral person’.36 He believed a moral preceptor had to be visible, had to set the tone; he made sure he was available to his children every morning for a long prayer in his impeccable white shirt and trousers and with a speech ready, often in Sanskrit. VI: FAMILY AND THE SCHOOL M.N. Kapur was a family man and came from high-achieving stock. His brother, a doctor, was married to the sister of the superstars of Hindi cinema at the time, Dev, Chetan and Vijay Anand. Before leaving for Bombay, Chetan Anand had taught at Doon School, giving the family a connection to and love for school life. MNK’s own sister, Uma Sahai, became a teacher at Modern’s junior wing and later became its headmistress. His wife, Amrita, was the daughter of a distinguished teacher at Government College, Lahore, and Amrita’s sister, too, was married into a family of teachers. Inevitably, Amrita Kapur’s niece Geeta Dudeja became a teacher at Modern’s junior school and later its

headmistress. MNK doted upon his daughters, Geeta and Anuradha, as he did upon his niece Suhaila. He would include Suhaila on school trips, delighting her once when he whispered in her ear that she would be going to meet Pandit Nehru. MNK’s family were, of course, exposed early to his educational philosophy, to his principles of responsibility and self-worth. Looking through old issues of the school magazines, Adarsh and Sandesh, it is striking how often MNK is photographed with his wife, his family, or in convivial spirits with staff and board members. The impression conveyed is genuinely familial, of everyone pulling in the same direction. The idea of the school as a happy modern family was anchored around the Kapur household. This was an ethos that bound students to the institution even when it had been decades since they were there; it’s an ethos that, till date, makes the Modern School Old Students Association one of the closest-knit and most effective alumni organisations in India. MNK ran the school like a family, often couching student successes and failures in how they reflected upon the family rather than the individual. This quite often ran counter to the telos of a liberal education, the foundation of the school’s pedagogical promise that it would allow for the evolution of the student as an individual and provide him autonomy. The school’s philosophy did not have room for family as an organising principle, instead the building blocks were modernity and nationalism. This apparent contradiction of rejecting family and at the same time structuring the school as a large family created a dynamic tension among students, prompting them to embrace the institution while building the self-confidence to leave it behind. It is worth noting that, in many ways, MNK brought back the centrality of family to the school’s zeitgeist, a notion that the school’s founder, Raghubir Singh, wanted to marginalise. He succeeded in tempering the school’s mission of creating a ‘free individual’ by reminding students, in Donne’s words, that no man is an island, that humanism must be qualified with an understanding of one’s obligations to society.

Since the 1930s, Delhi has witnessed the phenomenon of the single charismatic leader defining and burnishing the ideals of significant educational institutions across the city: Kamala Bose came to Delhi in 1920 to lead the newly founded Modern School; Kamala Sengupta led Lady Irwin School; J.D. Tytler was the first principal of Delhi Public School. In later years, Shri Din Dayal, the principal of Delhi Public School, Mathura Road, was another such visionary, while Rajni Kumar singlehandedly created Springdale School and led it as principal.37 This phenomenon has been peculiar to Delhi. In Calcutta, for instance, it is individual teachers, rather than principals, who have become prominent and even famous. The upright principal with totalitarian instincts, who rules his school with an iron fist, was portrayed by Amitabh Bachchan in Mohabbatein. Certainly, it’s possible to depict MNK as an overwhelming figure, dominating Modern School with his personality, but it would miss the point. It would be a mistake to write of MNK in terms of an individual career, when what he was about and what he represented was the very idea of what an autonomous school could be, what role it could play in the wider culture. The cultural life of Delhi was moulded by patrons and institution-builders such as the great Hindustani classical vocalist Vinay Chandra Maudgalya, artist Bhabesh Sanyal, the writer Shankar, arts patron Sumitra Charat Ram, and artist and actor Sarada Ukil. Their efforts were part of a larger nation-building quest, the product of a national mood of hope, optimism and duty after Partition. India was independent and at its helm was a sophisticated prime minister who understood that culture emerged from the freedom to experiment. It was at this critical moment, when India was making its institutions and setting out its values, that Modern School had M.N. Kapur as its principal. And it is because of MNK’s leadership that Modern took its place among the foremost institutions of independent India. It became a place, as his daughter Anuradha has written, for those who ‘desire alternate visions’ and lead ‘idealistic lives’.38

CHAPTER FIVE AT THE CENTRE OF AN EMERGING CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

The new Indian nation, coming to life after a long and arduous struggle for independence that shaped many of its sensibilities, was a seemingly bottomless receptacle for the hopes and aspirations of its people. One of the most critical areas for these dreams was in the domain of aesthetics, where artists had been voicing their individual as well as collective desire to become a part of the new nation-building project. Artists wanted to assert that they too were stakeholders in the new nation. They wanted independent India to be artistically inclined and to provide spaces and avenues for art to flourish. By dint of their manifold contributions—from giving shape to the past through their paintings, to awakening the nation’s sensibilities through the murals at Ajanta, Ellora or Bagh, to immortalising Gandhi through his motifs—they had a rightful claim to the attention of the republic.1 In the third week of August 1949, the All India Conference on Arts took place in Calcutta. The Ministry of Education was actively involved in organising the conference.2 Ideas and opinions were exchanged through letters between prominent art scholars like Niharranjan Ray and Asit Kumar Haldar on one side, and the representatives of different associations, such as Sarada Ukil of the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society (AIFACS), on the other. The objective of the conference was to come to a shared understanding about the way art and artists were to be part of the

institutional and educational arrangements of the new and independent India, ready to take on what Nehru had so evocatively referred to as the ‘tryst with destiny’. Those involved in promoting the arts were, at the same time, conscious that national pride might lead to parochialism. To counter this threat, they emphasised the universal nature of art and advocated a more or less free border so far as the appreciation of arts was concerned. They also argued for reorganising art education and promoting art on a vast scale so that not only was society enriched but the nation was recorded for posterity. This was related to another issue: young people graduating from the art schools in many parts of the country, including the ones that the colonial government had started, were not finding employment, while the traditional patrons of the arts, the local rajas and maharajas, no longer had the resources to support artists. In this situation, the purpose of the conference was also to deliberate over how to provide artists avenues for employment and ensure that they had steady earnings. In other words, the promotion of arts education was seen as intrinsically linked to building social support for the arts, and required the state to play an active role both financially and institutionally. 3 From Bombay, G. Venkatachalam, the president of the All India Association of Fine Arts, and from Lucknow, the painter Asit Kumar Haldar sent a list to the Ministry of Education, consisting of items they thought should be on the agenda for a new programme on art education, particularly the following: (3) The necessity for starting an art room in every school and college in the country, where a small representative collection of Indian paintings, sculptures and other works of art should be exhibited ‘for stimulating aesthetic sensibility and creative effort’ amongst students; where periodical art lectures should be given by competent critics; where entertainment, music and dance recitals should be encouraged.

(4) Every school and college must have a ‘library of art books for reference and study; also cultural tours to the great art centres of India like Ajanta, Mahabalipuram, Sanchi and Sarnath’ must be encouraged by the authorities.4 Significantly enough, what the leaders of the art world envisioned implemented by the government, was in many ways precisely what the Modern School had been doing since its inception. The school was indeed an institution that coevolved with the collective effort at cultural articulation in the first half of the twentieth century. I: TRAINING IN AESTHETICS If one were to examine them closely, the Christian ideals of schooling, which arrived in the shape of English schools and English-style boarding schools in India, would be found bereft of a template that would have facilitated a flourishing art tradition in education.5 In the Western traditions, training in art and aesthetics was an essential project in education, drawing upon the understanding of the ancient Greeks, who saw art as mimesis or imitation of the real and natural order of things. Many premodern normative texts from India as well placed an emphasis on art in the exercise of imparting and organising education. It is this implicit idea that became quite central in the efforts at a national reconstruction of education in late nineteenth- and twentiethcentury India. Any effort to reimagine Indian education needed to engage with the question of aesthetics. Thus, when Raghubir Singh was sketching out his curriculum for the Modern School and devising teaching methods along with Kamala Bose, he was consciously close to the man he saw as someone he could seek advice from in this respect—Rabindranath Tagore. It was Tagore who established the centrality of aesthetics in any attempt to reconfigure education in India along either modern or ancient

lines.6 Tagore’s Visva-Bharati was intended to be a meeting ground for not merely the universe, but also the aesthetic universe. At the level of ideas, therefore, Modern School had a close association with Tagore’s institution, though the different spatial contexts produced different trajectories for both institutions. Nevertheless, Sarada Ukil (at Modern from 1920– 1930) and Ramkinkar Baij (at Modern from 1930–1934), who established the artistic tradition in Modern School, were both trained at Visva-Bharati. Ramkinkar Baij’s successor, Sukumar Bose (at Modern from 1934–1945), was a pupil of Asit Kumar Haldar, who was trained by the Tagores too. By making the aesthetic so intrinsic to education, the Modern School and its initial preceptors were also unconsciously making the school the centre of a new world of arts unfolding in Delhi. Institutions, practices and personalities who would define the cultural world of the nation would very soon inhabit the city and live, significantly, quite close to the school itself. In a very substantial way, the school became an active agent in this world, and scripted for itself a horizon which was quite broad and illuminating. At the same time, the school would develop a close link with the state, otherwise unnoticeable to the eye due to the private nature of the school. II: THE BEGINNINGS Sarada Ukil, an illustrious student of Abanindranath Tagore, came to Delhi in search of a job as well as the space and opportunity to institutionalise the art that he practised. It cannot be ascertained whether he knew Raghubir Singh from when he was in Santiniketan itself or if they met only when Ukil came to Delhi, but it has been noted that they were friends. This friendship was cemented when Ukil began residing in Old Delhi, and once the school was established, he was one of the first teachers to be appointed. He must have been quite an inspiring teacher for the

motley group of the first batch of students. Bhagwant Singh, of the first batch of the school, remembered him fondly: On one of the trips to Agra under Sarada Ukil, I sketched the Taj from the prison window of the Agra fort. The imprisoned emperor Shah Jahan had gazed through that very window at the memorial he had built for his queen. Mr Ukil was so pleased with my pencil sketch that he used to show it to all the important visitors who came to visit the school.7 (emphasis mine) Sarada Ukil’s early association with the school was quite fortuitous. At the time he taught at Modern, the school was in its infancy and admitted only junior boys, which probably left him professionally dissatisfied. When Sarada Ukil went on leave, he engaged his brother, Barada Ukil, to teach at Modern during his absence. The Ukils soon set up their own art school in Delhi. This was the beginning of a very engaging association for Modern, as Sarada and his brothers, Barada and Ranada Ukil, became crucial to the efforts aimed at the propagation of art in the city. Sarada Ukil was actively involved in setting up institutions to organise and help artists, initially in Delhi and later in the whole country, and Modern’s early association with him meant it too became a part of this process. It was his efforts that led to the building of the monumental AIFACS gallery at the heart of the capital. Art should not be seen as something unrelated to politics, and this politics was already in motion in pre-Independence Delhi with regard to the selection of painters and artists to make paintings and murals on the buildings of the new capital of the British Empire. There was intense competition, and the colonial masters played a critical role in the adjudication process. The process of commissioning artists for these murals and paintings caused stress amongst the community of Indian artists.8 What appeared to be at stake was the heart and soul of Indian art.9

Detailed discussions on the way some artists were chosen and others were not gave credence to the idea that art was not a politically neutral subject. Abreast of the latest developments in the arts and with artists, as well as aware of their close relationship with some of the builders of Delhi, Raghubir Singh was familiar with these debates and the political machinations of the time. His own inclinations, however, were clearly shaped by Tagore, the Bengal school, and his association with Sarada Ukil. This was a time when artists of various types began flocking to Delhi, and the Ukils tried to organise a body under the AIFACS.This resulted in the construction of a hall and the gallery previously mentioned, which was later moved near the Central Legislative Assembly building. It was the first permanent art gallery in Delhi, and when Modern School left Sultan Singh’s Daryaganj haveli in 1932 for its sprawling campus on Barakhamba Road, it was convenient for the school’s art teachers to take students to shows and exhibitions at AIFACS. In 1947, the famous cartoonist K. Shankar Pillai, better known as Shankar, instituted an international art competition, which was conceived and organised as an opportunity for children to show their skills. Modern’s students, in part due to their nearby location, were enthusiastic, plentifully represented and often took home prizes. As the vistas for artists in newly independent India opened up, Delhi was a magnet, particularly for artists from the part of Punjab that was now in Pakistan. A group among them set up an alternate body of artists known as the Shilpi Chakra. The group vowed to prevent the arts from being monopolised by the rich and to make art available to the masses by hosting exhibitions on the street. For Modern, the group quite literally washed up on the school’s doorstep. In 1945, the school had appointed B.N. Mukherjee, and soon after, it added Kanwal and Devyani Krishna to the faculty too, artists who were temperamentally and ideologically closer to the Shilpi Chakra camp. The artistic debates around the country, and Delhi especially, were, in effect, being rehearsed on the grounds of Modern School.

III: THE MUSICAL UNIVERSE Of course, the cultural churn extended across the arts. Delhi’s association with music is very old, but its history of non-royal musical practices and of audiences outside the elaborate courts is not very well known. With the evolution of New Delhi in the 1920s, a new audience for music appeared to be emerging, but it wasn’t until a couple of decades later that the more enterprising among Delhi’s rich families, more particularly from the house of Lala Shri Ram, made efforts to organise musical evenings and invite singers from all over India. Shri Ram’s family, particularly his brother Sir Shankar Lal and son Murli Dhar, were connoisseurs of literature like him, and so was his daughter-in-law, Sumitra Charat Ram (the wife of his younger son Charat Ram). Soon after her marriage, Sumitra began organising musical programmes at her home, where young and talented as well as established singers, dancers and other artists came, stayed and performed. Her ‘Jhankar Music Circle’, boasted a veritable who’s who of the Indian musical and performative arts scene in later years. Her initiative and patronage in opening the Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra provided much-needed institutional support to many artists.10 The efforts by the Shri Ram family turned out to be some of the most effective initiatives towards conceiving and evolving a new musical universe in post-Independence Delhi. As with so many cultural efforts in this period, the Modern School had already anticipated the need to institutionalise the country’s classical music traditions. This was a novel effort and faced considerable resistance, as public performances by people, and specifically women of the upper classes and castes, was not yet accepted as the norm in northern India.11 Bhagwant Singh, the son of Sir Sobha Singh, has a delightful recollection of his grandfather Sujan Singh’s reaction to the dramatic and musical performances on the first annual day of the school in 1922, in which he and his brother took part. Sujan Singh apparently berated his son in his typical rusty Punjabi for allowing his grandsons to become mirasis (minstrels) and hijras (eunuchs) by

exposing them to this ‘feminine atmosphere’.12 In his story ‘The Portrait of a Lady’, a moving tribute to his grandmother, Bhagwant’s younger brother, Khushwant Singh, one of the most illustrious Modernites, speaks of her horror upon hearing that he was learning music, which she believed had ‘lewd associations’ and was meant for harlots and beggars.13 Notwithstanding such prejudice, music and musical instruments were an integral part of the students’ curriculum from the beginning. Raghubir Singh had made it compulsory for students to select at least one instrument and study it intensively with a teacher. This norm meant that Modern was always scouting for the best music teachers it could find. Sham Narain, a student who joined the school in 1946, reminisced: Under the care of Mr Bannerjee the School Music teacher, I learnt how to play ‘Sarod’ and then play it on School Stage as part of School Orchestra during morning prayer time. Mr Bannerjee excelled in playing violin. It was a treat to see him getting lost in strains of music when he performed.14 The emergence of a tradition of music in the school coincided with a movement of great cultural import for the city—the founding of the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya by Pandit Vinay Chandra Maudgalya. Earlier, in the late nineteenth century, two sets of musical movements had taken shape under the leadership of two very energetic and visionary musicians: Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar and Pandit V.N. Bhatkhande.15 Both wanted to develop a distinctly Indian music, albeit through different ways and processes. Bhatkhande and Paluskar tried to create an integrated sense of Hindustani music, along with a mass base for classical music.16 Paluskar operated out of Lahore and Maudgalya, who was his student, came to Delhi to fulfil the mission of his teacher. He settled down with his family in Connaught Place (near where

the Plaza Cinema would be built in the years to come) and began looking for students. Maudgalya’s music school, which he ran out of his two-room tenement, got its first students when Satyawati Malik enrolled her children. Satyawati was the daughter of a prosperous businessman of Jammu, and shifted to Delhi with her husband. In later years, she would become a renowned Hindi author. She allowed her daughter Kapila to learn classical dance at an early age, at a time when it was considered taboo in north India. When she sent her children, Keshav, Subhash and Kapila, to learn music from Pandit Maudgalya,17 it was the beginning of the latter’s efforts at setting up an institution, the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, to impart training in Hindustani classical music in Delhi.18 The Gandharva Mahavidyalaya expanded with the times and shifted its premises to Rouse Avenue, not very far from Modern and, in fact, closer than other institutions that would come up in the 1950s near Mandi House. While Pandit Maudgalya’s daughter went to the nearby Lady Irwin, both his sons, Madhup and Mukul, attended the Modern School. This meant Pandit Maudgalya was present at several school events. A report of a school programme, where Pandit Maudgalya presided as the judge, gives a vivid description of the cultural atmosphere of the school: The students were very keen on learning Music especially light songs. During their free periods they often used to come to the Music room for practice. The inter-house competitions were very interesting, and both the senior school and junior school enthusiastically took part in the musical events. The 30th came at last and the senior School assembled in the prayer hall for the completion. Mr Vidya Nath, eminent radio artist and Mr Vinay Chandra, the principal of Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, acted as

judges. The first item was light music … classical came next.19 Pandit Maudgalya’s long-term contributions, apart from establishing the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya in 1939, were first, to help in the formation of a choir based on classical Indian music in 1972 and second, to play a prominent part in introducing music to the CBSE syllabus, which was framed in 1957. In his role in both, his indirect association with the Modern School played a part. The Modern School was, in return, a beneficiary of his regular presence, and through his influence, it became an institution where students and teachers could become steeped in Indian music. A distinctive part of Modern School performances was its large choir, which later became a near-essential part of school productions across the city. With good music teachers a part of the school’s universe from the beginning, the children were trained inside a particular musical ecosystem, and it was sustained by an evolved, student-friendly approach to teaching. The story of the brilliant sarod player Amjad Ali Khan’s education illustrates this approach at its best. When it was pointed out by teachers that he was unable to score marks in mathematics, the principal asked them to go easy on the boy, and told them that the child had a rare musical talent that needed to be honed, not destroyed just because he was weak in a given subject. This enabling approach is the lifeblood for any meaningful performing arts education, and the school collectively fostered such an ecosystem. As noted earlier, this was also a time when Indian light and classical music was being freed of its upper-class chains. The Indian state was active in trying to popularise these forms through the AIR, among other avenues. Modern School had been preparing the ground for musical appreciation among its students in an unforced, admirably natural way. It didn’t matter what aptitude a student had for music, it was important that all students participate, that music became seamlessly entwined with the life

of the school, part of the knowledge base of an educated human being. When Aristotle talked about excellence, he emphasised habit-formation as necessary for the cultivation of excellence.20 It is no surprise, then, that that an alumnus of Modern, Kiran Seth, founded SPIC MACAY, which promotes and encourages an understanding of various aspects of Indian culture, particularly classical music and dance, among school and college students across the country. Headquartered in the school’s Barakhamba Road premises, Seth’s organisation has, over the decades, been vital to furthering young, educated Indians’ understanding of their own cultural birthright. IV: THE CHOREOGRAPHY REVOLUTION While classical music was in the incipient phases of a renaissance with the help of the government, other performing arts and artists too were looking towards the new republican state in expectation. Many of the cultural and creative experiments and endeavours that began before Independence now sought to locate themselves in the new democratic milieu: in most cases through their efforts to broaden it.21 The school was fittingly located at this historical conjuncture, and became a site where some of these new initiatives found a natural habitat, even if only for a short while. Among the most significant of the experiments that made their way to the Modern campus was the vision of dancer Uday Shankar, whose student Narendra Sharma joined the school as a teacher.22 Although the school already had a teacher specifically to train girl students in dance,23 artistic exploration was at the core of the Modern curriculum, and there could have been no better demonstration than that of the appointment of dance master Narendra Sharma in 1954. Sharma had left home when very young to join Uday Shankar’s troupe. By then, Shankar had opened an eponymous cultural centre in Almora.24 In Almora, Uday Shankar’s school gave Narendra Sharma a diverse and

first-rate education in dance. When Shankar folded up the school to move to Bombay to work on his film Kalpana (somewhat autobiographically about a young dancer trying to set up his own school), he took Sharma with him. For Sharma, it was perhaps only a matter of time before he struck out on his own. He had already been taught by Shankar to value experimentation, with body and with movement, and above all, to strive for something new.25 When he moved to Delhi, he was snapped up by Modern as its new dance teacher. Sharma was newly married and together with his wife, Jayanti, he created a world within Modern that was attuned to classical dance, ballet and all manner of contemporary dance styles. With Narendra Sharma teaching at Modern, the desire to see the exhilarating ways in which the body moves and creates different forms of energetic engagement with nature was instilled in students. This concept was not familiar in the Indian education system, with the exception of Tagore’s Santiniketan. Modern School became, in many ways, the Santiniketan of north India. An area of mimetic innovation, dance became a moving force in the school’s artistic repertoire. There were two broad fields in dance at the time: classical and experimental. Classical dance had not yet acquired its standard repertoire, and there were very few girls enrolled at Modern anyway. With experimental dance forms on the other hand, boys could participate with fewer preconceptions. This was an enduring lesson that Narendra Sharma’s teaching of dance left for all students (and indeed the rest of us): creative dance could help prevent the early onset of rigid, sectarian identity formation, an idea consonant with the values taking shape in the school’s ecosystem. Narendra Sharma, therefore, was doing something much more than merely training people to take control of their bodies; he was also teaching them to see the body as political and demonstrating that any progressive politics the republic desired them to have should be filtered through this recognition.

A sign of Narendra Sharma’s success was that by 1956, dance activities were extended to the junior and kindergarten sections.26 While centred around the idea of dancing as an aid to the development of a student’s personality, Sharma ‘continued the search for newer approaches’.27 Conscious of the kindergarten and junior sections’ different pedagogic needs, he designed their dance activities around the ‘play way’ method.28 As he explained: In this particular method, steps are selected from among the common playing ones, and then moulded into a rhythmic pattern. It has been our constant effort to keep the instruction lively and prevent it from becoming a burden on the students. Guided by this fundamental principle we knowingly abstained from introducing any complicated steps and technicalities in the Junior and KG schools.29 Dance is a creative act, and Sharma’s efforts were to foreground this creative aspect in students’ lives. Students, he said, ‘are asked to improvise on day to day subjects. The most informal atmosphere is maintained so that the students spontaneously come out with their movements’.30 This, he found, made the students eager to learn: ‘After a short period of such training students feel the urge of participating in a few short item performances.’31 The house system proved significant here. It provided the perfect space for students to perform and keep the experiment going. Dance increasingly became connected to theatrical components, and house functions saw a corresponding rise in dance dramas and ballet, with Modern almost a pioneer in this style of performance.32 The idea of performing in two stages, first, before the parents, and later on, before large audiences at official school events, ‘imparted great confidence to the children’.33 The importance of behind-the-scenes knowledge, such as lighting and

sound, was also part of the training.34 Sharma also introduced an increasing number of folk dances and ballets, inspired by the National Folk Dance Festival at Delhi Gate.35 He reported: On the Founder’s Day performance Senior School worked further on folk dancing this year too. The opening dance was Pushpanjali in which five girls pay homage to the stage and offer flowers to the audience. ‘Gargi Nrittya’, based on the folk dance of Gujarat with pitchers on the head of young maidens, was adapted. A folk dance of Kathiawar called ‘Astang’ formed the basis of dance ‘Pattern with ropes’. The basic idea behind the item, is simple. A number of ropes are hung from the ceiling which the dancers hold. The ropes are so composed that the ropes form themselves into a variety of patterns. The junior school participated for the first time in the Founder’s Day performances. They presented a 20minute ballet ‘Toys and Tots’. The stage was simple and the moral was that the children should not mishandle their toys.36 Long after students left the school, the atmosphere of Narendra Sharma’s dance room stayed with them. Nilima Sheikh has provided an evocative description of the dance room, quoted in the first chapter, that vividly brings to mind the sights and sounds associated with it.37 Narendra Sharma inspired the spread of dance education in schools throughout the city.38 Today, Delhi has the densest presence of dance as a part of school activity in comparison to other cities. Credit goes to Sharma for making the Modern School the benchmark. The importance of ballet as a form of storytelling and creative expression was repeatedly emphasised by Sharma in his writings on dance in the Modern school. An interesting experiment he conducted was to ask students to compose their

own ballets and enact them. In his thirty years at the school, he choreographed almost three hundred ballets.39 Narendra Sharma’s involvement in the school held layers of significance. His story is representative of the imperceptible ways in which Modern held a central position as a space and institution for cultural articulation in the city. As pointed out earlier in this chapter, since the 1940s, Sumitra Charat Ram was one of the moving forces in organising classical dance and classical music in Delhi, giving it institutional form by founding the Bharatiya Kala Kendra.40 When state institutions and academies began to emerge in the early 1950s, many of her associates became involved with these new schools, designing and managing their programmes. Nirmala Joshi, her closest supporter, became the secretary of the Lalit Kala Akademi, while Charat Ram’s own organisation, Bharatiya Kala Kendra, was the catalyst for many artists to choose to settle and make their careers in Delhi. In 1957, taking up a commission from the Delhi government, the Bharatiya Kala Kendra held its first Ramlila, an epic production that became an annual fixture and cultural touchstone for the city. But Bharatiya Kala Kendra needed—despite the financial support of the Shri Ram family—the means to enable artists to live in Delhi for long periods of time. By employing Narendra Sharma, Modern School showed its willingness to enable artists to stay in the capital. Narendra Sharma, of course, made some key contributions to the Ramlila, as did Jayanti, who helped prepare costumes for the large cast.41 The first shows of the Ramlila opened on 15 September 1957, at the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium near Delhi Gate, after heavy rains forced three days of cancellations. It was a majestic feat of new Indian artistic expression.42 When Narendra Sharma joined Modern School, Delhi was still new to the idea of dance, and around 1955, he was deliberating with others over the status of dances in India, where, for example, Odissi was not accorded classical status. Within a couple of years, he was choreographing the Ramlila and at the

same time shaping the approach of generations of students towards dance as an art form. The Sharmas’ son, Bharat, once quipped that he was born into the cultural landmark that was the Ramlila, watching his parents put the production together and play crucial roles as Ravana and Sita.43 The first rehearsals for the Ramlila took place on the lawns of the Modern. It is perhaps no wonder then that Anuradha Kapur, who as a child must have lived very close to those lawns, wrote one of the finest theoretical works on the Ramlila as a creative act. Her seminal critical study analysed the way the Ramlila of Ram Nagar, Banaras, was produced, focusing on how the entire corpus of audience and actors together created the act of the play.44 Incidentally, the spirit behind the production of the Ramlila in Delhi, Sumitra Charat Ram, once said that the inspiration behind the Ramlila was her memories of her childhood experiences in Banaras, where she would watch the Ramlila and also hear the Ramcharitmanas, Tulsidas’s epic poem. So Anuradha Kapur, a scholar raised in and arguably by the Modern School, and perhaps inspired by her own childhood experiences, turned full circle to the origins of the Ramlila for her seminal work. V: A NEW CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY The combination of an enlightened prime minister in Nehru and a team that included the likes of scholar and thinker Abul Kalam Azad, provided the impetus for a cultural reimagining of the republic. The state’s interest in fostering the arts, combined with the demands of artists, performers and writers, resulted in the setting up of the Sangeet Natak Akademi (1952), Lalit Kala Akademi (1954), Sahitya Akademi (1954), National Gallery of Modern Art (1954), and National School of Drama (1959) in quick succession. Vigyan Bhavan, built in 1956, and the Rafi Marg headquarters of the AIFACS, also built in the 1950s, added to the city’s burgeoning cultural excitement. The new AIFACS building had top-class exhibition halls and hosted major events, such as

the International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, which saw the work of artists from all over the world being displayed in the capital. Cultural and institutional spaces for performances were limited throughout the 1940s and even in the immediate postIndependence period in Delhi. Though the National Physical Laboratory in Pusa had an auditorium that was used quite extensively for performance, it was the development of the Sapru House Auditorium in 1955 that marked a radical shift in the cultural imagination of the city. It meant that the Mandi House complex, which included the new auditorium, became a bona fide cultural hub. Modern School’s location meant its students were close to Mandi House and its phalanx of cultural possibilities— top-class acting and dancing, art galleries, and open-air spaces for students to rehearse and debate for hours over cups of coffee and cheap snacks. Mandi House was pulsating with the fledgling and fully realised work of artists and the fresh energy of a galaxy of visitors. The school, even if vicariously, could not help but be a beneficiary of this atmosphere. With the building of a number of new colonies in the 1950s and 1960s to house the people flooding into Delhi, Connaught Place became the centre of the city, and Barakhamba Road was no longer a zone of transition but the throbbing heart of the nation’s cultural life.45 Situated at the heart of these changes— literally and figuratively—Modern found itself intimately bound up in the cultural articulation of the republic, a process that had been ongoing since the 1940s and began to find an institutional shape in the 1950s. The school was thrust into the limelight as an institution that had served as a nurturing ground for Indian education, and it became a standard-bearer for excellence—not just in the narrowly academic sphere but in the arena of creativity and culture. The idea of excellence has often been misjudged in a society where inequalities are a pervasive social fact. It can be construed as an elitist justification of unequal access to education and lead

to popular disgust at the upper-class legitimisation of their education. However, one can also have a notion of excellence which is, irrespective of one’s material location, based in excelling in individual and community virtues. It was in this sense that Raghubir Singh and the other mentors of the school could be seen as providing a direction for excellence in whatever they did. One such example was their decision to shelter Ramkinkar Baij, who came from Santiniketan and got a job with Modern School for a critical phase in his career: he evolved into one of the most original sculptors the country had seen after Debiprasad Roychoudhury in Santiniketan, and made astonishing, fabulous works of art. It was while he was at Modern that he sculpted the now famous Black Saraswati, arguably the jewel of the school’s art collection. Modern was lucky—though some of this luck could be described as foresight—to have been initiated into sculpting by someone who could be called a pioneer in the field.46 Cultural excellence and national consciousness, in this period, seemed coterminous. One of the best examples of this is the emergence of Bharatanatyam from the shadows of the temples, where the dance was initially performed, into public spaces, where it found a broad, nationwide audience. Similarly, many singing traditions became important and widely known, having previously been hidden within family or princely precincts. The articulations of these traditions in public resulted in a kind of democratisation and standardisation of artistic traditions. Both Bhatkhande and Paluskar, for example, worked to create a national equivalent of a musical universe. One could see similar processes at work in the artistic world of the school. There are some clues in this otherwise innocent recalling: Mr. Amar Nath Sehgal, was an example to follow in Sculpture work. Mawasi Ram taught us the Art of Ceramic Painting under Furnace Conditions. Mr Barthalomeo (sic) and his wife were great to follow in

Modern Art. All this led me get a Lalit Kala Akademi Special Art Prize, though I was a Science student.47 What this Modernite is describing is a matter of serious pedagogic discourse: the place of aesthetics in the processes of learning. VI: ART AND PAINTING The post-Partition artistic landscape of Delhi was shaped in large part by the presence of two almost parallel streams competing and contesting for space—modernist art, which had been the mainstay of the renaissance, and modern Indian artistic sensitivities. In fact, it has been argued quite forcefully by many scholars that modern Indian paintings, particularly those of the Bengal school artists like Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy, had their origins in colonial painting, as practised by Raja Ravi Verma, et al. Modernist sensibilities included a critique of the Bengal school of art, which had found a congenial home on the Modern School campus. The Bengal school had become the mainstay of modern Indian nationalist sensibilities, having found favour with the nationalist intelligentsia and leadership.48 Certain sensibilities and notions in the national movement for freedom returned in the post-Independence nation-making processes. Groups like Shilpi Chakra, which contested what they considered the staidness of the upper classes, while calling for ordinary people to have greater access to the arts, made their presence felt by organising shows and exhibitions in public spaces. In the process they popularised the Dhoomimal Art Gallery and other similar places near Connaught Place. Some of the leading painters in the Shilpi Chakra were Sailoz Mookherjea and the Krishnas, Kanwal and Devyani, who, of course, were the mainstay of the Modern School’s art faculty. Devyani was from Indore which, under the patronage of Yashwant Rao Holkar II, was a hub of modernist experiments in the ‘international style’ in the 1930s. Among many others, Eckart

Muthesius, the German architect, and Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian sculptor, were actively involved in reshaping the aesthetics of Indore.49 The young Devyani, inspired by this ambience, joined Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay. Kanwal Krishna, whom she later married, was from Multan, and had gone to study engineering in Banaras, but soon switched over to the arts, and then went to Calcutta, the capital of the arts at the time, and earned a diploma. Their union, two souls from different parts of the country becoming one, seemed to symbolise the new nation and, inevitably, both found a home as teachers at the Modern School. Kanwal Krishna joined the school in 1952 and became the head of the art department. Devyani followed, first teaching at the junior school before moving on to the senior school, where, with her husband, she created a distinctive art curriculum. Kanwal’s experience of the mountains was an enduring influence on his art.50 The Himalayas, the Tibetan monasteries, and the whole mystical experience combined with the clarity of an intellectual made his paintings something out of the ordinary. The depiction of nature was Kanwal’s most extraordinary gift. His friend and colleague, the critic Richard Bartholomew wrote that Kanwal’s greatest contribution has been his ‘lucid, strongly arranged mountainscapes: experiences of the Himalayas’.51 Both Devyani and Kanwal Krishna showed empathy and love for the Himalayas and, in fact, from 1949 to 1952, they retreated to the mountains. Devyani painted Tibetan masks in this period and delved deep into ritual dance and other aspects of Buddhist art. Their work in the Himalayas blazed with a spiritual fervour, though neither Devyani nor Kanwal were particularly religious. They were just thoroughly engaged with their environment, a quality that informed their work throughout their lives. Devyani went on to become a printmaker, preparing ‘her own plates’. She also ‘worked at the press especially designed by her husband Kanwal Krishna; and when metal surfaces were short she used what was available, even cardboard’.52 Scholars have described such

series of etchings as Bam Bam Bhole and What and Where as ‘rehearsals of pure spirit in its essential form: coming from within’.53 At Modern, the Krishnas’ art room became a ‘quasimystical space’ for many future artists. The school was a veritable art school. It frequently held exhibitions, and students filled the school magazine with their ideas and criticism. Kanwal Krishna wrote a scholarly piece titled ‘Our Art Heritage’ in a 1953 issue of Sandesh.54 Artist Amarnath Sehgal wrote an agenda-setting article for art education in the same issue under the title ‘Our Aim’.55 His notion of ‘education through cooperation’ reflected some of the most advanced thinking on the subject.56 What these pieces, particularly the articles by students, reflected was an atmosphere of thought and practice, the ability to both theorise about art and produce it. The school had become what Foucault would call a discursive universe. The teachers believed that ‘to express themselves the children must see new forms, and harmonious and true works of arts’.57 To facilitate this, a showcase was ‘put up in a prominent corner where objects of Indian art are displayed and changed after every fortnight’.58 One Modernite from the 1950s has credited his brilliant performance in the arts as the reason for him being selected as prefect of Ashoka House (one of eight houses in the school).59 Another prefect of the same house in 1961 later became one of India’s leading artists. It is no wonder that this rich atmosphere inculcated the spirit of art in students. A number of students from Modern went on to occupy significant positions in the world of art. Modern’s early influences on their artistic sensibilities are often visible in their work. The early paintings of Nilima Sheikh (née Dhanda)—whose aunt, Sita Sen, was the wife of one of the moving spirits of the school, Dr S.K. Sen—often evoke the harmony of the world in which children lived in those early days of the republic. The Dhanda children studied in the school and ‘slim built’ Nilima ‘was doing quite well in

swimming and learning dance quite well’.60 Of course, once Nilima Dhanda went to Baroda and became Nilima Sheikh, one of the leading artists of the time, her schooldays were often given short shrift by journalists and critics. But there is little doubt that Modern’s holistic education, the early training in a variety of disciplines, in keeping one’s mind open to ideas from any source, played its part in her evolution. And that’s keeping aside the quality of art teaching and thinking that students such as Nilima were exposed to at Modern, thanks to the presence of faculty like Kanwal and Devyani Krishna.61 In recent years, when Nilima Sheikh addressed the angst and tragedy of Partition in the postGujarat riots context in her work, one couldn’t help but wonder whether she was revisiting her schooldays, during which she was shielded by the secure and secular environs of both school and family. Secularism, which Nilima Sheikh and her Modern School generation helped define in their artwork, was still going strong with students in the 1980s, one of whom was Saba Hasan. Nilima’s contemporary Amba Sanyal, daughter of B.C. Sanyal, the famed artist and doyen of the Lahore School, expressed her angst about urban transformations and the changing city in the school magazine.62 She later became an important costume designer. Again, it’s hard not to see the moulding hand of the Modern School—visible in the school’s unabashed devotion to theatre, dance, music, art and culture—in this career choice. VII: THEATRE When the Modern School was founded and began establishing itself in the 1930s and 1940s, Delhi was a theatre backwater.63 It is only in the 1950s that places like the Regal Theatre and the New Delhi Town Hall (where the New Delhi Municipal Corporation headquarters are today) became available for audiences in the city to watch Indian theatre, classical music and dance performances. ‘When we came to Delhi in the early 1940s,’

reminisced D.N. Chaudhuri (son of Nirad C. Chaudhuri), ‘the city did not have any exhibition hall or auditorium worthy of the capital city. The usual venue for exhibitions was either the New Delhi Town Hall or, after 1946, the abandoned wartime church on Parliament Street, which was later taken over by All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society.’64 For quite a while in this barren milieu, the Modern School was an oasis where teachers and students put on regular performances, including several plays, skits and dance dramas, the new rage. The theatre scene began to change in the 1950s, with the capital city attracting artists of widely varying stripes, including actors and playwrights. Sheila Bhatia had moved to the Indian capital from Lahore and founded the Delhi Art Theatre. She popularised, if not originated, Punjabi opera. Her plays Heer Ranjha, Ghalib Kaun Tha and Dard Ayega Dabe Paon were instant hits. The Indian People’s Theatre Association brought a number of plays to Delhi, Habib Tanwir moved to the city, and the Bharatiya Natya Sangh promoted theatre in Shankar Market. In the early 1960s, when Ebrahim Alkazi moved to New Delhi from Mumbai, it was clear that the city had arrived as the centre of serious theatre. Alkazi’s 1964 production of Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug at Feroz Shah Kotla broke new ground. Jawaharlal Nehru came for the premiere, as did the who’s who of the capital. This experimental phase from the 1940s to the 1970s fit right in with the Modern School ethos, and unsurprisingly, the school became the epicentre of the new theatre. This was for two reasons: first, there were teachers and leaders at the school who embraced experimentation; second, sufficient leisure time was given to teachers and students to follow vocations, to be creative, to rehearse. Alongside the developments in theatre at the school, there was much innovation and excitement around dance dramas and music, giving the theatre community at Modern the confidence to take risks with their productions. The House Day and Founder’s Day at Modern were great events, providing students with an occasion to wow the assembled alumni,

distinguished guests, teachers and fellow students with their performances. It was a period of immense ferment. The ‘Nayi Kahani’ movement, intrinsic to which were the stories and plays of founder Mohan Rakesh, brought a completely new sensibility to the production of art. Plays based on history and mythology now gave way to contemporary examinations of the state of the soul, to existential questions about who one was and where one was going. Modern School students were avid for the new, fed by a faculty attuned to developments. The change from an age defined by, say, Jaishankar Prasad, who was known for his historical dramas, to the age of Mohan Rakesh has been explained lucidly by literary historian Vasudha Dalmia: Major transformation consisted in the radical shift away from the depiction of idealised character and reality, which in their idealisation were to be sources of both aesthetic pleasure and social transformation, the position Prasad had upheld so fiercely in the last years of his writing career. The emphasis in the following decades was increasingly on the evolution of the rounded personality and individuation of character, and the sharp conflict that this individuation engendered.65 Most plays prepared by students at the high-school and even junior-school levels were now informed by the new tastes and changes that were exciting theatre-goers in Delhi. Delightful plays were staged by the students with finesse. Poetasters of Isphahan, Rehearsal, The Girl Who Hated Milk and many more such plays helped the very young children create their own world of fun and fiction. In the 1950s, when the idea of children’s theatre came, Modern School not only hosted a Mr Koller, apparently a great propagator of this genre, but also conducted a seminar in 1954 on children’s theatre, which he attended. The seminar was attended by ‘almost all the theatre minded personalities of the capital’.66

Geoffrey Kendal’s troupe also came to Modern at this point and staged their legendary Macbeth in front of the students and teachers.67 The regular preparation and staging of plays, both at the junior and the senior school, were not solely a training for the students in various arts. These activities also helped train some students in the very niche area of reporting them, a skill that needed keen and observing eyes. For instance, a young reporter, Ketaki Sen, wrote about the play Do Andhe, which Pratap House staged in 1956: … the title part of which were played by Kameshwar Nath and Hena. The play was about an old blind couple who decide they want to be cured by the faqir only to find each other extremely hideous. They quarrel, call each other names and finally become blind again for speaking badly to each other … The play was of a fairly good standard, acting of some was quite good. The most upsetting (for Mr Ved Vyas) and unfortunate thing was the falling of the tree put up as a peepal tree for the play, for it was very noticeable.68 This tradition of student reportage on most cultural programmes in the school gave the country many future writers and thinkers on art and artists. Reporting, for example, on a play named Aurangazeb ki Akhri Raat (Aurangzeb’s Last Night), staged on Lajpat Rai House Day in 1961, the reporter, Anwar Abbas, could see ‘Vinita’s Anglo-Indian accent as the only flaw’ in the play which he thought she made up for by her polished skit The Queen’s Laugh, enacted with Deepak Diesh.69 (Maybe he was pulling her leg, who knows. But the fact that he wrote it down as a factual observation speaks volumes about the training in reportage.) The student production of Aurangazeb ki Akhri Raat, scripted by Ved Vyas, was overall wonderfully received and is remembered even today. Coverage of school productions in the

school magazine were extensive and must have, in some measure, contributed to cultural reporting in the city’s mainstream press. Apart from the regular performances at Modern, the alumni association, too, began to produce plays, and the coming of the auditorium in neighbouring Sapru House in 1955 was a boon. By the 1960s, Modern had become a very dynamic, creative space, with theatre an essential part of its cultural life. Many of the students from this time went on to become theatre personalities in the city for years to come, including, among many others, Vinod Nagpal, Sohaila Kapur, Pradeep Kuckreja, Arun Kuckreja and Feisal Alkazi. The centenary of Tagore’s birth in 1961 was a critical year for the artistic horizon of the school. Modern staged Muktadhara, a cautionary tale about the dangers of a narrow nationalism and perhaps Tagore’s finest play. It was directed by Shanti Dev Ghosh, with an orchestral score by Moni De. Narendra Sharma produced a brilliant dance drama, a genre invented by Tagore. Aside from the celebration of Tagore, arguably the school’s patron saint, the school’s two art teachers Kanwal and Devyani Krishna were the subjects of a beautiful presentation by the Lalit Kala Akademi.70 The junior school in that year also became physically separate from the senior school, and a new curriculum was designed for the younger children that maintained the emphasis on culture that had become the hallmark of a Modern School education. Notions of creating a distinct ‘Indian’ education, a project that had been attempted since the middle of the nineteenth century, were embedded in the Indian renaissance. There was intense debate over the content, aims and nature of such an education. Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas on education should be seen in this context. He envisaged an Upanishadic turn, which focused on bringing the site and contents of education close to its natural ‘aranya’ habitat. According to Tagore, secluded, natural surrounds were an ideal location in which to contemplate human behaviour,

including the impulse to create. His idea was that art should be taught, practised and contemplated as naturally as possible. The Indian intelligentsia of the time, including many individuals in government and politics, also reflected on the idea of the modern Indian. On examining their ideas, some common points begin to emerge: First, nearly all agreed on the value, even necessity, of modern Indians working with their hands. They agreed that a colonial education had distanced people from their selves and their bodies and that an Indian education should reemphasise the mind-body connection. Second, they felt that the independent Indian needed a thorough consciousness of their own past. Indians needed to give more credence to their own histories and cultural commitments than the belittling efforts colonial rule had allowed for. They agreed that history had to be read against the grain. It is at this time that some of the finest works of Indian history began to be published, placing Indian historians at the top of the professional league.71 The next generation of historians took this legacy to newer heights of sophistication and argumentation, resulting in independent-minded studies that provided a critical and balanced historical foundation to a self-respecting citizenry.72 Third, a more acute aesthetic self-reflection of the traditions and lifeways of different sections of people was required to raise the level of those who were denied association with many of the spaces and sites of the cultural life of the community, including temples and festivals. The upliftment of the Indian—and, indeed, the human—was to be an aesthetic act and not just a political mission. It is this overall consciousness of the arts that intellectuals agreed on that was also at the core of the Modern School philosophy. The rise of the school coincided with the growing recognition of the value of art in public life. There was considerable tumult among artists as they grappled with how art could and should reflect society. While there has been some

consideration of the role a number of institutions played in these changes, it is instructive that the Modern School has escaped the notice of even the most acute eyes. This may be because by the time such assessments began to take shape, there were very distinct and discrete intellectual spectrums, and Modern School resisted easy categorisation. Also, there is a tendency to avoid talking of children in newly independent India when considering the state of the arts in 1948. Though the early makers of the aesthetic and educational vision of the republic were clear on the impact of art on children and vice versa, contemporary society has somehow undervalued it. The erudite and refined education minister Abul Kalam Azad emphasised precisely this point in his address inaugurating the Lalit Kala Akademi on 5 April 1954. In fact, he was perceptive enough to link this to the larger and deeper needs of our education. ‘It is today realised,’ he said, ‘that no education can be completed which does not pay proper attention to the development and refinement of the emotions.’73 This, he thought, could be best done through ‘the provision of facilities for training the sensibilities by the practice of one of the fine arts’.74 If one were to place children at the centre of the evolution of an aesthetic world, one would recognise the Modern School’s relevance: studying the institution could provide key insights into many of the future developments related to the place of aesthetics in the world of citizenship. One of the primary tasks of the new republic was to prepare the ‘citizen’. Nation-making was to go hand in hand with culturemaking. Aside from new sensibilities and new values, cultural practices also had to reconcile with the recovery of many old texts and artistic practices—such as in theatre, music and dance—with which there could now be a fresh relationship. Training in the classical arts was seen as a sine qua non for citizenship, but such training was taut with tension. While in performing arts like music and dance there was a major effort to return to tradition— particularly with music, where institutions like the Sangeet Natak

Akademi and SPIC MACAY sought to revive lost glories—in painting, there was a concerted drive towards the new and the radical. Any diversions down historical paths were treated with derision, visible, for instance, in the distaste many now felt for the Bengal school of art. The Modern School was one of the sites in which these ideas were thrashed out, and debates over liberation and constriction ensued. By letting student speech go unabated, by letting staff and students experiment and explore, the Modern School set an enviable example for what an Indian education could come to represent.

CHAPTER SIX JUNIORS FIND A NEW ABODE HUMAYUN ROAD, 1961–2020

A visit to the junior school on a December morning was reinvigorating. While going through the nursery wing with its extremely energetic principal, Manju Rajput, I saw the children in the art room deeply engrossed in their work. Their young teacher, Suchismita, was equally involved. She had studied at Utkal University, Odisha and had come to Delhi to make a career as an artist. Modern initially appointed her on a contract basis, and after two years, she was made one of the regular staff. Her excitement at being able to both make her own work and transmit her enthusiasm for art to children was reminiscent of an earlier era, when the school appointed such working artists as the Ukil brothers, Aman Nath Sehgal, and Bishamber Khanna. As if to bolster my sense of déjà vu, I was introduced to Saloni, who teaches art in the primary section. She is a creative artist of high calibre and has worked professionally on the sets of several major movies before deciding to devote the rest of her career to teaching art. Both art teachers had all the facilities they could wish for. Their rooms were spotless, spacious and revealing of how seriously the teachers, the students and the school take art. The concentration with which the kindergarten children were either trying to make something with the clay given to them or trying to follow the movements of their dance teacher was a sight that would have pleased those who had founded the tradition of arts in the school way back in the 1920s and 1930s. The freedom

the children had to work either with their teachers and classmates or by themselves has always been a Modern School characteristic. Of course, this description could apply to any playschool today that has the necessary resources. What is different, though, is the history of these practices and how these values are connected to the ethos of the school and its founding philosophy; these are not borrowed values or external to the spirit of the school. In fact, this spirit was to exhibit itself while the principal and I were taking a stroll. A little girl who came up to greet the principal betrayed no hesitation, diffidence or even slight apprehension. There is a theory that suggests that this natural camaraderie is a product of privilege, a reflection of the symmetry of social class between teachers and children.1 But at Modern, I observed a friendly atmosphere even when there were asymmetries. In recent times, children from economically weaker sections have been admitted to the school in increasing numbers, and though I was only there a relatively short while, I could not discern discord or disharmony between students. Everyone seemed to be exhibiting the freshness and openness which one has read are recognisable traits of Modern School pupils. It is in these happy environs that I watched the teaching of both arts and music, saw that there was a seamless fusion of one into the other, and observed how the atmosphere itself denied any pedagogic separation between the arts and the art of teaching. This joy in both the teaching and the doing was a salutary reminder of Raghubir Singh’s thoughts on education and its curricular manifestation.2 I: LOOKING FOR THE SOURCES OF UNHAPPINESS In almost all writings where people have reminisced about their childhood, they have narrated how they were happiest when not in school.3 Beginning with Philippe Ariès’s monumental work Centuries of Childhood, scholars have convincingly shown that the abstract idea of childhood has a concrete historical reality and

foundation.4 We now know that the ideas and ways that children obtain historical consciousness are subject to our historical contexts. Thus, the medieval German ideas of childhood or those of early childhood in ancient Kannada country were the products of their concrete historical settings. It is while deciphering these histories that we understand the specific nuances of the ways societies have treated their children at various phases. The colonial period in India provides one such historical phase. In post-Independence India, it is the increasingly serious thinking about children that has enabled them and their concerns to come out in the open and in public discourse. One specific point about the Indian story of childhood is that children were made miserable in their schools during the last two centuries.5 Whether this was the case earlier too, we do not know for sure—as schooling was neither for the masses nor geared to any profession. But the early modern stories of schooling, which subsequently became the benchmark for ideas of early-childhood schooling, were stories of the child being led by the stern and strict central figure of the headmaster. Discipline, quite often very violently established, was the prevailing modern idea of schooling. The colonial phase added one more alien and cruel twist for children in the colonies: they had to negotiate their schooling in a language that they did not speak at home and was not spoken in their wider society and which they were barely able to articulate. This alienation also produced a repressive ambience in the institution of the school, which acquired a specific form in these times. There was also discouragement of other kinds of schooling that did not follow the official route: education in these did not result in any salary or recognition. The disappearance of the whole indigenous system of maqtabs, tols, madrasas and pathshalas was quite costly in this sense.6 This also meant an entire new regime of teaching practices, which, as scholars have pointed out, was authoritarian. The ideal of a disciplinarian master was now established. Happiness at school was a foreign concept.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, when Victorian moral codes came to be imposed on children in the colonies, their ideas of the future and of family and neighbours were distinctly coloured by the teaching, stories and schools that were now available to them. Thus, apart from being imparted only to a minuscule few, schooling in colonial India was hampered by many other infirmities in the system. It was in response to this harsh, punitive model that alternative schooling and teaching techniques began to be proposed, a means of sparing children the misery of a certain kind of education. Tagore and Gandhi, among many others doing serious thinking about the nature of schools, were acutely conscious of the punitive colonial model and proposed alternatives. Apart from imported ideas like the kindergarten and Montessori systems, Indian children needed an education that accounted for their history and their cultural contexts. It was Tagore who, going beyond this colonial and indigenous debate, for the first time tried to connect our ideas of childhood to ideas of education, and argued that a happy childhood is also a state where true knowledge originates.7 He started his experiment in schooling in 1901, when he set up the Patha Bhavan in Santiniketan to achieve what he brilliantly described as ‘education for fullness’.8 Schooling, as he articulated, was a space both for experience as well as experiment, both in consonance with nature and the child’s ability to feel and enjoy nature.9 A school needed to be a space for reflection for children, and this became a leitmotif of alternative thinking on schooling. No doubt inspired by Tagore, the Modern School’s Kamala Bose also emphasised closeness to nature as essential to any restructured education.10 She urged: The study of those dead records we call books, unless accompanied by a simultaneous study of nature around us fails to sharpen the faculties of the mind. It leads to a tendency to cram, to mine for information, to compensate for a limited frame of experience. The

growing self-consciousness of the child finds scope for development in a little world of its own. Nature supplements the education of the child with many valuable lessons which cannot be provided by any human agency, and which bring real joy to the youthful heart.11 The idea of children finding happiness in school in nature appealed to Raghubir Singh. He wanted school to be, as Tagore believed, a place for reflection in nature, a time to experiment with thoughts and ideas. II: KINDERGARTEN AND MONTESSORI: THE NEW HORIZON The education of children in Europe and North America was revolutionised between 1840, when Friedrich Fröbel coined the word ‘kindergarten’ in Germany, and 1907, when Maria Montessori opened the first Casa dei Bambini in Rome, by their respective approaches. Fröbel founded his school, which he later called a kindergarten, in Bad Blankenburg in 1837 for children between three and six years of age. He designed blocks and shapes, called ‘Fröbel’s gifts’, for the children to play with, and ‘heavily encouraged learning through self-directed play, games, songs, dancing and gardening’.12 The intent was to usher the child out from the interior depths of family into larger society through close interactions with teachers in a process he called ‘spielpflege’ or play-care.13 He derived his insights, as academic Ann Taylor Allen has elaborately mapped, from his study of the work of philosophers Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, both of whom argued for a regeneration of German national life.14 Pestalozzi wanted mothers to help create a new German public culture. As for Fichte, he wanted children to learn the art of citizenship, for which, he said, they needed to be moved away from the privacy of their families and brought into the public

sphere. Fröbel conceived kindergarten as an institution that would synthesise these approaches by stressing both the public virtues of citizenship and the private virtues expressed through maternal nurture.15 At the end of the nineteenth century, Henriette Schrader-Breymann, Fröbel’s student, established the PestalozziFröbel-Haus.16 The Modern School invited the Fröbel Institute to send teachers to Delhi from the start, and there was a constant stream of visiting teachers till around 1940, when the war made it difficult for them to come to India, which, as a colony of Britain, would have had to officially treat them as enemy aliens. The Fröbel kindergarten’s basic pedagogic method was to awaken ‘children’s innate awareness of divine truth’ by exposing them to toys that symbolically represented the relationship of the individual to the whole and of diversity to harmony. The toys, or ‘gifts’, as they were called, included a ball, representing ‘undivided unity’, and a set of blocks, ‘demonstrating the relationship of parts to the whole’.17 Songs and games prescribed for the kindergarten stressed both individual self-expression and cooperation with others. A new disciplinary regime was instituted which was not coercive, aiming instead to cultivate the child’s nature. This was in keeping with a pedagogy that eschewed the prevalent paternalistic reflexes of social authority in favour of the nurturing ‘qualities of the mother’ visible in the private domain of home.18 As historian Ana Miller has noted, Fröbel thought that kindergarten teachers ought to be women, and ‘called upon women to transcend their private domestic roles and to apply their maternal qualities (which he considered peculiar to women’s “nature”) in the public context of an institution’.19 Fröbel’s kindergartens were banned by the illiberal and repressive Prussian state in 1851, but by then, there was a receptive audience for the schools in Europe and the United States. By 1870, Fröbel schools were strongly supported in the US by the wealthy and philanthropic Peabody family of Boston. The schools also had the support of leading intellectuals such as John Dewey, who saw in this kind of education the resolution to a

growing and, at the time perhaps, predominantly American problem: the question of how to assimilate large groups of disparate immigrant children. This assimilative and integrative function is suggested to have been intrinsic to the Americanisation of the kindergarten system. In this sense Fröbel’s model could be seen to be the first progressive educational principle in urban America, in that it enjoined schools to educate children in cooperative living. 20 Though Fröbel’s kindergartens were steeped in German Protestant values, their pedagogic techniques, or rather their American version, swept through the US in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Cities and states across America made Fröbel’s methods mandatory. San Francisco took this action in 1878, Cincinnati in 1879, Chicago in 1880, Philadelphia in 1881, and Boston in 1883, and by 1914, most major cities had public kindergarten systems. Born in Italy in 1870, just around the time that Fröbel’s kindergartens were becoming a global rage, Maria Montessori sparked the next pedagogical revolution. Her eponymous method, like Fröbel’s, liberated children from the patriarchal and autocratic, from those who thought of childhood as merely the beginning of adulthood, a transitory phase to be grown out of as quickly as possible. Maria Montessori was among the first female medical graduates and physicians in Italy, and worked extensively with children suffering from mental and cognitive disabilities. She was thirty-six when she opened her first Casa dei Bambini (Children’s House) school in Rome’s working-class San Lorenzo district, putting into practice her pedagogical theories about children learning best when they were treated as autonomous individuals and encouraged to seize their independence.21 The Montessori method provided a ‘prepared environment’ with child-sized furniture, where educational material was made easily accessible to children. They were shown how to use the materials and then left to experiment and play.22 Children were taught to read and write using similarly tactile methods—‘by

touching letters and literally putting them into words and sentences’—and given ‘the opportunity to categorise things by their size, shape, smell, taste and colour’.23 The Montessori method gave the child the freedom to ‘find out things for oneself’, under the guidance of someone who was not a conventional teacher. What Maria Montessori emphasised to teachers being trained in her method was that ‘children are as different from adults as caterpillars are from butterflies. One does not expect a caterpillar to fly, that is not its work. Caterpillars eat; so likewise, children learn in order to prepare themselves to become adults.’24 III: ANCHORING A METHOD OF CHILDREN’S EDUCATION Raghubir Singh kept himself abreast of current happenings in the education of children. He had read up on Maria Montessori, who was in vogue in India. Like many progressive Indians, he, too, avidly followed developments in Ireland at this moment, and found her methods were also the subject of keen scrutiny among Irish teachers, who debated whether such teaching techniques could be applied to strict Catholic schools. While he was an enthusiast of the kindergarten system, as demonstrated by his respect for teachers from the Fröbel Institute, Raghubir also took to the Montessori system as a test case. He brought both these progressive pedagogical philosophies to Modern, hoping to counter the damage being done by colonial schools.25 He added to this mix the ideas of Tagore. Raghubir had long admired the Patha Bhavan, and was in complete sympathy with Tagore’s world view. Proximity to nature in the Tagorean sense, he believed, would complement the functional Montessori and kindergarten models. Raghubir Singh was also influenced by his Jain religious training, which subtly underpinned his core principles of education. Four of the qualities that he wanted to inculcate in Modern pupils—truthfulness, unselfishness, frankness, and selfcontrol—were directly taken from the Tattvartha Sutra’s ten

virtues. Raghubir Singh’s conviction that children learn from each other was not as commonsensical then as it appears now. It was an idea that emerged out of a deep-rooted living philosophy within Jain dharma and its ethics of ‘Parasparopagraho Jīvānām’ (the function of the soul is to help other souls). He also took inspiration from his family’s location in the heart of Old Delhi, the postMughal capital city of the Mughals. A capital city again under British rule, Delhi must have given him a sense of confidence and openness which other cities in India did not inspire. His close aides, friends and advisors were all top British officials and Indians that were closely connected to official circles. So there was neither a sense of diffidence in his approach nor the sense of non-cooperation that would become the overarching nationalist credo. Instead, he wanted to build a new institution that would challenge colonial education by matching its standards through indigenous excellence and themes. It is this spirit that inspired the Modern School motto: Nayamatma Balahinena Labhya, knowledge of self can be acquired only by those who have the desire and strength to acquire it. And it was happiness, Raghubir Singh believed, that was key to generating that strength and confidence in children. Raghubir Singh’s views were not unique, but he had a distinctive clarity about how to execute his vision. This was manifest in the curriculum he drew up with Kamala Bose. She, too, was well versed with the pedagogical experiments in Europe, apart from being familiar with the Indian hinterland, and was able to articulate a view that synthesised the two. Her heart lay in the extension of education to all Indians, in making learning free and universal. Together, they adapted European methods to the Indian context, attempting to modernise education in India while recognising the value of Indian knowledge and ideas that had been neglected or ignored by colonial schools. Modern’s devotion to the new was not faddish, it stemmed from a profound commitment to self-actualisation. It was important to Raghubir that children be free of the shackles of family, that they be able to counter certain negative influences that he felt

Indian families exerted on children, impeding their growth. He wanted the new methods of education to influence how families looked at their children, to help families see their role as aiding the development of a confident, independent and happy child. He felt Indian families did not value these qualities enough. He wanted to modernise the family structures of the communities with which he was familiar. While he was concerned about the manner in which colonial education denied the colonial subject his own persona, he was similarly concerned about the ways in which the family and its rootedness in space and tradition throttled childhood and impeded its fuller development. His solution was day boarding, which he considered foundational to his idea of Modern, and it stemmed from the idea that the students should spend as much time at the school, including meals, as possible. By trying to take children out of the precincts of the family for a longer duration, he was opening a new window onto the world for them and challenging their ideas of both school and family. This was tricky, as the effect of modernity in the West was to separate the individual from the family. Over there, the emergence of the individual came at the cost of the family’s hold on the child. While Raghubir Singh would have had some idea of this radical impact on traditional family structure and even partly welcomed it, he did not overly consider the full impact of modernity on family life in India, because the might of Gandhi and the entire freedom movement had already created an alternative vision of family— that of the nation as family. For Raghubir, school ought to be a place where children could have the space and confidence to break free of the often restrictive binds of family and family values. He noted in his diary that he found rigid family hierarchies could make children timid, parochial and unscientific, the exact opposite of his ideal person: unafraid, open to new experiences and rational. The school, he argued, should enable children to learn from each other, develop their own thought processes and values and retrieve a childhood that would otherwise be lost.26 It is this

world view that made early-childhood and primary schooling vital to the edifice of Modern—its very foundation. Even in his twenties, Raghubir Singh had understood that the prevailing methods of educating children were akin to being shouted strict orders at in a foreign language. There were plenty of Indian alternatives to this harsh model. A reflective child was an ideal for which there were models available in the ancient, canonical texts—for instance, the examples set by Nachiketa and Aruni in the Upanishads. Tagore’s idea of schooling came closest to creating an Upanishadic ideal, connecting nature and reflection to childhood happiness. Gandhi’s vision of childhood was inflected by his ideas about ‘bread labour’, influenced by the likes of Tolstoy and John Ruskin. Here, the happiness of the human depends on his labour, his capacity to earn his daily bread by working with his hands. Children, too, Gandhi posited, could find dignity through labour with their hands. This was in keeping with his critique of machine civilisation and of schooling as a means to turn the child into a slavish adherent to the rules of the machine. Instead, education, both Gandhi and Tagore argued, though in widely different ways, should be a path towards dignity and selffulfilment. Both men offered the most pertinent, pervasive and fundamental alternatives to the kind of thinking prevalent in colonial schools and the education they provided,27 and these alternatives were reflected in the ideals the Modern School adopted. A naturalised version of Montessori and kindergarten methods aside, a key element of Modern’s progressive earlylearning syllabus was to introduce pupils to musical instruments and the arts. It was Raghubir Singh who personally invited artists of the highest calibre to the school, providing them the necessary space and liberty. He made student performances the heart of house functions, which went a long way towards establishing the cultural norms of the school. By applying these varied and profoundly cosmopolitan precepts to the Modern School, Raghubir Singh’s methods became essential to understanding how humanistic, progressive

education evolved in post-Independence India. Starting a coeducational institution itself was a sign of progressive thinking. There was intense debate in India through the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth century about the nature of girls’ education. There were diverse opinions within communities and castes, but more often than not, they converged around the idea that even though girls needed to be educated, it was only to complement the needs of their husbands and families. Education was merely a means to an end—the goal of becoming a good mother and housewife, one who kept her home in perfect order and was a pillar of support for her husband. Leading educationists like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan—despite his work to reform Muslim education and bring it up to date with modern requirements—often had little to say on the education of girls, though the likes of Nazir Ahmad Dehlvi and Karamat Ali of Delhi College fame had in fact endorsed girls’ education. Among Hindus, there was intense opposition to girls’ education from the diverse communities that dominated Delhi society, including the Banias, Jains and Kayasthas. The opening of a girls’ school by Christian missionaries further aggravated the tension. Gradually, the desire to send girls to school increased, but the idea that Christian missionaries would have a negative religious influence stopped non-Christians from sending their daughters to Christian schools. It was the pressure of these competing and conflicting demands that persuaded educationists and philanthropists to establish schools for girls in Delhi. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Arya Samaj had established a number of schools and programmes for girls, including the first higher education institution for girls in Jalandhar, the Kanya Mahavidyalaya. Responding to this activity, various Sanatan Dharma Sabhas also began to want to set up their own institutions. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the communities that dominated Old Delhi began to throw their resources into supporting the education of girls. The schools of Christian missionaries were becoming popular with families committed to their daughters’ education regardless of community

or religion. Eventually, in 1924, Indraprastha College gained the status of the first women’s college in Delhi. By the 1920s, therefore, it was largely accepted that both boys and girls should be educated, with schools established for both sexes. But coeducational schooling, if it existed at all, was an oddity. The Modern School was a product of these fevered debates about the location of women in Indian society. In Delhi, girls were still being sent to the Kanya Pathshalas or to the Convent of Jesus and Mary, the conventional choices for households that wanted to educate their daughters. When Modern was founded, Raghubir Singh personally made efforts to try to enrol girls in his new school.28 With the idea of co-education unpopular among the city’s still conservative communities, few Old Delhi families came forward to sign their daughters up to Raghubir Singh’s experimental school, and as a consequence, until Independence, there were hardly any girls who were students at Modern. IV: THE BEGINNINGS OF THE EXPERIMENT While considering Modern School’s impact on education at that time, bear in mind that both Montessori and kindergarten were still relatively new ideas, in Europe just as much as in India. So were ideas of home schooling and Gandhi’s principle of ‘basic education’, for instance. Raghubir Singh’s developing philosophies were practical in nature, and he cut through much of the jargon and shibboleths of the 1920s. His notion, for example, of school as an aid to remove children from the cloistered orbit of their families was a response to observed social reality, rather than just theory. Of course, family continued to play a critical role in a child’s education, but Raghubir Singh sought to mitigate its most pernicious influences, including the perpetuation of inequality in education.29 Space, both literal and metaphorical, was crucial to Raghubir Singh, as a means to combat the parochial narrowness of the family unit. Though Modern School may have been located in the centre of the city, Raghubir Singh

was preoccupied with the quality of space available to students, to the value of space for a child’s well-being. As the school’s orbit widened beyond the group of likeminded, prosperous parents who played a significant role in the life of the new city, it became a secular alternative to religiouslyfocused schools, including the evangelical missionary schools. It was at the nursery and primary level that the philosophy of Raghubir Singh and Kamala Bose would bear fruit. The school spent considerable time, energy and money in finding good teachers from England and Germany to come to India and work at Modern. The primary school, particularly, benefited from this influx of foreign teachers and the resulting diversity. The teachers’ average residencies were somewhere between one to three years. Some, though, returned to their respective countries in just a few months, and others appeared to think of it as an opportunity to get paid to visit India. In one infamous example, a teacher arrived from England, her passage fully paid, quit teaching almost immediately and demanded that her fare back also be paid by the school. While the trustees were generally generous, they were stern when they believed they were being exploited or taken for granted. A teacher from England, Miss Scott, was appointed in 1921 to organise and conduct kindergarten classes. Soon after, Raghubir Singh got in touch with the Fröbel Institute and invited its newly minted teachers to come to Delhi. Pioneering teachers from the institute included Miss Baden Haussen, who came in 1931, Maria Strecke, who came for three years in 1933, Miss Aldwinkle and, later, Miss Hedwig Lude, who taught at the school until 1940. Miriam Young of the Baptist Mission, Palwal, and Miss Padwick were two of the other foreign teachers at the school until the Second World War broke out. After the war, the influx of teachers from Europe slowed to a trickle, with few leaving their continent to seek employment or adventure. Lady Joginder Singh was the first local Montessori-trained teacher at the school. In the post-Independence era, the school was lucky to have an ideal mix of trained and dedicated teachers, including some excellent

Anglo-Indian teachers who committed their life to the school. In terms of the techniques which were practised, Montessori held sway: in part because German-trained kindergarten teachers were not available in the way Montessori-trained teachers were, especially once Indian teachers began to go to England to become qualified Montessori teachers.30 At the time, home schooling, which in recent years has become a topic of considerable discussion, was not uncommon among Indian families with resources. Raghubir Singh was preparing to do just this with his three children when the foundation of the school was laid. Now he entrusted his children, Virendra, Pratap and Rita, to the teachers at Modern. Both Tagore and Gandhi, who so deeply influenced Raghubir Singh, had, without hesitation, used their own children to test out their ideas about education. A peculiar phenomenon among the middle class was to castigate Gandhi for enlisting his children as participants in his experiment. Surely, though, the test of a leader is not to do to the children of others what you would be unwilling to do to your own children. It was, for instance, Tagore’s thoughts on development in agriculture that persuaded him to send his son Rathindranath to the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, at the time the most innovative, progressive agriculture school in the US. V: SETTING OUT A PEDAGOGICAL COURSE The establishment of Modern provided Raghubir Singh with a live laboratory in which to study the effects of his educational philosophy. Even from the distance of a hundred years, his thoughts seem contemporary, intent on producing a version of the Renaissance man—a well-rounded, empathetic individual who would transcend the social pettiness of caste and community and rely on science and reason to analyse and solve problems—in his students. Raghubir Singh wanted a Modern School education to nudge students towards observing the world around them and

towards being drawn to asking scientific questions. In a detailed syllabus published in 1947, written jointly by Raghubir Singh and Kamala Bose, one finds evidence of the goals they had been working towards for the twenty-seven years since the school’s founding. The syllabus was an admixture of the nationalist urges that had propelled Raghubir Singh to found the school as a counter to colonial education and the desire for a school where the ideas of Tagore and Gandhi could be discussed alongside the latest scientific advances in the West. There was a productive tension between Raghubir Singh’s recognition of the value of an early science education and his equally strong desire to yoke a modern education to the country’s cultural core. The school was founded at a time when there was an ongoing and bitter struggle between historians of a colonial hue and their critics. Raghubir Singh, a Delhi resident all his life, was acutely sensitive to narrative and the historian’s perspective, so he was eager for Modern students to develop an empathetic understanding of history, to interrogate texts and bring to their inquiries as many perspectives as possible. Observation and empirical evidence were paramount at Modern, but the emphasis on culture showed students that modern science was not the only way to approach questions and seek answers. Finally, what seemed to be original to Modern School was a nationalism almost wholly inspired by Tagore, who gave the school both its prayer and the contents of its early textbooks. Bengali was part of the curriculum largely so that students could read Tagore in his language. Raghubir Singh’s version of a modern India required students to know three languages: Bengali, Urdu and English. Initial issues of the school magazine Sandesh included articles by Bengali and Urdu teachers. In one of the issues of Adarsh, Kamala Nag, for example wrote a beautiful article in Bengali on the origins and evolution of dance in India.31 The presence of Kamala Bose must have contributed in part to Bengali’s place on the curriculum, as would have an atmosphere in which many of the participants of the intellectual life in Delhi—

the writers, poets, artists, teachers at colleges and clerical staff in the new capital of British India—were transplants from Calcutta. Delhi’s older literati were wedded to Persian literary culture, so Urdu’s position on the curriculum reflected Raghubir Singh’s own literary and intellectual lineage and that of the city. Indeed, Modern played host for some considerable time to the celebrated mushairas of Shankar Lal, the younger brother of Lala Shri Ram. By the time of Independence, the school was on its way to becoming what Raghubir Singh had wanted it to become: a site where the processes of cultural and literary synthesis were being naturalised. VI: SHIFTING TO THE NEW ABODE After the Second World War, the world changed shape radically and rapidly. Indian independence, long in the offing, was suddenly thrust upon a country severed crudely in two. Modern School had to negotiate this reality without the steady influence of its longtime principal Kamala Bose. Knowing that she wanted to retire to Calcutta, Raghubir Singh, as we read earlier, had met with John Sargent to discuss any suggestions he might have for the future of the school. Sargent had recommended that the nursery school be separated from the main school and that the trustees work on broadening access to the school.32 Separating the students into two schools had financial and administrative implications. Despite its vast new premises, Modern was not yet a financially independent organisation, and Raghubir Singh was regularly dipping into his own pocket to finance it. His son, Brigadier Virendra Singh, had in the meantime got involved with the school’s affairs. In 1958, he took premature retirement from the army, as Raghubir Singh’s health declined. Virendra Singh’s retirement conversely meant he was busier by the day, as the school still needed hand-holding and family matters also vied for his attention. It was in this context that the school grappled with the prospect of relocating the primary

section. Also on Virendra Singh’s plate was a personal request from Prime Minister Nehru to set up the NCC. By 1963, the NCC had become compulsory throughout the country, and though this rule only lasted for five years, the NCC continued as an aspirational goal for many students. In favour with the authorities, Virendra Singh finalised a deal with the Delhi government for a new space near Humayun Road to construct a nursery school. In 1961, the Kotharis won the contract to design the new building. This would be the first school building in the city with no British involvement, and was a marker for post-Independence schooling. The Kotharis had themselves studied at Modern, and so had a sentimental attachment to the project. Raghubir Singh inaugurated the construction work but died in 1959, before the new building was finished. His death was an enormous loss to the Modern family, despite Virendra Singh’s involvement in the school and the presence of stalwarts like Sobha Singh who connected the school to its origins. By the time the Humayun Road school was finished, much was changing in Delhi. The pre-world war architecture, symbolised by the buildings of Lutyens and Herbert Baker, had been jettisoned for modern architecture, including, for instance, the IIT campus, which was built in 1961, and the Hall of Nations, built about a decade later. The capital’s skyline was changing, and the junior school would be an expression of this new mood. Around this time, Bhagwant Singh became an essential part of the school. In 1958, Virendra Singh had proposed that Bhagwant be included in the trust. He was then given the responsibility to oversee the construction of the new school building on Humayun Road. By then, his prominent family, led by his father Sobha Singh, had left the construction business, but Bhagwant still had the social wherewithal to mobilise the resources to get the job done alongside Principal M.N. Kapur. The year 1961 was consequential in many ways for the school. It was the centenary of the birth of Tagore, whose ideas were the foundation on which Modern was built. So the inauguration of the new school—done by Jawaharlal Nehru—in

that year felt symbolic, momentous even. The new school space provided the teachers and students with the contours and framework of a new personality for the school. Since the 1930s there had been sweeping developments in teaching techniques from the nursery through to the junior levels of school, and these had to be reflected in the new building. Modern moved many of its teachers over from its previous space, but knew it would be important to hire new teachers who weren’t hamstrung by memories. Teachers such as A. Sengupta and R. Mishra, who had only been at Modern for a year each before the junior school was relocated to Humayun Road, Padma Khera, who joined the school when the new building was inaugurated, and Geeta Dudeja, who began teaching at the school in 1963, would remake the school to fit its new home. As ideas of the kindergarten and Montessori systems were imported from Europe, Indian teachers became accustomed to and educated in these new techniques and ways of interacting with students. As we have seen, Modern had a major role in shaping this new world, bringing in teachers from England and Germany and then spreading their methods throughout the city. With the acquisition of the new space, the junior and kindergarten school began to assert itself. The challenges were almost immediate. The war with China in 1962 brought the students face to face with national calamity early in their lives. But the headmaster reported that he was ‘deeply moved’ by the response of the children, who sought to mobilise financial and other contributions.33 The kindergarteners, on their own initiative, pooled their pocket and ice cream money, for instance, to contribute Rs 6,543 to the war effort. The absence of senior-school students and the more compact surroundings of the new building meant the children had the whole space to themselves. The junior school was a world unto itself that they did not have to share. Meanwhile, lessons at school had to carry on as normal. Indeed, given the emphasis

Modern placed on early education, efforts had to be doubled. As A. Sachdeva noted in a 1963 issue of Adarsh: About the general routine of work, efforts to keep the school programme interesting, worthwhile and challenging for children continued as ever so that through various activities the little ones gain rich experiences and grow and develop physically intellectually, spiritually and socially into fine members of the society. Besides regular features like music, dance, painting, drawing, clay works, etc., other creative activities like composing and collecting poems, writing stories, dramatization, making Birth and day (sic) invitation cards have been very much encouraged. Children took delight in and felt rightly proud when they themselves made invitation cards for their parents for the KG annual day. Puppetry and drama were added to the curriculum in 1964, and three teachers were sent for six weeks’ advanced training at the National Institute of Audiovisual Education.34 By 1962, the junior school already had four hundred students, and the house system became the backbone of school life. A core value of the school was that students must learn to assume responsibility and to cooperate with each other. A link to the genteel social mores of pre-Partition Delhi was maintained by a code of conduct that students were expected to follow regardless of teacher supervision. The most effective agency that sustained this spirit of cooperation was the house system, which compelled students to work together and rely on each other and create a more harmonious world. This philosophy was inherent in the names of the houses: Gautam Buddha,35 Shankaracharya, St George, Mahavir, Kabir, Chisti, Aurobindo,36 Guru Nanak37 and Vivekananda.38 One of the house reports noted the benefits of the house system:

The House system served many useful purposes. Firstly it helps us to get acquainted with each other. Secondly, the older and better students are able to help the younger and weaker students in their studies and also in their day-to-day problems. Thus it brings about a unity and a spirit of loyalty to a group of growing children in a small society. The House–Master acts as a local guardian who is always prepared to give a helping hand to any child that comes to him.39 Occasionally, two houses would combine forces to put on extravagant shows. Many excellent ballets were staged, as were plays in both English and Hindi. The range of plays was so exciting and fresh that it not only showed off the theatrical competence of the students, but also their mastery of language, particularly Hindi. Over the decades, many English-medium schools in India have failed to inculcate sufficient respect for Indian languages, or at least their literary qualities. But Modern has been different chiefly because of its traditional devotion to theatre at the junior-school level. Another school institution that played a critical role in bolstering the esprit de corps was the magazine. The student writing in Adarsh, developed with the aid of teachers, displayed some exceptional qualities. A major part of the magazine’s coverage was devoted to house functions, with reporters making impressively informed, judicious assessments of the events they had witnessed. Though the reporters were reporting on their own houses, their observations were routinely self-effacing and serious. Reporting on Chisti House, for instance, Raman Dang wrote, ‘We don’t claim to be an intellectual one, we have a couple of good students who have been doing well throughout and some have worked hard to come up to the mark.’40 Another student wrote of their house: ‘Behaviour is one of the most important things.’41 Deepak Bhargava of Kabir House noted that though it had made progress in all fields, sport was its forte.42 Any reader

of these reports cannot fail to also notice how students internalised the qualities associated with the luminaries after whom their houses were named. Navin Dang, for instance, wrote that his house was ‘named after the great saint Mahavir who brings to our minds the ideals of peace, truth and non-violence, for which the great leader stood’.43Adarsh, as with any school publication, served as a mirror for the children’s thoughts, and fostered their camaraderie and sometimes a friendly rivalry. It gave them a grounding in working together, cooperation being as essential a lesson to modern education as the great capitalist ideal of competition. As for the teachers, teaching at Modern was still largely a labour of love. The school often had outstanding teachers on staff, drawn to the school by its progressive methods and values. Initially, the principal of the senior school carried out the same function for the junior school, though the latter also had a headmistress. The figure of the principal integrated both schools. VII: THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION Two things happened which had limited but long-term consequences for the school. When M.N. Kapur left his post in 1977, after thirty years at the helm, the school decided to restructure, and by 1980, both senior and junior schools had dedicated principals. It was an acknowledgement that the junior school was now a major institution in its own right, with a large operating budget. A separate management committee was also constituted. The school had a very capable principal in Doris David.44 The other development was the decision to start a second school at Vasant Vihar, the classes for which began in the school at Humayun Road. Teachers at the Vasant Vihar branch, therefore, were initiated into Modern’s culture right at the heart of the school, in its junior wing. This also meant the junior school would not be the only one to carry on the experiment that the

Modern School had started. The new school, being a composite one, was going to start the experiment afresh and, hence, with renewed vigour. The subject of children was now increasingly becoming visible in the larger policy debates in the country. Critics pointed out that it seemed only children from the privileged classes had chances handed to them by both the state and the society at large. The work of academics such as Myron Weiner and Shanta Sinha and activists like Swami Agnivesh indicated major absences in the Indian world view, in how the country had denied basic rights to millions and condemned them to lives of destitution.45 The prevalence of large-scale child labour, for instance, began, finally, to be a cause for political agitation. By the time the Modern School celebrated its silver jubilee in 1995, there was a strong push towards widening and improving the poor’s access to schooling. The argument that Kamala Bose had made in 1928 for free and compulsory universal education was making a comeback after almost seven decades.46 On the other hand, the children who now attended the school were also coming from families that had more cultural and social capital than their parents and grandparents had in the 1930s and 1940s and even in the 1970s.47 Thus, the teachers began to see new sets of parents with new demands and expectations from the school. By the 1990s, competition also emerged from the new and experimental early-childhood teaching centres coming up in the city, allowing the teachers a new window of learning and practice. Today, the founders’ ideas regarding the methods of teaching children have been transcended. As new ways of engaging with children have emerged and the idea of schooling has transformed, change has been inevitable. Children and their childhoods are different today, as are teachers and their training and world views. A new and transformed parenting has also evolved since Independence.48 As children’s education has become an increasingly lucrative component in the global commodity market, the struggle to discern meaning in education,

as opposed to preparing and polishing up pupils for the corporate world, becomes ever more difficult. Happiness, as Tagore and his admirers at the Modern School believed, comes from a sense of unity with one’s surroundings. But the story of the contemporary child is increasingly contested and fragmentary. While the privileges of the affluent make for a ‘happy’ childhood, there are millions living in close proximity for whom unhappiness is a constant. What do we do to enable our children to find happiness or enable schools to remain happy places? Is increasing diversity the key to providing happiness to the greatest number? Affirmative action has helped to force schools to at least gesture towards diversity and inclusivity. To have one’s early years reduced to a race in which the fittest are left standing is no one’s idea of a beautiful childhood. While the memories of the quaint, placid childhoods of the 1940s, 1950s and even 1960s make grandparents nostalgic, the world today demands different things from parents and children. It is in this changed universe that Modern is negotiating its way to make the leaders of tomorrow, leaders who do not belong to a particular class or section. If, by the 1970s and 1980s, the upper management was changing at Modern, with the older generations of stalwarts replaced by their children, far more sweeping political changes were taking place in the city. It took almost a decade for politicians to take a direct position on the schooling system in Delhi and to challenge the rules of admissions. The mandatory provision of the ‘neighbouring school’ was introduced as a compromise measure in the face of demands for universal schooling. The concept of the neighbouring school meant that even the city’s private schools were required to recruit most students from a relatively small radius. No distinction was made between old schools in the city that had a track record and educational ideals, such as Modern, and new profit-making enterprises. Though the Modern School’s history was closely connected to the anti-colonial effort and institution-making in newly independent India, it was inevitable that it would be forced to adapt to liberalised India, with parents

vying and competing for places in certain schools, eager to buy into them as brands rather than as places of education. Still, Modern appears to have resisted the urge to maximise profit over well-being. The idea of well-being is anchored in the way we treat our children. The idea of pupils’ happiness being essential to their education has always been at the heart of the Modern School philosophy. It is why music, dance and play have been so intrinsic to a Modern education, why even today you can visit the school and marvel at very young children, too, being encouraged to assert their creativity and imagination.

CHAPTER SEVEN MODERN ENTERS ITS MATURITY 1961–1977

In an excellent study conducted during 2007–2010 on the defining components of the academic culture and prevailing value systems in twenty-six schools in Vadodara, Gujarat, Vandana Talegaonkar pointed out that the ideas of freedom and equality formed the main constitutive elements in the schools’ culture.1 One point which escaped the scholar’s attention was that the schools’ internal environments and the cultural traits that they had imbibed were also functions of the overall social and cultural context in which the schools imparted those values. As is well known today, the family, the social milieu and the larger media ecology from which the child comes, definitely shape her perception of values, as does the school. The latter incorporates many of the prevailing values, drawn from the present or the past, in its own register so as to make the institution the repository of those values it deems fit to pass on to generations of students. The school’s ability to secure itself from being swept away by the existing dominant values in society and retain its autonomy in this regard is crucial to its character. There cannot be a better example of this than the manner in which the Modern School, while accepting changes, has been able to retain the core values that have defined its academic culture. I: THE PERIOD OF RAPID SOCIAL CHANGE

Despite rapid population growth between 1947 and 1961, in the 1960s, Delhi still felt more like a staid provincial town than a capital city. It was Calcutta, Bombay and Madras that held forth as the country’s grand centres, radiating metropolitan modernity.2 In truth, it was really only Calcutta and Bombay (Madras being too far south and steeped in conservatism) that were models of teeming, sophisticated and modern urban life.3 In his autobiography, actor Balraj Sahni has drawn a wonderful caricature of the artificial social life of Delhi’s bureaucratic elite at the time.4 Whatever might be said about the city’s culture, the demographic changes were sweeping: refugees flowed into the Indian capital from Punjab, East Pakistan and the North-West Frontier Province, and were resettled around the city and in Faridabad. The tumult caused by the Partition in Calcutta had been largely avoided in Delhi, in the main due to Nehru’s management of the refugee crisis. As the refugees settled, Delhi was woken from its torpor. This new energy was apparent in the accelerated establishment of a large number of both government and private schools. Indeed, the setting up of so many good schools by private individuals, on land given by the government, was unparalleled in any other city in postIndependence India.5 Though the bureaucratic and military upper classes still sent their children to public schools such as Mayo College, the Lawrence School, or others perched in the hills of Darjeeling and Ooty, the new schools in Delhi were beginning to match and even better those standards. A major reason for this was the post-Partition glut of good subject teachers who found themselves in Delhi. The rest of the country still suffered from a drought on this count, a problem that grounded India’s wellintentioned education reforms before they could take off. Notwithstanding the impressive growth of Delhi’s schools, secondary education in the country was in awful shape. In 1956, Charles Weber, an American scholar writing about secondary education in India, diagnosed the problem areas as the limited reach of schools, the overly bookish and academic curriculum, and the inability of teachers to conduct classes outside a very narrow

range of subjects, to make interdisciplinary connections, or to lead group work. You can almost hear him harrumph as he observes that: The secondary school in India still serves only about 10 percent of the nation’s children. Children in India must work at an earlier age… about 70 per cent of the people live in the villages, where primary education itself is only a recent addition and has yet to catch on with great success. Most secondary institutions are not coeducational, and even when they are, the boys far outnumber the girls.6 In this uninspiring scenario, there still remained slivers of hope. A team of dedicated educationists and bureaucrats were determined to shake up the system. The education minister, Maulana Azad, brought together the likes of Humayun Kabir, K.G. Saiyidain and Dr Zakir Husain to brainstorm solutions.7 While Kabir, an Oxford graduate, was a reputed professor of English at Calcutta University before he became the secretary to Maulana Azad and joined the ministry, Saiyidain (1904–1971) helped conceptualise many new programmes for the Ministry of Education as its advisor, which included introducing the idea of the NSS, to involve youth in constructive works while they were students. Dr Zakir Hussain (1897–1969) had demonstrated his commitment to education at an early age. Inspired by the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and a leading scholar of Delhi Hakim Ajmal Khan, he helped found Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi in 1920, and led it through its formative phase. He also championed Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of basic education or Nai Talim, which had a rich component of vocational training. After Independence, he agreed to the request of the national leadership to be the vice chancellor of Aligarh University and guide it on the path of recovery, as it had suffered great losses to its manpower and academic life due to the Partition.

Azad also had the support of such outstanding bureaucrats as Prem Kirpal, G.K. Chandramani and L.R. Sethi, who were committed to helping him change the landscape of education.8 Nehru, too, involved himself in the details, a prime minister selfconfident enough to invite the best minds in the world to help India find answers to its myriad problems. He did not see this as a sign of inferiority, as many less secure leaders might have. The paradigm of national development that had inspired nationalist leaders also informed the activities of the Indian state after Independence: the mainstream economic consensus was for a planned-development model through a mixed economy, where both state and private enterprise would play their respective roles. In education, the state took the responsibility of opening national institutions, such as the various IITs. In terms of education, the goal of national development required changes on a massive scale, and there were numerous issues to be resolved. But thanks to this stellar team of educationists, by the time the country reached the end of its Second Five-Year Plan (1961-1962), there was at least a road map in place for the education sector. It was, for example, accepted that secondary education needed immediate resuscitative attention. Secondary education was the main focus due to its critical linkage to both the production and the technological processes that India was planning to usher in science, the industries and agriculture. Employability was the mark of an effective secondary-education system, given that only a few students would go on to university, and many needed, instead, to be readied to participate in the economy. In any case, the issue of the increasing unemployed and unemployable manpower graduating from conventional universities must have caught the attention of policymakers. In 1959, halfway through the Second Five-Year Plan, India had 635,596 unemployed matriculates, a number which grew to a million when projected forward to the Third Five-Year Plan. Thus, education orientated towards employment was thought to be imperative, though it is an issue that continues to cause disagreements between those who see education as a purely economic aid and those who think of it in terms of self-

knowledge and an expansion of imaginative horizons. But there was no question that the government needed to undo much of the damage inflicted by colonial authorities, which had established universities before they even planned widespread, universal primary and secondary education. The colonial legacy of high school as a linear progression towards university meant that universities were oversubscribed. It also meant that secondary education was treated as preparation for the academic life of the university rather than life itself.9 It was thought that unless this link was broken and comprehensive highschool education established as an end in itself, there would be no way out of the educational impasse in which the country found itself.10 Still, secondary education was a privilege in India: a vast number of people had no education at all, or only some primary schooling. It was necessary to increase the number of schools and widen access to secondary schooling so that historically excluded groups, including the SCs and STs, had an opportunity to attend. Could it then be possible to tell people who had overachieved just by being in secondary school that they should forget any aspiration they might have to go to university? The consequences would be disastrous. Indeed, the high rate of failure to matriculate, many argued, was an indication that the system was biased against the upward movement of those who were lower in either caste or class hierarchy. Certainly, the percentage of those who failed the matriculation examination was staggering: 53 per cent, 49.6 per cent and 44.52 per cent of those who took the examinations in 1959, 1960 and 1961 respectively. And a large number of those who had failed comprised people from communities that had just begun to be represented in higher education.11 Humayun Kabir, the educational advisor to the government, opposed the idea of schooling as simply a means of acquiring the basic skills necessary for entry-level employment on four counts. First, basic skills were unlikely to be firmly implanted at so early a stage. Second, the general education acquired at school was too scanty to serve as a qualification for skilled employment. Third, adolescence was an unstable period and hence unsuited for

choosing a career. Fourth, the world was changing so fast that ‘stabilisation of specialised skills at an early age would instead of fitting the individual better for life, make him less fit to meet the challenge of changing times’.12 Instead, as Mathew Zachariah, a leading contemporary commentator on Indian education policies, noted, Kabir ‘favoured a general type of secondary education with diverse courses’.13 Kabir was correct: favouring a vocational or limited nature of secondary education would have been a disservice to students from the poor, backward and rural segments of the population. The government’s own data showed that, at that point, secondary education was also an urban and upper-caste privilege.14 It was a costly enterprise, and only the authorities in Madras saw fit to make secondary education free to residents. Nearly two-thirds of Indian pupils dropped out at the secondaryschool stage in the 1960s because of poverty.15 Opponents of vocational schools pointed out that pushing young people into a trade, or into agriculture, failed to address the real reasons why students were dropping out of school. Notwithstanding these larger debates, since 1947, the central government busied itself with restructuring aspects of secondary education, including the curriculum, examination structure and teacher training. The All India Council for Secondary Education was established in 1955 to improve the quality of secondary education, with the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) taking over this role in 1961. By 1961, the 4 regional colleges of the NCERT were set up in Mysore, Bhopal, Ajmer and Bhubaneswar, becoming the lifeblood of the entire teacher-training edifice. The 4 regional colleges, in turn, opened extension centres within a radius of 50–100 miles, to facilitate training for a larger number of teachers by reaching out to them. By the mid-1960s there were 69 such centres working with 11,500 schools and involving about 40,000 teachers. The dissemination of the training through the extension centres was handled by the 4 regional colleges.16 Handbooks, bibliographies and monographs were published for teachers, while seminars, conferences and

workshops were organised for in-service teachers. The NCERT ‘created a ferment’ that even visitors to the country could sense.17 Indian authorities consulted with several international agencies, including the UNESCO and the Ford Foundation, about their plans to change the curriculum and examination system in the sciences and mathematics. In the latter, for example, exemplary care was taken to make teaching techniques and textbooks engaging. Most of these efforts and changes were evident in the improved quality of schools in the capital.18 Teachers in Delhi, particularly, benefitted from the investment in training. In May 1963, for instance, Ramjas College held a ‘Summer Institute of Mathematics’ for teachers from colleges, universities and schools, with the help of the NCERT, the University Grants Commission (UGC), the Teachers College at Columbia University, and the USAID programme. Several such summer institutes were organised—a dozen in 1968 alone—to cover maths teachers around the country. The NCERT set up a committee under the eminent mathematician Ram Behari to prepare subject textbooks, which was later replaced by an editorial board, helmed by the equally capable mathematician J.N. Kapur as chief editor.19 New initiatives were also launched to find young scientists, such as the National Talent Search Examination, which began in 1963.20 There were efforts to make science teaching at the secondary level more general than faculty or discipline based, though this was eventually dropped when it was found that teachers did not have the broadbased expertise necessary, or the inclination to acquire it. 21 Between November 1963 and 1966, the education minister at the time, M.C. Chagla, a liberal, secular man, encouraged Indian universities and institutes of higher education to adopt the highest standards. He considered dropping the word ‘Muslim’ from Aligarh Muslim University, and introduced a debate in Parliament to restore the original name of the Banaras Hindu University, i.e., Kashi Vishvavidyalaya, as demanded by many.22 He wanted Indian schools and universities to be world class. He listened when experts explained that history and social science textbooks, in

particular, were substandard and full of mistakes, and arranged for them to be written by reputed scholars—the NCERT was given a mandate to get these model textbooks written and published.23 Chagla also began the process to update the salaries of school and college teachers, who were being paid a pittance even in government institutions; poor pay deterred the best minds from becoming teachers. Nothing was too small for Chagla’s attention. He was eager to apply best practices from the states at a national level. The Madras Playground Act, for example, was an exemplary law which made it mandatory for schools to be equipped with a playground.24 Chagla wanted to extend this rule across India. His energy meant the Union government was quite active in the field of education. In strict constitutional terms, education was a state concern, and there was only so much that the Union government could do or control. It had charge of half a dozen universities, which derived their funding through the UGC, but in the critical area of primary and secondary education, the states were in charge. Central government staff, who could be transferred to any part of the country, acutely felt the lack of a centralised, standardised curriculum as they moved their families from post to post. Chagla addressed this problem with the introduction and expansion of a network of central schools (Kendriya Vidyalayas). But it was his setting up of the Education Commission in 1964, under the chairmanship of Professor Daulat Singh Kothari, that was his biggest step in a radical direction. Kothari was an eminent physicist and a student of the famed Meghnad Saha, who taught at Allahabad University and was an active public voice for science and development. Saha had played an instrumental role in the development of the Damodar Valley Corporation, which had tremendous benefits for Bihar and Bengal. Following in his teacher’s footsteps, Kothari played a crucial role in creating the infrastructure for science education in the country, and was, effectively, the founder of the physics department at Delhi University. He was, therefore, the most appropriate person to be chosen to chair the commission.

Schooling, as we have seen, was in a really worrisome state at this point of time, with the existing system, particularly in the northern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, already in terminal decline. The deteriorating quality of education in these states was connected to the rapid decline of their once outstanding universities. There is a close, intricate link, of course, between schools and universities, with the latter providing the teachers while the former provides students who will populate the campuses. Beginning in the 1960s, the saga of the rapid decline in university standards and its impact on schools is a story of epic proportions, and has yet to be written. One of the biggest contributory factors in those years was the anti-English political movement. This was, arguably, a response to the anti-Hindi movement in southern states such as Tamil Nadu that grew in the wake of the central government’s announcement in 1959 that from the next year, Hindi would replace English as the official language in all circumstances. This was in accordance with the Constitution, which stated that after fifteen years of the Constitution’s promulgation, Hindi would replace English as the language of official communication. This official circular created an uproar across non Hindi-speaking states, as it was seen as a blatant imposition, and they erupted in violence. As if prepared, certain groups exploited latent pro-Hindi sentiments across the north Indian states, which began their tit-for-tat anti-English agitation.25 This was also a time when a large number of first-generation students were beginning to join schools, and it was logical that they be educated in their mother tongues. However, the issue of which language would best enable young children to reach their academic potential was suppressed under the anti-English agitation. Political concerns now had the upper hand, and in many states, starting with Gujarat, it was decided to introduce the local language as the medium of instruction in higher education with immediate effect. This decision, which many protested, was hasty, primarily because states were unprepared, without sufficient textbooks in local languages or teachers with relevant experience.

This resulted in the sudden dislocation of faculties already in place around the country, a precipitous fall in educational standards, and the forced localisation or, at best, regionalisation of educational manpower.26 English was shown to be the language of the elite and the upper classes, and much of the animus against the language and teaching in it was motivated by class anger. The socialists, led by Ram Manohar Lohia, attacked English-language institutions for their embedded elitism and called for substantial changes to be made. Northern India would take this anti-English invocation most seriously, and the political organisations that mobilised support for agitations in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh included the Jan Sangh, precursors to the BJP. In Bengal, the class anger against the elite or the upper class was most virulently expressed through the political programme of Naxalism. The students of the elite Presidency College, for example, attacked the very idea of elite institutions and demanded that the elite give way for the establishment of a more equal society. II: MODERN AND THE NEW WORLD OF SCHOOLING The 1960s saw a ferment with regard to secondary education in the country. New segments of the population were being drawn towards education, and there was a need for structures, personnel and a new vision. The report of the Education Commission (better known as the Kothari commission) in 1964–1966 would change the structure of secondary education and also bring reforms in other areas. Modern High School at Barakhamba was ready to take on the new responsibilities as recommended by the commission. The first issue raised by the Education Commission pertained to the availability of secondary schools, which were few and far between across the country. The second feature that the commission highlighted, as shown in table V, was the fact that the majority of these secondary schools were managed by private entities, many of them being philanthropists and trusts.27 This increase in private schools can be traced to the first two five-year

plans in the 1950s, when the number of private schools grew at a much faster pace than the government schools, though they, too, increased in large numbers. TABLE V: NUMBER OF SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN INDIA Management No. Of Schools Percentage No. of Schools Percentage 1948–1949 1948–1949 1960–1961 1960–1961 Government 1,281 8.9 3,239 18.8 Local Authority 4,751 33.1 2,066 12.0 Private 8,310 58.0 11, 952 69.2 Total 14,342 100 17,257 100.0 Source: Report of the Education Commission, 1964-66, p. 250. Thus, the secondary school itself was a privilege in the country. It was an urban phenomenon, and rural areas still cried for even primary schools. A true appreciation of why Modern School would insist that students be given the lesson of responsibility to society lay in the management’s own understanding of Indian society and the need to ameliorate the inequalities in the country. Modern recognised that it was privileged, in the sense that being a secondary school in itself was a privilege. However, this privilege in the school, unlike most other public schools, was tied to a sense of responsibility to society in ways that were not visible to the outside world. It is here that the school played an extremely constructive role. First, it broadened its efforts to expose students and teachers to teaching in other countries, which was something initiated in the early years itself. The teachers began travelling on government fellowships and other foundational fellowships to the United States and other countries, and brought back the latest educational techniques that the government itself was keen to implement in the education system. Awadh Kishore, Ayodhya Char, Chawla and many others had already had their training in the United States, and the principal himself travelled extensively in the United States

in 1963 with a view to understanding new ways of organisation of schools, examinations and education in general. Second, it built upon government efforts to encourage group activities as an essential part of schooling, which was part of a collaboration with the US government. Sport, cultural activities and regular tests of different kinds, which had anyway been the mainstay of the school culture, prepared teachers and students for the kinds of changes that educationists were looking for. The cumulative effect of these efforts in the context of secondary education was noticeable in the academic field. When the re-energised secondary boards were having exams in the 1960s, Modern achieved astounding success. In fact, almost every year from 1961 to 1965, Modern students made a mark in the board examinations,28 with toppers in history, chemistry and other subjects; in 1965, the school excelled by securing all the top positions in the board. In 1965, the board was reorganised and the All Indian Higher Secondary Examination was introduced, and again, from the very first year, the students of Modern began to set the standards. In the very first year, almost all the positions at the top (seven out of the top ten) were monopolised by the school; out of the eighty-nine students who appeared for the examinations, forty-nine secured first class and thirty-nine second. It was a brilliant result for the school. With respect to the future of examinations and the board, it was a vindication of the fact that good students could be motivated to write CBSE exams, and the aura of Senior Cambridge was challenged. In the very next year, too, six out of the first ten rankers were Modern students. The girl students of Modern were the first among the girls in many subjects and also in the overall category. This story was repeated year after year, and in 1969, when the arts and science streams were separated, Modern students topped both the streams. Thus, by the time the school celebrated its golden jubilee in 1970, it had also helped to bring the secondaryschool system in the country on a strong wicket. It is on the strength of this success, mixed with an overall positive result, that

the examination system was able to see the last of the Senior Cambridge examination not long after, in 1977. However, this success held a larger significance for the secondary-education system itself. The success of Modern School in the secondary-school examinations conducted through the CBSE was also the vindication of the Government of India’s faith in itself and the process of reform that it had initiated. In this sense, Modern School presented itself as a testing ground with no cost to the government. Its teachers and principal and even its premises were available for official use for all such experiments. The people who made this possible and scripted its success were the teachers. Many of them had been in the school since their arrival in the early 1940s and some had been there even before that. They had built the school, solidifying its academic credibility and friendly atmosphere. But while they were doing all this, the general conditions of teachers was not good. The teaching profession had lost faith in itself, and society hesitated in according teachers the dignity due to them. The prevailing political and financial crisis due to wars and other economic turbulences had also affected living conditions, particularly in urban areas. While the government, thanks to the new education minister, Nurul Hasan, initiated an increase in the salary of teachers across various segments of education—universities, colleges and schools —a survey conducted by the NCERT in 1973-1974 on the salaries of school teachers presented a dismal picture. The average annual income of secondary-school teachers turned out to be Rs 3,573. Government-school teachers received an annual average income of Rs 4,117.60, and teachers in private, unaided schools had a low average annual income at Rs 2,850.50. School teachers in rural areas were paid lesser than those in urban schools—both in government and in private schools. A rural, unaided private-school teacher’s annual average income was Rs 3,679.10. The teachers at private, unaided secondary schools in urban areas received an average annual income of Rs 2,463.80 per year.29 Private teachers were also unorganised and hence could not demand a better wage scale. Thus, the Kothari Commission’s observation

about the scarcity of teachers appears to have been intrinsically tied to the low salaries that would have prevented many from joining the teaching profession. In the period between 1961 and 1977, the sangam of the old and new as far as teachers was concerned was at its best in Modern—this was a mature phase where the new learnt from the old and where the dedication to teaching was visible and the dignity of being a teacher was upheld. This was due to the management’s efforts in not only trying to pay the teachers higher than any available scale but also being liberal with their needs and demands. The idea of emotional bonding that Modern followed in these changing times was very significant. A benign employer meant a lot to the kids as non-disgruntled teachers were always a prized lot. There was also a sense of dignity about knowledge and teaching, and this made many of the children of teachers take up the teaching profession themselves when it came to their own careers. In the 1960s, there were massive waves of student protests across the world, and India was not untouched. World over, the disillusionment with many social norms was openly expressed through literature, music and theatre. The tyranny of reality was attacked with invocations to imagination and romance, catalysts to youthful rebellion. The pop group The Beatles were arguably the global personification of this mood, this uprising against the oppressive structures of power. The youth wanted to remake the world in their image.30 The young gathered in droves to listen to the political dissident Václav Havel in Prague, while in India the grounds for revolution had been prepared by the dreamers in Naxalbari. Attached to power and beneficiaries of the system, students in Delhi were more muted, less prone to calling for the overthrow of existing structures. For senior Modern School students, too, disillusionment with society was not so fraught an existential issue, given the class advantages so many of them enjoyed. Indeed, the majority of the school’s pupils came from families entrenched in the establishment and with considerable interest in perpetuating the

status quo. Not unsurprisingly, a large proportion of Modern students from the 1960s through to the 1980s migrated to the developed world, closer to the levers of global finance—an indication of their privileges. Still, the air was thick with rebellion, and many Modern students were exposed to the era’s pop culture. They showed a very mature understanding of the gap between the politics of the zeitgeist—which they recognised from films, music, art, literature, the talks they heard at school and the reports they read in newspapers and magazines—and the reality of their lived experiences. Among the structures being questioned in the 1960s in India, as elsewhere, was the school. As mentioned earlier, M.N. Kapur, speaking to a government committee, had noted the loss of discipline among students, presumably including those at Modern. Even if MNK bemoaned the loss of discipline at Modern, the effect could only have been fleeting. In fact, what Modern had done in its earliest years was to privilege certain values in the name of academic culture, and now that these values were being challenged in society at large, the school sought to reinforce its traditional moral precepts. Key to these were the notions of responsibility and truthfulness. Students generally preferred to think of freedom as the mainstay of the school’s value system. But a deeper analysis shows that Modern students have long revered responsibility and truthfulness and the complementary roles they play in permitting students and teachers to treat each other with respect and trust. In the junior school, for instance, the atmosphere between teachers and students is extraordinarily relaxed, more collegial than such a relationship is in other schools, where teachers are primarily figures of authority. In part, as has been acknowledged elsewhere in this book, this is a function of privilege: this can be seen in the interactions between teachers and lessprivileged children in privileged schools and in the interactions in schools attended by pupils who are broadly underprivileged.31 Howard Adam, in his masterly work Learning Privileges, has shown how teachers are accommodative towards children from privileged backgrounds in schools run by privileged communities,

while the same spirit of bonhomie is not evident in their interactions with students on merit scholarships or from minority backgrounds at these same schools.32 In countries like the US, the discrimination not only runs deep but, in state-run schools, oozes violence of the worst kind.33 At Modern, M.N. Kapur would insist teachers came from ‘good backgrounds’ to minimise class friction, a position that would perhaps be less palatable today (stated baldly, that is, rather than in practice). The Modern School also encouraged couples who were both teachers. In the mid-1960s, there were many such couples, including the principal, whose wife played a major role on campus, bolstering the school’s claims to a family atmosphere. That said, it would be facile to argue that the atmosphere at the Modern School was accounted for solely by the class background of students and teachers. It is evident that pedagogical philosophies and teacher selection, particularly at the primary level, had a large part to play in staff-student relationships. The house system the school followed was a contributory factor. It inculcated a great sense of responsibility among students, who felt they were part of a team. With young students and their seniors pulling together for the same house, there was a sense of camaraderie across the school, and different cohorts worked together easily on group tasks for the good of the house. At Modern, when the houses organised functions, they did so with a sense of complete autonomy: they made their own programmes and worked out how to finance them. The whole organisation rested in their hands, with the house master serving as a sounding board rather than an active participant. The freedom so precious to Modern students was, in reality, the product of these values of responsibility and truthfulness. Students were quick to let each other know if standards slipped and to take ownership of their behaviour. These values also engendered a straightforward, plainspeaking prose that might account for the preponderance of good journalism in the pages of the school magazines.34 Responsibility and truthfulness, as the school’s most prominent values, enabled students to consider issues facing their society and country head-

on, without flinching. These values, the school espoused, were the requirements of being a reasonable citizen. Students felt free to pronounce their views on the major issues of their day—from the Suez crisis to the importance of Parliament as an institution to the growth of slums in Delhi—in the pages of the magazine.35 In other words, Modern’s values were intended to produce confidently engaged citizens. One could argue that this was possible because the students’ social status already imbued them with the necessary confidence, but that would be to fail to see that not all privileged schools or privileged students articulated their values and thoughts in this manner.36 Certainly, as an independent India became a concrete reality and a variety of social and political fissures began to open up, there was much for Modern’s students to ponder. In addition, Indian nationalism, so essential to the freedom movement, was tested by three wars around this time. Adversity brought out the best in Modern’s students, as they rallied to help the war effort as best they could. It is interesting to follow the progress of some of the school’s students from this time and note that many embarked on careers directly influenced by their experiences in this tumultuous period. Two of the prefects from this period, Nilima Dhanda and Amba Sanyal, would go on to become artists, while a third, Meera Verma, became an IAS officer. Purnima Mehta, who visited the Soviet Union as a youth representative, ended up as a historian on the other side of the iron curtain, in the US. Another former prefect, Rajat Narain, became devoted to Gandhian ideals and charted out his life in the Himalayas. III: LEARNING TRADITION AND ETHOS OF PLURALISM Steeped in the history of Indian tradition and culture, Modern School, from its nursery to its senior levels, presented its students with a dynamic cultural milieu. Students were taught to believe they had a responsibility to Indian culture, the sense of which carried them through their numerous musical and theatrical performances. It is perhaps true that the overt Arya Samaj influence on the school

after Partition, and its penchant for Sanskrit, meant that Modern’s definition of Indian culture was wedded to its north Indian Brahmanical representation, but the school strove towards a more universal, catholic ideal. If its frame of reference was limited, its spirit was open. Thus, the school’s pupils, rooted in their country’s history and tradition, embraced an essentially inclusive India. This faith underpinned their approach to contemporary politics as well as their historical perspectives. The Modern ethos is reflected by alumni such as the noted designer Rajeev Sethi. It is perhaps his early years at Modern that helped him emerge in the 1980s as an ambassador for the culture and tradition of Indian craftsmanship to the wider world. His ‘Festival of India’ exhibitions in various European and American cities have won him honours from European governments, and at home, his most conspicuous project, perhaps, has been to curate the capacious displays— about seven thousand artefacts—of Indian culture at Mumbai’s international airport. Sethi is another one of those Modern School alumni who appears to have a personal stake in a particular vision of India, one informed by national pride and a confident commitment to Indian diversity. He also shows another characteristic of Modern alumni: a desire to do work that has a clear public benefit.37 The legacy Sethi represents emerged out of India’s anticolonial struggle in the first half of the twentieth century—an attempt to forge a shared national culture and world view. If Sethi’s project has been, in some ways, to excavate Indian culture, Aman Nath, another Modern School product, has brought a similar focus on Indian heritage to produce something new. Nath’s Neemrana Hotels are evocative of Rajasthan’s courtly culture; they package his genuine love for and understanding of heritage into a deluxe experience for tourists. His is a vision for India that looks to and takes inspiration from the country’s heritage while keeping an eye firmly on the present.38 When Nath became editor of Sandesh, the storied Modern School magazine, he introduced a bold new font and design, an early example perhaps of his flair at reinventing a heritage product. In all seriousness though, Nath’s vocation

displays some classic signs of a Modern School education, particularly in his deep devotion to Indian tradition and his attempt to conceive it anew. This characteristic of Modern School alumni—examples include Ram Rahman, Anita Rampal, Amitabh Mukherjee, Rajeev Bhargava, Anuradha Kapur and hundred others of this time— inculcates a love for and pride in Indian pluralism and prompts an active civic life. For instance, Bhargava’s life work as a political scientist has revolved around Indian secularism and the relationships between the country’s religious communities.39 Rahman, too, has specialised in capturing India’s pluralistic traditions with his camera, and as an activist, he resists sectarian violence.40 It is surely not incidental that both Bhargava and Rahman went to Modern or that they were taught by O.P. Sharma, though the school’s ethos is not dependent on any one teacher but has emerged from its profound involvement in anti-colonialism and nation-building.41 Given the school’s history, teachers at Modern are able to fill students with pride in their country and its history, without it curdling into the quackery and jingoism that is nowadays passed off as teaching in some Indian schools. It is, therefore, not very surprising that when Anita Rampal or Amitabh Mukherjee champion a more inclusive and democratic science education, it is for the larger social good, which was possibly ingrained by the teachers in the 1960s as the meaning of nation and the idea of loving one’s compatriots. IV: THE PATRIOTIC FERVOUR OF THE 1960s Modern’s long legacy of a nationalist spirit made it natural that when the country entered into war with China in 1962, the school became a site of intense, passionate support for the war effort. Students mobilised to raise money to care for combat troops and the elderly, and tried to help in every other way they could. As noted earlier, the war with China coincided with a change of leadership in the school: Major General Virendra Singh took over

from his father Raghubir Singh, who died in 1959, at the helm. Virendra was an exceptional personality. Born in 1915, he was the younger son of Raghubir Singh, and had attended Modern alongside the likes of his brother, Pratap Singh, and Bhagwant Singh, as part of the first-ever batch. His choice to join the army, coming as he did from a wealthy background, raised eyebrows, but he was an obvious asset, given that the departing British had left a hole in the officer corps that had to be filled by an Indian establishment. He’d had a celebrated career in the forces and was in the process of taking over the reins of the school completely from his father, when the war with China led to his services being specifically requested by Nehru. As the NCC was made compulsory, the prime minister requested that Virendra Singh set up the NCC to induct young people into the ways of the military. With this new charge, he became further enmeshed with the army. Modern had been one of the pioneers of the NCC movement in the country, and the school won trophies regularly at various regional and national meets all through the 1950s. It was therefore very natural that it sent some of its students to the army and navy, who excelled there too. The newly organised NCC under Virendra Singh continued this tradition, with the new patriotic fervour helping. The NCC, for some reason however, did not particularly succeed at Modern, eventually folding for lack of interest.42 V: THE WOODSTOCK GENERATION Sanjeev Khanna, a Modern School alumnus from a prosperous Delhi business family, tells me that they belonged to the Woodstock generation. Even before the Woodstock generation could make its presence felt, though, India was in dire economic peril as an inexperienced Indira Gandhi struggled in her first couple of years as prime minister to deal with a reduced electoral majority, in part because of the sky-high prices of commodities. In republican eyes, whatever the state of the country, schools had to go on undisturbed with the business of producing the next generation of leaders. Still, at Modern, students were troubled.

Secure in their privileges, with several destined to go on to study at Oxford and Cambridge or in America, the students felt they should be helping the poor cope with the runaway prices. Ordinarily, the wards of the business community might not have troubled themselves with such issues. But at Modern, the students had bought into the school’s commitment to the nation as an extension of family. Whatever the barriers constructed by their own class, Modern’s students seemed willing to breach them—a nod to the spirit of the age. Hippies everywhere had called for an end to class protections and smug solidarity. The Modern School, at once traditional and resistant of tradition, was a space where the winds of change swirled headlong into other winds.43 If the Beatles had succeeded in implanting the idea of rebellion in the minds of many young Indians, it was Modern’s oft-repeated principle of responsibility that was at the core of the students’ social consciousness. When students, for instance, saw the conditions to which people had been reduced in the city’s slums, they were moved to anger. Their writing in the school magazine is revelatory of their general concern. It was in keeping with the Modern philosophy that students were expected to involve themselves in public service in their time at the school. Students went frequently to help people and communities in distress. When the school wanted to send a team to Bihar after a drought had left the state reeling, there were many enthusiastic student volunteers, and the school sent a group of students under the supervision of the teachers C.K. Chaddha and S.K. Gambhir to the villages to distribute relief.44 Modern students were also regular volunteers at the Delhi unit of Cheshire House, set up to help physically and mentally differently abled people. Perhaps the Woodstock generation at Modern was as influenced by the school’s ethos of service as it was by the spirit of rebellion that characterised the age. VI: THE RADIATING UNIVERSE OF VISUAL ART

The cultural complex that had come to Modern School had now entered a mature stage. Along with the principal and trustees, there was a coming together of gifted teachers to retain this complex in the school. In the 1960s, the school not only witnessed the fruition of these processes but many of the alumnus now began to expand these traditions outside. If rebellion was woven into the fabric of the school anywhere, it was in the art department, extensively staffed by gifted teachers and working artists. Foremost among these, of course, were Kanwal and Devyani Krishna. While Kanwal was still painting during this period, Devyani was experimenting with printmaking. Critics lauded her intelligence and sensibility, the intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, imagery of her work, and the deep experience that informed her art.45 She came out with her celebrated Bam Bam Bhole series of etchings between the years 1970–1974. Art critic and Modernite Richard Bartholomew described her as ‘India’s foremost woman artist’.46 Another eminent critic, K.B. Goyal, concurred.47 If Devyani was at the peak of her game, so too was Kanwal, whose work was, some critics said, the most daring, innovative and profound in India. According to Bartholomew: The critic must take heart from these manifestations, from such persons as Kanwal Krishna, and from the experience he sought and which he revealed. And he must be stout hearted and sure and genuine in his expression, as Kanwal Krishna is, in his work. Strong men and good art, such as we find in Kanwal Krishna and in his prints, direct the course of criticism. Their contemporaneous existence gives the critic his sanction and vision. 48 The effect of the Krishnas was not only on Among those they befriended and introduced to O.P. Sharma, a physics graduate from Lucknow became a photographer so eminent, his pictures

younger artists. the school was University, who are an indelible

part of the country’s visual history. The critic Goyal rhapsodised, after a 1969 exhibition, that ‘this was the farthest photography could go abandoning the camera on the way’.49 In an interview published in the 1970s, in which O.P. Sharma was asked about the role of the photographer beyond operating the camera, he argued that the artist in the photographer ‘always selects; his motifs, his lens, his filter emulsion … and all according to his sensibility’.50 Sharma seemed to suggest that in this way, the photographer more than merely shoots, he metamorphoses.51 Goyal called Sharma a ‘pictorialist’.52 Sharma’s coming to Modern energised the training in visual arts further. In 1977, the Krishnas retired, having created generations of Modernites attuned to the arts, never mind the many practising artists and critics. Working over the years amidst people of relative affluence did not diminish Kanwal’s espousal of progressive art, and he continued to champion the cause of access to art, even chairing a meeting of artists opposed to the Lalit Kala Akademi’s idea of organising a Triennale in 1968.53 The reasons for this opposition were varied: the non-inclusion of some Western countries with rich artistic traditions, the lack of transparency over the Indian artists selected, and the bureaucratisation of the event were some. One of the Krishnas’ students, in the process of becoming a scholar of art, did not oppose the Triennale per se but ‘saw it as having “close links” with cultural imperialism of the west and a “cultural commercial mechanism” … to perpetuate the cultural supremacy of the west, and precisely through “the manipulation of advanced technology”’.54 Clearly, the Krishnas’ own views had resonated. Teachers in Modern’s art department did seem to have a radicalising effect on students. Even Ram Rahman, taught by O.P. Sharma, once lost a scholarship because of his unembarrassed support for Marxist parties and for India’s secular plurality. The artistic ferment of the 1960s seized the theatre as much as any other medium of expression. The National School of Drama was established in 1959, and just three years later, the late Feisal

Alkazi staged Ashadh ka Ek Din, succeeding within one production in burnishing his own reputation, that of playwright Mohan Rakesh and of the National School of Drama itself. Mohan Rakesh’s two other major plays, Lahron ke Rajhans and Adhe Adhure, were hits too, directed by Shyamanand Jalan in Kolkata and Om Shivpuri in Delhi in 1967 and 1969 respectively. The Modern School became a home for many of those responsible for creating a new theatre in Delhi, as well as those doing the same in dance and music. The students were not left out. Even at the junior-school level, ballet, made Indian in the new genre of the dance drama, was popular among students. The flavour of the times rubbed off on students, whose own productions were never short of experimentation and artistic risk. Anuradha Kapur, a formidable scholar and exponent of the theatre, as we have already explored, once wrote of these years: What is modern in the theatre of the sixties? Chiefly an exploration of the self—a mode by which the individual personality is explored, nuanced, and realized on the stage. The devices ventured were those that had been both valorised by actors all over the world, how to present the self here and now, and how to be real and truthful in performance, these were the canons that were put in place in the working methods of the NSD.55 The high point of the school’s relationship with the performance arts in this phase was the arrival, as teachers, of Om and Sudha Shivpuri and Ram Gopal Bajaj, three doyens of modern Indian theatre. They had joined the school straight after graduating from the National School of Drama in 1967 and were itching to produce good, new plays. The Shivpuris left Modern in 1975, and went on to a career in the Bombay cinema. Later, the links between the Hindi-film industry and Modern were further enhanced by the career of Modernite Shekhar Kapur, a world-renowned director of both Hindi and Hollywood cinema. His sister, Sohaila Kapur, was an outstanding theatre director herself. But the earliest

Modernite to earn international success in the movies was Suresh Jindal, who studied at the school in the 1950s and went on to become a producer of Shatranj ke Khilari in 1977, the first Hindi feature directed by the legendary Satyajit Ray.56 The school also became a venue for the popular and revolutionary songs of the Indian People’s Theatre Association. They added colour to school productions and became a feature of a new genre, which the school’s scriptwriter Ved Vyas, the first principal of the school’s Vasant Vihar branch, would call ‘roopak’— short, entertaining plays on contemporary topics. Roopak became a school hallmark, a new production rolled out for major house functions as well as the Annual Day programme. On Founder’s Day in 1972, as the school paid tribute to its students Sashi Dang, Satish Bharadwaj and Kiran Seth, who had lost their lives in the war to liberate Bangladesh, it marked the occasion with a roopak production that was staged before the defence minister Y.B. Chavan, who was chief guest.57 By then, the school’s theatrical traditions were renowned, with elaborate productions the norm since the school’s grand staging of Kamayani, Jaishankar Prasad’s epic poem, considered a masterpiece of Hindi literature.58 Adl-e-Jehangir was another memorable student production, starring Anuradha Kapur as Jehangir.59 The school’s lawns served as the set for the students’ recreation of this Mughal romance, close enough to the last resting place of the Mughals themselves—the Red Fort of Delhi, if not Agra. The romance was beautifully scripted and played. But it was not without its controversies. The story goes that one of the actors in the production had his heart set on playing Jehangir and complained that the role had been given to Anuradha Kapur as a nepotistic favour, as she was the principal’s daughter. There was a stand-off, including teachers and even the principal, until the boy relented and agreed to play the role he had been given. The twist: on opening night, he didn’t show up, and a standby had to play his part impromptu.

VII: THE IDEA OF EXCELLENCE By the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps spurred by the competition with other, fast-emerging Delhi schools, Modern came into its own academically. It had always espoused excellence as integral to its nationalist mission, but the same brio it showed in its pursuit of culture was only now being matched by its academic performance in a number of disciplines. As the 1960s wound down, Modern School students routinely topped the CBSE charts, with many students earning distinctions. The top-performing students tended to channel their energies in later years towards professions that gave them leadership roles in Indian society. MNK had always encouraged Modern’s students to pursue the civil services and other administrative services, believing that the school’s duty was to supply the next generation of Indian leaders. And, indeed, a career graph of those who were among the most successful in the 1960 batch would show that they all ended up serving the country in such capacities. Jayant Prasad, who scored the highest in the humanities in the board exams, became a much-admired foreign service officer and was the Indian ambassador to Algeria, Afghanistan and Nepal. Similarly, the topper in science, Amitabha Mukherjee, became a leading scientist in Delhi University and a leading voice in science education in the country, at the forefront of the movement for progressive sciences.60 Anita Rampal, who stood first in chemistry in the board examinations, became one of India’s foremost thinkers on science education, and has given the country insights into how to teach science and engage students for the last four decades. VIII: THE DON DEPARTS But by the 1970s, the M.N. Kapur era was drawing to an end. Indira Gandhi had roared into power in 1971, on the back of an election campaign that promised to eradicate poverty. Her new government would abolish the privy purse, no doubt affecting the enrolment of royal scions in the country’s public schools. Not long

after came the Delhi School Act of 1973, which abolished certain anomalies in the way private schools were being managed and sought to implement standard protocols and management practices to make the schools’ governance structures more transparent. Government nominees were put on teacher-selection committees to ensure certain universal practices. MNK, very much a principal of the old school, was in the process of retiring at this time, a prolonged exercise that took until 1977 to complete. After thirty years in the hot seat, MNK did not relinquish it easily. He became embroiled in a standoff with the trustees over the extension of a contract for a sports teacher. It seems a small thing to fall out over, but neither MNK nor Major General Virendra Singh, whose association with the former went back thirty years, were willing to step back. The trustees, MNK thought, were treating him as any hired member of staff, rather than a principal of three decades standing.61 The trustees, it seemed, wanted greater control over the affairs of the school in the changing times. Kapur, who was on extension post-retirement, appears to have been wrongly advised by the teachers and others around him to make the case public: this unfortunately made it appear that he was asking the school to go against the 1973 act, which required teachers to retire at a certain age. Thus, the issue was even raised in the legislative assembly, and in the end, in a democracy, exceptionalism can go only so far, even when the person in question is of the stature of MNK, having made the enormous contributions he did to education not just at Modern but in India. In hindsight, both sides stuck rigidly to their positions, and after this incident, some of the gloss came off their long partnership. The whole episode precipitated a departure from the easy relationship shared by the trustees and the principals, and the lack of grace on both sides took a toll on the institution. Too many times in history, people have failed to show their best qualities when they have been needed the most. Just when the school appeared to have reached a high point in its development, its leaders were falling short on the national stage. When MNK eventually left the school in 1977, the country had just been

through an extraordinary election in the wake of the Emergency, with the Congress ceding power for the first time in the thirty years since Independence, to the Janata alliance led by Morarji Desai. The country, momentously, had a new prime minister, and Modern, equally momentously, had a new principal.

CHAPTER EIGHT SPORT, GAMES AND PHYSIQUE MODERN AND INDIA’S SPORTING HISTORY

In 2017, Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, visited Modern School. Perhaps more excitingly for the students, former Indian cricket-team captains Kapil Dev and Mohammad Azharuddin were part of the guest list. On the occasion, the principal, Dr Vijay Datta, led the captains to the field and, amidst wild applause and cheering, launched Azharuddin over the boundary at square leg. It was a historic visit for a couple of reasons. First, because the leader of a developed nation believed the Modern School was still an institution that merited a place in his itinerary. Second, because through his actions, the principal demonstrated that sport remained at the top of the school’s agenda. Physical and mental health have always been treated as conjoined at Modern, and Datta, a fine equestrian and a first-class sportsperson, leads by example. This is in keeping with the culture at Modern and the school’s place in the sporting history of both city and country. I: SPORTS, GAMES AND HISTORY OF INDIAN CURRICULA The relationship between Modern School and sport is intimate and long standing. Modern is not identified with any one particular sport—the way in which we can identify, say, Madhyamgram High School of West Bengal, in the 1970s and 1980s, with football and its Subroto Cup wins, or the schools in south Bihar (Jharkhand)

with the national championship-winning football and hockey teams they produced in the 1990s. Many schools in the country have been nurseries of regional sporting brilliance—schools in Punjab stand out for their production line of hockey players, while Bengal, Goa and Kerala have been mainstays of football in India. What stands out at Modern, instead, is not just the achievements of its students in multiple sports but a philosophy that sport is a vital part of an all-round education. The post-Partition influx of a large Punjabi population into Delhi changed the city’s sporting culture. The refugees brought with them their enormous enthusiasm and passion for sport, and Modern seems to have had its pick of teachers with athletic pasts, including Ved Vyas, L.N. Khurana, Lajpat Rai and Swaran Singh, among many others. Modern embraced a variety of sports from the beginning, or at least as soon as it had moved to its spacious, well-equipped campus on Barakhamba Road. A strong tradition of swimming emerged at the school, as did one of hockey, which continued for two successful decades at the Vasant Vihar campus. Notwithstanding its sporting success, Modern never tried to become a sports powerhouse, the sort of school that relied on its athletic achievements to attract publicity and students. Its emphasis was on sport as an integral component in a cultured life; this hinged on the idea that sport, like dance, theatre or music, should be practiced by ardent, enthusiastic amateurs. The larger idea was for Modern students to try to excel at whatever they chose to do or try, to treat all pursuits with the seriousness required to make the most out of their abilities. The self, on this occasion, was more important than the school, in that it was considered more crucial that individual students did the best they could, than that the school itself be seen as victorious. II: KUSHTI, PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND THE MODERN SCHOOL People across time and space have grappled with the question of how games and exercise aid the development of children. At one

point in India, the relationship drawn between sport and scholarship was that of opposition, and not playing at all was seen as an indication of an academic orientation. The mind and body, in this view, were separate: trained, honed and fed in differing ways. But with the introduction of modern education in the early phase of colonial rule came formalised physical exercise and organised sport. In the early years of the Modern School, when it was located in the heart of Old Delhi, there is evidence that the school was wedded to the city’s rich tradition of pre-colonial games. A taste of that atmosphere can be gleaned from the words of Lakshmi Chand Jain, the well-known political activist, writer and former ambassador, when reminiscing about his Old Delhi childhood: A popular form of exercise for Chandni Chowk dwellers was taking a long walk past the railway tracks to the Yamuna Ghats, where Delhi’s wrestling akharas were located. The akharas were maintained by prosperous families who lived in the old city. One haunt was the akhara of Lala Lachman Das, a big merchant … We would smear oil on our bodies and have vigorous sessions of kushti, and then my last favourite part—a plunge into the Yamuna river.1 Raghubir Singh, who also grew up in Old Delhi, had, like Jain, fond memories of both swimming and local akharas. But he knew he could not start a school that offered only kushti and swimming when he was aware of a whole field of research examining the importance of physical exertion to a child’s development. Nevertheless, what the exact nature of a school curriculum for physical exercise should look like was not yet clear. It was only in 1882 that the Indian Education Commission recommended incorporating physical education in Indian schools. By 1900, team sports like football, cricket, hockey and polo were becoming popular, and local athletic pursuits, such as gilli danda, dand-

baithak, yoga and kushti, were encouraged by private groups. There was a widespread belief, spread in part by colonial propaganda, that Indians were easily subjugated because of their lack of physical vigour and their weak, poorly fed physiques. The most popular national leader at the time, Lala Lajpat Rai, had this to say: The state of physical education within the subcontinent had become a matter of national concern, a problem of the first magnitude that required all Indian men to apply themselves to its solution with all the energy and force of soul they possess. A nation that is physically weak and degenerated can never be able to preserve and maintain it.2 It was only around this time that the colonial state began to address the issue of physical education in school and college curricula. The need for a physical-education regime was not articulated properly until 1906, when the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal began to encourage a particularly vigorous fitness regimen for the youth, which probably precipitated a colonial response. This subscription to building physical strength was enthusiastically embraced by the Anushilan Samiti, an organisation that ascribed revolutionary force to body building, which was seen as necessary to prepare oneself physically to fight British rule.3 Of late, historians have associated this trend with efforts at the construction of a manly nationalism in response to the internalised colonial assessment of the weak, effeminate Bengali.4 Though not written about much, the British policy that emerged in retaliation was to distract young boys and men from congregating in local gyms and akharas and get them to play Victorian organised sports such as cricket and football instead. The attempt was to link activity on the sports field to loyalty to colonial values.5

Officials divided the physical-exercise programme in schools in two distinct categories—‘desi kasrat’ and the new ways of physical exercise introduced by the British. By the 1920s, desi kasrat was increasingly left out of the discourse when physicaleducation curricula were being planned by the education authorities for colonial schools.6 Local institutions like the Vyayam Prasarak Mandal, which was founded in 1914 in Amaravati, offered Indians an alternative. A few years later, in 1924, the institution even put in place a five-week course in physical education for advanced practitioners, at the end of which they were awarded the certificate of ‘Vyayam Visharad’. But these sorts of programmes were soon challenged by the growth of organisations like the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Founded in London in 1844, the YMCA used sport and physical exercise to promote, what it described as, a ‘muscular Christianity’ to counter the supposed apathy of Sunday-school Christianity.7 The YMCA was particularly popular in the United States. In the year 1901-1902, Elmer Berry of Springfield College in Boston visited India to assess the possibilities for the YMCA in Asia. Subsequently, the YMCA College of Physical Education, said to be the first such institution in Asia, was set up in Madras in 1920 by an American football coach Harry Crowe Buck.8 The YMCA was given plenty of encouragement by the colonial authorities. The Calcutta branch of the YMCA was even made a partner in the Bengal government’s physical-education programme:9 the director of the physical-education programme at the Calcutta YMCA was appointed by the Bengal government as the director of its official department of physical education, underlining the importance given to the YMCA and its programme.10 The YMCA’s regime of physical exercise was different from general military drills. One of the key elements of the institution’s popularity was the training in the new curriculum that it offered to teachers of physical education. In 1932, the state government established the Government College of Physical Education at Calcutta. James Buchanan was appointed as

principal. His intensive training of teachers was so highly regarded that there was a great demand for ‘Buchanan-trained’ teachers of physical education.11 A rash of physical-education institutes began to open up across India, including the Government College of Physical Education in Hyderabad (Sindh) in 1931, the Christian College of Physical Education, Lucknow, in 1932 and the Institute of Physical Education, Kandivali, Bombay, in 1938. In the meantime, some significant developments were taking place in Punjab. Here, the responsibility of designing and implementing physical-exercise programmes was not outsourced to any outside agency like the YMCA. Instead, an official of the University of Punjab was appointed as the director of the physicaleducation programme. Physical fitness was described by the university as not just a product of exercise and sports training but also was to be achieved through the medico-psychological record keeping of the students to ‘help them develop their personal health as well as improve general physical health’.12 In 1927, the Department of Physical Training was established in Punjab to improve the ‘physique and health of the students’ and to introduce military training into the college curriculum.13 The Punjab government became the first provincial government to appoint a civilian as its director for physical education. Henry Lall was the first director of physical education and was succeeded by Guru Dutt Sondhi in 1927. The job was handsomely remunerated for the time, and required incumbents to supervise and inspect a department entrusted to ‘promote the health and physical efficiency by means of “a play for all” programme, including games and sports for the normally healthy and active, regulated physical activities, including corrective and body building exercises for the sub-normal and health instructions for all.’14 A separate department of physical training (PT) was established for women in 1941 with a separate woman director. In 1942, the state university even conducted an analysis of the physical standards of affiliated colleges.

III: MODERN SCHOOL ORGANISES ITS SPORTING REGIMEN For Raghubir Singh, sport was a key element of his vision for the school and the wholesome and full lives he wanted his students to go on to live. Modern School drew from the PT approaches in both Bengal and Punjab, synthesising them into a programme that reflected Raghubir Singh’s love and enthusiasm for both physical robustness and organised sport. The long hours the pupils spent on school premises also meant there was space to incorporate physical education into the schedule. The Modern School chose a path that managed to combine the physical and sporting culture of Old Delhi with the curriculum developed by the government in alliance with the YMCA. The school’s initial forays into a PT curriculum were led by army instructors, since the YMCA training centres had yet to produce their first batch of teachers, but in later years, the school not only hired YMCA instructors, it also sent teachers to the YMCA for training. Raghubir Singh invested in a fifty-metre, Olympic-size swimming pool, a facility so rare it became iconic, a marker of Modern’s ambition. Horse riding, too, became an integral part of the school’s physical-education programme. For Modern pupils, learning to care for and develop a relationship with a horse, and learning to take responsibility for the condition of the stables, was as much an education as learning to ride, whether as a hobby or in competition. Apart from the colonial diet of cricket, football and hockey, Modern students enjoyed gymnastics and even trekking in the mountains as part of the physical-education curriculum. While sport for girls was separate, the house system meant that girls too were an essential part of sporting events and earned success for their house. The joint events, even if girls and boys competed separately, ensured that the sporting atmosphere was not as male-centric as was unfortunately the case in the sporting arena. The antecedents of Modern’s sporting culture, as noted earlier, were the programmes developed at Government College, Lahore and Punjab University. These influences were evident in Modern’s early emphasis on swimming and riding. The equine

influence was typical of the princes’ schools in Ajmer and Rajkot and English-style public schools, in which sport offered the necessary preliminary training to boys who would go on to become officers in the army and the upper-class allies of British colonialism. Polo and cricket were prominent on the curriculum, as was learning to ride. Modern took its love for swimming from Punjab University. The activity enjoyed an extraordinary popularity on the university campus from the early years of the twentieth century. Early each morning, Modern students underwent compulsory PT drills for about forty minutes before classes started. In the school’s initial years, there were few students, and the school’s physical life was limited to drills and other forms of PT, with games left up to the students themselves to organise and play. From the very beginning, though, the school seemed prepared for the time when it would have more students, and it invested in PT teachers with sporting pasts, and involved prominent doctors N.K. and S.K. Sen in the monitoring of student health and development from both a mental and a physical standpoint. S.K. Sen, who would go on to become one of the country’s most decorated doctors, had been a student at the Lahore Medical College, and so was familiar with the new culture of physical education that became popular in the government institutions of Punjab. Delhi’s curriculum was modelled on the lines in Punjab, since it was for all practical purposes an education district of the province of Punjab. Dr Sen’s experience was thus very useful in helping the school devise medical schemes as per the requirements of the new PT curriculum. When the school began in Daryaganj, the students played games and took part in various physical activities. As student numbers grew, the teachers began to take students out of Delhi on more adventurous and physically challenging trips. And on the Barakhamba Road campus, though student numbers still belied the size of the school’s impressive campus, inter-house competition was intense. The school’s day-boarding philosophy meant students spent long hours at school, and sport could be

given ample time. The school’s sporting history can be split into three broad phases: the first takes us from the founding of the school up to 1948 or so and the arrival of MNK; the second phase is the decade and a half or so from 1963–1977, when the school timings changed; and the third begins in the 1980s, when the sporting culture gradually stabilised, with routine sporting events organised and the school winning at different tournaments in Delhi and in the country. This was also the time when cricket was fast taking over space in the nation’s sporting imagination, and at the same time, individual sports were becoming significant in one’s sporting choices. The first PT instructor at Modern was Bhagat Behari Lal, and once he left, the school turned to the Delhi Fort commanding officer to send along instructors to help the students with their exercises. In 1929, the school found S. Muinuddin, who was later sent to receive further training at the YMCA in Madras. Muinuddin continued in his post till 1937, when he left Modern to become a physical instructor at the Doon School.An army corporal, R.S. Tappenden, replaced Muinuddin and stayed at Modern for three years before leaving to accept a job at the Scindia School. Rameswar Dayal, who had trained abroad as a PT teacher, joined the school next and lasted in the post until 1945, when he, too, took another job, with the Delhi Education Services. It was perhaps a mark of the importance Raghubir Singh and Kamala Bose placed on hiring the best possible teachers that left the school so susceptible to its staff being poached. But when Dayal left, the school found it difficult to replace him during wartime. On 25 July 1944, Kamala Bose wrote directly to James Buchanan, the colonial government’s director of physical education: I was looking for a physical instructor for this institution and Mr. Peaker has suggested your name as someone who can help me in the matter. I am enclosing herewith a copy of the advertisement that I have just sent to various papers.

The PI whom we had, had his training abroad for 5 years. He has been taken over by the Education Department on the 15th instant. We naturally wish one with similar qualifications to replace him. I am sending you some school literature which will give you an idea of the kind of work we are trying to do.15 Buchanan had, in the meantime, left his previous position and been appointed to the Directorate of Training and Organisation of the Bengal Home Guards. He responded with alacrity, if also a little regret: Reference your letter date 25th July, 1944. As I am now the director of training Bengal Home Guards, I have handed your letter to Mr. K.N. Ray B.Sc. who is officiating as Physical Director, Bengal. I think it is almost impossible to find for you someone who had training abroad. I know of no one in this province anyhow. Even if you are willing to accept one with Bengal qualifications, I am afraid you will not be able to find a really good man at present. All the best men have gone to the Army, the Home Guards, and the civic guard, the Air Raid Precaution force or the Civil Pioneer Force and cannot be set free until the end of the War. I hope however, that Mr. Roy will be able to give you someone who will be good enough to carry you on until the war ends. 16 Soon after Bose received Buchanan’s reply, she received an application for the post from an S.K. Bhattacharya, who was a trained PT instructor working in a government college. Her letter had been passed on to him by Buchanan’s replacement, suggesting they were sincere about finding her a teacher.

Bhattacharya was called to Delhi for an interview on 18 August 1944. He responded to this request with a letter enquiring if the job would be permanent, pointing out that he would need a residence in Delhi, and asking if the salary would be sufficient to cover all the additional expenses he would undergo.17 To put Bhattacharya’s demands in context, most qualified people at the time worked for the government, and to leave secure government employment for a job in the private sector required a substantial leap of faith. The interview must have gone well, though, because Bhattacharya stayed with Modern for the rest of his career. The forty-minute, early-morning PT session was compulsory for both students and teachers. It was good for morale and camaraderie. The session, supervised by an instructor, included free-hand exercises, agility exercises and apparatus exercises (including the vaulting horse, the parallel bars, the horizontal bars, the wall bars and balance beams).18 Adding to the camaraderie among students and teachers were the frequent trips to camp and trek and the guaranteed presence and support of Raghubir Singh at every significant football or cricket match played by the school at every age group. IV: NCC AND THE LINKS TO THE SERVICES In time, the school added a Bharat Scouts and Guides programme. Writing in 1970, Modernite Prakash Narain, who went on to become chief justice of the Delhi High Court, recalled the outsize importance attached to the scouts and guides: In my days part of training as scouts was rifle training with .22 rifles which probably the school was permitted to use even in those days of unrest and of the national movement against the British. I cannot remember but with pride that in those days and year after year the school scout troupe was selected for distributing poppies and holding the wreaths that were laid by the British

Viceroy, the Commander in chief etc., on the war memorial which today is known as India Gate, on 11 November every year which was the Armistice Day after the first World War. We used to march from the school to India Gate and there stand in an honoured place, next to British troops while four of us, and on two occasions, I being one of them, standing in front of the Arch of the India Gate holding the wreath, waiting for the Viceroy to walk down, take it from our hands to place at the foot of the Arch.19 In 1948, on the advice of the newly set up H.N. Kunzru Committee, the NCC and Auxiliary Cadets Corps were set up for the schools and colleges of newly independent India. The NCC emerged out of the shadow of the University Officers Training Corps and was a natural outlet for Indian students who might otherwise have joined the scouts and guides. Modern School students were accustomed to quasi-military training, having had physical instructors with army backgrounds lead their daily PT sessions. When the NCC was established, they took to it like ducks to water. Within just a couple of years, the school was recognised for producing some of the finest cadet teams in the country. Reporting on the school’s performance one year, the principal noted: The NCC & the ACC form an important part of the general and physical training of the school. It is a national movement and we lay great stress on it. We have three wings, Army, Navy and Air Force, and all the three wings took part in the Combined Public Schools and King George’s Schools Camp held at Poona last December … The Modern School won the Best Troop Banner once again and we were declared winners in Drill and Aero-modelling competitions.20

That year, Modern’s army troop leader, Gursatinder Singh, was declared the best cadet of the camp and was also declared the best junior-division NCC cadet in India.21 The NCC found that the school was an ideal institution, imbued with national spirit. The students at Modern were equally enthusiastic about the NCC. An NCC national camp held at Lucknow in 1953 was vividly described by an excited Modernite: Last year, our average score was 36 but this year our average rose to 59.43 thanks to good shooting by all the boys and exceptionally good shooting by Trp/Sgt Surinder Randhawa and Cadet Subhash Sethi, both of whom obtained ½” in the grouping event and 24 out of 25 in the application event. We were placed 2nd in the shooting competition, the winner having an average of 59.84.22 The smartness of Modern’s student cadets and their pride in their overall performance is also evident in another report written by one of the team members: On the same day as the shooting competition, the eight boys of the guards, Surinder Randhawa, Prem Singh, Kailash Kohli, Kuldip Sahdev, Vippinjit Singh, Lalit Chawla, Subhash Sethi and Dilip Sen really put up a good show … Each boy had to be on 4-hour duty that day. Whenever a senior officer visited the camp, the first thing he did was to inspect the guards. All the visitors remarked that our guard was very smart. The same eight went on to win the Guard Mounting completions after the toughest competition possible.23 The proud Kailash Kohli, who rose to be a vice admiral in the Indian Navy, was a student of class nine. He also reported that the school’s drill performance was judged the best in the

competition and that it won the trophy for best turnout. He wrote that the cadets looked sharp, noting that after a ‘lot of good work with spit and polish: so good was our turnout that our dull khaki was looking much brighter than the navy’s glamorous white uniform’.24 Given Modern’s commitment to nation-building and service, it’s not surprising that its students shone as NCC cadets. Inevitably, given their education, many Modern students ended up serving in the military. Starting with Anant Singh, part of the school’s very first batch in 1928, who ended his career as a brigadier, the school has provided the Indian defence services with some of their finest officers almost every year since 1947.25 These include two air marshals Satish Chandra Lal and Manmohan Singh, of the 1943 and 1946 batches respectively, and one chief of air staff P.C. Lal, of the 1933 batch. Sashi Kant Dang of the 1946 batch was one of those martyred in the 1965 war. Thus, from 1948, when the curriculum was restructured and the NCC was created, Modern not only found a new avenue to persist with its commitment to national service, it enriched it further by ensuring a steady stream of students joining the services. The period between the 1940s and 1960s was a cultural renaissance for the school, as we discussed earlier, and the students who joined the services brought with them that experience of fervid experimentation in the arts, of a country searching for its voice, for a way to express its most profound cultural ideals. How affirming it must have felt to then serve and defend those ideals.26 V: INDEPENDENCE AND NEW PHYSICAL EDUCATIONAL CURRICULA To evolve and standardise a physical welfare and education regime for students across the country, a committee chaired by the archaeologist Dr Tara Chand was appointed in May 1948. The

committee suggested a three-year degree course, the latter part of which would be split so that students could choose to specialise in either physical education or recreation. Those who wanted to specialise further could opt for a year-long postgraduate course, recommended the committee. While these recommendations were intended to mainly cover physical education at the university level or for competitive athletes, it was the Secondary Education Commission under Lakshmanaswamy Mudaliar, which took up the issue of physical education at the secondary-school level. The commission recommended that the physical-education curriculum be so designed that it suit the individual’s capacity to endure. This was a major breakthrough from the military-like insistence on physical education for everyone that was stressed on by colonial schools. The commission also recommended that teachers ‘below the age of 40 should actively participate in many of the physical activities of students and thus make them a lively part of the school programme’.27 It added that ‘full records of physical activities of the students must be maintained.’28 It urged that physical-education teachers be treated at par with other teachers and be encouraged to teach subjects such as ‘physiology’ and ‘hygiene’. It also asked all parties to expand sporting facilities.29 It was the Central Advisory Board of Physical Education and Recreation and the Secondary Education Commission that proclaimed for the first time in India that physical education should be considered as an essential and integral part of general education—a philosophy that was acknowledged much earlier by the rest of the world. Of course, Modern was ahead of the curve in India, already some way towards developing and applying the model suggested by the commission. Now, as per the commission’s recommendations, the school separated physicaleducation classes from sports and NCC training. The school also made sport and physical education part of the overall education of students, with inter-house competitions enabling intense but healthy and widespread competition, separate from the pride and school spirit students felt when the school competed in state and

nationwide tournaments. A tradition of reporting on school performances in the sports field and on performances in the internal house competitions also embedded sport inextricably into school culture, helping to create and feed a committed audience. The school already kept records of the students’ physical and mental health, a commission recommendation that few other schools followed or had the resources to follow. And, finally, physical-education teachers at Modern were well integrated into the school’s mainstream staff culture. This last point owes a lot to MNK’s belief that games and physical education were integral to school life. He often encouraged coaches and physical-education instructors to teach academic subjects, to become more involved with the general teacher pool, and to show students that sport would not evolve, as it did at some schools, into a separate culture accessible only to athletes. VI: SPORTS AND IDEA OF COMPETITION As various government committees puzzled over the shape of Indian education, it was concluded at one such meeting that school and university teams should be encouraged to compete on the sports field. A federation was established in Calcutta in 1954 to oversee such competitions.The Ministry of Education drafted a model constitution for the federation, according to which it was to provide help to schools in bringing the best out of their student athletes, with the goal to produce athletes capable of competing at the highest levels, including the Olympics. The federation’s first national meet was held at Pachmarhi in Madhya Pradesh in May 1955, and only seven states participated. The education ministry also prepared a constitution for the states’ sports councils in 1956. According to this, the councils’ main objective was to plan the allround development of all games and sport in the states. By taking these steps, the central government’s education department was attempting to lay the foundation for a wholesome integration of the

culture of sport in schools and colleges. As a result of these efforts, many tournaments soon began to mushroom across the terrain, and the Delhi state inter-school tournament became one such event. Even before this, the Olympic Committee of Delhi had already organised a meet for athletes across Delhi. From 1937 onwards, Modern School was a regular competitor in athletics, boxing, and swimming events, with its students emerging as regular medallists. A student at the school, Shujaul Islam, for example, was a regular prize winner from 1940 to 1944. In 1944, he won almost every event that he took part in—the high jump, the running broad jump, the 100 m, 200 m, and 400 m races, the 400 m hurdle, and various swimming events. Over the years, Modern won various illustrious prizes as a school too: the Sardar Sobha Singh Challenge Shield, the Lady Ghaznavi Challenge Cup, the Sardarni Bahadur Singh Challenge Cup, and the Mrs B.R. Kagal Challenge Cup, among other trophies.30 Thus, by the time the Delhi state inter-school championship began and its Nehru tournament and vijay pataka, or championship banner, came into existence, the grounds for participating in such competitive tournaments had already been laid. There was a growing sports tradition in Delhi schools, and Modern was leading the pack. Raghubir Singh was not the only sports enthusiast among the school’s luminaries. Sir Sobha Singh, too, loved sport; the doctor S.K. Sen was a swimmer, and MNK had a range of athletic achievements to his name. The emergence of schools like the Delhi Public School helped foster rivalries. Its founder-principal, Reverend J.D. Tytler, was a sports fan, and later headed various sports associations, including the Delhi Olympic Association and the Delhi Weightlifting Association, and also served as vice president of the city’s gymnastics body. When Tytler founded another school, Summer Fields, one of his first decisions was to hire an outstanding sports coach. St Columba’s also had a strong sporting programme, catalysed by the traditions and enthusiasm of Delhi’s new Punjabi population.

At Modern, the house system, once devoted to theatre and dance, seemed consumed by sport, feeding the school’s teams with committed, competitive players. MNK’s involvement in national sports administration would have also spurred much sporting activity and ambition at Modern. He was sent as an observer and asked to prepare a report on the state of Indian sport, particularly hockey, at the 1960 Rome Olympics, which enhanced Modern’s prestige in the sporting world. The decades from 1950–1970 were thus an exciting time to be involved in Indian sport, and the Modern School had long caught the bug. The school particularly excelled at gymnastics, swimming and athletics. In the 1950s, students like Deepak Narang, Anup Kothari, Raghu Vatsa and Kamal Sharma emerged as first-class sportsmen. Vinod Dikshit was both the school’s cricket captain and among its most hardworking footballers. The teams Dikshit led, with the likes of Sukumar Pillai alongside him, would often take on teams far more senior in age and experience, including college teams such as those at St Stephen’s. After Dikshit came a roster of composed, capable cricketers, including Vinay Awasthy, Dennis Shukla and George Zachariah, all of whom were selected to represent north India in the Cooch Behar trophy—quite a coup for the school! Despite this success in other sports, swimming was Modern’s forte. The 1950s were marked by the presence of the Don, MNK, stalking the swimming arena, with or without coach L.N. Khurana, and motivating practising swimmers, who quickly went on to dominate the Delhi scene. In both the Delhi Olympic Association meets and the Delhi state inter-school tournaments, Modern’s swimming teams were undisputed champions and serial winners, with St Coumba’s as their closest rival. Modern’s top swimmers, including Sushil Chowdhry, Vinod Dayal, Proful Jaitley and the ace youngster Nareswar Dayal, became known faces on the tournament circuit. Anup Kothari, an outstanding overall athlete, ended his glittering school career by making the swim team. Modern could also take considerable credit for making gymnastics an organised sport in Delhi. Sardar Swaran Singh,

who forged a national reputation as a coach, joined Modern after twenty-two years as a coach at Lahore’s Sanatan Dharma College. He was known as a tough taskmaster, though the proof of his methods was in the winning. At the 1951 inter-school championships, Modern’s Suresh Chand was the tournament’s golden boy, astonishing the audience with his performance on the parallel bars. By the mid-1950s, Modern’s gymnasts began to gain an international reputation, with Sham Lal, the school’s outstanding gymnast, picked to compete in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. Ina Dhanda, too, was an exceptional gymnast, and she was picked on the Delhi team that competed in Bangalore that same year. Other gymnasts who made names for themselves in this period were Ashok Dhawan and Narinder Dutt. But if the school was sweeping the prizes at national swimming and gymnastics competitions, M.N. Kapur had a special place in his heart for hockey. In the mid-1950s, the school’s hockey coach, Lajpat Rai, was poached by the National Defence Academy, Khadakwasla. Despite the sterling efforts of the fine players Rai left behind, the likes of Ravindra Jauhar, Arun Shourie and Datar Singh, the school never really recovered from losing Rai. It was only in the 1980s, at its Vasant Vihar campus, that Modern once again became a hockey powerhouse. VII: SPORTING ALONE, 1962–1975 Both Virendra Singh and MNK believed that Modern’s role was to create an enlightened citizenry. They considered sport an essential part of becoming enlightened, of learning how to respect opponents and being able to both win and lose with grace. This was a spirit MNK knew from his own efforts as a sportsman and Virendra Singh learned from the army. When Virendra Singh was charged with revitalising the NCC, it brought the school even closer to national-level activities in the field of physical education and sport. By this time, Modern was thoroughly enmeshed in the national establishment: it hosted major tournaments, such as the

Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Hockey Tournament in 1964, and twenty-five years later, Modern School, Vasant Vihar, organised the Lala Raghubir Singh Hockey Tournament. In 1951, when the Asian Games were organised in Delhi, they were a great boost to the city’s sporting infrastructure. Modernites played a key role, especially MNK, who started to become involved in both local and national sports administration. Until then, the city’s sporting reputation had been mixed. There was little organised sport except for some club cricket and schoollevel football, but MNK knew from his experience in Punjab how to organise games and create and sustain enthusiasm for them. So when the National Council of Sports was set up, it was natural that MNK should serve on it. In this capacity, he was privy to information about sporting activity all over the country. The ancillary benefits for the school were apparent, with its talented athletes and coaches finding opportunities at the national level. As we saw in an earlier chapter, MNK arranged for the young Virender Pahuja to attend the swimming programme at the National Institute of Sports in Patiala, paving the way for a coach who would become something of a legend. In school tournaments, Modern was dominant, winning every trophy and recruiting the best players. It was not above poaching, stealing Abhay Kant Chaturvedi, a brilliant hockey player and coach, away from St Columba’s, where he had enjoyed considerable success. Modern also appointed Phool Chand Chowdhry, who had played for Uttar Pradesh in the Ranji Trophy, as cricket coach. The facilities and coaching standards at Modern were, arguably, the best available in Delhi. MNK’s leadership of the school and his presence at the highest levels of sporting administration in the country coincided with a golden period of sport—not just at Modern but India generally—a time when sports administration had not been taken over by politicians and bureaucrats more concerned about perks and privileges than the welfare or performance of athletes.31

VIII: HORIZONS BROADEN, VASANT VIHAR JOINS THE LEAGUE Two developments between 1974 and 1983 had a long-term impact on Indian sports culture. Just three years before, in 1971, the Indian cricket team had beaten the outstanding West Indies team, the latter known for its fearsome pace bowling attack. A new superstar of Indian sport emerged, subsequently, in the small, unassuming shape of Sunil Gavaskar. He was joined by other cricketing heroes, like the elegant G.R. Viswanath, whose wristy grace thrilled the crowds. Blessed with a winning team and compelling players, cricket began to dominate the sporting landscape, and by 1974, many of the matches were being played at the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium grounds in Delhi. Cricket’s popularity in India was also influenced by the Kerry Packer phenomenon of commercial, gladiatorial cricket in the late 1970s and the resumption of India–Pakistan matches. The Indian team went to Pakistan, followed by a return visit of the Pakistan team led by Asif Iqbal—a high point of subcontinental diplomacy as much as cricket. The rise of Delhi batsman Mohinder Amarnath gave the crowds in Delhi a local interest, and the cricket played between the two teams was of a high standard, though the Pakistanis had arrived without Imran Khan and the reverse swing of Sarfraz Nawaz. MNK had left Modern School by the time the Australians arrived in India, shorn of such stars as Dennis Lillee, Greg Chappell and Doug Walters, though the old warhorse Bob Simpson was back after a decade to lead the team. As the series commenced, the new Modern principal helped lay the new turf on the school’s ground, making it one of the best in the city. It attracted cricketers from all over the city, and one of these, Kirti Jha Azad, a 1976 batch Modernite and the son of Bhagwat Jha Azad, a leading Congressman and the chief minister of Bihar, would become a star on the Indian national team, alongside Kapil Dev from nearby Chandigarh. Together they would travel to Pakistan for the 1978-1979 series and less than half a decade later would be mainstays of the team that won the 1983 cricket

World Cup, the first time the Indian cricket team could legitimately describe themselves as the world’s very best. Many cricket enthusiasts of the time described Modern’s new cricket pitch as a lucky charm. They still reminisce about watching Kirti Azad lob away the city’s spin bowlers’ efforts to the boundary for mighty sixes. The competition at the time was fierce, and Modern supplied many good cricketers to the city’s club, university and zonal teams. The Barakhamba Road campus, which was already a centre of school cricket, became a centre of Delhi cricket. Modern, Barakhamba’s own team was now joined by the team from the Vasant Vihar campus, with the camaraderie among both the teams adding to the good feeling around the school’s sporting culture. Academy cricket was only nascent at the time, so school cricket ruled the roost, the teams and players exciting much more passion than the club teams could command. In a hint at the future, though, there were already two academies in Delhi, manned by Tarak Sinha and Gursharan Singh, and soon, young cricketers would prefer to play for and train at academies than for their school teams. But given Modern’s central position in Delhi culture, its extensive facilities, and its sporting tradition, it was inevitable that it would remain at the heart of the city’s flourishing cricket scene. Gautam Gambhir would be another Modernite who would go on to play a vital role in winning a cricket World Cup for India. The second development was the revival of Indian hockey. In the 1973 World Cup, India lost to the Netherlands, the hosts, in a penalty shootout. But at the very next World Cup in Malaysia in 1975, India became world champions by beating Pakistan at the Stadium Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur. In 1980, India won hockey gold at the Moscow Olympics. The Shivaji Stadium in Delhi was at the heart of this revitalisation of Indian hockey. For once, though, the Barakhamba Road campus of Modern School could not be said to be at the forefront of school hockey, and instead, it was up to the new school in Vasant Vihar to step up. Its beginnings, on a barren, dusty ground, were not promising. The school was not the full-day school that was so important to the Modern ethos—the

long hours binding students to the school in a familial relationship —and was located in a distant corner of the city. It was hard to imagine how this campus could emerge from the shadow of its much older, distinguished sibling on Barakhamba Road. But the Vasant Vihar campus had the benefit of an immensely dedicated staff fuelled by the Modern School spirit and energy. This energy was most manifest in the way in which the school encouraged sport. Hockey, with its constellation of Indian stars—the speedy Zafar Iqbal, Mohammed Shah, with his dribbling and magical reverse flick, and others like the brilliant Ravinder Pal Singh, M.K. Kaushik and V. Baskaran—was born again in the imaginations of Indian sports fans. The women’s hockey team was earning its own fans, winning gold at the Asian Games in Delhi in 1982, with the likes of Prem Maya Sonir and the captain, Eliza Nelson, becoming household names. To make its mark, the young Vasant Vihar campus understandably alighted on hockey. The school was fortunate to have a core of good, young players who had moved up from the Junior Modern campus, for the coaches to mould. The coaches, led by Anand Seth, built an excellent girls team, drawing on the school’s best athletes, turning track and field champions into hockey champions as well.32 Delhi alone, at the time, could boast of seven hockey tournaments, and the Vasant Vihar boys won almost all of them on more than one occasion. Apart from the impressive tournament victories, another crowning achievement of the Vasant Vihar branch was to organise the Lala Raghubir Singh Hockey Tournament from 1989 to 1995, attracting the best teams from across the country and even three foreign teams. The school hired the Shivaji Stadium for the tournament and covered the visiting teams’ expenses.33 When Modern celebrated its platinum jubilee in 1995, the tournament was a highlight, even though the Vasant Vihar team lost in the semifinals. Despite the buzz created by this tournament, the government’s sports authorities failed to capitalise. Had there

been some funding on offer, no doubt the school could have continued to host the tournament as a showcase of Indian youth hockey. Inevitably, given the authorities’ laxness, the momentum hockey enjoyed was frittered away, and the game slid into a long period of irrelevance. Modern, too, appeared to lose interest in hockey, which was dismissed by the new social classes as a sweaty game for poor people. The culture of football, too, which had once attracted the attention of the whole city with its multiple local and renowned tournaments like the Subroto Cup, the DCM Trophy and the Durand Cup, lay dead or dying.34 Without a vibrant football culture, school football also suffered. Modern School, Barakhamba, tried to revive the interest in football by starting a football academy under the coach Syed Shahid, the son of the legendary Indian coach of the 1960s Syed Abdul Rahim, popularly known as Rahim Saab, of the Hyderabad Police. B.K. Baweja, who was with the school from 1964–2006, played a critical role in keeping aloft the sporting spirit of the school. The branches of the Modern School are still some of the major players in the city’s football tournaments, like the Jauhar Cup. Meanwhile, cricket has stolen all the limelight and institutional support that other sports, too, might have enjoyed.35 IX: A NEW CENTURY AND NEW IDEAS ABOUT PHYSICAL FITNESS AND SPORTS India’s accelerated economic progress after liberalisation in the early 1990s has meant a new approach to sport. Modern’s students are now at the cutting edge of consumer society. Sport has felt the effect, becoming yet another aspect of lifestyle. Individuals, particularly those with means, as many Modern students are, feel free to choose their pastimes without necessarily seeking institutional sanction. Many Modern students, for instance, shine in golf tournaments, albeit as private individuals, playing tournaments backed and promoted by other private parties. It is harder to inculcate the community spirit

necessary to excel at games like football and hockey when the presiding culture is a celebration of individual choice. Cricket dominates the Indian sporting horizon in large part because it is a commercial behemoth that continues to attract all the casual viewership and so all the capital and investment. Sport is no longer seen as a facet of nation-building. Rather, many appear to believe the period for nation-building is over, and it is now time to assert the primacy of the nation. It is natural then that such a bullish approach would prefer to invest in and associate itself with sports in which success is a given, in which national superiority can be brandished like a weapon.36 Cricket fits the bill, to the detriment of every other sport. In this climate, sport is no longer a vehicle for self-improvement or a part of a holistic education, but an opportunity for flag-waving and brandishing success. The definition of success has changed, too, so a losing effort is not to be admired. Rather, winning is everything.37 Formal sport in the nineteenth century in India was a means to redirect the energies of young men, to inculcate physical fitness and a certain loyalty to the country’s imperial authorities. After Independence, sport became a nation-making exercise, a means to spread discipline, community feeling and a sense of healthy competition. The Modern School was at the forefront of this exercise. It led the way in connecting physical health to mental health, in the belief that strong minds reside in strong bodies. Modern, it can be said with no exaggeration, played a major role in making school sport a vibrant part of Delhi culture. The presence of two Modern teams—Vasant Vihar and Barakhamba Road—still gives school competitions a sense of continuity, of ties to the glory days of school sport. Competition among Delhi schools in those days did become significantly more intense. But what can seem to be healthy, can also curdle quickly. As the writer Sean McCollum has noted: Great rivalries represent sports at their most dramatic. These contests and the histories behind them can

inspire the best in athletes and bring together communities in shared enthusiasm like few other public events can. This is shown in venues large and small, from national pride during the Olympic Games to the community spirit on display when entire small towns turn out to see their high school teams compete. But when fans lose perspective on the purpose and relative importance of sports, rivalries turn rotten. At the interscholastic level, that rot can spread into the school community. When marred by vandalism, insulting chants, threats, and violence—in the name of team spirit —competition threatens to wreck the finest sports have to offer. It can poison the overall climate of a league or school, creating an atmosphere where harassment and bullying may be ignored or overlooked.38 Both the teams that now represent Modern have historical achievements and spirit to draw on, an understanding of how sport can be used constructively, how it is an aid to education rather than an end in itself, in which only winning matters. But it is also probably true that in the new context Modern finds it harder to inculcate sporting attitudes in its students who, influenced by the wider culture, associate sport with individual glory. This is notwithstanding the extraordinary and laudable achievements of international-calibre individual talents that have emerged from Modern School in recent years, such as the chess player Tania Sachdeva, an international master and women’s grand master. There is, therefore, a tension between the school’s belief in its inherited responsibility to enrich the collective life of the citizenry and the message spread by consumer culture of enriching the self, of looking out for the self, even at the expense of others. Can Modern, in this atmosphere, continue to imbue its students with the understanding that every individual champion contributes most importantly to the well-being of the social self? The new century remains an open space for such questions to be

settled. With a principal like Vijay Datta, who personifies the spirit and ethics of sport as traditionally practised at Modern, the answer to this question is likely to be in the affirmative.

CHAPTER NINE MODERN AND THE IDEA OF TECHNOLOGY

Technology, and at times the lack of it, played a critical role in the life of Indian society even before the advent of colonial rule. The place that technology occupied in the evolution of Indian society was brought to the fore by historians such as the polymath D.D. Kosambi, who pioneered a way to connect material remains with textual evidence to create an entirely new understanding of India’s history.1 In an amplification of this kind, historian R.S. Sharma showed how it was the first use of iron on a large scale that helped the Aryans in India to keep moving east and settle large swathes of forest in the region for agricultural purposes. This made production at more than just subsistence level possible, enabling a surplus that, in turn, helped develop structures of trade and eventually the state.2 The possession of iron mines and the use of iron were key to the Magadha kingdom’s expansion into an empire. It was iron-based Magadhan technology that propelled their advancement. There has been considerable scholarly speculation about the medieval Indian technology used to build massive temple complexes, large dams and sophisticated irrigation systems, among other innovations. While some of these technologies might have been imported, they were Indianised, and are still prominent components of the Indian production system.3 There is broad consensus that colonial rule, from the beginning, had an antagonistic relationship with Indian craft and technology.4 Britain’s industrial revolution was subsidised in part

by its dominion over India and other colonies, including Ireland.5 India’s de-industrialisation under colonial occupation led to an unprecedented transfer of wealth and reduced India into a consumer of imported technology. Moreover, in no way were these imported technologies disseminated or diffused so as to create a larger technical universe;6 while India may have been subjected to British education, there was little sharing of technology or knowledge. Britain may have industrialised, but all the power and wealth it accrued was not reflected in the economic conditions of its colonies. Since the nineteenth century, the Indian intelligentsia were persistent in their calls for India to pull itself free of the trap of backwardness, which, they said, had made her a colony of the British. They saw that Indians, too, could benefit from a modern education along scientific lines, an acknowledgement that acquiring an understanding of new technology was of supreme importance.7 It is precisely here that a line was drawn between the colonial state and the Indian people. The former had no intention of allowing Indians to appropriate superior technology. Thus, the Jamalpur Locomotive Workshop, one of the world’s most advanced railway workshops—it trained people (known as Jamalpore hands) from Japan to Kenya, and became a pioneer of the railway in those regions—trained Indians in only the lower levels of skills, while reserving higher skill sets for the British.8 After 1857, all the key technologically advanced and strategic installations of British rule were reserved for the British and, later, for the Anglo-Indians, albeit the latter were, again, confined to the lower reaches of skills and responsibilities.9 The most advanced technologies of governance in the empire—artillery and locomotives—were controlled entirely along racial lines.10 The debate on industrialisation began to take shape in the latter part of the nineteenth century as a nascent entrepreneurial class emerged, hungry for new technologies, including managerial technology. How was India to develop? How was it to secure its industrial future? These became urgent questions, which the

nationalist business class strove to answer.11 Industrialists like Walchand Hirachand, the Tatas and the Sarabhais emerged as nation-builders, eager to encourage indigenous technical and scientific endeavour.12 I: TECHNICAL EDUCATION, THE OFFICIAL RESPONSE These discussions found expression in the education sector. The educational system that the British organised in India had an antitechnology bias; they imposed an education designed to neglect the entrepreneurial and technical talent of Indians. The issue was crystallised in the early debates between the Anglicists and the Orientalists, which have been briefly mentioned in an earlier chapter. The Anglicists’ demand, if not an insistence, was for the technological and scientific education of the West to be replicated in India. This was based on their belief that it was English education which would enable Indians to follow Western advances in science and technology, while so-called Oriental learning was full of loquacious vacuities, poetics and sophistry. In 1854, Charles Wood, the president of the East India Company’s Board of Control, sent to Britain a list of recommendations to spread English learning in India—the famous ‘Wood’s despatch’: Our attention should now be directed to a consideration, if possible, still more important, and one which has hitherto been, we are bound to admit, too much neglected, namely, how useful and practical knowledge, suited to every station in life, may be best conveyed to the great mass of the people who are utterly incapable of obtaining any education worthy of the name by their own maiden effort; and we desire to see the active measures of Government more especially directed for the future to this object, for the attainment of which we are ready to sanction a considerable increase of expenditure.13

When soon after this, colleges and universities were established, while law, medicine and civil engineering received some attention, technical and industrial education was largely ignored. In 1882, the Indian Education Commission advised the introduction of a ‘modern’ component into high schools and the establishment of industrial schools. The resolution passed by the Government of India on 23 October 1884 said that the ‘bifurcation of studies suggested by the Committee was of special importance. Every variety of study should be encouraged, which may serve to direct the attention of native youth to industrial and commercial pursuits’.This task was taken up by the viceroy, Lord Dufferin, whose home secretary, A.P. MacDonnell, prepared a memorandum that analysed the prospects for the growth of technical education. He found that, barring Madras, no province had taken initiatives in the direction of technical education. He also found that engineering education in Calcutta, Madras and Roorkee was too theoretical, of little practical use, and that the colleges were largely isolated from the broader education system. The memorandum recommended the teaching of science and drawing in primary school. But in its Resolution of Education in June 1888, the Government of India refused to establish technical schools for fear that they would aggravate the problem of educated unemployment.14 When Lord Curzon became viceroy at the turn of the century, he quashed provincial efforts to improve and broaden the scope of technical education in India. He was a centraliser to the core. Eventually, in 1908 at the Ootacamund Industrial Conference, it was recommended that technical education be placed under the control of a director of industries and that the College of Engineering in Madras be expanded.15 The Madras government even established a Department of Industries, but John Morley, the secretary of state for India, and the hero of the Liberals, disallowed the pioneering of industries on the grounds that state funds should not be used beyond familiarising people with ‘improvements in the methods of production as modern science’.

In such a context, Indian business and political leaders took it upon themselves to advance the study of science and technology.16 Leaders of the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal started a college of engineering and technology in 1907 in Jadavpur. Other national schools and colleges that were founded around the same time collapsed ignominiously, but the technical college flourished, which in itself offers proof of the desire among Indians for such an education. Around this time, the colonial government was advised to permit wider access to technical education, in part because it was thought it might help distract and occupy those who might otherwise be agitating for freedom from British rule. But the government remained adamant, and India’s technological backwardness was perpetuated. As late as 1919, the British colonial government continued to argue that one engineering college for the whole of India was enough, because there was only need for about a hundred civil engineers. Government services were reserved for the Imperial Services, other superior services for Europeans, and in the provincial services, only nine to ten appointments were made every year. One of the ostensible causes for the slow growth of engineering education, forwarded since the beginning by the colonial authorities, was the lack of employment opportunities, which inexplicably appears to have been accepted as a valid reason by contemporary scholars in India.17 This despite the fact that in colonial India, it was the British who controlled the economy, jobs and access to technical fields, barring Indians from the best and most specialised roles.18 The obvious privations and unpreparedness of Indian soldiers and their mobilisational machinery was exposed in the First World War. In the meantime, there was the need for increased production to meet the requirements of the army and other strategic necessities. This led to demands for locally trained technical manpower from India, as the logistics of relying on London were no longer practical because the supply lines were no longer in safe hands. The

Modern School and the trajectory of its knowledge production must be located in this context. II: THE GROWTH OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION While educational philosophers like Tagore or Aurobindo provided an overwhelmingly philosophical basis of education, the primacy of scientific and technological education was never lost to mainstream debates on education. Though scholarly examinations of, say, the thoughts of Tagore and Gandhi on the value of a technological education are limited, a study of the Modern School ethos offers some practical insights. Raghubir Singh’s own training in his most impressionable years was that of a humanist, and his writings show his wide reading in English literature and philosophy. But as an educationist, he wanted to train future leaders, and he accepted that economic logic dictated that the path to freedom lay in a technological education. He followed Tagore and Gandhi in his wish to see a stronger, more self-sufficient India, and knew that in an age of technology and engineering, a humanistic education alone would not be enough. With Delhi set to become the capital of the country, it was apparent that schools would have to adapt to this reality. The parochial culture of Old Delhi would have to be brought up to date and made modern. Gradually, visionary Indians began to respond to the need for technical education. The founder of the Banaras Hindu University, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, introduced technical courses at the university and established an engineering school. Banaras Hindu University became a magnet for Indians from every province, given how rare it was to receive such an education in colonial India and how restrictive colonial reservation policies could be. There were not more than a couple of engineering seats available to upper-caste Hindus, for example, in the whole of undivided Punjab, Himachal, Haryana and parts of Delhi. Similarly, there were no institutions of higher education in large

areas of the Konkan and Malabar coasts or in Mangalore, and so students flocked to Banaras.19 This kind of education was so prized that Malaviya, in many cases, also received endowments in lieu of admissions. There was an immense desire across the country for applied and practical education. In the 1920s, when Modern was founded, the need for a technical education was acutely felt among the middle and upper-middle classes. The Modern School responded to this hunger, preparing its students to succeed in technical fields. It invested considerable sums on equipment, and encouraged students to experiment and take on individual and team projects. Even a cursory glance at the curriculum prepared by Raghubir Singh and Kamala Bose is sufficient to notice the emphasis on training in the sciences to tackle technical issues. Their standards for science teachers at the school were particularly exacting. Space for students to try different things with the available tools and to work things out for themselves was paramount for the school. From an early age, teachers stressed applied mechanics and the ability to build scientific and technical models. The school also had a strong electronics component in its teaching and training. In fact, the first thing that came up in the new Barakhamba Road campus was the tool shed built by the students themselves. The school understood that the importance of training in technology lay not merely in instruction but in understanding the role and place of technology in the larger world. Given the preponderance of children from business families at Modern, a technological emphasis was also an acknowledgement that many students would go on to run businesses, and would need practical foundations of knowledge. Modern had the freedom to experiment by virtue of having few students, all of whose families were committed to the school’s founding vision. With no external pressure, the school was free to reach for its own horizons.

When Modern School began its operations, Delhi was not yet the capital of British India, and it did not have an established technical institution, apart from the mediocre Delhi Polytechnic. Serious students who wanted a technical education would seek admission at the Thomason College of Civil Engineering in Roorkee.20 But competition was stiff, and British-era reservations in Punjab meant that only a handful of students were offered places. There were other places to go to, including Delhi colleges such as Hindu, St Stephen’s and Kirorimal, or the Punjab University campus in Lahore, but none of these were technicallyminded. And Stephen’s, in particular, was completely controlled by the colonial authorities. The other option was to join the Royal Indian Army, which gave recruits a strong grounding in technical knowledge, from where they could then find a place at such reputable technical institutions as Thomason College. One of the Modern School’s earliest graduates, Anant Singh, took just this route, becoming a major in the army, earning a degree at Thomason in 1932, and eventually being selected for the plum position of garrison engineer.21 The last—and possibly most appealing—option was to seek admission to privately endowed institutions such as the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, financed by Jamsetji Tata, and Mahendra Lal Sarkar’s Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Jadavpur, where Indian students and scientists had the freedom and facilities to do research. Despite the business concerns of the families of many Modern School students, it is a surprise that the school was so committed to science and technology so early in its history. Apart from business families, the school also attracted the children of the local Kayastha literati. These long-time Delhi residents lived in Civil Lines, near the school, and formed a significant portion of the old city’s educated classes until Partition, when the demographics were changed by the influx of Punjabi refugees. The Kayastha families complemented the educational ambitions of the business families who sent their children to Modern School in the early

years, albeit for different reasons. While the business families wanted their scions educated and fluent in modern ways, the Kayasthas expected their children to take up professions or middle-class government jobs. In this, they were similar to the founders of the school, who had a history of civil and administrative service. Indeed, many of the school’s most prominent teachers were Kayasthas, such as Awadh Kishore, who was effectively the deputy principal of the school for two decades, until his retirement. Born to an eminent Kayastha family from Rewari in Punjab, Kishore had earned a master’s degree in English before he decided to train as a teacher. Always impeccably dressed in white, Kishore enjoyed an equally impeccable reputation at Modern. In 1953, he was among the first teachers sent by the school to the US for advanced training. Another prized Kayastha teacher was Radhe Mohan Mathur, of the mathematics department. These teachers soothed the anxieties of Kayastha families, who began to send their children to Modern en masse. Influenced perhaps by the school’s anticolonial, nationalist traditions, many of these students would opt to become officers in the Indian Army. Apart from its immediate establishment connections, the Modern School also enjoyed some early academic successes. High-achieving alumni, from the earliest periods in the school’s history, offer compelling proof of the quality of teaching at Modern and the abilities of its students, stifled for so long by colonisation. By the 1930s, Modern could already boast of having produced a student, Raghu Raj Bahadur, who had stood first in the all-India board examination. Bahadur went on to the Indian Institute of Science and then left, having completed his master’s thesis at St Stephen’s, for the University of North Carolina in 1950 to study for a doctorate. An early example of the intellectual migration from India, he taught at the University of Chicago for more or less his entire career, though he did return to India for a five-year spell (1956–1961) at the Indian Statistical Institute, where he was part of a team, led by P.C. Mahalonobis, of peerless Indian statisticians in the most distinguished period in the institute’s

history.22 Bahadur has been feted as one of the ‘architects of modern theory of Mathematical Statistics’.23 Bahadur is best known for his research in two aspects of statistics. One is the theory of sufficiency, in which statisticians reduce large amounts of data to smaller, more manageable numbers that can then be applied to all of the data in a given model. Bahadur also developed what came to be known as the ‘Bahadur efficiency’. Statisticians, Stephen Stigler, a professor at the University of Chicago, has explained, can choose from a wide variety of competing procedures to measure a given situation. Efficiencies, or performance measurements, of varying testing procedures help determine which procedure works best.24 In Bahadur’s obituary, Stigler succinctly observed that statisticians ‘don’t have highly visible awards like the Nobel Prize, but if we did, he’d have won’. Raghu Raj Bahadur is arguably the finest example of the Modern School’s pre-Independence significance and its contribution, in the backdrop of colonial obstruction, to Indian knowledge creation. Modern’s humanist traditions helped create unusual scientists. Uday Sukhatme, incidentally the son of another great Indian statistician, left Modern in 1961, having achieved a high rank in the board exams, and went on to considerable success in American academia. Currently a physics professor at Pace University in New York, Sukhatme, whose father helped establish the Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute, has held a variety of senior administrative posts at various American universities. One of his juniors at Modern, Amitabha Mukherjee, has also had substantial success as a physicist. He is a mainstay of the Delhi University physics department that was made famous by D.S. Kothari, who was himself close to Raghubir Singh and a part of the Modern School story. It was Kothari who recommended that Modern hire one of his protégés—U.S. Nigama, freshly graduated from Lucknow University—as science teacher in 1945. Nigama stayed at the school for thirty years, becoming the science faculty’s pillar of strength.

But most earlier generations of students, such as Bahadur, conditioned by their experiences in colonial India, sought to leave for the United States, where they could fulfil their intellectual ambitions. Raj Pratap Misra, from Chattarpur, went from Modern to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, where he earned an engineering degree, before working on wireless technology for the Marconi Company. Though colleges in Delhi were eager to promote science and technology, starved of resources, they struggled to provide the necessary quality of instruction. Plans to upgrade Delhi Polytechnic to an engineering college with British funding did not materialise. After Independence, the establishment of IIT was a boon to the entire country, rather than Delhi residents in particular. As a school, Modern’s excellence was an outlier. It was a deeply frustrating situation for teachers, who did not have highereducation institutes of quality in the vicinity to serve as inspiration for their students. The tension between the ambition and performance of Modern students in science and technology subjects and the poverty of opportunity in India could at times only be resolved by moving to the US, where the universities were lavishly resourced. It wasn’t until the late 1980s and 1990s that students at the new branch of Modern School in Vasant Vihar, faced with a new economy, demanding new technologies, felt this tension could be resolved at home. III: SOCIETY AND TECHNOLOGY In recent years, ‘technologies’ has come to convey the range of means and institutional webs through which systematic knowledge is applied to produce desired results. The French philosopher Michel Foucault investigated the technologies of governance and social control. As we move fast into a world where surveillance is emerging as the main source of governing people, his alarming vision of a society in which citizens are always under watch, as if prisoners, has become commonplace, a

truism of contemporary life. Institutions such as schools and colleges are places where technologies have been understood, if not produced, in their larger context. It is not necessary that they produce technologies, but how that technology comes to acquire its social and cultural shape and importance are functions which are designed, disseminated and learnt in institutions. In 1958, eleven years after Partition had transformed the composition of the city’s population, P.N. Dhar, a young and dynamic economics professor at the Delhi School of Economics, carried out a detailed survey on the medium and small industries working in and around Delhi. He found thirteen kinds of industries in Delhi and studied them in depth: flour mills (272), printing presses (267), trunk manufacturing (225), leather footwear (180), light engineering (105), general engineering (80), soap (80), hosiery (77), electroplating (76), foundries (51), drugs (50), electric goods (36) and oil mills (32).25 The sample he chose was quite large and representative, and his work laid bare the technical, technological and industrial set-up of Delhi. A substantial section of the student body of Modern School was from families that remained in the old part of the city, in Civil Lines and in central Delhi and had not spread into New Delhi and the areas further south. Thus some of the conclusions in Dhar’s work provide us with significant insights into the future academic trajectories of incoming students at the time. The bulk of the units, 282 out of 326, that Dhar surveyed were single proprietary or family concerns. Single entrepreneurs owned the largest number of units (154). An equally large number (128) were under family partnerships, and only 42 units were partnerships in which the owners were unrelated. There were only two cases in which family-owned units had admitted outsiders into the ownership structure.26 An industry-wise analysis by Dhar showed that in the general engineering, printing and soap industries, over 20 per cent of the units were partnerships.27 In fact, the average amount of capital employed per firm revealed that general engineering and printing industries had the largest amount of average capital

investments per firm. This would seem to indicate that where a larger amount of capital investment was necessary, family resources were generally insufficient and were increased by converting firms into partnerships. The pressure to form non-family partnerships arose mainly out of the need to augment capital resources. In this situation, there was a need to educate the child—and in the 1940s and 1950s, this mostly meant the male child—so that he got into the business with some capital. In hosiery and electrical goods manufacturing, the average amount of capital investment needed was considerable, though the percentage of partnerships was not as high as in the three industries mentioned above. Among hosiery manufacturers, there was a very high percentage of individual proprietorships (62.5 per cent). The owners of some of these establishments were persons of means, who did not need to change the structure of their ownership in order to add to their financial resources. In electrical goods, two-thirds of the units were owned by family members; the heads of these industries were often electricians, mechanics, or similarly skilled, and were able to raise some money on account of their technical competence and greater credit worthiness. In drugs and trunk manufacturing, there were no partnerships, and the majority of the units were owned by individuals. Partnerships in other industries constituted an insignificant component of their ownership structure.28 Dhar’s survey shows us how the school and its world is influenced by the structure of the economy and the manner in which the society it is located in views the future through its children. In essence, schools, particularly in urban locations, are influenced by the socio-economic and political realities of their immediate surroundings. Local technological requirements changed in the pre- and post-Partition economies of the capital city. Initially, Delhi was mainly a major trading centre for northern India and western Uttar Pradesh, rather than a centre for industrial and technological enterprise, like Calcutta, Mumbai or

even Madras. The class formations of Delhi’s society reflected the economic preoccupations of its demography. Until about the 1950s, Delhi simply did not have a substantial enough professional or bureaucratic middle class to demand the technological education required in India’s metropolitan centres. The need for a technological education was, therefore, first defined by the trading community, then, in the post-Partition era, by the migrants from Punjab and later still, by the development of the Indian economy. The substantial family and individual proprietorships, which required immediate capital and succession and defined most industries, also meant that children who were sent to school would eventually be called back to the family business. This was generally seen as true in retail and wholesale trade families, where children needed to finish school as fast as they could and come back to the ‘gaddi’. But as the survey indicated, firms employing technologies were also in need of new blood and fresh infusion of capital. The technologies required for printing as well as the capital needed in the industry are a case in point. The trajectory of printing and its allied publishing industry in the city would make for a fascinating study. The families involved in this industry have been a mainstay of Old Delhi, and some made glorious contributions in the fight against the British. This is also an industry in which technologies continually change, sometimes radically, making older forms of production and technology management quickly obsolete. Once again, the school is located at the heart of the matter here. It is from this particular industry that a number of families sent their children to school to be a part of the modernising drive. While business was family based, industry, by its very nature, required a more robust catholicity of ideas and knowledge, and children had to acquire knowledge to become part of the business. School was also important because a large segment of the production and supply depended on government orders, so an understanding of and connection with the modernising bureaucracy was essential. This convinced even orthodox

business families to invest in educating their children in schools, where they were exposed to and instructed in the mores of a changing world. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Modern School educated a substantial number of children from families involved in the printing and publishing industry. The who’s who of the Delhi publishing industry are a list of Modern School alumni. Vikas Publishing, Sultan Chand and Allied Publishers have been among India’s leading publishers for academic and other books. They have provided publishers as well as academia in India some edge since the 1950s by operating a very powerful and competent publishing business. Modern’s humanistic education, with its focus on an appreciation of the arts and aesthetics, appealed to these families, as did the school’s broad syllabus with its suitably rigorous grounding in science and technology. The generation that took over from their parents at the helm of these businesses were Modern School products, and they introduced new technologies and ideas and amalgamated them into existing structures. The cumulative result for the publishing industry in Delhi at the time was that its lackadaisical, sleepy pace, predicated on government largesse, was transformed. The new energy of educated owners made publishing into one of the most advanced systems in the country, in terms of both its value and the quality of its production. A contrast is evident with Calcutta, where printing and publishing were in Bengali hands and, notwithstanding the highly educated and cultured manpower, lagged behind in both technology and capital. When digital technology hit the market, these Delhi publishers were again among the first to respond and provide Indians with cheaper products. A major contribution that these publishing houses made, and can perhaps be traced back to the Modern School ethos, was to make books available to the large number of schoolchildren in India whose parents could not afford costly books. Madhubun Educational Books, an imprint of Vikas Publishing, was an initiative in providing affordable textbooks; it’s not surprising that it was spearheaded by an alumnus of Modern.

Similarly, in the bulk- and news-printing segment, Rakesh Printers, Tej, Pratap, and other publishers rapidly amalgamated new technologies and raised capital to upgrade their already sophisticated operations. Some of the individuals who defined the new contours of the publishing industry and trade had attended Modern when the school was buzzing with the excitement of nation-building and debate over the values and priorities of the still-new nation. The Modern ethos is stamped all over their efforts and in their devotion to innovation and quality. Kapil and Sudhir Malhotra of Vision Books acknowledge that the education they received at Modern expanded their horizons, preparing them to embrace the larger world. As the industrialisation of Delhi accelerated, businesses that operated out of the city were no longer just small, mostly family concerns. The involvement of more partnerships coupled with the lack of capital also meant there were a large number of civil disputes over property. Family firms were in need of lawyers in the family, persuading some families to permit their children to go into a profession rather than the family business. Modern’s students were familiar with the concepts of justice and morality, at the heart of which were the school values of responsibility and truthfulness. Notwithstanding personal and family discords, many Modern students were romantic about law as a possibly crusading profession. Thus, business disputes aside, Modern’s expansive humanities programme had the effect of generating applicants for the country’s law colleges. A remarkably large number of judges in India have once walked the hallways of the Modern School, including B.N. Kirpal, the thirty-first chief justice of India, Mukul Mudgal, a retired Delhi high-court judge and former chief justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Madan Lokur, a former Supreme Court judge in both India and Fiji, and S.K. Kaul, a current Supreme Court justice. The bar, too, was already full of Modern alumni. The core constituency of Modern, as is clear from above, was the Delhi business establishment and a smaller, if still substantial, section from the city’s literate middle class. Family, despite the

misgivings of Raghubir Singh, was to become the most vital organising principle. But by naming his enterprise ‘Modern’, Raghubir Singh made his intentions plain—to introduce science, technology and entirely new ways of thinking to the children of otherwise conservative, risk-averse Delhi families. IV: THE ART AND TECHNOLOGIES OF HEALTH SCIENCES At one point, Delhi was the centre of Unani medicine; the city’s famous Tibbia College, where Unani medicine is taught, traces its origins in Karol Bagh back to the 1880s, when it was founded by Hakim Ajmal Khan.29 The city took some time to develop colleges that taught Western techniques of medicine—modern medicine, if you will. Consequently, even in the 1940s, Delhi had a very poor network of health practices and manpower. There were some Bengali families who practised Ayurveda in Old Delhi, but by the 1940s, Dr J.K. Sen of Calcutta Medical College, who had moved to Delhi and was practising in Daryaganj, became the most sought after medical practitioner in the city. He sent his son, S.K. Sen, to study medicine at Punjab Medical College, the only medical school in the region, and then to England.30 S.K. Sen, later recognised as one of the finest surgeons in India, became a prominent person in Delhi and, as was true of many prominent people in the city, was close to Raghubir Singh and the operations of the Modern School, as has been mentioned earlier. One of Sen’s primary concerns was institutional. He would innovate with methods of organising the health system, and in the process, he introduced many health-related ideas simultaneously to Delhi and the Modern School. Some of Modern’s earliest students recall how Sen was a regular visitor to the school and that sick boarders would be taken to his eponymous clinic, ‘Sen’s Nursing Home’, for treatment. He also served in an unofficial capacity as the school psychologist. His health scheme for the school testifies to his early thinking on health-care management.31

Regionally, Delhi had a real shortage of medical professionals, and it was only Lahore that had a medical and dental college. Once the population from Lahore migrated in large numbers to Delhi during Partition, the capital became home to a number of doctors—the former dean of the Vallabhbhai Patel Chest Institute in Delhi, Dr O.P. Jaggi, a doyen of medical science research, was a product of Lahore—as well as others who wanted to see their children enter the profession. Many of the doctors transplanted from Lahore sought admission for their children in Modern. The establishment of AIIMS in 1953 gave these aspiring doctors a place in the city to continue their education. Later on, the establishment of the Maulana Azad Medical College also broadened the range of opportunities. It is quite illustrative that a large number of Modern alumni are in the medical field. A quality of Modern School students, as we have discussed, was their desire to be of value to their society, to put their skills not just to individual gain but towards public service. Those who started their medical careers after their schooling in Modern were motivated to both serve people as well as improve the prospects of the nation, to bring to it the latest techniques and equipment. There are innumerable ways in which Modernites have added to the health of Delhi, of India and, indeed, of the various parts of the world in which the school’s alumni have settled. Arguably, the best-known example of one of these pioneering doctors is the heart surgeon Dr Naresh Trehan, who attended Modern. In a short poem he wrote in the school magazine in the 1950s, Trehan reflected on love of country. Whatever field Modern’s alumni from that period entered, their love of country was manifest in their commitment to service. Their nationalism was expressed in values learned at school about the greatest common good. Trehan, after several years in the United States, returned to India to open major hospital complexes, and personally performed hundreds of open-heart surgeries. The Shroff family, too, have been attending Modern School for generations. Minoo Shroff sent his son Noshir to the school and now Noshir’s grandchildren, too,

attend Modern. Noshir’s grandfather, S.P. Shroff, founded Delhi’s first Dr Shroff’s Charity Eye Hospital, which has been expanded into an institution so renowned, it treats statesmen and paupers alike. There are many other similar stories of Modern alumni, where the integration of technology and scientific knowledge with professional commitment is strikingly visible. V: MODERN SCHOOL, VASANT VIHAR: THE CHILD OF TECHNOLOGY A new branch of Modern was constructed in the Delhi neighbourhood of Vasant Vihar in the mid-1970s. It was a child of the modern, post-Independence age. The parents of the children studying here had done the work to build India up, and it would be their children’s role to enable India to flourish. A key difference between the pupils at Vasant Vihar and earlier generations at Barakhamba was the access to technology, institutions and resources was more easily available in Vasant Vihar, which allowed students here to embark on a path of professional advancement in a much more focused manner as compared to the early Modernites. From the very beginning, teachers and students on the new campus understood that their world would be different from that of their predecessors, that their schooling would be geared to cope with exponentially increased competition for places for science and technology at national institutions. IIT, for instance, had already become a prestigious brand. By the time the Vasant Vihar branch was established, there were many public schools that produced large numbers of students fluent in new managerial and technological developments. The intake in these schools was much more directed than that of Modern, which still held fast to its humanist values and its belief in the necessity of culture and cultural production, manifest in the time it devoted to art, music, theatre and other extracurricular activity. Modern deliberately formulated an admissions policy that led to mixed cohorts—

students with widely divergent interests and approaches, who could feed off each other’s energies. The school was wary of the rat race and wanted to show its students that they had the privilege to pursue a considerable variety of options. Among the greatest contributions of the school has been its ability to provide Indian society with a large number of young people ready to test themselves by taking new and unusual professional paths. A school that has been in operation for a century, promulgating much the same values and principles, can have a profound and lasting influence on society. Modern has lived up to its name by enabling its students to have the confidence necessary to push and explore beyond the limits set by capital and technology. The school was closely associated with the families of many who shaped the industrial and technological infrastructures of both Delhi and the country at large. Students at the school were already familiar with the need to adapt to new technologies, but Modern successfully broadened their perspectives so that whoever studied here—whether a Bharat Ram, or Vinay Bharat Ram, or Tilak Dhar, the scions of the preeminent Shri Ram family of industrialists—could see the possibilities of business from a larger human and cultural perspective. The glass ceiling created by the colonial state was shattered.

CHAPTER TEN MSVV A CHILD OF THE NEW INDIA

Casually sitting in their uniforms, the students were intensely focused on the movie when, to their utter shock, they found their principal, Ved Vyas, before them, his shadow looming over the screen. He had arrived at the cinema in Chanakya to haul the bunking pupils back to class. The rest of the audience weren’t sure if they should laugh, or if they, too, would become objects of the principal’s ire… This story has gone down in the folklore of Modern School, Vasant Vihar (MSVV)—an example both of mild student truancy and mischief and, more importantly, of the principal’s commitment to his students. Like errant sheep, they could only gambol in the fields for so long before they would be shepherded back to the safety of their pens. In hindsight, of course, the students knew the pleasures of escape, of skipping afternoon classes together to watch a movie, were sweeter because they were temporary. The school was the reassuring nest to which students could return, the perch from which they were being introduced to the world. Irate principal in cinema halls notwithstanding, running away from Modern’s Vasant Vihar campus, older generations of Modernites remember, was an easy feat. The walls around the perimeter of the sports fields had not been built, and the forest beyond, in contrast to the half-constructed concrete jungle around

them, offered an enticing escape. The desolate, dusty forest, students recall, filled them with an inexplicable joie de vivre. They felt as if they had been cast adrift, marooned on some ghostly island. This feeling of being out in the middle of nowhere brought students and teachers closer, as if they realised they were perhaps literally all in the same boat. A fair number of alumni from the Vasant Vihar campus ended up marrying fellow alumni, as if those early experiences together shaped their expectations of what they might want from a life partner. About half a dozen years before Modern School’s Vasant Vihar branch began, a new university campus was opened in the vicinity. The buildings that comprised the fledgling institution, named after India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, were in harmony with the semi-arid surroundings and tried to beat the Delhi summer with their overall design. These iconic red-brick buildings got the attention of people. It was also at this point of time that architects Jasbir and Rosemary Sachdev were putting together a somewhat futuristic design for the MSVV campus. The couple were brave to take on the project when the land—dry and rocky on first sight—must have promised so little. Rosemary, a teacher of architecture and design history at Melbourne University, met Jasbir on a three-month study trip to India. He had worked with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in the 1950s in Chandigarh. Rosemary moved to India in 1964, and some years later, they founded Sachdev Eggleston Associates together. For the buildings on the MSVV campus, they used, as in the neighbouring JNU, mostly red brick and concrete. Constructed in phases over a fifteen-year period until 1989, the school buildings were at once discrete and in harmony, grouped around courtyards, the open spaces letting natural light into the school, though there was plenty of shade too. There was easy access from the classrooms to the wide playground, as if it were calling the pupils out to play. The thoughtfulness of the design, its structural charms (the arches and windows that resembled oversized portholes), and the many large, common spaces, which

compelled students and teachers to gather together, made the Vasant Vihar campus iconic despite the school’s relative youth. Today, when you enter the complex, the red-brick, compact blocks give the impression of earthy solidity. One of the first things that catches the visitor’s eye at the entrance is the list of students who topped the school, a reminder for present students of the standards set and what they need to do to be similarly honoured. On talking to the present principal, Meenakshi Sahni, it becomes clear that the sense of mission that motivates the staff is effectively passed on to the students, and before long, the students themselves feel responsible for upholding and representing the school’s principles and ideals. As with her three predecessors on the Vasant Vihar campus, for Sahni the school remains a site where the process of harmonising social good and institutional ideals requires the principal’s judicious intervention. MSVV’s mission, inherited from its older Barakhamba Road sibling, was scripted by the rapidly unfolding democratic texture of independent India and the country’s growing sense of itself as a diverse, plural and liberal society. The Modern School, which, as we have seen, began as an anti-colonial enterprise, was devoted to equality, to overturning hierarchy in favour of democratic enquiry and discourse. Of course, as Modernites will readily acknowledge, their education in a deeply hierarchical, unequal society is a mark of considerable privilege. The school has never shied away, though, from confronting this privilege, from emphasising that with privilege comes the responsibility to uphold and live up to India’s democratic values. The history of the school shows how closely entwined its ethos is to that of the country, how Modern was, in its way, both shaped by and a shaper of independent India’s aspirations. It’s not a surprise then that an alumna of the school would publish a wonderful book titled Righteous Republic:1 it is that sense of trying to walk a righteous path, of striving to be your best possible self, that best characterises the school’s mission, which was shaped by the vision of the leaders who wrote the profoundly high-minded

Constitution of independent India. It was serendipitous then that the first principal of the Vasant Vihar branch was Ved Vyas, a refugee and therefore a close witness to the travails of Partition and the mighty struggle to fulfil the republican promise of the freedom movement. In many ways, the Vasant Vihar branch captured the spirit that characterised those early, heady post-Independence days: the commitment to democracy and the readiness to meet the new. The architecture of the school itself, for instance, symbolised an embracing of democratic ideals, the school’s physical ambience reflecting its desire to be a part of the larger democratic transition. Part of what it means to be ‘modern’ is to search for the new. After about a century of British rule, India had thrilled at the prospect of the new, or at least of national renewal. An attachment to the new, whether it be new knowledge or finding new, original ways to express and consider old ideas, seems to have become the hallmark of the Modern School. There was the danger that in this relentless, restless quest for the latest idea, the school might lose sight of its overarching ideals, might flirt with anarchy. No less a figure than Mahatma Gandhi had warned Modern of this possibility, writing in the visitor’s book that the search for the new, or the ‘arvachin’, should not be at the cost of the past, or the ‘prachin’, and ‘the indispensable values of its tradition’.2 Still, the school’s devotion to the new, to development of all kinds, imbued it with an energy that observers recognised as particular to Modern. And if Modern School, Barakhamba, was established when India had little by way of institutions and facilities that provided a technical and scientific education, its younger sibling, MSVV, was a child of new India: technologically more robust, confident of its ability to match the best in the world, and committed to industrial and scientific development above all. While the Barakhamba branch emerged from humble and challenging beginnings, Vasant Vihar got its start when the school, rather like the country, was considerably more established, had

command over substantially more resources and enjoyed the fruits of greater development. I: THE COMING OF THE SECOND MODERN SCHOOL The first avatar of the Modern School aimed at creating ideal citizens who would provide leadership for a free India, a dream Raghubir Singh must have sensed was only a matter of time. MSVV, though, was a manifestation of the son’s vision, not the father’s. Virendra Singh’s courage, in a sense, was greater. Raghubir Singh had begun the school with a self-imposed measure of success; there was little public pressure or precedent holding him back. MSVV, however, had the name of a now-iconic institution attached to it, and the risk of very public failure was correspondingly much greater. It required someone with great reserves of self-confidence and bravery to try to build a new Modern School, let alone to pull it off. Returning to civilian life after a successful military career, Virendra Singh’s first initiative of this kind was when he teamed up with Bhagwant Singh to oversee the construction of the Junior Modern building on Humayun Road. Virendra Singh’s responses, even when dealing with rudeness and anger, were invariably helpful and polite, focused on solving problems rather than exacerbating tensions. He enjoyed a strong working relationship with both civilian and military authorities. As he increasingly took over from his father in the day-to-day running of Modern, he was fortunate to have M.N. Kapur by his side, steering the ship. MNK’s control of Modern’s affairs left Virendra Singh the time and space to take on and attend to other responsibilities, confident that despite occasional moments of friction, he and MNK were broadly on the same page. Virendra Singh had large ambitions for Modern, but was himself content with a simple life rooted in hard work. An ideal day would see him spend the morning in his modest office on Humayun Road, followed by a meeting with his army buddies at

the officers’ mess and then work on his humanitarian projects, particularly the Cheshire Home in Delhi. He had been personally sought out to help here by Leonard Cheshire, a former Royal Air Force pilot whose experience fighting in the Second World War left him determined to dedicate the remainder of his life to helping the disabled. Both Lord Cheshire and Virendra Singh were of like mind, with the latter following in his family’s extensive traditions of public service till he breathed his last in 2009.3 Virendra Singh also enjoyed a strong alliance with Sir Sobha Singh and his sons. In 1911, Sir Sobha, still in his early twenties, won a contract to help build the new capital of British India, to be designed by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker. He was the sole builder responsible for South Block, the administrative headquarters of the Government of India, and what was then called the War Memorial Arch (now India Gate). By the time the new capital was inaugurated in February 1931, Sir Sobha owned vast tracts of land in the city centre. It helped both Raghubir Singh and Virendra Singh immensely that a man of such stature was in their corner. Sobha Singh believed so strongly in Modern’s goal to provide Indian children with a humanistic education that he had no hesitation in entrusting the education of all his children to the fledgling school.4 Sir Sobha’s sons had thus attended Modern alongside Virendra Singh, when the school was still being operated out of Sultan Singh’s Daryaganj haveli. When Virendra Singh took over the running of the Modern School in the 1960s, it was perhaps inevitable that he and Bhagwant would work together, in an echo of their fathers’ long-lived partnership. Given Raghubir Singh’s legacy and the Modern School’s position as a Delhi institution—its location and imposing size implicitly linking it to the power centres of Lutyens’s Delhi— Virendra Singh took it upon himself to monitor the construction of MSVV. The new school’s management committee noted as much: Major General Virendra Singh has been associated with the Modern School Vasant Vihar from its inception, from

the planning stage to various phases of its growth in terms of its beautiful building, spacious lawns, and play ground and in providing every facility necessary for an efficient, good school …Due to his untiring efforts and loving care the Modern school Vasant Vihar has been able to make a place for itself in Delhi.5 Virendra Singh, at this juncture, was also joined by his nephew, Ashok Pratap Singh. The latter had spent his childhood in Calcutta before attending Doon School and then going on to Cambridge University. He returned to the family businesses in Calcutta, but aggressive trade unionism and Naxal violence meant it was no longer a city conducive to budding industrialists. He moved to Delhi in 1973, proving to be a great aid to his uncle. Ashok Pratap Singh took over executive duties at MSVV, which opened in 1975, and dealt with all the regulatory complexities and reams of red tape. Though Virendra Singh was intimately involved in the planning and building of MSVV, he was not initially convinced of the need to open a new branch of the renowned Modern School. His son Pradeep was equally uncertain, but despite his initial misgivings, he contributed enormously to MSVV until his untimely death. For Ashok Pratap Singh, though, from the moment he joined Virendra Singh, MSVV represented an opportunity to carry the torch forward from Modern, Barakhamba Road. Institutions, he believed, became choked unless they grew and challenged themselves. The decision to go ahead and build MSVV coincided with the enactment of the Delhi Education Act in 1973, which defined the structure and function of all educational institutions in the capital city. The legislation must have further dampened Virendra Singh’s enthusiasm for the new project, as it brought in additional restrictions and complexities they had not accounted for. It was Ashok Pratap Singh who took the problems on, smoothing bureaucratic wrangles and ensuring the school’s setup complied with regulations. He would soon be joined by Dr S.K.

Sen’s daughter Ketaki Sood and the children of Bhagwant Singh, Geetanjali Chandra and Preminder Singh. A new generation was now taking over the responsibility of governing and managing the expanding Modern School. II: THE CONTEXT IN WHICH MSVV WAS ESTABLISHED By the 1970s, India was hurtling towards technological obsolescence.6 As Nehru discovered in 1949 and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, in her first year as prime minister, the United States had a penchant for using aid as a political lever. Annoyed by India’s refusal to endorse American actions in Vietnam, the US humiliatingly trickled wheat into India in 1967, staggering shipments so that Indians felt at once grateful and resentful over America’s begrudging largesse. Indira Gandhi decided India needed to become self-reliant in food production. By 1972, the first fruits of the green revolution began to appear in the country’s northern states.7 As the economy grew and India’s resources and revenues rose, the government decided to enact a number of welfare schemes. But the West, perhaps wary of India’s non-aligned stance and its closeness to the Soviet Union, was parsimonious about sharing technology, hampering state efforts to grow and enter the global economy. One of the areas where the lack of technological access particularly hurt was textiles, in which India should have been the world’s leading power. India needed its industries to modernise and desperately needed a competent workforce. There was pressure on the political class, transferred on to the schools, to produce this manpower. Competition for global trade meant there was a desperate need for young people (mostly men) who had both technical and commercial training.8 DCM and Escorts Limited were the city’s major employers, sheltering Delhi under their massive industrial and entrepreneurial umbrella.9 Both conglomerates were modern in their perspectives, and were always on the hunt for new ideas and

collaborations and fresh management techniques. The technical and industrial units on the road to Rohtak, in Faridabad, were thriving, bustling places filled with opportunities and the promise of reasonably remunerated employment. By the mid-1970s, new industrial hubs were coming up in Okhla and Gurgaon, but they were yet to take the shape that they would acquire a couple of decades later. In this atmosphere of improvement, with more people attracted to the city to seek work, there was again a need for new schools as well as for old schools to adapt to changing times. It was to address this need that the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) convened on 21 April 1972 and resolved, among other things, that: 1) every state should set up a State Board of Technical Education on a statutory basis for a) coordinated development of polytechnic education, b) continuous evaluation of standards, c) holding of examinations and awarding of diplomas. 2) under the joint auspices of each Board and Regional Committee of the AICTE, there should be a standing Evaluation Committee to inspect the polytechnics and to suggest measures for improvement. 3) this Board should establish close cooperation and coordination with industry so as to train the right type of technicians.10 There was also a resolution to set up ‘a committee to take an overall view of the present state of all private technical institutions in the country’.11 A central institute of printing technology was also planned.12 Two decisions were to directly impact the way educational curricula would be planned in the years to come: first, ‘providing cent per cent Central grant for a minimum period of ten years to institutions approved by the Board of Management Studies’ and second, ‘instituting an expert committee to review

and modify the selection procedures in technical institutions and a Joint Committee of the UGC and the AICTE to review the whole system of engineering education at the first degree level’.13 Meanwhile, a new factor was slowly changing the social and entrepreneurial landscape of the city: the coming of age of the second generation of the refugee families that had taken root in the city over twenty-five years ago. Many from this segment of the population had reached a certain level of prosperity and were seeking new avenues to expend and accumulate social capital, including through association with institutions of high reputation. There was a great demand for what the French scholar Pierre Bourdieu would describe as ‘cultural capital’.14 Private schooling was now assuming a higher value for the socially ambitious, and places in such schools were much sought after by those seeking to either acquire cultural capital or to maintain and further entrench their status. Access to networks and cultural capital became reason enough to pay for private education. The expansion of the state also meant the expansion of bureaucracy, and Delhi was no longer a slumbering capital sequestered within the stately, leafy confines of the Lutyens zone. The city expanded south in the 1970s, with quarters being built for civil servants and government officers in R.K. Puram and spacious houses being built in Vasant Vihar, close to the city’s diplomatic enclave. The building boom included the campus of JNU, established in 1969 with the hope that it would become a bastion of intellectual inquiry, a central university devoted to the serious assessment of global thought and to which students from economically weaker sections of society would have access. MSVV therefore emerged in a time of social churn, when the city’s commercial and social ambitions came to the fore and Delhi felt ready to stake its claim to a place at the table alongside other global capitals. It is of no small importance that Indira Gandhi went to meet Ronald Reagan in Cancun in 1980 to ease Cold War suspicions, mostly because of India’s principled insistence on following an independent foreign policy, and to bargain for

increased access to US technology.15 If Western reluctance to share technology with India was earlier implicit, it became official policy after India tested its atomic capacities in Pokhran in 1974. But, as Indira Gandhi’s summit with Reagan showed, India was determined, with the advent of supercomputers, not to miss the third industrial revolution. III: PEDAGOGY AND TEACHING In the half century between the establishment of the first Modern School and the new branch in Vasant Vihar, the field of education in Delhi, and by extension the rest of India, had transformed. Finding well-trained, subject-specific teachers had been difficult in the 1920s in Delhi, requiring Modern to scout for talent from across the country. But by the 1970s, there was a large pool of committed, motivated teachers who had graduated from various training colleges and, more reliably, from the Central Institute of Education (CIE), Delhi. Modern was lucky to have some of these teachers on its staff. On the other hand, the school’s previous policy of recruiting specialised talent—practising artists, actors and dancers, for instance—to teach students specific subjects would no longer be possible unless the artists in question satisfied the minimum qualification requirement legislated by the 1973 Delhi Education Act. Modern was forced to let many able practitioners go as a result, their students undoubtedly the poorer for not having access to talented, hardworking people keen to pass on their knowledge, in addition to professional teachers. Forced to let so many teachers go, MSVV ended up with an unusually young staff, the new school imbued, perhaps appropriately, with a distinctly youthful exuberance.16 Younger teachers were perhaps also more sympathetic and attuned to contemporary concerns, including the growing number of children from small, selfcontained nuclear families or children from families where both parents worked and as a consequence had less time to devote to

minutely monitoring their children’s schooling. Qualified and adaptable, the new hires quickly and fluently adjusted to the many curriculum experiments and changes made in the 1970s by the NCERT and proved to be excellent teachers, particularly in the primary section, a traditional Modern School strength. At the middle and higher levels, too, the school appointed some excellent teachers. In an echo of the days when Modern’s teachers were instrumental in devising the CBSE syllabi, MSVV teachers helped the NCERT reform and update its curriculum content. Many of the new teachers MSVV hired—some who went on to serve long careers like Kiran Bhatt (1976–2012), Zal Daver (1978–2011), Sarita Sahi (1976–2007) and Kiran Bhasin (1979– 2016)—came to the school with entirely fresh pedagogical techniques that encouraged innovation and creative thinking, and continued to update their own knowledge base and training as their careers progressed. There was no complacency among the faculty, and it wasn’t long before MSVV became a byword for engaged, imaginative teaching, especially of subjects like English that required less rote learning. There was also a healthy level of competition with select schools nearby that boasted equally fine teaching, including Springdales, Delhi Public School, R.K. Puram, and the less celebrated but high quality Tagore International and Holy Child Auxilium. A lesser school than MSVV might have hid behind the reputation of Modern School, Barakhamba Road, but MSVV’s self-belief was too high to shirk a challenge. Eventually, MSVV was able to give a fillip to its various departments, despite the new restrictions around hiring teachers with domain expertise. With the grand name of Modern School, Barakhamba Road, behind the Vasant Vihar branch, the new school’s success and impact might seem expected to an outsider. From the inside, however, the governing trustees were full of nerves. Starting the junior school at Humayun Road had just been a question of necessarily having to allocate a space to younger children to develop free of the overawing, overweening presence of much older children. With the Vasant Vihar branch, though, the

management was in uncharted waters, establishing a school in very different circumstances, with entirely different personnel than the first Modern School. Even M.N. Kapur was unsure. Raghubir Singh was no longer around, and besides, the hold his family had over the city had weakened, a result of Delhi’s dizzyingly rapid expansion. Most of the old faces had completely disappeared, as had the old way of doing things. But the school governors made the right choice in turning to Ved Vyas, a veteran teacher at Modern School, Barakhamba. A close colleague of MNK, Vyas was effectively his deputy and knew the school’s culture. He had returned to Modern a year after he quit the school in 1966, perhaps knowing intuitively that he had still to make his impact on the school. While there were, broadly speaking, more and better-trained teachers available in the 1970s, the decade did bring its own particular challenges to school authorities. Science teachers were in much demand and so relatively scarce. At the same time, house rents in Delhi were on the rise, with few units readily available, making the costs of hiring teachers from other states prohibitive. For MSVV, these factors complicated recruiting. In addition to this, it had young staff, many of whom were on probation, meaning the threat of sudden departure always lingered, souring the air. Selecting the right staff and keeping them happy and motivated at the new school—on the periphery of the city, with rudimentary transport links—was the first priority for Vyas as he took on the demanding task of leading a school, a less comfortable choice than staying on as a beloved teacher in an already established one. Ved Vyas brought with him the legacy of the larger Modern School ethos, and with him as the principal, the link between MSVV and Modern, Barakhamba was strong. At Barakhamba Road, M.N. Kapur believed in urging teachers to push themselves beyond their particular subjects. Under him, physical-education teachers were encouraged to teach an academic subject while others were given opportunities to show off a diverse array of talents. Vyas, for example, turned himself into a prolific playwright,

putting the talent he demonstrated with words as a Hindi teacher towards the invention of ‘roopak’, Modern’s own theatrical genre. The plays, dozens of which were produced for special school events, particularly Founder’s Day, also served to make Hindi a literary language for students, even if they normally read and thought in English. This culture prevented Hindi from becoming marginalised at the school or used only to communicate casually with family or friends and made it a vehicle for students to express complicated ideas and politics. While the school management had in Vyas a figurehead whose institutional memory was long, he was not an experienced administrator. His advice was much valued, but in his long career, he had never been called upon to deal with routine administrative tasks, and the school’s paperwork, after the passing of the Delhi School Education Act in 1973, was only mounting. This was in addition to the countless decisions that had to be taken over construction, materials, recruitment and so on. It now fell on Virendra Singh, who was grateful to Vyas for his genial style as headmaster, to take the administrative and management responsibilities off Vyas’s plate. The administration of the school required the sort of attention to detail and ability to multitask that came naturally to Virendra Singh’s smoothly competent nephew. Ashok Pratap Singh became vital to the running of the school, while Ved Vyas focused on nurturing the school’s ambience and learning objectives. Together, Virendra Singh and Sir Sobha presided over what would become an operation to match Barakhamba Road. IV: THE BEGINNINGS MSVV was to offer classes at both the junior and senior levels, though initially the junior classes began at the campus on Humayun Road so that the teachers could become acclimatised to the Modern way. Some of that first batch of children who joined MSVV’s junior school now have leadership positions in the school,

with Ambika Pant, for instance, the secretary of the board of trustees. Many students who were unable to find places in the oversubscribed Barakhamba Road campus were now accommodated in Vasant Vihar. A notional dividing line was constructed for the sake of admission: Mahatma Gandhi Road, the ring road of Delhi, was accepted as the demarcation line to enrol students. Those who came from the inner ring road were to apply to the Barakhamba Road campus, while those from the outer side of the ring road, effectively all the south Delhi colonies, were funnelled towards Vasant Vihar. This meant that Ashok Pratap Singh, for example, who lived in Maharani Bagh, enrolled his children in the Vasant Vihar branch, as did Ketaki Sood, another trustee. These overlaps, the children of Modern, Barakhamba alumni now being educated in Vasant Vihar, strengthened the bonds between the two campuses, the sense that they were part of the same tradition. For those working at institutions like IIT Delhi, JNU and AIIMS, all in close proximity to the new campus, it came as a boon that they had a school to which to send their children. The second phase of the MSVV project began in April 1976, and new buildings and teachers were the priority. Recruiting new teachers remained a particular headache for the committee because of the requirements of the new education act. Modern had long employed teachers on an ad hoc basis to teach specific classes or skills, and also appointed many assistants in classrooms. But questions were now being asked within the school about how these appointments were made and for clarity in terms of the criteria for them. Many of the teachers Modern appointed on an ad hoc basis would be considered ‘over age’ according to the new government guidelines. There were some relaxations in the otherwise strict regulations, for instance, when the authorities issued a letter permitting ‘those who have worked in recognised institutions’ to be appointed until the age of fortyfive. But thirty remained the standard age until which teachers could be appointed. MSVV’s issues around recruitment were only resolved around 1978-1979, when the school appointed a

permanent, full-time staff, though it limited the school’s freedom to appoint teachers who had limited, formal teacher training but an abundance of practical experience in the subject. V: A NEW TEAM AND NEW CHALLENGES Between 1976 and 1982, the school put together a distinguished management team. While the trustees were already in place, the management committee, which included the prominent retired bureaucrat Dharma Vira, a former governor of Punjab, West Bengal and Karnataka, and the former air chief marshal P.C. Lal, lent the school its gravitas. Other senior bureaucrats and officials were also on the committee, particularly appropriate because Vasant Vihar and other nearby areas were largely inhabited by defence and bureaucratic personnel, and the school would be reliant on these communities for its intake. Vasant Vihar was intended to be a residential colony for government staff, interspersed with senior military staff, including several generals who were allotted land in the area. Since Vasant Vihar was close to the cantonment area, a proposal had been made in the late 1960s to open a school in the neighbourhood that could serve the children of defence personnel. It’s possible that Modern School was invited to build the school because it had provided so many officers to the Indian Army and played an important part in keeping up morale during the wars with both China and Pakistan. Major General Virendra Singh’s service in the forces, particularly his return after the conflict with China to reinvigorate the NCC, must also have helped solidify Modern’s claim. But there were two issues that the leadership had to confront. There was a plainly articulated and, quite frankly, legitimate opposition to starting a new branch of the school, which many believed was a vital and historic institution that shouldn’t, indeed couldn’t, be cloned. There seemed to be something distasteful about the school opening franchises that would inevitably detract from the iconic status of the Barakhamba Road original. The

second, more practical concern was that there would not be enough by way of resources to open a school that would do justice to the Modern tag. The investment in new premises and facilities would have to be considerable. Was expansion financially feasible? But the school’s trustees decided they would take the bull by the horns and build regardless of the formidable obstacles that would have to be negotiated before a new Modern School could leave its mark on fresh generations of pupils. A link between Barakhamba Road and Vasant Vihar was forged early with the transfer of some management staff from the former to the latter, and with the junior staff at Vasant Vihar beginning lessons at the Humayun Road junior school, the atmosphere and pedagogical techniques at MSVV were not so much a matter of replication as of continuation. Unlike the beginnings at Barakhamba Road, where Raghubir Singh was involved in the day-to-day business of the school and the indispensable Kamala Bose, who lived on site, handled all pedagogical concerns, Modern in the 1970s was not so dominated by towering personalities. Both Barakhamba and Vasant Vihar were managed by committees instead, with the retirement of that other totemic figure MNK another reminder that times had changed. In any case, the Delhi School Education Act now required the composition of school management committees to be made public as well as that of any recruitment committees. No individual, whether principal or proprietor, was permitted to handle labour issues without the wider input of management, changing the culture of schools across Delhi. August as the management committee was, its members operated in a different time, with different rules. Ashok Pratap Singh, steeped in the new ways of doing business, arrived in Delhi at just the right moment, then, to pilot MSVV through fresh, sometimes choppier waters. Chief among the problems he would contend with was unionisation and the willingness of janitorial and other lower-paid workers to go on strike for their rights. Of course, this was a long time coming, given how easy it was in the near past to exploit workers and deny them their rights. Whatever the

justness of the workers’ actions, strikes meant everybody, including principal Ved Vyas, had to pitch in to keep the school premises clean. The fledgling school also had to contend with litigation, with a nearby temple claiming rights to a part of the land on the school’s boundaries, a case it eventually won. The labour issues were less clear-cut, and litigation in the labour courts would drag on for years, requiring enervating investments of both time and money from the school’s governors. VI: CHILD OF THE NEW WORLD But Modern, despite the changing times, still wielded enough influence to settle its teething issues. Far more scarring would have been the 1984 riots in the wake of the assassination of Indira Gandhi, which ripped to shreds any complacency Delhi might have felt about the city’s communal harmony. For Modern’s pupils, the impact on their values must have been seismic. The school had always insisted on and taken pride in Indian pluralism. But the massacre of Sikhs on the streets of the Indian capital showed Modern’s students, perhaps for the first time since Partition, that communal harmony was a fragile, vulnerable thing in need of constant care and vigilance. Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded his mother as prime minister, visited the school to answer some of the questions that arose in the aftermath of the violence in an interview with students.17 If society around MSVV was in turmoil, pedagogically, too, the ground was shifting fast beneath the pupils’ feet. Modern knew it had to invest in computer technology to keep up with the changes in global schooling. In 1985, the school purchased three BBC microcomputers, built as a part of the BBC’s computer-literacy project, and renowned for being hardy.18 Computer courses for the students came at a hefty price, costing Rs 20,000 for the full course. Computer classes were offered to students in classes nine and ten as an after-school course for two hours a day and five days a week. To complete the course, students needed to

spend eighty hours in training, half of which was theory and the other half practical. Computer classes were also offered twice a week in school for Rs 600, the fee reflecting the charges demanded by the private company tasked with conducting the courses. By 1986, computer classes were introduced for classes six and seven, too, giving MSVV students an early start in the technology that would define the age.19 Given these advantages, many of the first students who had access to such technology went on to make fine careers in the field in the United States. In later years, MSVV would continue to invest in technology, and it should come as no surprise that a Modern School alumnus played a part in creating the computergenerated special effects for the pioneering 2009 film Avatar. Ironically, by giving its students access to computer technology before most other schools in India, Modern, which had played such a crucial role in the nation-building efforts after Independence, was now paving the way for the brain drain, by helping students attain the platform needed to further their careers abroad. Of course, one can’t blame Modern for doing the best for its students. It must also be acknowledged that computer courses came at a cost the school could not afford, thus passing those costs onto parents, so only those students at Modern whose parents had the money felt the benefits of the technology. Money, generally, was a concern at MSVV, where phased construction meant building work was near constant in the early years. Unable to rely any longer only on largesse from the founder’s family, the school began to look to corporate sources to raise funds. The Ruias of Essar, for example, funded the building of the school’s auditorium. Parents, too, became a steady source of contributions as the school put on fetes, festivals and special programmes to raise money for facilities. While it was undoubtedly good for students to come up with innovative plans for fairs and festivals as well as brainstorm ways to raise money, there was the apprehension that this would give undue advantages to the children from families with means. Modern

School, Barakhamba, had also drawn on families with resources, but in those days the resources were as much cultural as financial. If the Barakhamba Road branch had once been a bastion of the middle and upper-middle classes, MSVV, it seems, was largely becoming a haven for the children of the new industrial and commercial rich. By then, Vyas had retired, and he was succeeded in 1986 by K.J. Vari, who remained principal until the turn of the millennium. Born in Kerala, Vari was raised by the Irish Christian Brothers of Darjeeling. He had an excellent education as a result, and was also a good musician and organiser. He became, for instance, the inspiration behind school fetes, which served as an opportunity for students to learn the complexities of putting together such events. Soon, Modern’s annual fete became among the most sought-after annual events in the city. VII: THE MSVV UNIVERSE Indira Gandhi’s popularity was at a high point in 1971 after India’s decisive role in Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan, but the economy soon began to show cracks. The Americans, in the grip of the Cold War, viewed India unfavourably as a pro-Soviet country and did not extend help to it when it needed assistance to feed the large number of refugees coming into the country from the erstwhile East Pakistan. The green revolution had given India a semblance of food security by the early 1970s. But the refugee crisis and eventual war with Pakistan in the winter of 1971 pulled India into a vortex of rising prices, unemployment and a fall in public spending. The unrest of the youth and labour in many parts of the country in 1973-1974 must be seen in this context. The Emergency, in some ways, was a product of such devastating material conditions. Things improved in the early 1980s, and India’s hosting of the Asian Games reflected these changes to a great extent. The large-scale construction and settlement of colonies in south Delhi

also changed this part of the city. The 1984 anti-Sikh riots came on the heels of this optimism. It was a fraught period, with the school also embroiled in several off-campus issues. Still, MSVV students thrived academically. The school was born into the darkness of the Emergency, but MSVV students had a distinctly oppositional view of politics thanks to the presence of JNU on their doorstep, which was the scene, it seemed, of constant student uprisings and even violence. Student leaders who opposed the Emergency were often arrested, with some of them even becoming national leaders in the aftermath of the period. If the neighbouring university, JNU, seemed for Modern students a thrillingly radical, even dangerous place, for the university’s teachers, the school was an ideal place to enrol their own children. With the influx of professors’ children, Modern was able to reclaim some of the ground it had lost to Delhi Public School in appealing to educated professionals as opposed to just the wealthy. It would be reductive, however, to discuss MSVV just in terms of wealth versus social and cultural capital. The Indian family, too, was changing in this period. Urban rhythms in the mid1970s demanded smaller families. At the same time, the green revolution meant that rural families, particularly in Punjab, were becoming richer, and they clung to larger, more conservative family structures. Modern students were familiar, since Barakhamba Road, with the concept of becoming educated so as to positively expand the family business rather than for only personal ambition. For the children of the educated, though, particularly girl children, this concept and that of the extended family were restrictive. Education was a way out and the joint family a structure to be dreaded. Dowry deaths, for instance, in the entirety of north India and particularly in Delhi were up in that period. The Hindi cinema of the time reflected the cultural clashes, with angry, political films a contrast to the more nostalgic appeals to the joys of large families—films in which an elder brother and his virtuous wife would reaffirm joint-family values.20

MSVV was curiously placed: at once a safe space for more traditional families seeking to educate their children in preparation for a future in the family business and, by the 1980s, also providing the sort of advanced technological education designed to free students up as individuals, to go on to begin their own businesses or forge corporate careers, particularly in the developed countries of the West. Modern’s history was as a resolutely forward-looking school, determined to be a space that reflected India’s pluralistic ideal—a modern society in which caste and class, up to a point, were irrelevant, including in social interactions. Modern was, for a time, able to persuade students, within the boundaries of the school, to participate in a space where the school and its values trumped other social norms and hierarchies. Thus, while the computer became Modern’s outlet to the world, the school’s concerns for society and humanity, too, began to evolve. This evolution did not solely stem from its earlier values or from a desire to change the system and even the world in its image. Instead, Modern’s values appeared in keeping with the newly emerging global frame. This ‘prism of profession’ was embraced, for example, even by those who otherwise had an upbringing in business or middle-class families with very traditional values. And it is in this professionalised universe that the school acclimatised its students, making them fluent and even uninhibited in its language and mores. The relationship among students was increasingly open and not cloistered by any class privileges. The MSVV student was a child of the age of industrialism, where equality in the public sphere, notwithstanding actual class inequalities, was the overarching social principle. The school, then, was the umbrella under which its sheltered students were able to have a distinctively modern experience.

CHAPTER ELEVEN MODERN AND THE NEW ORDER OF THINGS

For Modern School, the two decades spanning the debates that culminated in the National Policy on Education in 1986 and the National Curriculum Framework in 2005 were a period of adapting to the accelerating material change in society. More than structure and resources, the Modern School had to re-examine its core ideas in a radically different context from the time when it was born and in which it became an institution, a symbol as much as a school. For the students at the school in those decades, they would have been participants in these momentous changes without perhaps quite realising that they were also the agents of change. I: THE CHANGING TIMES By 1977, when Morarji Desai became the first non-Congress prime minister in independent India, Modern School had become a solid, stable institution at the heart of Delhi life. Its teachers and their teaching practices were widely admired, and its students were filled with school pride, the sense that they would be the leaders of the future. It helped that the school mostly attracted the children of the establishment—government officials, bureaucrats, industrialists, businessmen and white-collar professionals. But the doors of the establishment were also in the process of being opened to admit new sections of society with new sources of capital. Perhaps the first set of factory-fresh Maruti 800s on Indian roads was a harbinger of this change, of a shift in

momentum. The pejorative term ‘puppy’ (prosperous urban Punjabi) was later coined to refer to this new middle class that emerged, predominantly Delhi Punjabis with disposable incomes who were very eager to spend on the latest consumer goods. For an India that had made a virtue of austerity, used to low incomes, meagre salaries and pious privation, this sort of boisterous spending seemed out of place, even shocking. As economists and contemporary historians have pointed out, the Indian growth story, which we commonly date to economic liberalisation in the 1990s, actually began in the early 1980s, particularly for middle-class families in urban centres, who had demonstrably more spending power than they had ever previously had.1 Small- and medium-sized businesses, particularly in new technologies, were burgeoning, and there was much talk about changing the structure of the Indian economy, changing tariff, banking and industrial policy, and creating a framework to facilitate international trade. Changes began to be seen in the official pronouncements, and there were efforts to gear policy regimes towards action on all these fronts.2 By 1991, India’s newly elected government embarked on its economic reforms programme, led by the finance minister Dr Manmohan Singh.3 As if underlining how plugged into the Indian establishment Modern was, Dr Singh appeared as chief guest at the school’s Founder’s Day festivities that year. He spoke to the students on the occasion, telling them that he had never seen his village school after he left Pakistan during Partition. His note in the visitors’ book at Barakhamba Road addressed the topic of inequality, emphasising that it should be stemmed at the institutional level. Paradoxically, the economic changes that this same chief guest scripted were soon to unleash torrents of change, some of which fundamentally affected Modern. Technological paradigms and a linear institutional design meant that schools were judged by their ability to send their students on to ‘chosen’ elite technical or professional institutions of higher education. With its two schools, Modern now had access

to a larger pool of students to influence, but faced with the new demands, trends and transformations in what society wanted from its schools, there was a danger that the school might lose sight of its original, foundational philosophy as it adapted. Though the cracks in the idea of a general and liberal education as a good entry point to society were becoming increasingly visible, the trustees at Modern resisted. They wanted their school to provide a holistic, humanistic education as well as prepare their students to compete with others to gain admission into the institutions and universities so prized by the upwardly mobile middle classes. The tensions between the school and its students, particularly those who were writing their matriculation or board examinations, were palpable. By the late 1990s, it would become an unchallenged ‘fact’ of aspirational schooling that a technological education was the only means to get ahead. The effect was to choke choice and creativity in early school education, and the irony was that those who survived the grind to make it into hallowed institutions of technology often left to find lucrative jobs abroad. Of course, it is accurate to say that, back then, the opportunities to maximise one’s education and to live a materially prosperous life were substantially better outside India. Whatever the case, it is equally accurate to state that Indian society, in aggregate, lost a lot of the investment it made in educating so many of its brightest, most capable children. Incidentally, Modern had an advantage over other institutions in this respect, as a large number of its students came from a family business or industry background and so, in due course, they settled in India to expand their business and industrial operations. The phenomenon of educated Indians settling down abroad was not new. Since the 1960s, when India was moving slowly but steadily on the path of development, many Indians had moved to Western countries, attracted by the opportunities there, specifically in science and technology. But what the country witnessed in the 1980s and 1990s was an exponential increase in the number of people leaving while the demand for similar kinds

of professionals began to grow at home. The yield of public and individual investment in technological education was, unfortunately for India, being reaped elsewhere. Still, the demand for it meant that there was increasing pressure on the government to provide more such institutions, so education policy was tweaked to enable the entry of private investment in the technological and professional higher-education sector. Between 1989 and 1999, in many states, private institutions more or less took over from the government in providing widely accessible educations in engineering, medical sciences, computer science and the like. Since the 1970s, the changes had arrived at breakneck speed, so that what had been a steady flow of emigration became a flood. Many parents who now sent their children to Modern School reaped the benefits of India’s more liberal economy. They were ambitious for their children to become college-educated professionals, even if this meant using their prestigious educations to move abroad, where it seemed so many educated Indians were now making successful lives. These parents were joined by a new, aspirational class that coveted Modern precisely because it would teach their children how to adapt to and succeed in the professional world. The Indian economy, which by now had grown into a much bigger economy with a much stronger industrial base, was set to reintegrate with the world economy, a euphemism for the new phase of capitalism, given the imminent collapse of socialist economies in eastern Europe.4 The national economy, which still needed to be built during the nascent post-Independence years, was now taking on the world.5 Modern, with its historical understanding of how to lead such a process, was a natural candidate to educate the country’s students to meet the new demands and requirements to take their place among the elite. II: MODERN AT THE CUSP OF CHANGE

There were other changes to life at Modern. The school was now able to provide its students with the amenities they were used to as the children of parents with ever-increasing disposable incomes. Finally, too, the number of girls admitted to the school was also increasing, reflecting a loosening of socially conservative taboos on educating daughters and signifying the entry of young women into professional occupations. It was also at this time that the junior school, Raghubir Singh Junior Modern (RSJMS), came into its own. It had got its own premises in Humayun Road in 1961 and became completely autonomous from its elder sibling in 1981, with its own dedicated principal. In the newly appointed Doris David, RSJMS had a wonderful principal, and it still retained many of the teachers who had been appointed back in the 1960s, so the school felt extremely settled and content even after the change. Major General Virendra Singh, too, kept an eye out for the school, as his own office was on campus, and his wife, Mohini, would often join the children for ‘story time’. Mira Jain, who became the Major General’s daughter-in-law, began teaching at RSJMS straight after she graduated with her teaching qualifications, and often said how open and welcoming the school had been. Geeta Dudeja, who later became principal, also felt that the teachers at RSJMS looked after each other as well as the children as if they were family. On the whole, the bonds in school were strong. At the same time, the new campus in Vasant Vihar had not been around for even a decade, and the atmosphere here was different—more boisterous and exuberant. But many of the very young teachers had already experienced life at RSJMS, where the Vasant Vihar branch initially held classes for its primary-school children.6 It was, as the Vasant Vihar principal, Ved Vyas, had hoped it would be, a lesson in the Modern way, in sharing pedagogic methods and cultures. The strong links between teachers and the student community and the atmosphere of care meant that teachers of both schools, at this time, were able to intuit something

sociologists had not yet been able to observe—that families were changing. The teachers noticed telltale signs of families being pressed for time, with children showing up at school less than impeccably dressed and groomed and sometimes even badly fed.7 This was, the teachers saw, the result of the new economic reality that required both parents to spend their days at work. And with the increased disposable income came other signs of changing lifestyles, with late-night parties becoming common and the mundane tasks of childcare often delegated to household staff. III: THE SOCIAL UNIVERSE OF THE STUDENTS By now, Modern had been home to at least two generations of students from the Old Delhi families that were the original patrons of the school. While the cosmopolitan world view of Punjab had contributed a great deal to the sensibilities of Delhi’s post-Partition high culture, in terms of hegemony, the language of the petty middle classes, which in Delhi also meant the culture of those who were trying to eke out a decent living in trying circumstances, dominated in the city. The citizens of Old Delhi, on the other hand, had increasingly withdrawn their language and their culture indoors. Modern had been a space for the open articulation of that culture. It was, therefore, ‘their’ school, and many of these Old Delhi families provided the school its stability as they were in no hurry to migrate. It is in these times of transition that the new rich as well as the old and traditionally affluent sections were looking for a language to express their respective class-based experiences and living codes. Modern was able to give both the new and the old the self-assurance to express themselves and so the school became a playground for the development of a syncretic Delhi language. The city was now beginning to see a lot of capital flowing in, and earlier inhibitions and restraints were giving way. Parents were ready to shell out a lot of money to have their children

admitted to choice schools. This was not merely for the networks these schools gave access to, or to enhance marriage prospects, or even to set their children on the path towards professional success, though all of these were motivating factors. Rather, a major consideration was parents’ desire to acquire a particular class status, which attending a school like Modern would have assured for their children.8 For the business classes, the statist development model that marked the post-Independence years did not give them the respectability they sought and the entitlements they felt their prosperity merited in a hierarchical society. The language of socialism and the rhetoric of equality made their kind of aspirational striving seem faintly petty or grubby. Conscious of the resentment felt by members of this class, coupled with their sense of entitlement, Modern, from the very beginning, instituted a pedagogic universe that placed the teacher and conforming to certain values at the centre. Thus, students’ consciousness of their class position was always balanced by a sense of their responsibility to society. Teachers were central to ensuring that the students remained committed to this idea. The principal’s morning lectures, too, were more or less a daily reminder of these values and responsibilities. As someone who had watched assembly proceedings for a couple of decades, Amrita Kapur observed that the ‘atmosphere in the Modern School morning assembly became a serene influence on the young minds. This atmosphere was Indian, national’.9 When S.P. Bakshi became the principal at Barakhamba, he retained this tradition, as did his successor, R.K. Bhatia. Speeches by members of the board of trustees and chief guests at various functions, aware of Modern’s values, similarly reinforced this idea of social responsibility. When these guests praised Modern’s sense of mission and its involvement in its community, it contributed to the pride students felt in their school. In later years, though, as wealth became a feature of Indian life and, indeed, life at Modern, the school was criticised for having forgotten these values, of having become an institution for

rich kids, marked by the vices of the rich, including drug abuse. Rumours were rife about admissions being secured by large sums of money changing hands. The trustees were aware of these rumours but, as Ketaki Sood insists, they could find no evidence of any truth behind such accusations. Some of these whispers were not new, with the children of the wealthy often accused of indiscipline and arrogance. Many Delhi schools at this time faced similar criticisms concerning students who blatantly disregarded disciplinary codes and did so without fear of punitive action. Sociologists suggested that a generation gap had developed in India without teachers or parents noticing, that the social changes in the late 1980s were so swift and so radical that adults didn’t have time to respond to what was happening to their children. The gap between the culture of new money and the old middle class as well as the old business community was wide, and it was schools on the frontline of the new wealth, like Modern, which naturally felt the effects first. As referred to earlier, it was the teachers at RSJMS and Vasant Vihar who reported changing family structures—working parents, more disposable income, latenight parties, less supervision and a greater reliance on hired help rather than extended family. The teachers of primary-school pupils had their hands full trying to insist on Modern’s old values while negotiating the influences of culture, society and the changing shape of family life.10 At the high-school level, the indiscipline and breaches of school values were infrequent but more serious. Maintaining trust required teachers to sometimes assert control. For instance, after reports of a fight in the hostel, Virendra Singh himself, despite the misgivings of the principal, who wanted to handle the situation more discreetly, tried to intervene in the matter. So there was occasional stress about how to handle the new kinds of student indiscipline. Teachers also had to come to grips with the myriad ways in which children in Delhi could now distract themselves. Video games were a particular bugbear. If the trouble with video games

was the growing attraction of a sedentary lifestyle, conversely the hosting of the Asian Games in Delhi meant that the city was supplied with an abundance of facilities for physical recreation, including swimming pools and cycling paths. And as the city migrated south, picnics as far away as the farms in Chattarpur became a common weekend activity. Urban Indian children were also able to delight in Target, a monthly magazine edited by the English expatriate Rosalind Wilson. This publication was of such a consistently high standard that parents could often be found sneaking copies. Perhaps only Junior Statesman in Calcutta, edited by Desmond Doig, who was of Anglo-Irish heritage, could compete with, or even better, Target in terms of quality and production values. Delhi, which had an increasing population of aspirational English-speaking, middle-class professionals, was crying out for a magazine such as Target. The Delhi Press had been bringing out magazines such as Champak and Caravan, but Target felt more contemporary, similar in quality to Tintin or the comics urban children craved. Wilson and associate editor Vijaya Ghosh published some of India’s best future cartoonists and creative writers in Target, and parents and children alike waited to read about the latest doings of Ajit Ninan’s ‘Detective Moochwala’, or the singing donkey Gardabh Das, created by brothers Neelabh and Jayanto Banerjee, or the cartoons and stories of Manjula Padmanabhan and Atanu Roy. After the turn of the millennium, Neelabh Banerjee would collaborate with Jug Suraiya, a protégé of Doig back in the mid-1960s, to create the famous ‘Dubyaman’ strip in the Times of India.11 But back to Target, where an early coup was arranging an interview of Rajiv Gandhi by eleven schoolchildren, including two from Modern’s Vasant Vihar branch. After the interview, a journalist reported that the children’s impression of their prime minister was mixed. What Target captured was the emergence of a new India—an open society, creative and ready to embrace change. Palika Bazar, close to the Barakhamba campus, with its many video-game parlours raking in money, was at its zenith. Its

popularity soon made it crowded, and it appeared to become down at heel, with dodgy hangers-on, and not safe for children to visit on their own. But for groups of Modern students, looking to play video games or for a hint of urban seediness, Palika was paradise. It was also a first brush with technology, which for many would become key to their academic and professional lives. If parts of this contemporary culture seemed questionable, it was also more inclusive and ready to take a joke. This openness, this willingness to challenge tradition, was part of the character of the Modern School, too, and helped, in a way, to make Delhi emerge in the 1980s as an intellectual centre. Teachers found that relations among the students became more free, with older students transcending barriers of class and caste to form romantic attachments with fellow students and going on dates to Connaught Place or hanging out at the nearby railway station. The students even coined an acronym for those who were leaving their often conservative backgrounds behind—DTM. These DTMs —desis turned modern—radically changed their dress and attitude from what would normally be encouraged by their families. The jokes were, of course, mildly classist but reflective of the tension within both Modern and society at large as changes accelerated and people, young and old alike, reinvented themselves. Some of the changes were not so benign. The communal killings in Punjab from 1982 onwards infected Delhi, vitiating the atmosphere and culminating in the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the cataclysmic anti-Sikh riots of 1984, which hit particularly close to the bone at Modern, where students often had relatives that straddled both communities. When the school reopened in November after the riots, many Hindu students struggled to look their Sikh friends, some of whom had cut their hair, in the eye. Many articulated their angst and guilt through their writings, including in school journals, and in person to sympathetic teachers. The articles in Modern’s magazine were sharply critical of any unreflective thinking, even on Indian tradition, with many issuing rallying cries for a return to secular and democratic values.

Even in 1982, Umer, a tenth standard student, had published an impassioned plea for secularism, under threat from the communal violence in Punjab, in the school magazine.12 Modern School, Barakhamba, it appears, was prepared to hold a mirror to society and reflect the cracks. At the prayers and in many meetings after the riots, S.P. Bakshi, the principal at the time, played a vital role, somehow managing to infuse the students with both confidence in their society and solace in this otherwise terrifying time.13 At a time when students were becoming very political and quite often had diametrically opposite views on emerging culture, politics and society, the principal’s soothing words were of import.14 IV: BUNIYAAD AND THE RETELLING OF THE REFUGEE LIVES When Doordarshan began broadcasting the serial Buniyaad in 1986, depicting the travails of post-Partition resettlement in Delhi, at least two, sometimes more, generations of those descended from former refugees from Pakistan would have been watching, reliving the trauma of their elders. The refugee colonies of the 1950s had, by now, either taken definitive shape or were in the process of expanding and changing. The rehabilitation and squatters’ economy had given way to a dynamic entrepreneurial bustle. What defined the city now was what some called its ‘crass Punjabiness’, while for others, like the former census chief Asok Mitra, it was the ‘grit and determination’ associated with Punjabis.15 There were still some reminders of the subtle, refined cultural life of Old Delhi, including the Shankar-Shad Mushaira, held annually at Modern, Barakhamba. Connoisseurs of music and poetry, Sir Shankar Lal and Murli Dhar, the brother and son, respectively, of Lala Shri Ram, the head of the DCM, had emerged as great patrons of Urdu and Hindustani poets. Together, they began sponsoring a mushaira, or a congregation of Urdu poets, inviting them from across the subcontinent. Apart from a few occasions when it was held the Sapru House

auditorium, this became a permanent annual fixture on the Modern, Barakhamba campus.16 By the 1980s, though, new imaginaries needed to be placed at the heart of this population. Lahori or Punjabi nostalgia was passé among the younger generation who were, understandably, tired of a culture they had only received second-hand. For the new generations of Old Delhi, Civil Lines and Daryaganj (zippily called Delhi-6 in twenty-first century parlance), the city their parents knew and talked about had disappeared with Partition. Modern School offered these generations a comforting hybrid, retaining a link to their parents’ Old Delhi culture while admitting all the changes wrought by the refugee influx. The school was, for the children of Old Delhi families, literally an introduction to the modern, to the new republic to which they now belonged. By the 1980s, therefore, when Buniyaad reminded the descendants of refugees of their parents’ stories, they could look around them and see how they had made new homes for themselves. Some seven school buses went from Model Town, built in the 1950s, to the Barakhamba Road campus every day. Buniyaad was confirmation that these refugee families had not only survived but thrived in Delhi, transforming the city and making it their own. While the children of the refugee families, especially those who went to Modern, were perhaps untouched by the convulsions of Partition, they were the faces of that experience on television. Modernites who played roles on the show included Vinod Nagpal, Abhinav Chaturvedi and Kamia Malhotra. Nagpal, in particular, was a star performer at Modern in the 1950s, even impressing the professionals on the city’s arts circuit with his acting and singing.17 Similarly, Alok Nath, who as a child in the 1960s would frequently run away from home to the houses of his schoolteachers at Modern, found his calling to be the theatre, and his stellar performance as a freedom fighter in Buniyaad is remembered even today.18 Abhinav Chaturvedi, the son of Abhay and Vinita Chaturvedi, both teachers at Modern, had been a star cricketer at the school. Buniyaad made him a

household name, building on the success of his role in another 1980s serial, Hum Log. His contemporary, both at school and on screen, Kamia Malhotra also achieved great fame. The school’s links to Buniyaad were extensive: the father of Sushma Seth, a leading actor on the show, was a physical-education teacher at Modern in the 1940s, and her mother taught at the kindergarten. It was as if, fittingly, the story of Delhi that the show’s makers were trying to tell was also the story of the Modern School. This retelling of the struggle in a new and popular medium also paved the way for universalising the Partition experience, which had until then been mostly considered from a personal or a communitarian angle. V: THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM AT MODERN HIGH SCHOOL, BARAKHAMBA ROAD Till 1979, for all accounting purposes, Modern High School was known as such. But in that year, the management decided to change the name from Modern High to Modern School for practical reasons.19 There were now two schools in the city with the same name, separated only by their location. Modern School, Barakhamba, was now effectively led by Ashok Pratap Singh, who also managed the Vasant Vihar branch and the trust that oversaw the school. Virendra Singh was still officially at the helm of the trust, supported by his son Pradeep Virendra Singh, Anuradha Singh (Ashok Pratap Singh’s wife), Bhagwant Singh and his children Geetanjali Chandra and Preminder Singh, and Ketaki Sood. Ashok Pratap Singh’s style of management was increasingly noticed by the staff. All of this simply meant that the various branches of Modern were increasingly governed as one. Indeed, the only radical change was in the composition of the student body at the schools. This was to do with the criteria for admission, which regulations now demanded be largely geographical. The unintended effect was to make each of the schools more homogenous in its intake, less able to

accommodate those who came from outside the schools’ territorial divisions. That said, and even with the increased competition from other fine schools in the city, Modernites had arguably never had it so good, their schools combining both oldworld charm and the excitement of the new world of computers and commerce that was opening out in front of them. The biggest plus at this time for Modern School, Barakhamba, was the return of S.P. Bakshi as principal. There had been some instability at the school after the resignation of P.C. Chowdhry, who, many suggested, was extracted by the management. Chowdhry had previously taught at the school in the 1960s before going on to teach at another school in the city, but his stint as Modern principal did not go well. In some ways maybe this was inevitable, given that M.N. Kapur, who had been such a commanding figure in the school’s history, had left and the senior trustees were perhaps searching for a principal who, unlike Kapur, would be more amenable to the authorities. S.P. Bakshi, who replaced Chowdhry, had started at Modern as a temporary teacher in the mid-1960s before working his way up. He had become principal of the Army Public School in 1977 and so had some experience leading a school. He was both steeped in the Modern School way and had sufficient experience outside Modern’s environs to uphold that tradition without being overwhelmed by it. The school was also in a period of transition, with staff who had been at the school since the 1950s making way for newer, younger teachers. Bakshi, with his love for the school, his friendly disposition towards teachers and students, and his experience of being a principal, was a perfect fit for Modern at this moment.20 At both RSJMS and Barakhamba, a generation of teachers retired in the early 1970s, but the schools recruited a new crop of outstanding teachers, particularly the many women who now found places on the school faculty.21 The influx of these new teachers between 1972 and 1980 reenergised the atmosphere at Modern, though there was enough of the old guard around to

ensure that the school’s traditions and values were not forgotten.22 Not much was changed in terms of pedagogic practice, which was still centred around ensuring children were happy to be at school and so happy to learn. But, as noted earlier, the teachers did have to contend with parents, who had changed, as had parenting. And particularly by the end of the millennium, these changes were so pronounced that the school and its teachers had to reorient their own methods and perspectives and, in many cases, their attitudes too. VI: THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM AT MODERN SCHOOL, VASANT VIHAR When Modern began, project-based teaching was suggested as the ideal method to follow for science and social science education. The school’s success in enthusing students to learn had largely been the result of this approach. Vasant Vihar, from its beginnings, followed this practice, and its academic results were spectacular. The project-based style was particularly suited to an increasingly professional age with its associated corporate demands. Just as important as getting students to collaborate on projects, however, was Modern’s insistence on close interactions between teachers and students. At Vasant Vihar, the friendliness and mutual respect between teachers and their students is legendary. Certainly, it has helped with discipline in a city in which rich, young males are often rowdy. Teachers such as Zal Daver, Aziz Akhtar, Kiran Bhatt and Kiran Bhasin, among many others, were known to be exceptionally supportive, never short of time to talk to or help students.23 The many new teachers that joined together also brought with them an infectious camaraderie.24 The school’s teachers were also very involved in contributing to the new kinds of textbooks that the NCERT was producing for its revised curriculum in English. Thus, despite its relative newness, MSVV was almost instantly plugged into the city’s ecosystem. Its students were regularly selected in various national talent

searches in science and other subjects, and the branch’s sports and music departments were also quickly successful. However, by the early 1990s, there were some noticeable disruptions in the school’s hitherto impressive progress. Some of this disruption was caused by a turnover in the school’s teaching staff, as older teachers who had been with the school since its inception began to retire, and others took advantage of the school’s generous study-leave policies. Some teachers even quit mid-session, affecting student results. In 1992, for example, Hemant Luthra, a member of the management committee and a Barakhamba Road alumnus, warned about the school’s staffing ‘problems coming in the way of effectiveness in whatever is being done in the school, above all in the academic field’.25 The teachers’ representative on the committee emphasised that staff turnover was a serious issue and needed a special meeting, as the school’s objectives had to be redefined.26 Consequently, a special meeting was convened on 11 December 1992 to which the headmaster, headmistress and various faculty representatives were also invited. The principal, K.J. Vari, circulated a comprehensive analysis of the first-semester exam results for each teacher and the amount of course material each had covered.27 After this extensive soul-searching, important changes began to be effected. Chief among them was a return to the ‘activity based teaching’ that had always proved so effective at Modern, particularly for its science department.28 The school also doubled its computer science faculty and improved its facilities, replacing old hardware and creating two new computer labs, each holding twenty students at a time. The school also insisted on ‘aided learning after proper training by the subject teachers’ and ‘procured appropriate subject wise software’.29 Among the enhanced facilities was a new language lab with special audiovisual aids for the English department.30 The music department introduced lessons in tabla, guitar, sitar, violin and keyboards.

VII: A HOLISTIC EDUCATION: THE DILEMMA OF THE NEW TIMES The disruptions that MSVV witnessed, however, were neither limited to the ones mentioned above nor to the school itself. By the mid-1980s, the technical education that Indians had demanded for nigh on a century be provided in schools, threatened the country’s educational equilibrium. So pervasive were the links between technology and success that competition among students to win a place at a prestigious institute began to distort normal schooling routines and practices. Part of this distortion was the constant demand for school hours to be reduced, often so that pupils would have the time to go to intensive coaching centres. This flew in the face of a longstanding Modern pedagogical principle—to persuade students to spend long hours on campus to enable participation in extensive extracurricular activity and allow for closer bonding with fellow students and teachers. In any case, earlier in the decade the central government had declared a mandatory five-day week and shortened the permissible school day while revising and expanding the amount of material to be covered in the syllabus. Extra tuition became so pervasive that it was referred to as a ‘shadow education’ entirely separate from the dynamic of the school.31 Extra tuition had become a worldwide phenomenon, with scholar Hyunjoon Park and his team of researchers finding that between 2003 and 2012 the ‘percentage of students participating in tutoring’ had risen in most countries.32 Students in regions as diverse as Brazil, Greece, South Korea and Thailand spent ‘some time each week in commercial out-of-school classes’.33 Similarly ‘three out of ten in Germany, Hong Kong, Latvia, Russia, Spain, and Turkey took commercial lessons, while one out of ten students attended such classes in Australia, Austria, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.’34 In India, where tuition classes had become increasingly professional and commercial since the early 1970s, the emphasis changed from remedial education to intensive preparation aids

geared at clearing competitive exams for admission to engineering and medical schools. Competition for law seats, too, attracted a flow of students towards coaching centres, as did aptitude tests such as the SAT, GRE and GMAT, which were required for entry to American universities and professional schools. Student engagement in supplementary schooling or tuition was due to larger socio-economic processes taking place across the world, chief among which was the institutionalisation of mass schooling.35 As the demand for equal educational opportunities and access to quality schooling increased across social classes and countries, the middle classes, and in some cases even the upper classes, were no longer effective in influencing the schooling processes, particularly the curriculum. There were, therefore, concerns among the middle classes about the efficacy of the curriculum meant for the ‘average’ student or the ‘masses’ and whether it would be enough for their wards. A major reason for the increase in private sources of additional learning for children was this anxiety.36 The increasing professionalisation of parents and their corresponding aspirations meant that they wanted for their children what some have referred to as ‘concerted cultivation’.37 They now wanted their children to do better than they themselves had done, even though such success was increasingly hard to come by.38 This also implicated sociological phenomena: students’ home environments mattered.39 Since the children who were admitted to elite institutions broadly came from an environment of high skill, they were quick to pick up basic skills.40 This meant that schools were pressurised into creating arrangements for learning challenging skills and holding intensive sessions to develop higher orders of skill over and above the school curriculum.41 The rapid inroads made by after-school tuition and coaching classes, Modern correctly foresaw, would impinge on the academic culture of the entire school system. Modern had long

tried to ward off this practice, initially by strictly proscribing their teachers from offering private tuitions. In the 1970s, Modern permitted some tuition, with the school itself organising remedial classes, a practice the school still follows, particularly for finalyear students who need help preparing for board exams. Modern’s teachers had long encouraged students to discuss any academic issues they might have, even inviting students to their homes for extra help without it taking on the formal nature of supplemental courses. With the unstoppable rise of tuition centres, however, MSVV shrugged its shoulders and joined in, offering a fully fledged career-guidance cell to students as early as 1992. In a meeting on the Vasant Vihar campus, S.P. Bakshi, the principal of Modern, Barakhamba, argued that the school had always functioned for six days a week, from nine to five, as if the pupils were working a full day at the office. He didn’t even agree with a two-day weekend, which to him was not in keeping with the Modern ethos, which believed in a school education that encompassed a child’s entire academic, physical and cultural growth. Modern’s new nearly six-hour long school day, he said, was inadequate for the numerous co-curricular and extracurricular activities the school offered. He also pointed out that in the US, teachers could avail only two days of leave during term time, while in India casual and medical leave could mean a teacher spent as many as twenty-two days away from school while classes were ongoing. Modern, he believed, should set its own standards rather than follow those of the government or other schools. Old Modern hands like Bakshi and Vyas knew the school’s identity was founded on its notions of community, on its desire to recreate a family atmosphere without the insularity of actual family. Modern had evolved an artistic, cultural and sporting identity that required long hours of practice and engagement in the art room, on the stage and on the playing fields. Ending the school day at half past one each afternoon would mean only the most self-motivated and talented students would continue to seek out individual training. The separation of academic and extracurricular activities was, to

the Modern School view, a reduction of what it meant to be educated. The stiff competition of contemporary life was taking its toll. VIII: REIMAGINING ONESELF IN THE INTERNATIONAL ARENA Philosophically, a good school now meant one that could equip its pupils with the technical and social tools to move freely in the world. The material aspect was paramount, in that successful migration required the right kinds of degrees and certificates. This development was described as ‘meritocratic’, as if scores achieved on mass exams were an accurate gauge of academic ability. In India, the deficit between the number of institutions and the huge number of people wanting access to them caused the need for tests, despite the unequal opportunities to appear for and prepare for them. Thus, in India, the craze for marks was institutionally driven, while in other places, like the United States, where aptitude tests became vital to the admissions process, far from being meritocratic, they created a structural impediment to accessing any institution for a large number of underprivileged students.42 Over the years, global exams, including the International Baccalaureate and the British A-Levels, became increasingly popular in India but only as a particular class of Indians aspired to give their children a cosmopolitan education. This education was not anchored in a national curriculum but designed for students who wished to migrate at will and were likely to go abroad for their higher educations. But Modern chose to root itself in its historic location while retaining its global outlook. Instead, it chose to implement a number of exchange programmes with schools in developed countries from the junior-school level onwards so that by the time students graduated, they were intimately familiar with global standards and expectations. For all the global opportunities Modern students enjoyed, the school was conscious of its local responsibilities. The talent drain

of the late 1990s was painful for the school to witness. The school has long encouraged its students to use their advanced skills to the benefit of their home country, so doctors, for instance, have combined their lucrative private practice with providing services to those who cannot afford specialised treatments, or the many lawyers who got their start at Modern, Barakhamba have been happy to do work in the public interest in addition to more profitable work. With violence becoming growingly endemic to Indian culture and the state apparatus becoming an increasingly partisan participant in the affairs of private citizens, Modernites can be excused for feeling nostalgic about their schooling. Many of the school’s most distinguished alumni have been among the country’s greatest defenders of human and civil rights. Khushwant Singh, for instance—so proud a Modernite that he helped edit a celebratory anthology—was a constant and clear voice against divisive politics.43 Despite his own lack of religious feeling, he was empathetic enough to write the most authoritative history of the Sikhs and proud enough of his identity to resign from the Rajya Sabha in the wake of Operation Blue Star and the then prime minister Indira Gandhi’s decision to send troops into the Sikhs’ holiest shrine. Arun Shourie, another Modernite, believed in journalism as a tool to defend ordinary people against oppressive power. His coverage of the 1983 Nellie massacre in Assam, for instance, was an eye-opener for people who hadn’t understood the dangers of communal furies engulfing popular movements. By 1982, Shourie had already won the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay award for his fearless and independent journalism. He would become the most articulate opponent of the Congress government and its policies, including his criticism of fellow Modernite Rajiv Gandhi when he became prime minister. Rajiv Gandhi’s assumption of prime ministerial duties, in the wake of his mother’s assassination, coincided with the Bhopal gas disaster. Though the government, led by a Modernite, did not acquit itself well during this time, the

photographer who captured the defining image of the tragedy was Pablo Bartholomew, another Modernite.44 The engagement with public office and dedication to social causes was visible across the board in this generation of Modernites. Anil Agarwal, for instance, helped found the Centre for Science and Environment, which, in 1982, published a pioneering citizens’ report on the state of the Indian environment. In 1985, Agarwal edited a second report that caught the eye of Rajiv Gandhi. His co-editor was another, younger Modernite, Sunita Narain, who began working at the Centre for Science and Environment while she was still a student at the University of Delhi. Since the 1990s, she has been involved in several local and international environmental campaigns, becoming so prominent that the 2016 issue of Time listed her as one of the world’s ‘100 Most Influential People’. In Delhi, particularly, her work on pollution has been heroic, succeeding in forcing even stubborn government authorities to take the crisis seriously.45 Significantly, as the 1990s began, the sections nurtured by the state, and which had most benefited from its policies, became the most ardent votaries of opening up the Indian economy to foreign investment. Bureaucratic control, stemming from Delhi, ceded its power to capitalists, based largely in Bombay. The nexus between state, business and industry was more incestuous in Delhi, even though the city’s cultural life ensured that the capital had been the centre of the modernist revolution in India. Modern, as the name indicates, was located in that culture and yet was also embedded, as one of its alumni has maintained, in the structures of power: both of money and polity.46 This meant that any change in the character of the state and the nature of the national leadership would have an impact on the way generations of Modernites might look upon their own role in the order of things. The moral codes that bound schools like Modern had, at their core, a certain deep and abiding connection to the ethics of an earlier time, a connection the school was not ready to give up so easily.

CHAPTER TWELVE THE NEW CENTURY

Today, Delhi and the satellite cities that make up the NCR have become almost unrecognisable to old-timers, who still recall the slumbering town of the 1940s and 1950s with its wide but unpeopled avenues. Recording a population of nearly seventeen million in 2011, Delhi overtook Mumbai as the most populous city in India and was second only to Tokyo worldwide.1 The flyovers, the network of PVR cinemas, the sprawling metro and the complete metamorphosis of Connaught Place, with its high-rise buildings and offices, have utterly changed the heart of the city.2 Amongst all the changes, though, and all the things Delhi has gained, there is much that the city has lost and is continuing to lose. One Modernite has said Delhi was once a city of generous, gregarious Punjabi families and that its ‘big heart’ is no longer so evident. Instead, according to her, Delhi has become a city marked by pettiness.3 Humility, in her opinion, has been replaced with arrogance, even among underdogs who might be expected to have more kindness, more empathy for suffering.4 But more searching questions have to be asked about what money has done to a city in which as much as a quarter of the residents are affluent by the standards of the rest of India. What social virtues or values are the markers of Delhi’s acquisitive middle class? The question is more pertinent in the context of Delhi’s historical graciousness, a city in which the residents of the older parts, who built such institutions as Modern School, accommodated tens of thousands of post-Partition refugees.

If the city has perhaps become more crude, it also has a certain energy, a certain swagger. The city’s schoolboys from the 1980s are now scripting some of the country’s finest, most creative films, and are also shining on the music scene.5 But there is no getting away from the violence and alienation that plagues the city. Young women, as everyone around the world knows, have been the worst affected by Delhi’s culture, whether working, studying, or even staying dutifully at home. The city has been called the ‘rape capital of India’. Even after the horror of the 16 December 2012 gang rape and brutal murder of ‘Nirbhaya’, there has been no letup. National Crime Record Bureau figures showed a reported 1,813 rapes in 2014, up from 1,441 the year before.6 The city was once a centre of fun, of performances and sports events, but that carefree aspect has become much diminished as crime, particularly against women and the poor, has become synonymous with Delhi.7 It is in this city of stunning contrasts—of wealth and poverty, of beauty and extreme urban ugliness, of generosity and violence—that Modern, with over five thousand pupils, still occupies centre place, both literally, given the location of its Barakhamba Road campus, and metaphorically. I: CONVERGENCE OF THE SCHOOL UNIVERSE When, in the winter of 1999, MSVV began a year-long celebration of its silver jubilee year, the school displayed almost all of the typical characteristics associated with its elder sibling. The aesthetic ambience it evolved was unique to its own context and honed by teachers who were artists of a completely different stripe than the ones who had given pupils their cultural foundations at Modern School, Barakhamba, and RSJMS on Humayun Road. The one thing these teachers did have in common through the generations was that they were working artists, teachers who taught from experience. Shubhika Lal, for example, joined MSVV as one of its first art teachers in 1978, bringing to the school her innovative techniques and methods in metal casting. She stayed at

the school till 2012, taking time off to travel on fellowships and show her work but always bringing back to the school her evolving knowledge of her craft, gained through sustained practice and experimentation. Similarly, Ravindra Verma, who had been educated at the art college in Indore, joined the sculpture department at MSVV, after returning from Italy, where he won a scholarship in 1984 to study ceramics. As we have noted already, Devyani Krishna, the legendary teacher at Modern, Barakhamba, had also been at Indore in the 1930s when it was a hive of fevered modernism. As if to stress the continuity of artistic experimentation at the school, Devyani retired in 1977 just as the likes of Shubhika Lal and Ravindra Verma arrived at the new Modern. Much like Barakhamaba, MSVV, too, always preferred its art department to be staffed by professional artists rather than professional teachers, mostly because students benefited from seeing what it took to forge an artistic career and what it meant to expand one’s horizons and then feed the experience back into one’s work. Ravindra Verma’s early career is illustrative: I spent seven years completing BFA in sculpture. Prof. Dhanraj Bhagat was my teacher. Mr. Biman Das was also there. Simultaneously, I joined Triveni Art Gallery. Rameshwar Broota was there. I did painting for five years there. Then I got a job with Modern School, Vasant Vihar as a Sculpture Teacher. In between, I got scholarship to go to Italy in 1984. I did a course in paintings and ceramics. Then I travelled to France, USA, Bhutan and travelled a lot. In 2007, I received a very prestigious award ‘Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity’ by the President of Italy.8 Later, MSVV hired Sabiha Hashmi, who was simultaneously pursuing her doctoral work on the Jataka tales and their influence on cave painting in Dunhuang, China, indicating the school’s appeal to rising scholars.9 Much of this appeal, of course, was Modern’s unstinting commitment to open-ended inquiry. The

message to pupils was that they had to look beneath the surface and probe past conventional lessons, even if the questions they had were sometimes uncomfortable or unanswerable. The search for the answer was the thing, not the answer itself. And this is why the arts played such an essential role in a Modern School education. In MSVV, too, the hugely popular art teacher Marie Arora worked with the children on drawing and painting. Ved Vyas famously gave her the run of the art room, and she would encourage the children to make massive collages for the walls, filling the room with colour and texture. The seriousness with which Modern took aesthetic questions rubbed off on students, many of whom went into creative fields themselves, ranging from filmmaking to architecture, music, dance and writing. Two relatively recent graduates of MSVV, Ishan Khosla and Sunaina Coelho, for instance, have made a substantial impact in the fields of graphic design and illustration.10 Another Modernite, academic Kajri Jain, has written a definitive treatise on India’s visual culture, a tribute in some ways to her early schooling in how art is inextricably woven into the fabric of Indian life.11 If MSVV has had a considerable artistic tradition, its music department, too, has not been far behind. Again, the school has relied on employing working musicians from every genre, classical or contemporary, and has made itself a musical centre in the wider culture beyond the school gates. Music lovers at MSVV will have been excited when sarod maestro Amjad Ali Khan, himself a Modernite, decided to send his sons, Ayaan and Amaan, to the school, perhaps because it meant he might become more involved with the school’s already renowned department. Nalini Kumaran, a singer whose stints on AIR and Doordarshan made her famous, was one of the first music teachers hired at MSVV, along with the extremely affable Shankar Dasgupta. In 1980, she prepared students to compete in an AIR song competition, with the best entries sent on to the BBC for global airplay.12 The school also appointed G.K. Nair, a trained Kathakali dancer, to lead its dance department, perhaps the first school in a north Indian city to place such faith in an art form so intrinsic to the deep south, and further

evidence of Modern’s commitment to educate its pupils about their pan-Indian cultural heritage.13 In fact, more than pan-Indian, Modern’s approach could be characterised as global—a confident cosmopolitanism rooted in India. K.J. Vari, for instance, who succeeded Ved Vyas as principal of MSVV, was trained in Western classical and choir music at the seminary near Darjeeling where he was raised.14 MSVV’s cultural ambition was particularly manifest in its 1989 production of the musical West Side Story, which ran for eight consecutive nights (21–28 October) at Kamani Auditorium, one of the city’s most important cultural venues. Fifty students, past and present, made up the cast, including the budding choreographer Ashley Lobo, and the show was directed by an economics teacher George Pulinkala. Thus, the seeds that Ved Vyas and his team had sown were reaped by K.G. Vari, who enabled the garden to flourish. With West Side Story, MSVV did what Modern, Barakhamba had done, which was to make its mark on the city’s cultural-scape. Many who had nothing to do with the school would have sported the trendy black T-shirts with the words ‘West Side Story’ splashed across the front that were sold at the event. And for the teachers and students and those intimately connected to the school, it would have been a source of immense pride to have six thousand plus people crowd into the theatre to watch the performance. For MSVV’s elder sibling, the success of the show spurred it on to produce something special for its diamond jubilee celebration. For three nights (23–25 November) in 1994 at the large Siri Fort Auditorium, Modern, Barakhamba put on an enthusiastically acclaimed production of the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar.15 Sir Nicholas Fenn, the British high commissioner at the time, described the performance as ‘spectacular’ and said it reflected ‘great credit on the students and staff alike’.16 The performance served, again, as a reminder of the school’s secular spirit in a time of nativism and violent communalism. Modern’s principal at the time, S.P. Bakshi, a former English teacher, was a firm adherent of the school’s foundational

values, chief among which was a commitment to secular diversity.17 The conceptualisation and staging of West Side Story and Jesus Christ Superstar were triumphant confirmation that these values were still at the heart of the Modern mission.18 Historically, Delhi had not been particularly receptive to classical Western music or musical theatre. So the Modern School productions were pioneering. Though there was more of an audience for theatre, even here Modern was at the vanguard. Outside the National School of Drama bubble, theatre groups such as Yatrik, Yavanika, Parvatiya Kala Kendra Abhiyan, Three Acts Club, and the Indian People’s Theatre Association held regular performances and had created a substantial following. This was also a time when Modern, Barakhamba’s own Arun Kuckreja, along with his schoolmate Feisal Alkazi, was experimenting with plays on the Delhi stage. They set up one of the most dynamic of the theatre groups of today, the Ruchika Theatre Group.19 Eager to take their work to the people, groups like the radical Jan Natya Manch, led by Safdar Hashmi among others, took their theatre to the streets. Hashmi, ideologically a communist, would be murdered in 1989, attacked by politically motivated thugs after a street performance in a village in Sahibabad. His legacy, though, was considerable, turning theatre into a vehicle for protest against gender, communal and class oppression. Modern alumni, including the likes of Anuradha Kapur, would play a central role in the growth of socially conscious theatre, expanding the repertoire of groups across the city and articulating their inclusive, progressive ideals before large audiences.20 In 1995, both branches of Modern celebrated important anniversaries. Modern, Barakhamba, founded in 1920 (though the actual move to Barakhamba Road was made in 1933), turned seventy-five, while the Vasant Vihar branch turned twenty. It felt as if there had only been a greater convergence between the two schools over the years, and Pradeep Virendra Singh and Anuradha Singh, at different points of time, emphasised the need to transfer this synergy at the level of the administration of the schools as

well.21 This was not about control or to curb the schools’ autonomy, but about a joint sense of purpose. The joint jubilee festivities tightened the schools’ bond as they collaborated on a year-long celebration, including sports events and cultural performances. The combined sports meet of the junior schools (Humayun Road and Vasant Vihar) took place at the same time as an all-India swimming competition at the Olympic-size pool at Modern, Barakhamba. Five days earlier, Modern had held its annual inter-school hockey tournament, named after Raghubir Singh, at Shivaji Stadium.22 All the joint events led up to a special Founder’s Day celebration on 20 October 1995, organised jointly by the two branches at the Sir Shankar Lal Concert Hall.23 The special jubilee song was written by former principal Ved Vyas and composed by Amjad Ali Khan. The schools were together again the next day for the concluding session of the jubilee function at Vigyan Bhavan, where their combined report was read by the president of the trust, followed by a speech by the chief guest, the president of India at the time, Shankar Dayal Sharma.24 II: THE CONTESTED DOMAIN OF EDUCATION Around the turn of the millennium, the new NDA government appeared to be considering the introduction of a vague ‘indigenous’ education, even as demands were growing in Delhi and across India for schooling on par with ‘global’ standards. Many entrepreneurs began to prefix the names of new schools with the term ‘global’ in a bid to cash in on these aspirations. Meanwhile, educationists made a strong case for universal access to education, for the Indian citizen’s right to at least a minimum amount of schooling provided by the state.25 Schools like Modern were challenged on a number of fronts—from those who questioned their secular pedagogical philosophy to those who demanded that admission to the school be expanded in quantity and scope.26

As far back as the 1950s and 1960s, Delhi’s business community was aware of the need to increase the number of institutions that provided Indians with technical and professional education at the higher-education level. Government institutions were not enough to meet the demand, with only a handful of such institutions established, like the Shri Ram College of Commerce, which was founded by the industrialist Lala Shri Ram but was affiliated to Delhi University. It was Lala Shri Ram who, as the head of many committees, particularly the joint committee on Industrial Administration and Business Management in 1953, and later as the chairman of the planning committee for the northern region of the AICTE, had campaigned and got started many institutions of technical and management education in the region during the late 1950s and early 1960s. He prodded his own trust to encourage the building of more institutions in the region, which was long starved of educational facilities.27 The foundation of the Shri Ram Centre for Industrial Research was laid in 1947, and it began its research in industrial products.28 However, for reasons not seriously studied, the region, home to some of the finest industrial and business houses and hard working people, could not develop autonomous or state-owned technical and management institutions till very late. Even the encouragement provided to private players by the National Policy on Education in 1986 failed to serve as a catalyst for the accelerated growth of institutions of adequate quality in states such as Bihar, UP, Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab. As a result, Delhi served as a hub for a large swathe of students from across the northern belt. A consequence of this was the increased pressure put on schoolchildren in Delhi to find places in their local colleges and universities. Parents knew their children faced intense competition not just for places in central institutions but also in private colleges, thus requiring increased amounts of time and money devoted to specialised preparation outside school hours. From the 1980s, the once relaxed atmosphere of Delhi’s schools changed, to reflect a more thrusting, aggressive, competitive society.

By the time the new century arrived, the material foundations of Delhi’s economy had changed drastically, requiring its institutions to address those changes. While the city was home to such a big chunk of the national economy, the city’s economic foundations had completely shifted from what they were in the early 1950s. From the industrial and machinery-based economy of its early years, where a large number of big industries and businesses defined the city’s economic horizon, by 2000, we have clear indication that the tertiary sector, and more so some key areas of that sector, was crucial to the new economy. Table VI shows the changed magnitude of Delhi’s industrial sector. Delhi was becoming an economic hub and needed the manpower to suit its status. The magnitude of industrial growth in the city had been exponential over the previous half century. The city’s entrepreneurs and family-run firms wanted to be able to rely on its educational system to meet these needs. Delhi was second only to Mumbai in its capacity to produce wealth, though indications are that much of this wealth creation was not necessarily the result of industrial development but of the growth of sectors such as apparel, transport, communications and finance.29 TABLE V1: GROWTH OF INDUSTRIAL SECTOR, 1951–2001

1951 1961 1971 1981 1991 2001

Industrial Units (numbers) 8,160 17,000 26,000 42,000 85,050 129,000

Investment (crores) 18.13 60.00 190.00 700.00 1,659.00 2,524.00

Production (crores) 35.35 121.00 388.00 1,700.00 4,462.00 6,310.00

Employment (numbers) 95,137 187,034 291,585 568,910 730,951 1,440,000

Source: Economic Survey of Delhi, 2005-2006.30 National Sample Survey Organisation data revealed that about 9 per cent of Delhi’s population could be classified as very rich

compared to the rest of the country while 30 per cent was comfortably middle class. A National Council of Applied Economic Research study based on consumer behaviour showed Delhi was far ahead of Mumbai or any other city in the country in having what its researchers termed the ‘sheer rich’, ‘clear rich’, and ‘strivers’.31 Similarly, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS IV) of 20152016 also indicated the city had the largest number of households having more income than any other city in the country.32 While research agencies consistently maintained that the city had more rich (billionaires and millionaires) than any other city in the country, the phenomenon of urban poor in the city continued to attain staggering dimensions and demanded immediate attention.33 What was also noticed was the process of prosperous parts of metropolitan cities carving out their own spaces. So, depending on your income and social class, you were more likely to connect with others in your bracket in cities hundreds, even thousands of miles away, than with neighbours from a different social segment in your own city.34 It was a kind of secession, even if not geographical.35 A new substratum of schools was available to assist this migration, often mental but equally often physical, to metropolitan centres in other, more developed countries.36 These were the material conditions in which Delhi parents were choosing where to send their children to school.37 The 2001 and 2011 censuses indicated that Delhi was fast becoming India’s most populous city, and also showed that of this vast population, some 35 to 40 per cent was comprised of schoolgoing children.38 Modern School, Barakhamba Road, its junior wing on Humayun Road and the second branch in Vasant Vihar served nearly two million schoolchildren. And this doesn’t take into account those who lived in Gurugram, Noida and other parts of the NCR and were eager to enrol their children in Delhi’s most prominent schools. The increase in the number of schools in the capital could not hope to match the pace of the increasing population. According to the Delhi Directorate of Education, there were 2,735 primary schools in 2001, a number that reduced to

2,416 the next year. And if one accepts data from the Ministry of Human Resource Development (now called the Ministry of Education), this number has been stagnant, with only 2,755 primary schools registered in Delhi in 2016.39 These statistics suggest that all schools in the capital were under pressure to admit larger numbers of students. It was an admissions situation ripe for all sorts of malpractices. This also added to the issue of out of school children, which was one of the critical areas of concern for those concerned with both children and education.40 For a large segment of Delhi’s population, ‘affordable schooling’ was the immediate need. But, as we have seen, the middle class and the rich formed a substantial part of the population, and their concern was access to ‘quality education’. An incipient consensus among the middle class was that quality education would make their children globally competitive. III: MODERN AND THE CHOICE OF SCHOOL The choice of school was usually a family decision and one that was obviously influenced by values and social class. Research shows that the middle class looked to schools to confer social and cultural capital on their children, to prepare them for corporate and private-industry employment and, increasingly, to enable them to negotiate the global job market. Older schools such as Modern, their own evolution coterminous with that of the schooling system in the country, found themselves in a dilemma. It is not as if Modern School students did not go abroad; they did and do in legions. They have also excelled at and maintained a presence in some of the world’s most renowned institutions. Where once Indian students would go abroad for postgraduate studies, in recent years, they have also been going to elite foreign universities for undergraduate degrees. And while at one point, foreign education was a path embarked on by individual students, it is now becoming a standard to aspire to for a whole social class. Modern was confident in its ability to facilitate whatever life choices its students wanted to make, including going to university in the West. But this

widespread ambition did affect the final years of a child’s education. Once they knew they wanted to apply to a university abroad, their interest in the curriculum slackened, as they focused their energies on specific application requirements and aptitude tests. Their lack of interest also affected the atmosphere at school and, inevitably, other students who had no intention of going abroad. Modern was also aware of the irony of being founded as an anti-colonial institution but evolving to become an effective vehicle for some of India’s most able students to take their talents abroad. Of course, the continued paucity of high-quality higher educational institutions in northern India was a major reason for students to look outside the country. Regressive politics meant even those institutions that had once been outstanding were descending down a spiral towards terminal decline. The need to migrate or at least become globally competitive increased the call for English-medium schools. Between 2003 and 2011, there was a rise of 274 per cent in English-medium schools all over the country.41 In Delhi, while the raw number of schools remained roughly static, there was a resurgence in schools that were of a ‘global’ or ‘international’ character. Academic Vimala Ramachandran, after a detailed analysis of the data, has observed: The systemic class and caste-wise sorting and streaming of children into different categories of schools has become so clearcut and solidified that schools themselves appear to be socially stratified. Schools are branded as Dalit schools and elite schools and so on, as opposed to socially mixed schools.42 The Modern School was among the first choice of schools for many families for the reasons outlined above compounded by the fact that families also had connections to the school going back three, sometimes four generations. But the school neither saw itself as a school of the privileged nor, even, as an English-medium school. In fact, after Independence, one of the first decisions of the

school’s management committee was to make Hindi compulsory.43 Very few schools in Delhi could have produced Hindi plays of the calibre that Modern did. As recently as 2018, the junior school put on a performance of Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s epic poem Rashmirathi for their annual day, underlining Modern’s commitment not just to Hindi but to Hindi literature as well. It was an instalment in a long line of Hindi epic poems that have been performed on the Modern stage, including Dinkar’s Kurukshetra and Jaishankar Prasad’s Kamayani. This perhaps has been among the greatest achievements of Modern, that it did not allow a language, whether English or Hindi, to become a tool of ‘social fragmentation’.44 Indeed, Modern students’ vocabularies included the choicest expletives in Hindi, Punjabi and English, all employed with Delhi’s unique candour. Similarly, if the status of teachers was any indication of the privileges accorded to any one discipline, language or system of thought in the school, then no such discrimination could be found, as no greater heed was paid to English or Westernised manners, whether among staff or students. Moreover, teachers of Hindi, Sanskrit, Bangla and Urdu have long played a critical part in the school’s growth. Ved Vyas, who taught Hindi, was the founding principal of MSVV, and Sanskrit teacher K.D. Bharadwaj was the long-time publisher of the school’s journal. Modern, therefore, was uneasy about this new hierarchical order of Delhi’s schools, even though it ranked near the very top. It faced the difficult choice of either conceding that it was an exclusive school for the city’s elite and preparing to compete with institutions touting their adherence to the International Baccalaureate or of finding a way to reinvent itself while remaining true to its founding ideals. The school chose the latter, learning from its own strengths and re-emphasising the diversity that characterised its earliest years. In the new millennium, the school’s trustees appeared to decide, Modern would be best served by rediscovering its original purpose and reinvigorating its commitment to its ideals.45 In this, Modern’s most formidable foes turned out to be on the one hand, the rising rich, for whom education was fast becoming another consumable product, the

costlier and fancier the brand the better, and on the other hand, the government regulations that chipped away at the school’s autonomy and its individual way of doing things, in particular, its admissions processes and pedagogical style. IV: THE NEW CAMPUSES There were three ways the school could have responded to the challenge of making Modern globally competitive. First, the school could have simply ignored the challenge and banked on its historical glory and pride in its reputation. Second, it could have done what other private schools did and invested considerable capital into a makeover to resemble, albeit in superficial ways, fashionable international schools, including teaching a foreign curriculum. Modern chose the third, which was to bow, at least partially, to the future while retaining trust in its past, in the strength of its structure and academic principles. Its facilities remained unparalleled as an Olympic-size pool was added to the Vasant Vihar campus to match the one at Modern, Barakhamba. A suitably large, impressive auditorium was added in the Vasant Vihar campus, named after the Ruias, who funded the construction. The Sir Sobha Singh Block was completed on the Barakhamba Road campus, to house the middle school in its own state-of-the-art building. And as Modern approaches its centenary, improvements have included updated track and field facilities for both MSVV and RSJMS, floodlights for the Modern, Barakhamba football pitch, and resurfaced tennis courts. At a more conceptual level, the school decided to break free of the constrictions imposed by the new demographic and material conditions. This must have been weighing on the minds of the trustees when they thought of extending the gates of the school beyond the capital. If an increasing number of parents bought into the Modern vision, the trustees seemed to be thinking, why turn admissions into a rat race? Why not open newer branches of the school and widen access? Therefore, in 2014, the school opened a new branch in Kundli, Sonepat, where the establishment of the

Rajiv Gandhi Education City by the Haryana government has brought a rush of private investment in education, including at the university level. The new school has provided opportunities to implement ideas and pedagogical experiments that are less possible in the older branches for a variety of reasons, including historical ones. The campus has also meant a chance to flex architectural muscles that have been dormant for decades. While parts of the campus are still under construction, Modern ECNCR, as the Kundli campus has come to be known, has begun classes— with the help of alumni and recently retired staff—in an ecologically sustainable building with an integrated solar-power generation system. In 2014, in keeping with its penchant for continuity, the trustees appointed Neelam Puri, a former chemistry teacher and headmistress at Modern, Barakhamba, as the new school’s academic director. Two years later, in 2016, the school opened another branch in Sector-17, Faridabad. These new branches are indicative of the hunger in the region for the Modern School way and, naturally, the desire to bask in the reflected sheen of the school’s exemplary history. While these schools are too new to have evolved their own identities, MSVV serves as an example of what is possible. For now, being attached to a rich legacy provides its own frisson for students and teachers alike. One wonders, given the school’s nation-building past and its intricate links to India’s foundational ideals, if the brand can now be taken to different parts of the country. V: ISSUES OF EQUITY AND ACCESS As we discuss the prospect of Modern franchises popping up around the country, we must also acknowledge that the mushrooming of private schools and their dominance of the Indian education landscape in the twenty-first century reignited the debate on the privatisation and commercialisation of education. In this new and still overheated debate, the distinction between the old unaided schools and new business enterprises was lost. The

Modern School, however, unlike most new private schools, was not built to make profits. The idea it emphasised in its earliest avatar, when it had yet to move out of Daryaganj, was a kind of intellectual ennoblement.46 The social composition of the school always skewed towards the privileged, but this was more by accident than design. Still, it is this undeniable privilege that has always made the school seek out ways to admit deserving students who would otherwise be lost to Modern. Students have long been and continued to be offered full scholarships to study at the school. Way back in 1980, just five years after the founding of MSVV, the management committee asked the principal to ‘suggest appropriate measures to attract bright and gifted students’.47 The school’s authorities had resolved ‘that deserving students from the low income group be given scholarships’.48 Later, in 1997, as the fee systems of schools became controversial, with several parents’ groups and concerned citizens filing lawsuits, Modern School’s accounts were audited. Investigations by the Department of Education revealed that over a hundred students at MSVV were attending the school for free, on a combination of scholarships and waivers. Rather than making a profit, MSVV was in regular deficit. That said, the costs were passed on to the parents in large part. MSVV increased teacher salaries in keeping with the recommendations of the Fifth Pay Commission Report in 1997 and raised its fees by 65 per cent before parent protests forced it to reduce the hike to 40 per cent.49 Balancing fees, charged to parents who can afford to pay, with scholarships for deserving students has long been a complicated struggle. Access to schools such as Modern is necessarily restricted, because demand exponentially outnumbers supply. For a long time, too, government schools have lost the faith of parents, so even people of extremely limited means scrimp and save to send their children to local, sometimes fly-by-night private schools. So many liberties have been taken and so many parents duped, that both the governments and the courts have had to step in to regulate (and sometimes over-regulate) admissions.50 Since the

beginning of the millennium, there have been a regular series of instructions from courts about how schools can fairly admit pupils. The Delhi government has now made it mandatory that private schools earmark a quarter of available seats for students from economically weaker sections.51 Instead of a collaborative approach to solving issues of access, the government has put the onus on schools, making pronouncements in a punitive spirit and failing to give schools the necessary time to come up with appropriate pedagogical methods to bridge the yawning chasm between various students’ backgrounds and cultures. That said, the composition of classrooms are now a more accurate reflection of the larger society, rather than just comprising a privileged segment. But the apparent inclusiveness only belies how fragmented society has become, how far we have moved from the nationwide consensus about certain essential principles that prevailed around the time of Independence and as the republic was established. The effort to achieve ennoblement at Modern now needs everyday negotiations with the demands of privilege and entitlement. VI: THE CURRICULUM AND QUALITY Amidst these radical social changes, there has been continued political wrangling at the national level about the contents of school curricula and examination patterns.52 The Modern School has played a considerable role in the establishment of a national curriculum and examination system in India. We have already discussed its support for the CBSE, for instance, in assisting its rise from a local school-leaving exam in Ajmer, Bhopal and the former Vindhya Pradesh to an exam that effectively replaced the colonial Senior Cambridge examinations across India. Modern has also been a pillar of support to the NCERT, the relationship perhaps reaching its peak when a Modern alumnus, Parvin Sinclair, was appointed as the council’s director in 2012, by the then education minister Kapil Sibal. Modern School staff even helped write NCERT textbooks. As recently as 2009, Biba Sobti, a

history teacher at Modern, Barakhamba, was on the board of the history-textbook committee. Of late, though, the school’s ties with those who make curricula and write textbooks have faded. There were public expressions of disquiet when the CBSE wanted to bring in changes that were perceived to be bringing down academic standards. The school’s own misgivings reflected those of a section of people who believed the incessant tinkering with public examinations and curriculums, in part to suit political aims, went against the promotion of excellence and the autonomy of academic institutions. There were hints, around 2008, that Modern might even be prepared to make a switch to an international board. It would have been an extraordinary turnaround for such a nationalist school to have gone global, but Modern appears to have decided it can still find a place for itself and its principles in the new environment. For Modern, its place in Indian culture has always been of paramount concern. In 2006, the school hosted a Community Development and Leadership Summit for schoolchildren from across the world, that saw a week of debate and discussion over issues of concern for the global youth. This became an annual conference, an opportunity to both hear a varied international perspective and present an Indian view of the world. By the twelfth edition of the summit, Modern had become confident enough to pose complicated and controversial questions to participating students: one debate discussed whether refugees were a liability or a responsibility, another whether fairness creams were an expression of racism.53 MSVV too started its own Young Leaders Conclave in 2013, inviting students to discuss plans ‘for a better India and a better world’.54 Such meetings were an essential extension of Modern’s project to reach out to the world while remaining firmly anchored in India. One significant dimension of these conclaves was a continuous effort to relate to the digital world.55 Technology itself is radically changing, and new digital frontiers, easily explored and crossed via personal computers and

mobile phones, have changed the way students see the roles of those who teach and those who are taught as well as their notions of schooling itself. New laws and disciplinary regimes have attempted to combat growing access to and reliance on the internet, but the cat is, essentially, out of the bag. Modern will have to reconsider the school’s cultural and social life and assumptions in this light, and as it approaches its centenary, the shape of its response, how it chooses to retain its foundational idealism, becomes ever more crucial. How, in other words, will this iconic school continue to anchor a deep humanistic core in an emerging world view defined by technology? In a country which faces a deep digital divide, forcing education through digital platforms, as has been happening during the pandemic-enforced lockdown, has made Modern face questions about how to humanise digital pedagogy on the one hand while making sure, on the other, that schooling continues to be a universal right rather than a privilege. Technology has also brought about a crisis in the teaching profession. While supplementary education and coaching had already encroached upon the space of formal classroom teaching, new technologies have made a certain kind of teaching obsolete. Modern, since its inception, has required its teachers to keep themselves abreast of the latest knowledge in their fields. But whatever their efforts, their authority is now secondary to information that can be found online, information that, increasingly, might turn out to be misleading or false. Modern’s authorities, then, have to deal with questions of unequal access to technology, the diminishing of the teacher’s authority and the bewildering variety of sources of information, all while adhering to the inclusiveness and progressiveness the school has always claimed as an ideal. But everyone at Modern, from administrators to teachers and students, has rallied in the cause of the greater common good. This is a testament to the strength of the school’s founding vision. VII: ECOLOGICAL SENSITIVITY

One of the key subjects at Modern in the present and future will be ecological sensitivity—how, in other words, to reverse the distortions of climate change. MSVV has had a lot of practice fighting to preserve ecological balance. The neighbourhood of Vasant Vihar has, in the lifespan of the school, expanded from a dustbowl close to the Ridge to a sprawling colony with markets, schools, hotels and upper-middle class houses and apartment blocks. For years, MSVV pupils have joined local residents and university students at protests over the swallowing up of large chunks of forest to build luxury hotels and sprawling shopping malls. Between 2002 and 2005, the face of the movement to save the Ridge was journalist Kuldip Nayar, father of lawyer Rajiv Nayar, a Modernite and a member of the MSVV management committee. The nearby forest, with its biodiversity, has long brought an array of birds to MSVV, captivating teachers and students, many of whom, as a result, have been keen ornithologists. MSVV has a dedicated club, the Green Brigade, that focuses on raising awareness and creating change around such environmental issues. The Green Brigade checked the emissions of four thousand vehicles to assess their effects on Delhi’s air at a time when several lobbies were arguing that vehicular pollution was insignificant. Buoyed by the effect of their vehicle campaign, the Green Brigade began several long-term research projects that will be of considerable value to future scholars in the field. They were ably supported by a foundation endowed by the family of Vinod Dikshit, a Modernite and the late husband of Sheila Dikshit, the three-term chief minister of Delhi who died in 2019. The students also campaigned hard for people to forgo the use of crackers on Diwali at a time when there was not much awareness on the issue. It helps perhaps that the international face for India’s fight against pollution has been Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and Environment and a Modernite. MSVV, incidentally, has been in the limelight for its marvellous, prizewinning garden, an aesthetic as well as an ecological boon. By dint of both location and temperament, MSVV students have played and will continue to play a significant part in pushing the authorities

in India to adopt more sustainable measures and policies vital to our survival. VIII: GENDER SENSITIVITY Alongside ecological sensitivity, a key and ongoing concern for Modern students has been gender sensitivity. Since the 1980s, despite years of feminist activism in Delhi, the city has witnessed an exponential rise in crimes against women, particularly violent crimes such as rape, murder and assault. This misogyny seems hardwired into a city that appears to pride itself on its aggression, on a ‘masculinity’ that preys on the weak and vulnerable. Social media, with its endless reserves of trolls who use particularly vile, sexist and violent rhetoric when bullying women, has appeared only to have exacerbated the problems girls and women face. Modern, home to a huge number of students, many of whom are girls, has been aware of these growing pressures on young women in a culture seemingly ever more geared towards men despite all the efforts to redress the balance. At Modern, the steps to reverse any cultural conditioning begin at primary school. When Ketaki Sood became president of the Modern School trust in 2019 and Mira Pradeep Singh was appointed as treasurer, the ascent of two women to the top posts at the school confirmed a trend that had been picking up momentum in the school. The trust had already appointed Ambika Pant as its secretary a couple of years previously. And on the educational rather than the administrative side, the school has long been controlled by women. In 2000, K.J. Vari retired as principal of MSVV. His successor was Goldy Malhotra. In the same year, Modern, Barakhamba appointed Lata Vaidyanathan to replace R.K. Bhatia as principal. In 2003, Manju Rajput became the principal at Junior Modern on Humayun Road, so now all of the schools were led by women. Manju Rajput is still principal at RSJMS, while at MSVV Goldy Malhotra was succeeded in 2011 by Meenakshi Sahni. Lata Vaidyanathan was succeeded in 2014 by Vijay Datta. But Datta is the odd one out, as the newest Modern branches in Kundli and Faridabad are also led

by women, Abha Sadana and Neetu Blest respectively. The alumni bodies of both Modern, Barakhamba and MSVV are spearheaded by women. The composition of a school’s governing structure does not necessarily reflect the principles and spirit of the school. Modern, to be fair, has not needed the affirmation of women in positions of administrative power to prove that it has always been progressive in its attitude towards women. But culture is a tricky opponent, and until the late 1980s, girls only formed a small part of the student body. Often, the few girls that were enrolled at Modern were the daughters of alumni. Slowly and surely, though, the barriers before female education in the north began to lift, and girls were admitted in far greater numbers while Modern’s teaching faculty started to comprise more women. It’s an oddity that it took so long, given that Modern’s first principal was Kamala Bose and it was an early adopter of the Montessori method, which argues strongly for women to teach children at the earliest stages of their education, to counteract patriarchal projections of power and violence from the start. IX: BRIDGING INEQUALITY The Delhi government’s decision to mandate schools to admit a quarter of their intake from economically weaker sections and so make schools more economically and socially inclusive gave Modern the opportunity to return to its roots as a school founded to combat colonial-inflected hierarchies. In the run-up to Independence and over the next couple of decades, Modern was embroiled in the national project, in seeing the national dream of becoming a pluralist, secular, inclusive republic come to fruition. It is revealing that as the school moved from its infancy to its maturity, it was a composite school where children from rich business families studied with the children of middle-class government servants. This limited income and cultural diversity was levelled further at school, so that many of Modern’s most famous alumni from the time mostly came from rather average

backgrounds. It is true, too, that India was a more austere country at the time, less impressed by or interested in the trappings of wealth. As the Indian economy opened up, Modern became increasingly associated with the rich and politically powerful. The vicious circle of admissions and the unceasing demands on the school might not have allowed it to reflect on the need to change the composition of its student body until the external force of government suddenly provided it the necessary stimulus to reinvent itself. Schooling, as Willard Waller has suggested, is among the most important tools of socialisation in modern democratic societies, a force of citizen-making. In our liberal and progressive imagination, too, schools are supposed to prepare the young to enter into the public sphere.56 Once sufficiently trained at school, German philosopher Jurgen Habermas has said, students can contribute to public-policy making in a reasoned, thoughtful manner and, equally reasonably, present their critiques.57 Modern’s desire to make its students leaders in their society required them to engage with the world around them and respond to their environment. Many alumni have lived up to the challenge: the likes of Amit Kumar, who moved to the hinterlands of Madhya Pradesh to set up schools and work for and with tribal people in the area, or Anita Rampal, an education professor who defends the right to education of the urban destitute and dispossessed, or Saba Hasan, who fights for the rights of the vanquished and violated, or sisters Barkha and Bahar Dutt who, in their own ways, document the stories of those who would otherwise not have a voice. Mira Pradeep Singh has long thrown herself into her work with Cheshire House. The early history of Modern is sufficient testimony to the joy a socially responsible, committed education can bring to students.58 It is here that the school’s leadership becomes vital because it is they who must create a moral universe for their students. Teachers are central to inculcating students with school spirit, which in Modern’s case meant imbibing the school’s moral code.

But teachers are not the only claimants to a child’s education. It is intriguing to see how Modern, from its earliest days, has sought to portray itself as an alternative to family. The institution of family constitutes a very close relationship, some might even say one synonymous with the nation, with each member legitimising the other to the detriment of individual freedom, equality and justice. Modern, from its foundation, wanted to break open families and reconstitute them at school. The result would be to replace cloistered clannishness with a self-selected Modernite family that was open to the world, to ideas and to social and cultural liberation. While it is true that we do not have much understanding of how schooling and family as institutions are related to each other in a dynamically moving society such as India’s over the last century, it is clear from many studies that they have some significant connection that cannot, as sociologist Andre Beteille in his work on inequalities in India has pointed out, be ignored.59 Families, as we noted earlier, decide which school is best for their children, and it is a choice based on the family’s internal and external resources. Thus, argues Beteille, it is family and not caste which is central to the way schooling leads to the inequalities in society.60 India’s attainment of independence in 1947 gave Modern the opportunity to test its belief in universal goodness, in the ability of humans to transcend their limitations. Modern aspired to be a national institution with a global outlook,61 but gradually, with transformations in the nation, the world and even the city, it appeared to have more of a global character than one contributing to envisioning the nation in a creative way for the new generation. A critique of Modern is essentially a critique of Delhi and the emerging metropolitan cities in India and the world, where secession and alienation rather than invitation and inclusion are being celebrated. From its inception, the school looked beyond Delhi for its teachers, and students came from local business and middle-class families as well as from other regions in the country to be its boarders. As the economy of the country developed, Delhi saw the rise of a new affluent section. The mix of students in Modern was affected as a result, as the teachers were drawn

largely from the city and sections lacking social confidence ceased to enrol their children at Modern. The absence of a composite social mix had an impact on the school. Modern was staring at a homogeneity impelled by the demands and pressures of Delhi’s growing wealth and the official diktats on teacher recruitments and admission policies. Notwithstanding these developments, by inviting the long-term commitment of its teachers and fostering the continuity provided by the management, the school has endeavoured to keep itself anchored to its foundational ideals. Historically, art and culture were essential tools at Modern, a way of inculcating shared values and traditions among students so that Modernites were connected to other Modernites, regardless of family or background. Building these connections has become more challenging as society, particularly in a metropolis like Delhi, becomes ever more fragmented and any common threads are increasingly frayed. In this context, the Modern School Old Students Association, formed in 1957 by the students of Barakhamba Road, has contributed significantly to provide a sense of historical continuity to the student body. Modern, Barakhamba and RSJMS have many students who are the fourth generation of their family to attend the school. MSVV has some second generation students, and will perhaps soon even have third generation students. Again, it is this continuity that serves as a buffer between the school’s unchanging founding principles and the constantly changing city around it, and it is this continuity that means the school’s values are passed on, even to those completely new to the school and its ethos. The alumni association and other students do this for those students who are the first in their families to attend Modern. The alumni association is critical in spreading this lore, in perpetuating the idea that the school can be a stand-in for family. In 1983, for instance, ex-students such as Prakash Narain, Vinod Dikshit, Ravi Khera and Shashi Puri, among others, created a fund to support students who lacked the resources to carry on their studies. MSVV, too, has its own alumni group, where old students come together to constitute a universe of their own, in sync with what they thought were the ideals they

shared as Modernites.62 They have even established a magazine titled Modernites, filled with nostalgia, recollections of batch mates and earnest accounts of how vital the school has been to their lives and careers. As if to underline the continuities, the Modern School alumni associations continue to arrange annual performances, mostly in theatre, including plays written by old teachers such as Ved Vyas. The school’s culture has retained its hold over alumni, and the productions bring together professional talent that has emerged through the Modern production line and amateur enthusiasts, with little snobbery about ability or experience. It is this kind of a thing that makes you ask how deep the connection runs between two Modernites. The alumni associations act as shadow trustees, feeling equally responsible for upholding and spreading the values of the school. Since 1990, the alumni have been organising a programme titled ‘Gurusmaranam’ to honour their teachers and present them with gurudakshina—a token of their esteem. As times have changed, the alumni body reflects that change, with social cohesion considerably diluted by globalisation, which has meant that batchmates are now just as likely to bump into each other in San Francisco as they are in Delhi. But the school’s symbols and iconography remain the same, as does later students’ surprisingly strong commitment to the school’s stated ideals and values. Modern has recently made a concerted effort to facilitate children with disabilities on campus. Buildings are being restructured and plans are being made on the Barakhamba Road campus to ease children with disabilities into life at the school. This once again reflects Modern’s commitment to a socially inclusive ethos. Modern is grand; it has come to provide the city of Delhi with one of its stable landmarks for the last one hundred years, successfully weathering several challenges. It continues to uphold the empathetic, progressive promise it made to India a century ago.

EPILOGUE

For a historian, it has been a challenge to weave through the history of an institution that enjoys the status that Modern does— of an ‘elite’ institution—and over the years, this status has been so internalised by its stakeholders that any move to scrutinise it hurts those who have invested their social, cultural and emotional capital in the institution. Yet history is about unravelling truth to the extent that is possible based on verifiable facts. Modern institutions have more often than not been seen through an instrumental prism, where institutions either exist for the state or some particular political reason, or for the market. Both these perspectives have been enriched by the study of the role that institutions have played in evolving the political economy of the nation. In fact, the growth of Western economies as developed ones was seen to be hinged upon the coming of modern institutions.1 In India, institutions have been seen as the only spaces that provide a window to a modern life.2 Here, modern life has also been seen as coterminous with modern economy and the building of a new nation.3 Seen historically, however, the fact that so many schools were set up by individuals and groups with their own resources during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in different parts of the country, in its villages, towns and cities, demands explanation. Labelling these institutions as private efforts today, aimed at either maximising profits or contributing to the economy, may end up vulgarising the efforts of those who were filled with a desire to contribute to the life of the people. The Modern School and its origins have to be seen within this overarching frame. Charting

the history of the school does not entail merely looking back and tracing its path towards becoming what is now called an ‘elite’ institution. This institution, like many others of its kind spread across the country, is different from those established for reasons of the state, like Mayo College or Doon School, or for the sake of profit, like the recent rash of ‘international’ schools. Modern may have enriched our economy and political life but that alone cannot exhaust the reasons for the school being set up or, indeed, why the trustees have consistently demonstrated a passion to carry on with schooling activities. In this context, we would do well to recall the setting up of Sriniketan at Visva-Bharati—developed by Rabindranath Tagore in 1923 as a new type of school to impart knowledge to village children, enabling them to resuscitate the village economy and community—or the Gandhigram Rural Institute set up by G. Ramachandran in Tamil Nadu in 1946,4 and other such initiatives that aimed at improving agricultural practices not only to develop the economies of the village but the village themselves. Similarly, many other institutions were established for the purpose of bettering collective lives. The efforts by Karmaveer Bhau to start what is now known as the Rayat Shikshan Sanstha in Maharashtra or the institution set up by Pandurang Shastri Athavale as part of the Swadhyaya Movement were all part of this vision of enriching collective life. In fact, from the nineteenth century onwards, India can boast of the illustrious examples of Ram Mohan Roy, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Jyotiba Phule, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Veeresalingam Pantulu and so many others, who were votaries of institutional transformation through education. The history of institutions, therefore, needs a different and broader framework than mere classification through the binaries of elite and government school, or public and private school. These binaries may end up vulgarising the debate, as under the cloak of elite or private, old and historical initiatives can end up being randomly clubbed with the new profit-maximising initiatives.

In 1920, when Modern School began, there were no more than six–seven thousand high schools in the whole of the Indian subcontinent, and Indians at every locale wanted to set up schools, colleges and even universities to elevate the life of the mind of their compatriots. Many associations, organisations and even political parties were formed to do exactly this. This study of Modern School is a historian’s effort to examine the historical context and processes involved in the making of an institution, an effort I have previously undertaken with regard to the history of JNU.5 In doing this, there is a need to go beyond the perceptions that prevail about the institution, which also become over time, the self-perception of its stakeholders. The task of the historian while working on the school was to highlight the processes around the making and evolution of the institution and embed the institution in the larger course of history. In 2012, I undertook a field visit to schools in the rural and interior villages of India as part of a government evaluation of educational efforts in some strife-torn regions of the country. I encountered numerous instances where similar impulses and a rationale of public service dominated social life. While it is understood that the state has an overwhelming responsibility to set up and run educational institutions, people do not see schools only in terms of contributing to a rise in their economic status in the future but as a place full of life-changing possibilities. Everywhere, I encountered villagers in search of schools and in pursuit of the promise that education would transform their lives —from the Santhal children in refugee camps in the villages of Kokrajhar district (Assam’s Bodoland area), who were staring at their teacher teaching them in Assamese, which they just could not understand, to the residential ashrama schools for tribal children in Maharashtra, with their shabby hostels. In many districts of Bihar, children were enrolled in government schools but were often studying in private schools for all practical purposes. This was because while the private schools were not recognised, government schools lacked regularity in teachers and

teaching. Teams of volunteers were instituted in all these areas— the ‘Bal Bandhu’—to help candidates pass their matriculation exam. Failure to do so would drastically affect the whole course of their lives: they would either be taken in by the insiders (radical elements) or used by the outsiders (the state). Experts from international organisations had a devastatingly novel idea: to bring all the children from interior villages in Sukma close to the main highway and hold them in barrack-like cabins (called ‘schools’). It was not only hideous but bordered on the criminal. My visits to many schools in the tribal hinterland during the mid-day meal period were an eye opener. At a hamlet in Cherla block of the Khammam district in Andhra Pradesh, a significant number of the deprived Gutti Koya community were present at the time of the mid-day meal to prepare the food and feed about eighteen or twenty first-generation learners in their newly opened school. When asked why they were all there to cook for and feed the children, their response was that the education of the children was integral to the community’s knowledge and health. The founder of the Modern School, Raghubir Singh, had articulated a similar idea in 1920, when, despite the fact that he had lost a lot of money, he insisted on provisioning a common meal for students and teachers. For many, education has been a hope, while for some, it has symbolised the loss of hope, as it ties people to the apron strings of the state, reducing their autonomy of imagination. In a society that has existed over millennia with ascribed hierarchies, education has been the only means to come out of the situation of hopelessness that must have been characteristic of the life and world of many. The desire to have education was so strong that people did not always wait for the state to come and open schools —they organised themselves in whichever way they could. In one panchayat I visited as part of my fieldwork, I realised that the young lady who was teaching the children would more or less be categorised as semi-literate. The founders of schools in colonial India may themselves have not been highly educated or may have received home schooling or training in their trade. But they

saw in education an opportunity to uplift their communities and contribute to the society at large. In the last two decades, a number of Modern School alumni have been honoured by the Indian state for their contribution to public life.6 This is a rare honour for any individual institution occupying such a large space in the eye of the state itself. The school has given the country some of its best military, air and naval officers, and has also lost quite a few young bravehearts on the battlefield. Quite a number of its students have enriched the cultural life of India’s capital with vibrancy and colour. Honour, valour and creativity, therefore, have become embedded in the way the school has evolved over the last one hundred years.7 The teachers are remembered well both by the state, which has honoured quite a few of them, and by the larger community of students for their contribution to their lives.8 With the continued expansion of sociocultural and political life over the last century, it is difficult to imagine modern India, and particularly modern Delhi and its evolution as a world capital, without reference to the Modern School and its administrators, teachers, staff and students. The school and the city, as it were, have co-evolved. In the pre-Independence stage, the school connected people to cosmopolitan Delhi—the capital city of the Mughals and the city of letters—even though a death blow to that past was struck by the British in 1857. The twin processes of Partition and the coming of the new republic defined the school after 1947. Both provided the school, like the city itself, with a new dynamic. While one allowed it to contribute to the rehabilitation of the education and the cultural lives of the displaced populace, the other allowed it to add its own flavour to the emerging republic and its educational and cultural requirements. The changes in the economy and society of Delhi and India in recent years, while allowing Modern to add different shades to its life, including some new branches, have, in their own way, created further possibilities for the school to contribute to the development of the city and the country. It is in these processes that the school

has needed to negotiate newer challenges. While there have been obvious successes, there may have been stark failures, too, along the way. One of them is the prevalent perception of Modern as the school of the privileged, contrary to its original objectives. However, the school’s ability to effect changes without violating its core foundational values remains powerful, largely due to the way it has always put the children at the centre of its thinking and planning. In a society marked by the rule of adults, this corner of freedom has always been cherished at Modern. The generation of Modern School students who have now become mentors at other institutions in the country find inspiration from this part of their own schooling and, in turn, have been extending the frontiers of this principle. The foundational universe of Modern School was not radically different from the one that Indians located in the context of the Indian national movement endeavoured to create in their own lives. Theirs was a dream of a just, modern and moral society, and the idea of social, economic and political equality defined the contours of that moral universe. Science, intelligentsia and institutions were made the bedrock for such a world. Modern School, its students and its teachers have contributed immensely to such a pursuit. Even when the sheen of that vision began to fade, Modern held on to many of those foundational ideals of Indian society, almost as a museum of virtues. The idea that aesthetic sensibilities be embedded in the child’s pedagogical experience, for example, had been the core of the curriculum design from the beginning. This has allowed the school to provide children diversity and space to reflect and imagine. Progressive efforts to anchor schooling experience in rich and varied cultural premises in an otherwise homogenising cultural life, might find the Modern experience illuminating. Similarly, the contemporary quest within the school to find harmony between the hegemonising desire for technology to dictate how we learn about ourselves and our world on the one hand, and the life-changing possibilities created by face-to-face teaching, on the other, is illustrative of Modern’s processes of

renewal. In 2020, in the middle of a pandemic that has disrupted established modes of living, learning and working, such an engagement has been very useful. With the school entwining its vision with the larger social concordat, i.e. family aspirations, individual ambitions and societal vision, a shared intellectual universe has driven its students and teachers for a long time. In recent times, when the global economy and its attendant cultural issues have begun creating a sense of uncertainty and suspicion about any shared social vision, the school’s ideological premises and its shaping of young minds to take on the world with a sense of confidence defies such scepticism. Though Indians have created a large number of institutions over the last century or so, a number of these institutions have also been seen to lose their way in the dreary sands of mediocrity or history. If Modern has retained its position as an institution of eminence, its principle of governance must have some role to play. The autonomy that the school has always tried to claim for itself appears, in turn, to have been shared with its own stakeholders. This has allowed the school to produce people of distinction in every walk of life. Many years ago, Ramkinkar Baij, one of the greatest sculptors and artists of twentieth-century India, had gifted the school his invaluable Black Saraswati, an image of the goddess of knowledge in an unconventional shade. Perhaps it was the colonial experience of Indians that motivated the critical artist in Ramkinkar to present Saraswati in a colour traditionally considered to invoke inauspiciousness. Or the colour could be a representation of his understanding of the challenges to education in Indian society. Today, when colonialism has long been gone, knowledge is still a distant desire for millions. For a school that is the custodian of Ramkinkar’s Black Saraswati and that was once set up to liberate knowledge from its colonial precincts and create free and confident Indians, the pledge to ennoble those who enter its portals must be one that it renews every time it celebrates that foundational moment. Its Upanishadic motto may seem

anachronistic, given the limited access to knowledge at the time of the composition of the Vedas and Upanishads, but it is the universality of the idea—that self-realisation requires endurance and strength—that the school has sought to project. Like the Black Saraswati, the invoking of Upanishadic ideas may be seen as the habilitating of ancient traditions and ideas in a modern cast, resonating with Mahatma Gandhi’s desire to bring together the prachin (ancient) and arvachin (modern). The quest for tradition may have been located in many forces, as has been discussed in the book, but the question regarding what is modern about Modern has been interrogated by many within the school itself. The integration of the two—tradition and modernity—is a uniquely Indian phenomenon tied to the context in which the school was born: the freedom struggle. It is, in fact, the very idea of India, and Modern School embodies it.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. Andrews, C.F., Zakaullah of Delhi, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1929, pp. 73-74. Cited in Gupta, Narayani, ‘Military Security and Urban Development: A Case Study of Delhi 18571912’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 1971, pp. 61–77, fn.3. 2. Ibid., p. 63. 3. Ibid. 4. Islamuddin, Shaheen, ‘Legalising the Plunder in the Aftermath of the Uprising of 1857: The City of Delhi and “Prize Agents”’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 72, part 1, 2011, pp. 670–682. The prize agents held high ranks in the British army, and post-1857, they were, by special order of the British government, given a free hand to extract prizes and treasures in the city. This was, in essence, a euphemism for looting the city. Ibid., p. 671. 5. Aslahi, Abdur Rehman Pervaz, Mufti Sadruddin Hayat, Shakhsiyat, Ilm our Adabi Karnamein, Delhi, 1977, p. 83. Cited in ibid., endnote 47, p. 682. 6. Ibid. 7. Jafri, Saiyid Zaheer Husain, ‘Education and transmission of knowledge in Medieval India’, Symposium, 71st session of Indian History Congress, 2011, pp. 21–22., Cited in ibid., endnote 48, p. 682. 8. Robinson, Francis, ‘The Muslims of Upper India and the Shock of the Mutiny: Rutkhez-i-heja’, in Hasan, Mushirul, and Narayani Gupta (eds.), Indian’s Colonial Encounter: Essays in

the Memory of Erick Strokes, p. 265. Cited in ibid., endnote 49, p. 682. 9. Report submitted by Fortescue, Civil Commissioner, Delhi to C.T. Metcalfe, Secretary to Government, dated 19 August 1820, National Archives of India, Foreign Department, Political Branch, No. 2. Cited in Arshi, Nida, ‘Expansion of Colonial Authority in the City of Delhi, 1803–1856: A Study of Grants, Endowments and Urban Space’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 73, 2012, p. 528. 10. Ibid., pp. 528–537. 11. Ibid., p. 530. 12. Minault, Gail, ‘Delhi College and Urdu’, The Annual of Urdu Studies, vol. 14, 1999, p. 122. 13. Ibid. 14. See, Liddle, Swapna, Cultural History of Nineteenth Century Delhi, unpublished PhD thesis, Jamia Millia Islamia, 2007. 15. Habib, S. Irfan, and Dhruv Raina, ‘The Introduction of Scientific Rationality into India: A Study of Master Ramachandra-Urdu Journalist, Mathematician and Educationalist’, Annals of Science, vol. 46, no. 6, 1989, pp. 597–610. See also, Minault, Gail, ‘The Perils of Cultural Mediation: Master Ram Chandra and Academic Journalism at Delhi College’, in Pernau, Margrit (ed.), The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State, and Education Before 1857, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2006, pp. 189–202. 16. Liddle, Swapna, op. cit., 2007; Minault, Gail, op. cit., 1999, pp. 119-134; Pernau, Margrit, ‘Teaching Emotions: The Encounter between Victorian Values and Indo-Persian Concepts of Civility in Nineteenth-Century Delhi’, in Sengupta, Indra, and Daud Ali (eds.), Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2011. 17. Bruce, J.B., A History of the University of the Panjab, Punjab University Press, Lahore, 1933, p. 70. 18. The writings of Swapna Liddle provide the most lucid accounts of the history of Delhi in the nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. See, Liddle, Swapna, Chandni Chowk: The Mughal City of Old Delhi, Speaking Tiger, Delhi, 2017; Liddle, Swapna, Connaught Place and the Making of New Delhi, Speaking Tiger, Delhi, 2018. 19. The concept of assemblages has been used by Saskia Sassen in her now widely read work. See, Sassen, Saskia, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2006. Sassen defines the term ‘assemblages’ in terms of new and highly specialised ways of connecting spaces, which defy the older connections through national territories. See, ibid., pp. 389–390; Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society, Wiley Blackwell, New Jersey, 2011; Castells, Manuel, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983. Saskia Sassen has linked cities to the idea of assemblages. See, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2001. See also, Saskia, Sassen, Cities in a World Economy, Sage, New York, 2018; Saskia, Sassen (ed.), Global Network Linked Cities, Routledge, New York, 2002 (reprinted in 2018). 20. Harvey, David, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, Verso, London, 2012; Venturini, Federico, Emet Degirmenci, and Ins Morales (eds.), Social Ecology and the Right to the City: Towards Ecological and Democratic Cities, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 2019. 21. Bhargava, Meena, and Kalyani Dutta, Women, Education and Politics: The Women’s Movement and Delhi’s Indraprastha College, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2005; Sharma, Kavita, and W.D. Mathur, Hindu College, Delhi: A People’s Movement, Niyogi Books, Delhi, 2014. 22. Sharma, Kavita, and W.D. Mathur, op. cit. 23. Batabyal, Rakesh, JNU: The Making of a University, HarperCollins, Delhi, 2014. 24. Bhargava, Meena, and Kalyani Dutta, op. cit.

25. Pathak, Avijit, Social Implications of Schooling: Knowledge, Pedogogy, and Consciousness, Rainbow Books, Delhi, 2002. 26. See, Kumar, Krishna, Prejudice and Pride, Penguin, Delhi, 2000. 27. Kapur, Devesh, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, and Milan Vaishnav (eds.), Rethinking Public Institutions in India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2018. 28. The ideology of ‘mestizaje’ or mixture refers to an apparently national homogenisation, which in reality is effective in hiding the racial exclusion in most parts of Latin American society. The inclusion suggested by mestizaje is seen as complex, and often there is a mere mask of inclusion, with the hegemony of one—in this case, the colonial—culture. The idea was borrowed by Anglo-Saxon literary writers to signify their own condition in occupying a hybrid location, i.e., ex-colonial, brown or black people in the academia of white colonial metropoles. They popularised the concept of hybridity, which unfortunately English authors or theory builders in the postindependence countries too began imitating in completely different contexts, i.e., their own societies. For a discussion of the idea and the way it has been used, see, Anzaldita, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1987; Azoulay, Katya Gibel, Black, Jewish and Interracial: It’s Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity, Duke University Press, Durham, I997; Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994; Root, Maria P.P. (ed.), Racially Mixed People in America, Sage Publishers, London, 1992. 29. Singh, Raghubir, and Kamala Bose, A Successful Experiment in Education, Modern School, October 1920–May 1947, Modern School, Delhi, 1947; Modern School Golden Jubilee, 1920–1970, Modern School, Delhi, 1970; Singh, Khushwant, and Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (eds.), A Dream Turns SeventyFive: The Modern School, 1920-1995, Allied Publishers, Delhi, 1995; 100 Not Out: Modernites Remember Their Principal

M.N. Kapur, MSOSA, Delhi, 2011; The Milk Break and After: Raghubir Singh Junior Modern School: 1961–2011, Academic Foundation, Delhi, 2011; Ahmed, Khwaja Iftikhar, The Modern Perspective, Manak Publications, Delhi, 2013; Sarin, Vineet Sahai, et al., The Banyan Tree, MSOSA, Delhi, 2016. 30. The present secretary (Hon.) of the board of trustees of Modern School has taken a keen interest in this front, and has invested in professional advice regarding the conservation and preservation of the historical resources in the Modern School archives, which have a wonderful collection of print, photo and digital artefacts. 31. Waller, Willard, Sociology of Teaching, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1932.

1: MODERN SCHOOL, BARAKHAMBA: LABYRINTHS OF SPACE AND MEMORY 1. Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Trustees (hereafter BOT), Modern School, Barakhamba Road, 18 March 1921. 2. Ibid., 31 July 1921. 3. Ibid. 4. Singh, Sobha, ‘Golden Legacy, Modern School, New Delhi’, Golden Jubilee, 1920–1970, Modern School, Delhi, p. 22. 5. Panikkar, Madhusudan, ‘The School as I Knew It’, in Singh, Khushwant, and Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (eds.), A Dream Turns Seventy Five: The Modern School, 1920-1995, Allied Publishers, Delhi, 1995, p. 93. 6. The cost of this was Rs 7,200. Singh, Raghubir, and Kamala Bose, A Successful Experiment in Education, Modern School, October 1920-May 1947, Modern School, Delhi, 1947, p. 77. 7. See, Saint, A., Towards a Social Architecture: Role of School Buildings in Post War England, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1987; Dudek, M., Architecture of Schools: The New Learning Environments, Architectural Press, Boston, 2000; Burke, C., and I. Grosvenor, School, Reaktion Books, London, 2008; Clarke, A., Transforming Children’s Spaces: Children’s

and Adults’ Participation in Designing Learning Environments, Routledge, London, 2010. 8. Sharan, Awadhendra, In the City, Out of Place: Nuisance, Pollution, and Dwelling in Delhi, c. 1850–2000, Oxford University Press, New York, 2014. 9. Liddle, Swapna, Chandni Chowk: The Mughal City of Old Delhi, Speaking Tiger, Delhi, 2017. See also, Mehra, Diya, ‘Planning Delhi ca. 1936–1959’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, 2013, pp. 354–374; Ridley, Jane, ‘Edwin Lutyens, New Delhi, and the Architecture of Imperialism’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 26, no. 2, 1998, pp. 67–83. 10. Chaudhuri, Nirad C., Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India, 1921– 1952, Addison-Wesley, London, 1987; Chaudhuri, D.N., Delhi: Light, Shades, Shadows, Niyogi Books, Delhi, 2005. 11. The idea of the ‘provincial’ is one used by postcolonial authors to denote the way colonised societies were modelled after metropolitan centres like Paris or London. Thus, deprovincialism refers to the effort that African author Ngugi wa Thiong’o had earlier called decolonising the mind. See, Thiong’o, N., Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, East African Educational Publishers, Nairobi, 1986. 12. A lot has been written on colonial architecture. One of the finest works on the topic is by Veena Talwar Oldenburg. See, Oldenburg, Veena Talwar, The Making of Colonial Lucknow,1856–1877, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2014. The city of Delhi has also attracted many historians, and in recent years, excellent histories of the way the new capital city was planned and built have been written. See, Liddle, Swapna, op. cit., 2017; Liddle, Swapna, Connaught Place and the Making of New Delhi, Speaking Tiger, Delhi, 2018. 13. School Buildings in India, (Occasional Reports) Government of India, New Delhi, 1944. 14. Burke, Catherine, and Ian Grosvenor, School, Reaktion Books, London, 2008.

15. Ibid. 16. Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, Wiley, London, 1992. 17. Interview with Ashok Pratap Singh, Sandesh, 1992. 18. Sheikh, Nilima, ‘Learning to Feel Dance’, in Singh, Khushwant, and Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (eds.), A Dream Turns Seventy-Five: The Modern School, 1920-1995, Allied Publishers, Delhi, 1995, p. 117. 19. Ibid. 20. Kapur, Geeta, ‘The Enchanted Studio’, in ibid., p. 110. 21. Sarin, Vineet Sahai, et al., The Banyan Tree, MSOSA, Delhi, 2016. 22. Sanjay and Geeta Chopra were brutally murdered by the two criminals Billa and Ranga when the siblings were on their way to participate in an AIR event. The killing chilled the country. See, https://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi/ranga-billa-reduxhow-rapists-were-sent-to-gallows/storyKwFJ1GOlC33GdEITPOYVyL.html. 23. Summerson, John, Georgian London, Paul Mellon Centre, London, 2003 (1945). 24. Kapur, Geeta, When Was Modernism: Essays on Cultural Practices in India, Tulika Books, Delhi, 2000, (second reprint 2007). 25. Sanjay Srivastava has used the template of modernity to study Doon School. But our treatment differs substantively as the schools are quite different in character. See, Srivastava, Sanjay, Constructing Post-Colonial India: National Character and the Doon School, Routledge, London, 1998. 26. Premchand, Rita Kishore, ‘Jottings Regarding Modern School From Lalaji’s Diary’, in Singh, Raghubir, and Kamala Bose, A Successful Experiment, Modern School, October 1920–May 1947, Modern School, Delhi, 1947. 27. See, Pathak, Avijit, Recalling the Forgotten: Education and Moral Quest, Akaar Books, Delhi, 2018. Recently, the idea of the loss of soul in education is being felt deeply even in contexts where the soul is not a philosophical or metaphysical

concept. See, Peterson, Thomas, ‘Examining the Loss of Soul in Education’, Education and Culture, vol. 15, no. 1/2, 1999, pp. 9–15.

2: EDUCATION, BUSINESS CLASS AND THE IDEA OF ENNOBLEMENT 1. Sen, Satyendra Nath, Scientific and Technical Education in India, 1781–1900, Indian National Science Academy, Delhi, 1991; Kumar, Deepak, Science and the Raj, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1995; Menon, Visalakshi, ‘Aspects of Colonial Education in India’, in Raghavan, Vyjayanti, and R. Mahalakshmi (eds.), Colonisation: A Comparative Study of India and Korea, Academic Foundation, Delhi, 2015. 2. Srivastava, Sanjay, Constructing Post-Colonial India: National Character and the Doon School, Routledge, London, 1998. 3. Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Herder and Herder, New York, 1970; Illich, Ivan, Deschooling Society, Harper & Row, New York, 1971. 4. Thapan, Meenakshi, Life at School: An Ethnographic Study, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2006. Also see, Pathak, Avijit, Social Implications of Schooling: Knowledge, Pedagogy and Consciousness, Rainbow Publishers, Delhi, 2002. 5. Tagore, Rabindranath, Rassiar Chithi (Letters from Russia), Visvabaharati Granthalaya, Calcutta, 1952 (trans. mine). Also see, Nehru, Jawaharlal, Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions, Allahabad Law Agency Publications, Allahabad, 1928. 6. Tagore, Rabindranath, op. cit., p. 17. 7. Ibid., pp. 39–45. 8. Nehru, Jawaharlal, op. cit., p. 134. 9. Mukherjee, Uma, and Haridas Mukherjee, The Origins of the National Education Movement, 1905–1910, Jadavpur University, Calcutta, 1957. 10. Basu, Aparna, The Growth of Education and Political Development in India, 1898–1920, Oxford University Press,

Delhi, 1974; Basu, Aparna, Essays in the History of Indian Education, Concept Publishing, Delhi, 1983. The effort of leading intellectuals and nationalist leaders in every part of the country was to start institutions not only to educate Indians but also to excel. The founding of the Deccan Education Society by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, Vishnu Shastri Chiplunkar and others and their establishment of the New English School in Poona, for example, was one such effort. Thousands of such efforts are strewn across the country, and the spirit behind them is brought out very well in the words of Visalakshi Menon: ‘What was it that drove people like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar in Bengal, Jotirao Phule in Maharashtra, Lala Munshi Ram, Lal Dev Raj and others in Jullunder, Sayid Karamat Husain in UP, and Lala Jugal Kishore in Delhi to work against the odds, divert their hard earned money or their ancestral riches and even compromise their dignity to set up schools for girls? Obviously it must have been the same spirit that drove many others to start newspapers, which they knew would have a precarious existence and could lead them to financial bankruptcy. Or later still, to resign their government jobs and lucrative legal practices on hearing the appeal of Gandhi. Or even to stand on the streets with a measuring rod in hand and sell khaddar. All these people and countless others shared a sense of public spiritedness, an overwhelming desire to work for the common good and an ability to act on their convictions and beliefs.’ Menon, Visalakshi, op. cit. 11. Roy, Ram Mohun, English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, edited by Jogendra Chunder Ghose, Bengal Press, Calcutta, 1901. 12. Gellner, Ernest, ‘The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 February 1993, pp. 3–4. 13. Sahidullah, Kazi, Pathshalas into Schools: The Development of Indigenous Elementary Education in Bengal, 1854–1905, Firma KLM, Calcutta, 1987. For developments in Punjab, G.W.

Leitner, the principal of the Government College, Lahore, has left a valuable document. The work of Dharampal is also an oft-referred to source for information regarding the state of preBritish indigenous education. See, Dharampal, The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century, Biblia Impex, Delhi, 1983. See also, Menon, Visalakshi, op. cit. 14. See, Leitner, G.W., History of Indigenous Education in the Punjab: Since Annexation and in 1882, Department of Language, Patiala, 1971 (1883). 15. See, Menon, Visalakshi, op. cit. 16. Bagchi, Amiya, Colonialism and India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2010; Sen, Sunanda, Colonies and the Empire: India, 1890–1914, Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 1992; Banerjee, Debdas, Colonialism in Action: Trade, Development, and Dependence in Late Colonial India, Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 1999. 17. For a detailed discussion of the Irish famine, see, O’Grada, Cormac, Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1999. 18. See, Chandra, Bipan, Essays on Colonialism, Orient Blackswan, Hyderabad, 1999; Chandra, Bipan, Selected Writings of Bipan Chandra, edited by Aditya Mukherjee, Orient Blackswan, Hyderabad, 2014; Chandra, Bipan, Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India, Har Anand, Delhi, 2000 (1965). 19. Kling, Blair, Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India, University of California Press, California, 1973. For a biography of Dwarkanath Tagore, see, Kripalani, Krishna, Dwarkanath Tagore, National Book Trust, Delhi, 2005. 20. Mukherjee, Aditya, Imperialism, Nationalism, and The Making of the Indian Capitalist Class, Sage, London, 2004. 21. Tripathi, Dwijendra, Business Communities of India: A Historical Perspective, Manohar Publishers, Delhi, 1984. 22. Banerji, A.K., India’s Balance of Payments: Estimates of Current and Capital Accounts from 1921–22 to 1938–39, Asia

Publishing House, New York, 1963; Ray, Rajat K., Industrialization in India: Growth and Conflict in the Private Corporate Sector, 1914–47, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1974; Bagchi, Amiya Kumar, Private Investment in India, 1900–1939, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000 (1989). 23. The great Indian scientist and famed chemist Prafulla Chandra Ray started Bengal Chemicals to boost indigenous industrialisation and entrepreneurship. The company soon became one of India’s most famous brands for items of household use. For his autobiography, see, Ray, P.C., Life and Experience of a Bengali Chemist, 2 vols., Chuckerverty and Chatterjee, Calcutta, 1935. He also wrote an authoritative account of Indian chemistry. See, Ray, P.C., A History of Hindu Chemistry: From the Earliest Times to the Middle of the Sixteenth Century A.D. with Sanskrit Texts, Variants, Translation and Illustrations, Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works, Calcutta, 1902. For the trials and travails facing the scientific and educational field at the time, see, Lourdusamy, J., Science and National Consciousness in Bengal: 1870–1930, Orient Longman, Delhi, 2004. 24. Tripathi, Dwijendra, op. cit.; Gadgil, D.R., Origins of the Modern Indian Business Class: An Interim Report, International Secretariat of the Institute of Pacific Relations, New York, 1959; Tripathi, Dwijendra, and Jyoti Jumani, The Concise Oxford History of Indian Business, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2007. For a comparative understanding with business communities in other regions, see, Mehta, Makrand, Business Houses in Western India: A Study in Entrepreneurial Response, 1850–1956, Jaya Books, Bombay, 1990. 25. Gopal, Surendra, Born to Trade, Indian Business Communities from Ancient to Medieval Eurasia, Routledge, London, 2017. 26. Oral interview with A.P. Jain, NMML; Oral interviews with Anuradha Singh and Meera Pradeep Singh, Trustees, Modern School, Barakhamba Road, Delhi, on 16 January 2020 and 17

August 2019 respectively. Also see the biography of Dharam Vira. 27. Sharma, Kavita, and W.D. Mathur, Hindu College, Delhi: A People’s Movement, Niyogi Books, Delhi. 28. Ibid., p. 80. 29. Joshi, Arun, Lala Shri Ram: A Study in Entrepreneurship and Industrial Management, Shri Ram Memorial Foundation, Delhi, 1984 (1975), p. 382. 30. Ibid., p. 383. 31. Ibid., p. 389. 32. Ibid., pp. 400–407. 33. Sharma, Kavita, and W.D. Mathur, op. cit., p. 86. 34. Minutes of the Meeting of the Management Committee, Modern School, Barakhamba Road (hereafter MMCMSBR), 30 August 1920. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Cell, John W., Hailey: A Study in British Imperialism, 1872– 1969, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. 38. Ibid. 39. Jain, L.C., Civil Disobedience: Two Freedom Struggles, One Life, The Book Review Literary Trust, Delhi, 2011; See also, Gupta, Narayani, Delhi Between Two Empires, 1803–1931: Society, Government and Urban Growth, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1997. 40. Jain, L.C., op. cit. 41. Mangan, J.A. (ed.), The Imperial Curriculum: Racial Images and Education in the British Colonial Experience, Routledge, London, 1993; Mangan, J.A. (ed.), Making Colonial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1990. 42. Joint Meeting of the BOT and MCMSBR, 28 March 1929. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid.

46. Gandhi, Mahatma, 13 November 1924. The English translation is excerpted from RSJMS, Milk Break and After, 1961–2011, Academic Foundation, Delhi, 2011, p. 85. 47. Minutes of the MMCMSBR, 12 October 1920. 48. Minutes of the MMCMSBR, 7 March 1921. 49. Brig. Anant Singh, Sandesh, 1995. 50. Minutes of the MMCMSBR, 20 November 1920. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. ‘The school should not be encumbered with any loss on account of sending the school to the hills, but that if it is decided to send it to some hill station, the actual expenses of the trip should be borne by the parents pro rate.’ 53. Minutes of the BOT, 13 December 1929. 54. M.J. MacDonald to Secretary, Modern School, Delhi, 29 March 1930, File No. 3 (90) Edu. 1929 (Delhi State Archives). The matter was pursued later, but the government remained steadfast in its refusal. For later correspondence, see, File No. 3 (112) Edu. 1931. 55. J.M.G. Johnson, Officiating Chief Commissioner, Delhi to A.H. Mckenzie, Superintendent of Education, Delhi, 9 September 1930, ibid. 56. Raghubir Singh to the Members, BOT, 16 January 1935. 57. Ibid. 58. BOT, 4 February 1935. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Mukherjee, Aditya, op. cit.; Kudaisya, Medha, ’, The Business History Review, vol. 88, no. 1, 2014, pp. 97–131. 62. Greenfeld, Liah, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001. 63. Mukherjee, Aditya, op. cit.

3:

INDEPENDENCE, SCHOOL

PARTITION

AND

THE

MODERN

1. Mitra, Asok, Delhi: Capital City, Thomson Press, Delhi, 1970; Keller, Stephen L., Uprooting and Social Change, Manohar Publishers, Delhi, 1975; Rao, V.K.R.V., and P.B. Desai, Greater Delhi: A Study in Urbanisation, Asia Publishing House, Delhi, 1965. 2. Demographically, Delhi had 32.53 per cent Muslim population in 1941, which was reduced to 5.7 per cent in 1951. See, Mitra, Asok, op. cit. 3. Sharan, Awadhendra, In the City, Out of Place: Nuisance, Pollution, and Dwelling in Delhi, c. 1850–2000, Oxford University Press, New York, 2014; Mehra, Diya, ‘Planning Delhi ca. 1936–1959’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, 2013, pp. 354–374. 4. Mitra, Asok, op. cit. 5. Interview with Mr Bhawani Shankar, 19 March 2019, New Delhi. 6. Delhi state expansion of educational facilities in Delhi schools —conference held in the education minister’s room on 12 June 1952 at 4 p.m., File no., f.6-49/52-G(1), Education Department, National Archives of India. 7. The Tribune, 2 December 1947. Cited in Harmeen, ‘Rehabilitation and Resettlement of Refugee Students (East Punjab, 1947)’, Proceedings of Punjab History Conference, 49th Session, 2017, p. 267, fn. 37. 8. The Civil and Military Gazette, 27 November 1947. Cited in ibid., p. 264, fn. 10. 9. The Tribune, 3 June 1948. Cited in ibid., p. 264, fn. 13. 10. The Board of Economic Enquiry, Eastern Punjab. Cited in ibid., p. 264, fn. 15. 11. For instance, the Dayal Singh Trust, which ran one of the finest colleges and libraries in Lahore, was given land for a college and a public library in central Delhi. Similarly, other trusts, too, came forward to start institutions. Pt Girdhari Lal Salwan, the founder of the Salwan Education Trust, received

aid to start the Salwan School in Delhi; the DAV management committee was also one of the recipients of assistance. 12. Unstarred Question no. 886 in Lok Sabha, 8 December 1956, File no. F.6-119/56, Education Department, D-5. 13. Ibid. 14. Number of Schools in Delhi, ibid. 15. Delhi state: Raisina Bengali Higher Secondary School Building at Reading Road, New Delhi, File no. 9/9/49d.4, 1949, p. 25, ibid. 16. ‘Construction of a school for 500 Students at Kalkaji’, File no. RHB/35 (9) 1953, pp. 1–2, 13, Government of India, National Archives of India. 17. Ibid. 18. Minutes of the MMCMSBR, 30 March 1946. 19. Ibid., 5 March 1948. 20. Ibid. Bachelor of Teaching (BT) was the predecessor to BEd (Bachelor of Education), which is the degree now required to enter into the teaching profession. 21. File no. F-12/57/B-1 (B4), Education Department. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., p. 31. 24. Ibid. 25. Dhar, P.N., Small-Scale Industries in Delhi: A Study in Investment, Output and Employment Aspects, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1958. 26. Modern High School: A Brief Report, April 1945–March 1947, BOT, 1947. 27. Table 2 of Chapter II, in Mitra, Asok, op. cit., p. 63. 28. Report on the Post War Educational Development in India, 1944, Government of India, Delhi, 1944. 29. Modern High School: A Brief Report, April 1945–March 1947, BOT, 1947. 30. Anand, Ela, and Ketaki Sood, A Cut Above: The Remarkable life of Dr S.K. Sen, Surgeon Extraordinaire, 1910–1979, The Printers, Delhi, 2007.

31. Interview with Bhawani Shankar, who passed out of the school in 1949, 19 March 2019, New Delhi. 32. Ibid. 33. Minutes of the BOT, 18 December 1948. 34. Kumari, Sangeeta, Development of Women’s Education in Delhi, 1920–1947, unpublished PhD thesis, Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, 2019. 35. Minutes of the MMCMSBR, 6 February 1951. 36. Regularisation of schools which are enrolled as Indian but wish to follow the syllabus of the Cambridge University examination, File no. f.9-3/49, D.4, 1949, Education Department, Government of India, National Archives of India. 37. Starred Question no. 8097, asked by I. Eacharan in the Lok Sabha on 21 May 1956, regarding the number of public schools and number of SC and ST students admitted there, in File no. 16-37/56 D5, ibid.

4: M.N. KAPUR AND THE IDEA OF A PRINCIPAL, 1947–1977 1. Wing Commander (Rtd.) Jagdish Kishore, in 100 Not Out: Modernites Remember Their Principal M.N. Kapur, MSOSA, Delhi, 2011, p. 21. 2. A bio-documentary film, Dhruvtara, was made on him by the old students of the school, and was directed by Abhinav Chaturvedi, who not only studied in the school but also spent his childhood in the premises, as both his parents, and also for some time his grandfather, taught in the school. 3. ‘The debt I owe to my teachers’, Articles and Speeches of M.N. Kapur, Modern School Files. 4. Interview with Bhawani Shankar, 19 March 2019. 5. Kapur, Geeta, ‘The Enchanted Studio’, in Singh, Khushwant, and Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (eds.), A Dream Turns SeventyFive: The Modern School, 1920–1995, Allied Publishers, Delhi, 1995, p. 111. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid.

8. Interview with Neelam Puri, 13 July 2019, Delhi. 9. The autobiographical writings of many Dalit writers provide us with rich insights as to what happens in the precincts of schools and inside classrooms. See, for example, Bechain, Sheoraj Singh, Mera Bachpan Mere Kandhon Par, Vani Prakashan, Delhi, 2013; Ram, Tulsi, Murdahiya, Rajkamal Prakashan, Delhi, 2010; Valmiki, Om Prakash, Jhootan: An Untouchable Life, trans. Arun Prabha Mukherjee, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008. 10. Munshi Ram, known later as Swami Shraddhanand, was instrumental in the establishment of the gurukul at Kangri after the split in the Arya Samaj movement, which resulted in the formation of what were known as the ‘college’ party and the ‘gurukul’ party. In the meantime, the Arya Samaj started institutions in different parts of Punjab. These included Arya Putri Pathshala, Abohar (1903), Arya Girls Middle School, Moga (1921), G.M. Arya Girls Primary School, Patti, Amritsar (1933), Sain Dass A.S. Girls High School, Jalandhar (1942), Shri Banwari Lal Vedic Middle Kanya Pathshala, Abohar (1944), Hans Raj Mahila Mahavidhalaya, Lahore (1927), and Hindu Maha Vidyalaya, Lahore (1927). 11. Kishwar, Madhu, ‘Arya Samaj and Women’s Education: Kanya Mahavidyalaya, Jalandhar’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 21, no. 17, 1986, pp. WS9–WS24; Sandhu, Mini, ‘Comparative Analysis of the Panchal Pandita and the Panjabi Bhain from a Gender Perspective’, Journal of Punjab Studies, vol. 20, no. 1/2, 2013, pp. 77–109. 12. Kassing, J.W., D.A. Infante, K.J. Pearce, et al., ‘Exploring the Communicative Nature of Corporal Punishment’, Communication Research Reports, vol. 16, no. 1, 1999, pp. 18–28. 13. Raj, L., ‘Understanding Corporal Punishment in India’, Career Educator, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011, pp. 3–18. Cited in Sawhney, Sonia, Disciplinary Practices and Their Effects on the Emotional Well-Being of Children, unpublished PhD thesis, Osmania University, 2014, p. 43.

14. Sawhney, Sonia, Disciplinary Practices and Their Effect on the Emotional Well Being of Children, unpublished PhD thesis, Osmania University, 2014, p. 15. 15. Sen, Nivedita, Family, School and Nation: The Child and Literary Constructions in Twentieth Century Bengal, Routledge, London, 2015, p. 86. In fact, twentieth-century children’s literature provides Sen with a number of such situations, and she lists out a number of characters who play such emancipator roles for the wayward students. In, Ani, one of the stories of leading novelist Samaresh Majumdar, as Sen writes: ‘Sir does not get along with any of the other teachers because they, unlike him, do not subscribe to developing friendly relations between students and masters. But he is an ideal teacher with such a heightened patriotic fervour that he inspires Ani to substitute his dead mother by his motherland.’ Ibid., p. 86. 16. M.N. Kapur to I.S. Chawla, 11 October 1969, Modern School Files, no. 99. 17. Ibid. 18. M.N. Kapur to I.S. Chawla, 26 September 1969, ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Interview with Vinita Chaturvedi, 25 August 2019. 22. Virender Pahuja to M.N. Kapur, Modern School Files, no. 164. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. M.N. Kapur to General Sant Singh, 30 April 1963, ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Kapur, Anuradha, ‘Theatre in Modern School’, in Singh, Khushwant, and Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (eds.), op. cit., pp. 120–125. 29. Ibid. 30. Sood, Ketaki, ‘How the Girls Saw It’, in Singh, Khushwant, and Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (eds.), op. cit.

31. Jones, Kenneth, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19thCentury Punjab, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1966; Yadava, K.C., Arya Samaj and Freedom Movement, Manohar Publishers, Delhi, 1988; Pandey, Dhanpati, The Arya Samaj and Indian Nationalism,1875–1920, S. Chand & Co., Delhi, 1972. 32. Grewal, J.S., and Indu Banga (eds.), Lala Lajpat Rai in Retrospect: Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Concerns, Publication Bureau Punjab University, Chandigarh, 2000; Jordens, J.T.F., Swamy Shraddhananda: His Life and Causes, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1981. 33. For an overall context of the socio-religious movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see, Farquhar, J.N., Modern Religious Movements in India, Macmillan, London, 1929; Heimsath, Charles, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1964; Kopf, David, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1979; Singh, Hulas, Rise of Reason: Intellectual History of 19thCentury Maharashtra, Routledge, Delhi, 2017. 34. Leitner, W.G., History of Indigenous Education in the Punjab Since Annexation and in 1882, Department of Language, Patiala, 1971 (1883). For a recent discussion in the debate from the perspective of the emergence of the digits on which a new Punjabi language and a print culture would be both developed as well as politicised, see, Mir, Farina, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 2010. 35. Evidence by Shri M.N. Kapur, Principal, Modern School, to Emotional Integration Committee, New Delhi, 18 March 1962, Modern School Files, no. 164. 36. Ibid. 37. Kumar, Rajni, Against the Wind: A Life’s Journey, HarperCollins, Delhi, 2019. 38. Kapur, Anuradha, ‘Theatre in The Modern School’, in Singh, Khushwant, and Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (eds.), op. cit., p.

125.

5:

AT THE CENTRE GEOGRAPHY

OF

AN

EMERGING

CULTURAL

1. A slightly modified form of a part of this chapter has been presented at a national conference in 2019, Art Education Summit, in Delhi. The paper presented was titled ‘Art and the Republican Universe: Modern School, 1947-1961’, and it is to be published by Art1st soon. 2. The 1949 conference was followed by two others in 1951 on the letters, dance, drama and music. These conferences provided a clear-cut blueprint to the government about its own role in providing support to the arts. Also see, Maulana Azad’s welcome speech dated 28.1.1953 at the inaugural session of Indian Academy of Dance, Drama and Music (IADDM), in Kumar, Ravindra (ed.), Selected Works of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Vol. VII, 1953–54, Atlantic Publishers, Delhi, 1992, p. 12. 3. See, ‘Suggestions submitted by the Commercial Artists Guild for a scheme to provide artists in the country with work which will effectively help the nation-building programme, for the consideration of the Conference on Art to be held at Calcutta on 29th and 30th and 31st August, 1949’, South Asia Archive, https://www.southasiaarchive.com/Content/sarf.147165/228641 /010. 4. Extracts from letter dated 8 June 1949 from Mr G. Venkatachalam, President, All India Association of Fine Arts, Bombay, to, Mr Kirpal, Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Education, Government of India, New Delhi. Ibid. 5. Doren, Alice B. Van, Christian High Schools in India: Being the Report of a Survey Conducted on Behalf of the National Christian Council of India, Burma and Ceylon, YMCA, Calcutta, 1936. See also, Miller, William, and J.C.R. Ewing, ‘Christian Education in India’, The American Journal of Theology, vol. 14, no. 3, 1910, pp. 427–440; Mathias, T.A., ‘Christian Educational Effort in India’, New Frontiers in Education, vol. 8, no. 4, 1978.

6. Tagore, Rabindranath, The Meaning of Art, Oxford University Press, London, 1925. Also see, Tagore, Rabindranath, ‘My Educational Mission’, The Modern Review, vol. 49, 1931, p. 621. One of the most comprehensive discussions of Tagore’s educational values has been by Himangshu Mukherjee. See, Mukherjee, Himangshu, Education for Fullness: A Study of the Educational Thought and Experiment of Rabindranath Tagore, Asia Publishing House, New York, 1965. For a discussion of Tagore’s aesthetic ideals, see, Lal, Swati, ‘Rabindranāth Tagore’s Ideals of Aesthetic Education’, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 18, no. 2, 1984, pp. 31–39. In recent years, Martha Nussbaum has taken an interest in Tagore’s ideas, yoking them in her defence of humanistic education. See, Nussbaum, Martha C., Cultivating Humanity A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998. 7. Singh, Bhagwant, ‘From the Oldest Modernite’, in Singh, Khushwant, and Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (eds.), A Dream Turns Seventy-Five: The Modern School, 1920–1995, Allied Publishers, 1995, p. 81. 8. Mitter, Partha, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947, Reaktion Books, London, 2007. 9. In recent years, a number of historians of art in India have opened up the scope and concerns of the art world, a process that began with the intense critiques by Ananda Coomaraswamy, who wrote on Indian art in the early decades of the twentieth century. Partha Mitter and Tapati GuhaThakurta, two of the most prolific scholars in the field, have brought out the larger politics of art in colonial India. See, Mitter, Partha, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1977; Mitter, Partha, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994; Mitter, Partha, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922–1947, Reaktion Books, London, 2007; Guha-Thakurta, Tapati, The

Making of a New Indian Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017. When Modern School was organising itself, Ananda Coomaraswamy was presenting his brilliant appreciation of Indian art. See, Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., Dance of Shiva: Fourteen Essays, with an Introduction by R. Mahalakshmi, Rupa, Delhi, 2014. 10. Khokar, Ashish Mohan, Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra, Roli, Delhi, 1999. 11. Neuman, Daniel M., The Life of Music in North India: The Organization of an Artistic Tradition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990; Leante, Laura, ‘Observing musicians/audience interaction in North Indian classical music performance’, in Tsioulakis, Ioannis, and Elina Hytönen-Ng (eds.), Musicians and their Audiences: Performance, Speech and Mediation, Routledge, New York, 2016. 12. Singh, Bhagwant, ‘From the Oldest Modernite’, in Singh, Khushwant, and Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (eds.), op. cit., pp. 79-80. 13. Singh, Khushwant, The Portrait of a Lady: Collected Stories, Penguin, Delhi, 2007, p. 42. 14. Malhotra, Sham Narain, https://shamnarain.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-am-shamnarain.html, accessed 22 October 2018. 15. Bakhle, Janaki, Two Men and Music: Nationalism and the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition, Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2006. 16. Ibid. 17. Sinha, Manjari, ‘Remembering a Genial Master’, The Hindu, 30 March 2018, https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/music/rememberinga-genial-master/article23385082.ece. 18. Ibid. See also, Bhagat, Himanshu, ‘Class No Bar’, LiveMint, 13 March 2009,

https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/DubgqrLzSDiaKh5JMNz2tJ/ Class-no-bar.html. 19. Mukherjee, P.S., ‘Music’, in The Modern School Records, 1956-1957, pp. 106–107. 20. Jiyuan, Y.U., ‘Ethos and Habituation in Aristotle’, Frontiers of Philosophy in China, vol. 7, no. 4, 2012, pp. 519–532. 21. To have an insight into the milieu, see, Coorlawala, U., ‘Kapila Vatsyayan: Formative Influences’, Dance Research Journal, vol. 32, no. 1, 2000, pp. 103–109. 22. Chakravorty, Pallabi, and Nilanjana Gupta (eds.), Dance Matters: Performing India, Routledge, Delhi, 2010; Khokhar, Ashish Mohan, His Dance, His Life: A Portrait of Uday Shankar, Himalayan Books, Delhi, 1983. 23. This was reported by M.N. Kapur to the Management Committee. Minutes of the MMCMSBR, 21 November 1948. 24. Khokhar, Ashish Mohan, op. cit.; Sehgal, Zohra, Close-Up: Memoirs of a Life on Stage and Screen, Women Unlimited, Delhi, 2010; Banerji, Projesh, Uday Shankar and His Art, B.R. Publishers, Delhi, 1982; Purkayastha, Prarthana, Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism, Routledge, New York, 2014. 25. Chakravorty, Pallabi, and Nilanjana Gupta (eds.), op. cit., p. 41. 26. Sharma, Narendra, ‘Dance’, in The Modern School Report, 1956-1957, pp. 108. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Banerji, Projesh, Indian Ballet Dancing, Abhinav Publishers, Delhi, 2004. 33. Sharma, Narendra, op. cit. 34. Ibid., p. 117. 35. Ibid., p. 118. 36. Ibid., p. 109.

37. Sheikh, Nilima, ‘Learning to feel dance’, in Singh, Khushwant, and Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (eds.), op. cit., p. 117; Kapur, Geeta, ‘The Enchanted Studio’, in ibid., p. 110. 38. Katrak, Ketu H., Contemporary Indian Dance: New Creative Choreography in India and the Diaspora, Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2011, pp. 41–42. 39. In fact, Projesh Banerji thinks of him as one of the pioneers of ballet in India. See, Banerji, Projesh, op. cit. Also see, Rajan, Anjana, ‘A Toast to Creativity’, The Hindu, 19 May 2016, https://www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/a-toast-tocreativity/article8621662.ece; Venkataraman, Leela, ‘A Double Delight’, The Hindu, 9 October 2009, https://www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/dance/Adouble-delight/article16885645.ece. 40. For a rather vivid portrait of Sumitra Charat Ram, see, Khokar, Ashish Mohan, and Sumitra Charat Ram, Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra: A History: Sumitra Charat Ram Reminisces, Lustre Press, Delhi, 1998. 41. Rajan, Anjana, ‘Jayanti Sharma: The Quintessential Artist’, The Hindu, 23 January 2018, https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/art/jayanti-sharmathe-quintessential-artist/article22496175.ece. 42. Khokar, Ashish Mohan, op. cit. 43. Rajan, Anjana, ‘Bharat Sharma: In Heart of the Capital’, The Hindu, Delhi, 26 September 2019, https://www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/dance/Adouble-delight/article 16885645.ece. 44. Kapur, Anuradha, Actors, Pilgrims Kings and Gods the Ramlila of Ramnagar, Seagull, Calcutta, Delhi, 2004 (1990). 45. Rahman, Ram, ‘A Critic’s Eye’, India International Centre Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 1, 2008, pp. 140–144. 46. After a gap of almost a century, a student of the same school came back and revisited the effectiveness of Ramkinkar through an analysis of installation art. Kapur, Anuradha, ‘Traversing Sites, Traversing History: Practising Citizenship Through Art’, in Dutt, Bishnupriya, J.G. Reinelt, and S. Sahai

(eds.), Gendered Citizenship: Contemporary Performance Inter Actions, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2017, pp.117–139. 47. Malhotra, Sham Narain, op. cit. 48. Kapur, Geeta, ‘The Enchanted Studio’, in Singh, Khushwant, and Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (eds.), op. cit., p. 113. 49. Lang, Jon, A Concise History of Modern Architecture in India, Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2002. 50. Bartholomew, Richard, The Art Critic, BART, Delhi, 2012, p. 131. 51. Ibid. 52. Khannam, Shagufta, Portraiture of Indian Women in the Work of Arpana Caur, unpublished PhD thesis, AMU, 2014. 53. See, Datta, Ajit Kumar, Kanwal Krishna and Devyani Krishna, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi, 1961, and the description in the catalogue in Delhi Art Gallery (DAG). 54. Krishna, Kanwal, ‘Our Art Heritage’, Sandesh, no. 5, 22 September 1953, p. 93. 55. Ibid., pp. 93, 96. 56. Sehgal, Amarnath, ‘Education Through Co-operation’, Sandesh, no. 5, 22 September 1953, p. 269. 57. Krishna, D., ‘Art Section’, The Modern School Records, 19541955, pp. 110–111. 58. Ibid. 59. Malhotra, Sham Narain, op. cit. 60. Sandesh, 1961. 61. Hoskote, Ranjit, ‘The Disordered Origins of Things: The Art Collection as Pre-canonical Space’, https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/3738128 8/RH_AbbyGreyIndianModernism_12_15_14spreads.pdf? AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=154 7645807&Signature=5%2BKAY1QHDGcusaFb4NsnTFnRj%2 FU%3D&response-contentdisposition=inline%3B%20filename%3D. 62. Sanyal, Amba, ‘Life in a busy and crowded city’, Sandesh, 7 November 1961.

63. Sharma, Manoj, ‘Capital’s cultural affair began in 50s’, Hindustan Times, 16 November 2011, https://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi/capital-s-cultural-affairbegan-in-50s/story-4flPlJoWx8 E8WUa74SvJYM.html. 64. Chaudhuri, D.N., Delhi Light, Shades, Shadows, Niyogi Books, Delhi, 2005. 65. Dalmia, Vasudha, Poetics, Plays and Performances: The Politics of Modern Indian Theatre, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2006, p. 117. 66. Vyas, Ved, ‘Co-curricula and Hobbies’, The Modern School Records 1954-1955, p. 105. 67. Ibid. 68. Sen, Ketaki, ‘Pratap House Day’, ibid., p. 54. 69. Sandesh, 7 February 1961. This is the time when Pradeep Kuckreja and his friends enacted the popular play Akhbar ka Daftar. Pradeep was at the beginning of an illustrious theatre career. He would later go on to act in the play Kanjoos. 70. Datta, Ajit, Devyani Krishna and Kanwal Krishna, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi, 1961. 71. The works of V.K. Rajwade, R.C. Mazumdar, Jadunath Sarkar, A.S. Altekar, N.K. Sinha, Prabodh Chandra Bagchi, Nihar Ranjan Ray, H.D. Sankalia, R.G. Bhandarkar, Mohammad Habib, Tara Chand, Ishwari Prasad, Kali Kinkar Datta, Ganda Singh, Nilakanta Sastri, T.V. Mahalingam, along with so many others, provided history writing in India a very solid foundation. 72. This was the beginning of a new and more confident phase in history writing by scholars like D.D. Kosambi, Satish Chandra, A.R. Kulkarni, R.S. Sharma, Bipan Chandra, Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib. They would give the Indian past self-respect and self-definition in the larger universe of history writing, which otherwise obfuscated colonialism. Modern, too, contributed to this league of historians. Shahid Amin, a leading historian of the subaltern school, belonged to the next generation of confident scholars, whose penchant for writing on social themes in Hindi is visible in the school magazine.

73. Maulana Azad’s inaugural address at Lalit Kala Akademi on 5 April 1954, in Kumar, Ravindra (ed.), op. cit., pp. 193–194. 74. Ibid., p. 194. He further said: ‘Apart from the general question of developing the finer aspects of personality through artistic education, there is also the immediate utility of such education in developing our manual skill and perceptive sensibility … Education at pre-primary or nursery stage can be best imparted through training the child in the matching of colour shapes and sizes. This releases the creative instinct in the child and thus diverts his superfluous energy from merely destructive channels into those of social behaviour and decorum. Thus whether from the point of view of the training of the emotions or refinement of sentiments or development of manual skill and creative urge, the importance of art as an element of education cannot be over emphasised.’ Ibid.

6: JUNIORS FIND A NEW ABODE: HUMAYUN ROAD, 1961– 2020 1. Howard, Adam, Learning Privilege: Lessons of Power and Identity in Affluent Schooling, Routledge, New York, 2008. 2. From the beginning, the school had inspirational art and music teachers. The list includes, among others, C. Nelson (1944– 1967), P.S. Mukherjee (1943–1968), B.N. Mukherjee (1945– 1952), Bishambher Khanna (1961–1993), A.K. Khastgir, B.C. Sharma (1962–1992), Mawasi Ram (1952–1989), and B.K. Katariya (1951–1987). 3. Tagore, Rabindranath, My Reminiscences, Macmillan, London, 1917. 4. Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Vintage, New York, 1965. 5. Tagore, Rabindranath, op. cit. There are now a number of new studies that look at the school experiences of Dalit children and those from the SCs as well as economically lower classes. In fact, reading them may force us to rethink the way childhood is experienced in India. See, for example, Valmiki, Om Prakash,

Jhootan: An Untouchable Life, trans. Arun Prabha Mukherjee, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008; Ram, Tulsi, Murdahiya, Rajkamal Prakashan, Delhi, 2012; Bechain, Sheoraj Singh, Mera Bachpan Mere Kandhon Par, Vani Prakashan, Delhi, 2013. 6. Shahidullah, Kazi, Pathshalas into Schools, Firma KLM, Calcutta, 1987; Sen, Nivedita, Family School and Nation: The Child and Literary Constructions in 20th-Century Bengal, Routledge, Delhi, 2015. 7. Ghosh, Ranjan, ‘Caught in the Cross Traffic: Rabindranath Tagore and the Trials of Child Education’, Comparative Education Review, vol. 59, no. 3, 2015, pp. 399–419. 8. Mukherjee, Himangshu Bhushan, Education for Fullness: A Study of the Educational Thought and Experiment of Rabindranath Tagore, Asia Publishing House, London, 1962. 9. Kumar, Nita, ‘The Educational Efforts of Rabindranath Tagore’, Journal of Contemporary Thought, vol. 34, 2011, pp. 119–133. 10. Singh, Raghubir, and Kamala Bose, ‘A Plea For Educational Reform in India’, in A Successful Experimentation in Education, Modern School, Delhi, 1947, p. 45. 11. Ibid. 12. Johansson, J.E., ‘F.A.W. Fröbel, 1782–1852’, in Fleer, M., and B. van Oers (eds.), International Handbook of Early Childhood Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, Springer, Dordrecht, 2018, pp. 1323–1345. 13. Allen, A.T., ‘Spiritual Motherhood: German Feminists and the Kindergarten Movement’, History of Education Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 3, 1982, pp. 319–340; Allen, A.T., ‘The Kindergarten in Germany and the United States, 1840–1914: A Comparative Perspective’, History of Education, vol. 35, no. 2, 2006, pp. 173–188; Albisetti, J.C., ‘The Empress Frederick and Female Education in the Late Nineteenth Century: Germany, England and Italy’, Paedagogica Historica, vol. 48, no. 3, 2012, pp. 345–355; Albisetti, J.C., ‘Could Separate Be Equal: Helene Lange and Women’s Education in Imperial Germany’, History of Education Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 3, 1982, pp. 301–317;

Albisetti, J.C., ‘Froebel Crosses the Alps: Introducing the Kindergarten in Italy’, History of Education Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 2, 2009, pp. 159–169; Adelman, C., ‘Over two years, what did Froebel say to Pestalozzi?’, History of Education, vol. 29, no. 2, 2000, pp. 103–114; Bae, B., ‘Children and Teachers as Partners in Communication: Focus on Spacious and Narrow Interactional Patterns’, International Journal of Early Childhood, vol. 44, no. 1, 2012, pp. 53–69; Brehony, K., and J. Jarvis, The Origins of Nursery Education: Frederich Froebel and the English System: Vol. 3. Friedrich Froebel’s Pedagogics of the Kindergarten, Routledge, London, 2001; Read, J., ‘Free Play with Froebel: Use and Abuse of Progressive Pedagogy in London’s Infant Schools, 1870– c.1904’, Paedagogica Historica, vol. 42, no. 3, 2006, pp. 299– 323; Münchow, K., ‘The relationship between the kindergarten movement, the movement for democracy and the early women’s movement in the historical context of the revolution of 1848–49, as Reflected in “Die Frauen-Zeitung”’, History of Education, vol. 35, no. 2, 2006, pp. 283–292. 14. Allen, Ann Taylor, ‘“Let us live with our Children”: Kindergarten Movement in Germany and the United States, 1840–1914’, History of Education Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1, 1988, pp. 23–48. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., p. 25. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Two of the most thorough biographies of Maria Montessori have been by E.M. Standing and Rita Kramer respectively. See, Standing, E.M., Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work, Academy Library Guild, Fresno, California, 1957; Kramer, Rita, Maria Montessori, G.P. Putnam and Sons, New York, 1976. However, for a more complex and critical work on Montessori and her intellectual and political career, see, Babini, Valeria, ‘Science, Feminism and Education: The Early Work of Maria

Montessori’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 49, no. 1, 2000, pp. 44–67. 22. Burstyn, Joan N., ‘Maria Montessori, by Rita Kramer’, review, History of Education Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 1, 1979, p. 143. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. This was also the time when Gandhi’s ideas on education were forming. For an interesting insight on Gandhi and the ideas of pre-schooling, see, Fishman, Sarah, ‘Gandhi in the Pre-School’, The Journal of Education, vol. 134, no. 2, 2003, pp. 1–5. 26. Singh, Raghubir, and Kamala Bose, A Successful Experiment in Education, Modern School, Delhi, 1947. 27. Sen, Nivedita, Family, School and Nation, Routledge, Delhi, 2016. 28. Interview with Bhawani Shankar, 19 March 2019. 29. See, Sen, Nivedita, op. cit. The issue is still central in contemporary times. See, for example, Nambissan, Geeta, and Poonam Batra, ‘Equity and Excellence: Issues in Indian Education’, Social Scientist, vol. 17, no. 9/10, 1989, pp. 56-73; Beteille, A., ‘The Reproduction of Inequality: Occupation, Caste and Family’, in Sharma, K.L. (ed.), Social Inequality in India: Profiles of Caste, Class and Social Mobility, Rawat, Jaipur, 2004, pp. 127-156. 30. Interview with Geeta Dudeja, 11 May 2019; Interview with Meera Pradeep Singh, 17 August 2019. 31. Nag, Kamala, ‘Bharatiya Nritta Kalar Utpatti o Itihas’, (in Bengali; Origin and Evolution of Indian Dance), Adarsh, 1950, pp. 8–9. 32. Modern High School: A Report, BOT, 1947, p. 2. 33. Adarsh, Modern School, Delhi, 1963. 34. Adarsh, Modern School, Delhi, 1964. 35. Ravindra Gulati, Dinesh Kumar, Rakesh G., Aditya Sachdev, Jasbir Singh, Akhilesh Jain, Prameeta Sannon, Sarbajit Singh, Ravi Rupam, Nalini Topa, Ajai Bhalla, Alok Gupta, Prakash Mittal, Adarsh, Modern School, Delhi, 1964.

36. Praveen Bahl, Arvind Seth, Amitabh Banerjee, Dipankar Roy, Ranjan Tara, Naresh Shankar, Mrinalini Verma, Pradeep Jain, Hardev Singh, Anil Vasudev, Balbir Singh, Sri Narain, Tani Sandhu, Raman, Vijay Dayal, Subramaniam, Lalit Khanna, Sanjay Tiwary, Rakesh Dayal. 37. Virendra Kumar, Kaushik Trivedi, Ravi Narain, Rajiv Zutshi, Kandla Mendiratta, Anil Chopra, Sunil Mangla, Dinesh Kumar, Ajay Choudhry and Rajiv Sant, Rajan Sood, Sunita, Indira. 38. Amitabh Mukherjee, Deepak Sethi, Jayant Joshi, Sanjeev Kapur, Gunveer Kapur, Deepak Bhandari, Jaideep Mittra, Ravindra Chona, Rommel Mehta, Ravi Deva, Sanjeev Prakash. 39. ‘Guru Nanak House Report’, Adarsh, Modern School, Delhi, 1965. 40. Raman Dang, ‘Chisti House’, ibid., 1967. 41. Mankirat, ‘Dayanada House’, ibid. 42. Deepak Bhargava, ‘Kabir House’, ibid. 43. Navin Daing, ‘Mahavir House’, ibid. 44. Major Gen. Virendra Singh’s son Pradeep Singh and daughter-in-law, Meera Pradeep Singh, also got involved. His nephew Ashok Pratap Singh had already been involved in the school for a decade by then and had been of great help. Anuradha Singh, Ashok Pratap Singh’s wife, was also involved, along with Geetanjali Chandra, Bhagwant Singh’s daughter. Ketaki Sood, Dr S.K. Sen’s daughter, was another member of the younger generation who was already very active in school affairs. 45. Weiner, Myron,The Child and the State in India: Child Labor and Education Policy in Comparative Perspective, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1991; Wazir, R., ‘“No to Child Labour, Yes To Education”: Unfolding of a Grass Root Movement in Andhra Pradesh’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 37, no. 52, 2002, pp. 5225–5229. 46. Yagnamurthy, Sreekanth,‘Reservation for Economically Weaker Section Children in Unaided-Private Schools: Policy

and Practice’, International Journal of Educational Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2013. 47. The idea of cultural capital covers this aspect quite clearly. As developed by Bourdieu, the idea of cultural capital, in this context, suggests that the children of upper-class families come to the institution already embedded with attributes that others lack. See, for example, Symeou, Loizos, ‘Cultural Capital and Family Involvement in Children’s Education: Tales from Two Primary Schools in Cyprus’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, vol. 28, no. 4, 2007, pp. 473-487; Bourdieu, Pierre, and J.C. Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, Sage, London, 1990 (1970); Marjoribanks, K., Families and Their Learning Environment: An Empirical Analysis, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1979. 48. For an understanding of the changing idea of the teacher (‘guru mahashay’) in nineteenth-century Bengal, see, Shahidullah, Kazi, ‘The Purpose and Impact of Government Policy on Pathshala Gurumohashoys in Nineteenth-century Bengal’, in Crook, Nigel (ed.), The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia: Essays on Education, Religion, History, and Politics, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1996, pp. 119–134.

7: MODERN ENTERS ITS MATURITY: 1961–1977 1. Talegaonkar, Vandana, ‘Concept, Process of Nurturing and Influence of Academic Culture in School’, unpublished PhD thesis, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, 2010. 2. Chaudhuri, Sukanta (ed.), Calcutta: The Living City, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1996; Chattopadhyay, Swati, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny, Routledge, London, 2005; Singer, Milton, ‘Beyond Tradition and Modernity in Madras’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 13, no. 2, 1971, pp. 160–195; David, M.D., Bombay, the City of Dreams: A History of the First City in India, Himalaya Publishing House, Mumbai, 1995; David, M.D., Urban Explosion of Mumbai: Restructuring of Growth, Himalaya

Publishing House, Mumbai, 1996; Kidambi, Prashant, Manjiri Kamat, and Rachel Dwyer (eds.), Bombay Before Mumbai: Essays in Honour of Jim Masselos, Penguin, Delhi, 2019. See also, Hazarisingh, S., ‘Colonial Modernism and The Flawed Paradigms of Urban Renewal: Uneven Development in Bombay, 1900–25’, Urban History, vol. 28, no. 2, 2001, pp. 235–255. 3. Chaudhuri, Sukanta, op. cit.; Chattopadhyay, Swati, op. cit.; Singer, Milton, op. cit.; David, M.D., op. cit.; Kidambi, Prashant, Manjiri Kamat, and Rachel Dwyer (eds.), op. cit. 4. Sahni, Parikshit, The Non Conformist: The Memories of My Father Balraj Shani, Penguin, Delhi, 2019. 5. This can best be seen in the account of the founder of Springdales school in Delhi: Kumar, Rajni, Against the Wind: A Life’s Journey, HarperCollins, Delhi, 2019. 6. Weber, Charles E., ‘An Overview of Secondary Education in India’, The Clearing House, vol. 30, no. 6, 1956, p. 347. 7. Kabir, Humayun, ‘Indian Education Since Independence’, The Phi Delta Kappan, vol. 39, no. 3, 1957, pp. 104–107; Kabir, Humayun, ‘Secondary Education in India: An Overview’, The Journal of Educational Sociology, vol. 28, no. 5, 1955, pp. 194– 199; Kabir, Humayun, ‘Education in India: A Bird’s-Eye View’, International Review of Education, vol. 1, no. 1, 1955, pp. 48– 66; Saiyidain, K.G., ‘Secondary Education—A Statement of Objectives, Purposes, Moral and Spiritual Values’, The Journal of Educational Sociology, vol. 28, no. 5, 1955, pp. 205–209. 8. P.N. Kirpal was another Government College Lahore alumnus. He looked after general education and the organisational part of the ministry, while G.K. Chandramani was involved in the scientific and technical education component. Chandramani was instrumental in overseeing the establishment of the IITs and the AICTE, of which Kirpal, too, became a member in later years. After his retirement, Chandramani was appointed by the Tatas as the director of the Dorabji Tata Trust. Meanwhile, L.R. Sethi, who became the superintendent of education in Delhi in 1948, was instrumental in overseeing

educational rehabilitation works in the city. It was at his suggestion that Rev. J.D. Tytler started the Delhi Public School society, which then established the Delhi Public School. Soon after this, Sethi was sent to the United States by the Government of India as the cultural attaché to the Indian ambassador in Washington. In this capacity, he became instrumental in conceptualising and facilitating many important collaborative projects for the development of education in India. His contribution as a member of the Committee on Secondary Education, set up by the Government of India in 1948 to reorganise the country’s secondary education, was also very valuable. Interview with historian Neena Puri, daughter of the late L.R. Sethi, 12 February 2019. 9. Report of the Secondary Education Commission: October 1952–June 1953, Delhi, 1953, p. 23. Cited in Zachariah, Mathew, ‘The Durability of Academic Secondary Education in India’, Comparative Education Review, vol. 14, no. 2, 1970, p. 154. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Kabir, Humayun, ‘The Role of Education’, in Education in New India, G. Allen and Unwin, London, 1955, pp.195–196. Also cited in Zachariah, Mathew, op. cit., p. 155. 13. Ibid. 14. The Education Commission reported such socio-economic facts in its records. See, Table 6.4, in ‘Socio-economic Conditions of Students Admitted to Vocational Technical and Professional Institutions in 1965’, Report of the Education Commission, p. 110. Also see, Naik, J.P., Educational Planning in India, Allied Publishers, Bombay, 1965, p. 108. 15. Table 7.4, in Report of the Education Commission, 1964– 1966, p. 158. Also cited in ibid., p. 158. 16. Porter, Willis, ‘Secondary Education India’, The High School Journal, vol. 50, no. 4, 1967, p. 194. 17. Ibid., p. 196.

18. Kapur, J.N., ‘Some Recent Efforts for Improvement of School Mathematics in India’, The Mathematics Teacher, vol. 61, no. 3, 1968, pp. 321–327. A decade later, he provided a list of the changes that mathematics education had achieved through concerted efforts. See, J.N. Kapur, ‘India’, in ‘Change in Mathematics Education Since the Late 1950’s: Ideas and Realisation’, Educational Studies in Mathematics, vol. 9, no. 2, 1978, pp. 245–253. 19. Ibid., pp. 321-327. 20. Ibid., p. 324. 21. ‘Science Teaching in Secondary Schools In India’, Science Teacher, National Science Teachers Association, USA, vol. 34, no. 1, 1967, pp. 32–34. 22. Batabyal, Rakesh, JNU: The Making of a University, HarperCollins, Delhi, 2014, pp. 82–84. 23. Ibid., p. 58. Also see M.C. Chagla’s autobiography: Chagla, M.C., Roses in December, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay, 1980. 24. Batabyal, Rakesh, ibid., p. 57. 25. For a good overview of the whole issue, see, Batabyal, Rakesh, Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches, Penguin, Delhi, 2007, pp. 675–691. Also see, Agrawala, S.K., ‘Jawaharlal Nehru and the Language Issue’, Journal of the Indian Law Institute, vol. 19, no. 1, 1977, pp. 44–67. 26. For a nuanced discussion, see, Batabyal, Rakesh, op. cit., 2014. 27. Report of the Education Commission, 1964-66, p. 250. Cited in Zachariah, Mathew, ‘The Durability of Academic Secondary Education in India’, Comparative Education Review, vol. 14, no. 2, 1970, p. 159. 28. Sandesh, 1960–1966. 29. Pillai, P. Mohanan, ‘Secondary School Teachers’, Social Scientist, vol. 3, no. 5, 1974, pp. 52–60. 30. For a sensitive overview of the appeal of the Beatles, see, Frontani, Michael R., The Beatles, The Image and The Media, University Press of Mississipi, Jackson, MS, 2007. The

Beatles’ impact on the Indian youth, though limited to a certain section of metropolitan life, has been recently studied. See, Bose, Ajoy, Across the Universe: The Beatles in India, Penguin, Delhi, 2018; Bhatia, Sidharth, Psychedelic in India: The Story of a Rocking Generation, HarperCollins, Delhi, 2014. 31. Howard, Adam, Learning Privilege: Lessons of Power and Identity in Affluent Schooling, Routledge, New York, 2007. 32. Ibid. 33. Kozol, Jonathan, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, Harper Perennial, New York, 1992. 34. Khushwant Singh and Arun Shourie, two of India’s finest and most distinguished journalists, were Modern School students. 35. Shourie, Arun, Sandesh, 1956; Sandesh, 1958. 36. Howard, Adam, op. cit. 37. Chaudhuri, Mohini, ‘T2 Mumbai: A grand museum that shows “what Indian art is all about”’, Hindu BusinessLine, 10 January 2014, https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/logistics/T2Mumbai-A-grand-museum-that-shows-‘what-Indian-art-is-allabout’/article20710411.ece. 38. Wacziarg, Francis, and Aman Nath, Rajasthan: The Painted Walls of Shekhavati, Vikas Publications, Delhi, 1982; Nath, Aman, and Francis Wacziarg (eds.), Arts and Crafts of Rajasthan, Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad, 1997. 39. For Bhargava’s writings on secularism, see, Bhargava, Rajeev, Amiya Bagchi, and R. Sudarshan (eds.), Multiculturalism, Liberalism and Democracy, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1999; Bhargava, Rajeev, The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2010; Berman, Bruce J., Rajeev Bhargava, and André Laliberté (eds.), Secular States and Religious Diversity, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 2013. 40. Rahman, Ram, Sunil Janah: Photographs, 1940–1960, Vijay Kumar Aggarwal, Swaraj Art Archive, Noida, 2014; Rahman, Ram, and Jessica Moss (eds.), The Sahmat Collective: Art and

Activism in India since 1989, Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, 2013. 41. O.P. Sharma, who taught photography to the young students, introduced them to different ways of seeing reality through the lens of the camera. The possibilities of capturing a richer and more nuanced notion of reality than that depicted by politics is visible in the work of Rahman in particular. 42. It is interesting to note that the NCC embodied the national spirit, enjoying a wide following among students at schools, colleges and universities around the country. It was hoped that a spell in the NCC would serve as an antidote to communal and other fissiparous tendencies in the country. Perhaps since the ideals of the NCC were already embedded in the Modern’s foundational principles, it did not develop in the school in the same way. 43. Pablo Bartholomew, a student of the senior school, was among those who dropped out of school, and lent his voice to many causes. Later on, he would emerge as one of India’s top photojournalists, and he evocatively captured the Bhopal gas tragedy through his lens. 44. See, https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/1967/35858/ 2/1967-Thomas-Hoepker-GNS3-BF-(1). Prabhu Dutt, Vimal Shankar, Ramesh Lal, Arvind Seth, Amitabh Jain, Rajiv Gandhi, Siddharth Choudhry, Surinder Jain, Daya Shankar, Viswanath Menon and Yogesh Sharma were among the students on the Modern School team. See, Sandesh, 1967. 45. Bartholomew, Richard, The Art Critic, BART, Delhi, 2012, p. 614. 46. Ibid., p. 616. 47. Goel, K.B., ‘Some Women Artists, An Assessment of the Work of Leading Women Artists of the Day’, Link, 7 September 1975, reprinted in Parthasarathy, Shruti (ed.), K.B. Goel: Critical Writings on Art, 1957-1998, Sher-gil Sundaram Arts Foundation and Tulika, Delhi, 2020, pp. 268–270. 48. Ibid., p. 610.

49. Goel, Link, 18 May 1969, ibid., p. 297. 50. Ibid. 51. Goel, Link, 17 October 1971, ibid., p. 311. 52. Goel, Link, 18 May 1969, ibid., p. 298. 53. Goel, Link, n.d., 1968, ibid., pp. 188-189. 54. Goel, Link, 7 February 1971, ibid., p. 193. 55. Kapur, Anuradha, ‘Theatre in the Modern School’, in Singh, Khushwant, and Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (eds.), A Dream Turns Seventy Five: The Modern School, 1920-1995, Allied Publishers, 1995, p. 123. 56. Jindal, Suresh, My Adventures with Satyajit Ray: The Making of Shatranj Ke Khiladi, HarperCollins, Delhi, 2017. Jindal produced Attenborough’s Gandhi, too, in 1982. 57. Sandesh, 1972. 58. Deepak Bhandari and Anita Rampal played Manu and Shraddha, with Anindita Sengupta, Anil Khanna and Sanjeev Khandari playing the other lead roles. 59. Interview with former faculty and students. 60. Mukherjee, A., Why is Science Boring? Scientific Temper vs Science, National Conference on Scientific Temper, Delhi, February 2014; Mukherjee, A., Science Teaching in India: Experiments in Multiculturalism, International Conference on Education, Culture and Identity, Sarajevo, BosniaHerzegovina, July 2013; Mukherjee, A.,Teacher Training for Teaching Mathematics, International Conference on Issues in the In-service Development of Elementary Teachers, Bhubaneswar, October 2010; Mukherjee, A., Talking about Science to Undergraduates: Story of an Attempt, IASS Symposium on Science Education in India, Delhi, December 2009; Mukherjee, A., Re-envisioning the Science Curriculum, National Seminar on Science Education, Delhi, February 2008; Ali, S., A. Mukherjee, and J. Rajan, Study of Change in Primary Mathematics Textbooks at Grade 3 in Delhi Government/Municipal Schools, epiSTEME-2, Mumbai, February 2007.

61. This is an overall evaluation based on personal interviews with many stakeholders, including the trustees.

8: SPORT, GAMES AND PHYSIQUE: MODERN AND INDIA’S SPORTING HISTORY 1. Jain, L.C., Civil Disobedience: Two Freedom Struggles, One Life, The Book Review Literary Trust, Delhi, 2011, p. 25. 2. Rai, Lala Lajpat, Problem of National Education in India, Allan and Unwin, London, 1920, p. 255. Cited in Vertinsky, Patricia, and Aishwarya Ramachandran, ‘The “Y” Goes to India: Springfield College, Muscular Missionaries, and the Transnational Circulation of Physical Culture Practices’, Journal of Sports History, vol. 46, no. 3, 2019, fn. 23. 3. Koner, Janmenjay, Physical Education Scenario in West Bengal from 1882 to 1982, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Kalyani, 2002. 4. Sinha, Mrinalini, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1995; Alter, Joseph, ‘Indian Clubs and Colonialism: Hindu Masculinity and Masculine Christianity’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 46, no. 3, 2004, pp. 497–534; Peabody, Norbert, ‘Disciplining the Body, Disciplining the Body-Politic: Physical Culture and Social Violence among North Indian Wrestlers’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 51, no. 2, 2009, pp. 372–400. 5. Ibid., p.40. Colonial policies promoted a racial superiority that was also given a cover of masculinity and sexual overtones by maintaining a superiority over body and sex. For more on this, see, Ballhatchet, Kenneth, Race Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1798–1905, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1980. 6. Ibid. 7. Vertinsky, Patricia, and Aishwarya Ramachandran, op. cit., pp. 363–379.

8. Ibid., p. 366. 9. Koner, Janmenjay, op. cit. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Garrett, H.L.O., and Abdul Hamid, A History of Government College, Lahore, 1864-1964, Government College, Lahore, 1964. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Kamala Bose to James Buchanan, 25 July 1944, Modern School Files, 1944. 16. James Buchanan to Kamala Bose, 31 July 1944, ibid. 17. S.K. Bhattacharya to Kamala Bose, 30 August 1944, ibid. 18. Singh, Raghubir, and Kamala Bose, ‘Physical Activities’, in A Successful Experiment in Education, Modern School, Delhi, 1947, p. 55. 19. Justice Prakash Narain, ‘The Happy Happy Days’, Modern School New Delhi, 1920-1970, Modern School, Delhi, 1970, p. 69. 20. ‘Principal’s Report’, The Modern School Records, 1954-55, p. 23. 21. Ibid. Gursatinder Singh retired as a brigadier in the Indian Army. 22. Kailash Kohli, Report on the NCC Camp, Lucknow, ibid., p. 72. 23. Ibid., p. 73. Kailash Kohli and Lalit Chawla subsequently joined the navy and the army, and retired from their services as vice admiral in the Indian Navy and colonel in the Indian Army respectively. Kuldip Sahdev retired as distinguished member of India’s diplomatic corps. 24. Ibid., 1953-54, pp. 72–73. 25. Brig. Anant Singh (1928 batch of Modern School); Brig. Pritam Pal Singh; Maj. Gen. Virendra Singh (1932); Lt. Col. (Rtd) Kuldip Singh; Air Chief Marshal P.C. Lall (1933); Air Vice Marshal Ajoy Chandra Lal (1935); Col. Bishamber Dayal Sharma (1937); Cmdr. Bal Krishna Dang (1939); Lt. Gen. Pran

Nath Kathpalia (1942); Lt. Col. Jai Dev Singh Khera; Col. Mani Kant Dang; Lt. Col. Raj Behari Lal; Air Marshal Satish Chandra Lal (1943); Air Marshal Manmohan Singh; Capt. Sashi Kant Dang; Col. Shiv Raj Kishore (1946). 26. Lt. Col. Girraj Valabh Haldia; Col. Ranjit Kumar Sengupta; Air Chief Marshal S.K. Mehra (1948); Maj. Gen. R.K. Sood (1949); Rear Admiral A.P. Revi; Lt. Gen. Jagat Mohan Singh (1950); Lt. Gen. S.S. Kalkat; Maj. Amitabh Sen, Lt. Col. Surendra Nath (1952); Lt. Gen. Joginder Kumar Khurana; Lt. Gen. Raghunath D. Rao (1953); Maj. Gen. Badri Narayan Raizada, Brig. Gursatinder Singh (1954); Brig. Shyam Prasad (1955); Brig. Ashok Dewan; Brig. Daljit Singh, Lt. Col. Gurdip Singh Chopra; Wing Cmdr. Jagdish Kishore; Vice Admiral Kailash Kohli; Col. Lalit Chawla; Col. S.C. Mathur; Col. Trilok Nath Mehrotra (1956); Maj. Gen. Anand Prakash Palta; Capt. Jung Bahadur Chawla; Maj. Kanwaljit Singh; Lt. Col. M.M. Kapur; Cmdr. Ravinder Sikka; Cmdr. Surendra Kumar Mongia; Capt. Virendra Kumar (1957); Wing Cmdr. Ramesh Mallik; Col. Ravindra Khera; Maj. Shashi Kumar Mengi; Cmdr. V.P. Kapre; Lt. Gen. Vijay Lall, Cmdr. Vinod Chaudhary, Maj. Vinod Malhotra (1958); Cdr. Rajinder Krishna Khanna; Maj. Ravi Kapur; Maj. Gen. Satinder S. Puri, Lt. Col. Sham Narain; Lt. Gen. Shankar Prasad; Lt. Col. Vidya Bhushan Manocha; Col. Vimal Mehta (1959); Maj. Gen. Anil Sawhney; Lt. Col. Manmohan Goel (1960); Maj. Vinod Verma (1961). 27. The Report of the Secondary Education Commission: Mudaliar Commission Report, October 1952-June 1953, Ministry of Education, Government of India, 1953, p. 117. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Singh, Raghubir, and Kamala Bose, op. cit., pp. 181–193. 31. National Council of Sports, Modern School Files. 32. Vasant Vihar by now had excellent coaches in the shape of A.P. Seth, M.P. Singh and P.S. Sengar. Almost all of their sports and physical-education teachers were trained at the Lakshmi Bai School of Physical Education, Gwalior.

33. Interview with hockey coach P.S. Sengar, and also with physical-education teacher Suman Malasi. Vikram Pant, who was one of the brilliant members of the champion hockey team of the school in the 1980s, also discussed various issues with the author. 34. Kapadiya, Novy, Barefoot to Boots: The Many Lives of Indian Football, Penguin, Delhi, 2017. 35. Today, hardly any hockey is played in most schools, including Modern. Most do not even have the numbers to hold tournaments. This also speaks volumes about the completely changed life of sport in Delhi, with tournaments dying all round. See, Lokapally, Vijay, ‘Delhi’s vanishing sports tournaments’, The Hindu, 12 December 2019, accessed on 7 April 2020, https://www.thehindu.com/sport/delhis-vanishing-sportstournaments/article30288192.ece. 36. Desai, Santosh, ‘Two Cheers for Brand Sport’, in Kamath, Nandan, and Aparna Ravichandran (eds.), Go!: India’s Sporting Transformations, Penguin, Delhi, 2019, p. 31. 37. Ibid., p. 39. 38. McCollum, Sean, ‘Keeping School Sport Rivalries Respectful: In a Sports-Obsessed World’, Education Digest, vol. 78, no. 1, 2012, pp. 58–62.

9: MODERN AND THE IDEA OF TECHNOLOGY 1. Kosambi, D.D., An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, Popular Prakashan, Bombay, 1956. 2. Sharma, R.S., Material Culture and Social Formations in Ancient India, Macmillan, Delhi, 2007 (1983). 3. Habib, Irfan, Medieval India, National Book Trust, Delhi, 2007; Habib, Irfan, Technology in Medieval India, c. 650–1750, Aligarh Historical Society, Aligarh, 2008; Qaiser, A.J.,The Indian Response to European Technology and Culture, A.D. 1498–1707, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1982. 4. Hossain, Hameeda, The Company Weaver of Bengal: the East India Company and the Organization of TextileProduction in

Bengal, 1750–1813, Oxford University Press, Bengal, 1988; Chaudhury, Sushil, Companies, Commerce and Merchants: Bengal in the Pre-Colonial Era, Routledge, London, 2017; Chaudhury, Sushil, From Prosperity to Decline: Eighteenth Century Bengal, Manohar Publishers, Delhi, 1995. 5. Bagchi, Amiya Kumar, Private Investment in India, 1900–1939, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000; Banerjee, A.K., India’s Balance of Payments: Estimates of Current and Capital Accounts from 1921–22 to 1938–39, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1963; Ray, Rajat K., Industrialization in India: Growth and Conflict in the Private Corporate Sector, 1914–47, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1974; Mukherjee, Aditya, Imperialism and the Making of the Indian Capitalist Class, Sage, Delhi, 2004. 6. Kumar, Deepak, Science and the Raj: A Study of British India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1995; Sarkar, Smriti Kumar, Technology and Rural Change in Eastern India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2014; MacLeod, Roy M., and Deepak Kumar, Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Technical Transfers to India, 1700–1947, Sage, Delhi, 1995; Sarkar, Suvobrata, Quest for Technical Knowledge: Bengal in the Nineteenth Century, Manohar Publishers, Delhi, 2012. 7. Kumar, Deepak, op. cit., 1995; Sarkar, Suvobrata, op. cit. 8. Mandal, Debashis, ‘Techno-Engineering Education and the Railways in Colonial India’, Indian Journal of History of Science, vol. 51, no. 2, 2016, pp. 227–237. 9. Metcalf, T.R., The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1858–1970, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1964. 10. Kumar, Deepak, ‘Racial Discrimination and Science in Nineteenth Century India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. XIX, no. 1, 1982, pp. 63–82; Kumar, Arun, ‘Colonial Requirements and Engineering Education: The Public Works Departments, 1847–1947’, in MacLeod, Roy M., and Deepak Kumar (eds.), Technology and the Raj, Western Technology and Technical Transfers to India: 1700–1947, Sage, Delhi, 1995.

11. Chandra, Bipan, ‘Ideas of Development in 19th Century India’, in Nationalism and Colonialism in India, Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 1979; Rothermund, Dietmar, An Economic History of India, Routledge, New York, 1993 (1988). 12. Kumar, Deepak, op. cit.; MacLeod, Roy M., and Deepak Kumar, op. cit. 13. The Despatch of 1854 on ‘General Education in India’, General Council on Education in India, East India Company, London, 1880; Sinha, Devi P., The Educational Policy of the East Indian Company in Bengal to 1854, Punthi Pustak, Calcutta, 1964. For an interesting discussion on the theme, see, Ghosh, Suresh Chandra, ‘Dalhousie, Charles Wood and the Education Despatch of 1854’, History of Education, vol. 4, no. 2, 1975, pp. 37–47. 14. For a detailed treatment, see, Shah, Nirmala, ‘TechnoScientific Education and the Indian National Congress, 18851918’, Indian Journal of History of Science, vol. 49, no. 3, 2014, pp. 278–292. 15. For a detailed study, see, Swaminathan, Padmini, ‘Technical Education and Industrial Development in Madras Presidency: Illusions of a Policy in the Making’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 27, no. 30, 1992, pp. 1611–1622. 16. Shah, Nirmala, op. cit. 17. Subramanian, Ajantha, Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachussets, 2019. 18. For a different treatment on the ways the imperialism of technology transfer worked, see, Headrick, Daniel, Tentacles of Progress, Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940, Oxford University Press, New York, 1988. 19. B.N. Baliga, a nineteen-year-old lad, travelled all the way from Mangalore to study engineering in Banaras in 1938, and was helped by the then registrar, Mr Bhat, who happened to be from the Konkan region and had a reputation for taking all the south Indian students under his wing. Baliga became a wellrespected engineer with Martin Burns, which ran the United

Provinces power system, and later headed the Uttar Pradesh State Electricity Board, a very prestigious position. (Source: Personal communication with Pai’s daughter Sudha.) Hundreds of such stories abound. Sujatha Gidla’s wonderful book Ants Among Elephants draws our attention to the magnetic nature of Banaras Hindu University in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly for those who fervently desired education and did not have the resources or institutions to go to. See, Gidla, Sujatha, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2017. 20. Mital, K.V., History of The Thomason College of Engineering, 1847–1949, University of Roorkee, Roorkee, 1996, pp. 28–29. 21. Major Anant Singh finished his schooling in 1932 and followed it up with a BSc from St Stephen’s. After obtaining his bachelor’s degree, he went to the Indian Military Academy and was enlisted in the engineer corps in 1938. He attended Thomason College in the same year for his engineering degree. Previously, R.N. Batra finished his schooling in 1928 and joined the Royal Flying College and then the air force. Bishambhar Dayal of the 1930s batch also joined Thomason College in 1937. 22. Ghosh, J.K., P. Maiti, T.J. Rao, and B.K. Sinha, ‘Evolution of Statistics in India’, International Statistical Journal, vol. 67, no. 1, 1999, pp. 13–34. 23. Stigler, Stephen, quoted in ‘Obituary: Raghu Raj Bahadur, Statistics’,The University of Chicago Chronicle, 12 June 1997. 24. Lahiri, S.N., ‘On the Bahadur—Ghosh—Kiefer Representation of Sample Quantiles’, Statistics & Probability Letters, vol. 15, no. 2, 1992, pp. 163–168. 25. Dhar, P.N., Small Scale Industries in Delhi: A Study in Investment, Output and Employment Aspect, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1958. 26. Ibid., p. 20. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., p. 21.

29. Coming from a long line of Unani doctors, some of whom served as physicians to Mughal emperors, Khan was also one of the founders of Jamia Millia University. 30. Anand, Ela, and Ketaki Sood, A Cut Above: The Remarkable Life of Dr. S.K. Sen, Surgeon Extraodinaire, 1910–1979, The Printers, Delhi, 2007. 31. Ibid.

10: MSVV: A CHILD OF THE NEW INDIA 1. Vajpeyi, Ananya, The Righteous Republic, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2010. 2. Mahatma Gandhi, Visitor’s Book, Modern School, 1924. 3. Lord Cheshire built the first house for the autistic in London. For a write up on the early phase of the building of the different Cheshire homes across England and the world, see, Phipps, Frances, ‘Cheshire Homes’, Life of the Spirit (1946–1964), vol. 15, no. 169, 1960, pp. 18–23. 4. Singh, Khushwant, and Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (eds.), A Dream Turns Seventy-Five: The Modern School, 1920–1995, Allied Publishers, Delhi, 1995. 5. Minutes of the Meeting of the Management Committee Modern School, Vasant Vihar (hereafter, MMCMSVV), 17th Meeting, 5 July 1982. 6. Garg, R.K., ‘Technical Education in the Seventies’, Indian Journal of Technical Education, vol. 3, no. 2, 1974, pp. 77–80. 7. Bhalla, G.S., Y.K. Alagh, and S.P. Kashyap (eds.), Structural Analysis of Gujarat, Punjab and Haryana Economies: An InputOutput Study, Allied Publishers, Delhi, 1980. 8. Baruah, S.K., ‘Professional Education in Changing Technology’, Industrial India, vol. 27, no. 9, 1976, p. 21. 9. Joshi, Arun, Lala Shri Ram: A Study in Entrepreneurship and Industrial Management, Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 1975. 10. ‘Developments in Technical Education’, University News, vol. 10, no. 5, 1972, pp. 4–5. 11. Ibid.

12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘The Forms of Capital’, in Richardson, J. (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, Greenwood, New York, 1986 (1983). 15. Dutt, V.P., India’s Foreign Policy Since Independence, National Book Trust, Delhi, 2011. 16. Suman Malasi, for example, had joined a south Delhi school, and was also the warden of its hostel. Soon, however, she found Modern more attractive for her pursuits. Richa Mudgal was a product of the CIE, and came straight to teach at the school while Shubhra Dasgupta was quite surprised to find the invitation to join and so was Jasleen Dougal. In many ways, these initial appointments provided the school with its early bursts of exuberance and Ved Vyas with a team to train as his own. 17. Minutes of MMCMSVV, 1st Meeting, 24 January 1976. 18. Minutes of the MMCMSVV, 26th Meeting, 23 August 1985. 19. Ibid. 20. Dasgupta, Susmita, Amitabh: The Making of a Superstar, Penguin, Delhi, 2006.

11: MODERN AND THE NEW ORDER OF THINGS 1. For a discussion on this issue, see, Dhar, P.N., The Evolution of Economic Policy in India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2003; Joshi, Vijay, and I.M.D. Little, India: Macroeconomnics and Political Economy, 1964-1991, World Bank, Washington, DC, 1994. The political scientist Baldev Raj Nayar disagrees about the 1980s as the starting point of the new growth trajectory, and has, in fact, hinted towards an earlier period. See, Nayar, Baldev Raj, ‘When Did the “Hindu” Rate of Growth End?’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 41, no. 19, 2006, pp. 1885–1890. Historians, however, have seen the 1980s as the period when obvious signs of the later growth trajectory became apparent. See, Chandra, Bipan, Mridula Mukherjee,

and Aditya Mukherjee, India Since Independence, Penguin, Delhi, 2000. For the 1960s being referred to as the decade of stagnation, see, Jha, Prem Shankar, India: A Political Economy of Stagnation, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2003. 2. Since the time Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations in 1774, trade has been the central point in the discussion on economic development. Whether trade can be the centrepiece of the Indian development vision has also been the subject of much debate, at least since the 1950s. A couple of decades later, trade again became central to India’s new vision, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s term since the 1980s concentrated on this aspect: she began to rearticulate Indian’s position by opening up to the developing economies as a worthy trade partner, by helping them shed their earlier protectionist and Cold War reservations about India. 3. Interestingly, Dr Manmmohan Singh did his doctoral research in the early 1960s in Oxford University on aspects of India’s trade and wrote a thesis entitled India’s Export Performance, 1951– 1960, Export Prospects and Policy Implications. 4. Kurien, C.T., ‘Indian Economy in the 1980s and on to the 1990s’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 24, no. 15, 1989, pp. 787–798; Kurien, C.T., ‘Indian Economic Reforms in the Context of Emerging Global Economy’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 28, no. 15, 1993, pp. 655–657, 659–661, 663, 665. 5. Srinivas, Nidhi, ‘Mimicry and Revival: The Transfer and Transformation of Management Knowledge to India, 1959– 1990’, International Studies of Management & Organization, vol. 38, no. 4, 2008/2009, pp. 38–57. 6. For example, some of the earlier members of the staff in the primary section included Jasleen Duggal, S. Roy Choudury (1975), S. Kapur, S. Bahadur, A. Arora, S. Bharadwaj, C. Mehta, Richa Mudgal, R.C. Kalia, M. George (1976), M.H. Hira, V. Mehta, S. Dasgupta (1977), S. Suri, M. Bhalla, P. Mehta, Suman Malasi, Rama Tuli, D. Kapur (1979), P.D. Singh (1975),

Shankar Dasgupta, T. Ahmed (1977), J.S. Gill (1978), and S.P. Sharma (1978). 7. Focused discussion (on 11 September 2019) with some of the former teachers of the primary section of MSVV, namely, Richa Mudgal, Jasleen Duggal, Shubhra Dasgupta and Suman Malasi, who had joined the school in its formative years. 8. For a discussion on the politics of the economic growth in the period, see, Kohli, Atul, ‘Politics of Economic Growth in India, 1980-2005: Part I: The 1980s’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 41, no. 13, 2006, pp. 1251–1259; Kohli, Atul, ‘Politics of Economic Growth in India, 1980-2005: Part II: The 1990s and Beyond’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 41, no. 14, 2006, pp. 1361–1370. 9. Kapur, Amrita, ‘Tales of MNK’, in Singh, Khushwant, and Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (eds.), A Dream Turns Seventy Five, The Modern School, 1920–1995, Allied Publishers, Delhi, 1995, p. 61. Commenting on the way the morning assembly brought a transformation to the larger ethos of the school, Amrita Kapur writes: In Modern School, the student congregation sat on durries in the hall, cross legged, (eyes closed I should presume) singing songs, from Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore or a secular poem, or an all faith bhajan, and then go on to the day’s business in school. Ibid. 10. Interviews and interaction with the past and present teachers of RSJMS, Humayun Road, and MSVV. Personal interview with Geeta Dudeja, Principal, RSJMS (1990–2003) on 11 May 2019 was particularly helpful. 11. The story of Target and that of Rosalind Wilson have been compiled from fresh writings that have appeared in recent years. See, Deol, Taran, ‘Target—the kids’ magazine of the ’80s that has spawned fan groups in the new millennium’, ThePrint, 22 September 2019; Naseer, Tamanna,

‘Remembering Rosalind—of Truth, Beauty and Goodness’, The Statesman, 29 July 2019; Nair, Roshni, ‘Meeting Vijaya Ghosh: the Record Keeper’, DNA, 17 May 2015, https://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/report-meeting-vijayaghose-the-record-keeper-2086474. 12. Umer, ‘Secularism’, Sandesh, 1982. 13. Interview with the Principal, S.P. Bakshi. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Mitra, Asok, Delhi: Capital City, Publications Division, Delhi, 1981. 16. Significantly, Shankar Lal’s daughter was married to Pratap Singh, the son of Modern School’s founder Raghubir Singh. 17. See, Sandesh, 1953-1954. 18. Interview with Vinita Chaturvedi, 25 August 2019. 19. Minutes of MMCMSBR, 1979. 20. See, Sandesh, 1982-1983. 21. At Barakhamba, for example, regular appointments, including those of Jyoti Singh, Tara Chadha, Ragini Maheswari (1972), Neelam Puri (1974), Raj Batra, Saroj Bakshi, Usha Kumar, Kona Roy (1975), Mridula Vichitra (1977), B. Barua, Meena Joshi, Vijai Singh (1978), Rita Gupta, Indu Sharma (1979), Usha Bhalla, Madhu Agarwal (1980), Uma Khanna, N. Narang, A.P. Rao (1983), Usha Tanana (1984), Bolaka Nag (1985), M. Kaura (1987), Geeta Chadha (1988), Mamata Pandey (1989), Sapna Bhatia, Neera Kapur (1990), and S. Bhargava (1991), brought a consistent stream of younger teachers to the school. 22. S.K. Gambhir, E.R.R. Menon, U.S. Nigama, O.P. Goyal, Kanwar Juneja, R.D. Goyal, Vishnu Dutt, K.K. Mahindroo, M.L. Babar, G.L. Juneja, M.R. Mendiratta, C.K. Chadha, R.K. Sharma, Renuka Khanna, S. Oberoi, S. Jogindra, P.A. Char, A.K. Chaturvedi, I.S. Arora, R. Talwar, O.P. Sharma, V.K. Baweja and Narendra Sharma had come to the school a couple of decades earlier, in some cases in the early 1950s. 23. A.P. Seth, Dharam Pal, M.P. Sharma, K.K. Sharma, M. Vashistha (mathematics), I. Menon (political science), M. Maini (chemistry) and I.K. Gujral (economics) were some of the other

teachers who joined the school in 1979. The recruitments at this time also included the librarian S. Mishra and both the Sanskrit teachers, S.P. Sharma and S. Rath. 24. Other people who joined in 1979 were S.K. Bhandula, (English) D.M. Mehta (chemistry), K.K. Mathur (mathematics), S. Aggarwal (zoology), A. Madan (physics), A. Kapur (English), T. Sapra (maths), A. Puri (English), K. Bhatia (physical education), K. Punia (home science), M. Rana (physics), V. Mathur, I. Shervani, S. Kumar (primary teachers), V.K. Sharma (dramatics), P.S. Sengar (physical education), P. Ramakrishnan (drawing) and T. Visvanath (photography). 25. Minutes of the MMCMSVV, 49th Meeting, 20 November 1992. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Minutes of the MMCMSVV, 51st Meeting, 13 May 1992. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Grodsky, E., ‘Learning in the Shadows and in the Light of Day: A Commentary on “Shadow Education, American Style: Test Preparation, the SAT and College Enrollment”’, Social Forces, vol. 89, no. 2, 2010, pp. 475–82; Stevenson, D.L., and D.P. Baker, ‘Shadow Education and Allocation in Formal Schooling: Transition to University in Japan’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 97, no. 6, 1992, pp. 1639–1657. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., p. 233. 34. Ibid. 35. Baker, D.P., and G. LeTendre, National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2005. 36. Park H., J.R. Behrman, and J. Choi, ‘Causal Effects of SingleSex Schools on College Entrance Exams and College Attendance: Random Assignment in Seoul High Schools’, Demography, vol. 50, no. 2, 2013, pp. 447–469. 37. Lareau, A., Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003.

38. Ibid. 39. Sorenson, Aage, and Maurin Hallinan, ‘A Reconceptualisation of School Effects’, Sociology of Education, vol. 50, no. 4, 1977, pp. 273–289. 40. Heckman, J.J., ‘Policies to Foster Human Capital’, Research in Economics, vol. 41, no.1, 2000, pp. 3–56. 41. Park H., J. R. Behrman, and J. Choi, op. cit., pp. 447–469. 42. Lemann, Nicholas, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1999. Lemann’s work has contributed greatly to the ongoing debate on the nature of selection and exclusion in the American educational system through standardised marks. See, for example, the discussions in Perkins, Linda M., ‘Meritocracy, Equal Opportunity and the SAT’, History of Education Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 1, 2001, pp. 89–95; Powel, Arthur, ‘Notes on the Origins of Meritocracy in American Schooling’, History of Education Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 1, 2001, pp. 73–80. In recent years, sociologists, too, have started seriously looking into the ways in which such tests have contributed to exclusion. See, Alon, Sigal, ‘The Evolution of Class Inequality in Higher Education: Competition, Exclusion, and Adaptation’, American Sociological Review, vol. 74, no. 5, 2009, pp. 731–755. There are other writings that seek ways to change the situation. See, Sacks, Peter, Standardized Minds: The High Price of America’s Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change it, Perseus Books, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999. Sacks brings the famous 1958 novel The Rise of Meritocracy into the discussion. See, Young, Michael, The Rise of Meritocracy, Transaction Publishers, New Jersey, 1996 (1958). 43. See, Singh, Khushwant, and Bipan Chandra, Many Faces of Communalism, CRIID, Chandigarh, 1985. His two-volume history of the Sikhs had already established his credentials as a serious scholar. See, Singh, Khushwant, A History of the Sikhs, vol. 1 (1469–1839) and vol. 2 (1839–1964), Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1984. His novel A Train to Pakistan,

written on the personal tragedy of the Partition, was widely regarded a classic statement on the issue. See, Singh, Khushwant, A Train to Pakistan, Orient Longman, Bombay, 1956. In his later years he was appointed the editor of Hindustan Times and later of the Illustrated Weekly of India, making it one of the most read weeklies of India with a penchant for attracting a young and varied readership with its photographic coverage of all things contemporary and moving. For an autobiographical sketch of him, see, Singh, Khushwant, Truth, Love and a Little Malice: An Autobiography, Penguin, Delhi, 2002. 44. Deep political cleavages were becoming apparent, and the need of the hour was to redirect energies to cement social bonds at different levels. Another journalist who made such an effort, also a Modern student, Inder Jeet, tried to play the mediator between the Gorkha leaders and the Centre at the height of the Gorkhaland agitation. 45. There are so many others who continued these efforts by taking up the issue of ecology to the larger world. 46. Nath, Aman, 100 Not Out: Modernites Remember Their Principal M.N. Kapur, MSOSA, Delhi, 2011.

12: THE NEW CENTURY 1. Table 29 (1), in Delhi, Census of 2011, Government of India, Delhi, 2011. 2. The PVR enterprise changed the way people watched movies in India. Its chairman, Ajay Bijli, was a good student at Barakhamba Road and a prize winner at that. (Modern’s prestigious Rudra Prize is given annually to the most promising students who have excelled in academics and performed well all round.) His education at the school must have given him an overall understanding of society and cultural life and the capacity to identify and bring in entertainment technology that had such potential in India. For a good idea of cinema halls and the movie goers experience, see Ziya Us Salam’s interesting

introduction to the cinema halls of Delhi: Salam, Ziya Us, Delhi 4 Shows: Talkies of Yesteryear, Om Books International, Delhi, 2015. 3. Kapur, Sohaila, ‘India’s Great Paradigm Shift: Humility and Diffidence Have Been Replaced by Arrogance Including from the Underdog’, The Times of India, 24 February 2018. 4. Ibid. 5. Dibakar Banerjee of Bal Bharati, Rakeysh Om Prakash Mehra of Air Force Bal Bharati, Shantanu Moitra of Springdales, Singer K.K. of Mount St Mary’s, Palash Sen of St Coloumba’s, Susmit Sen and Rahul Ram of St Xavier’s were the Delhi schoolboys of the 1980s and 1990s. 6. Rukmini, S., ‘Delhi is New India’s Rape Capital, Show NCRB Data’, The Hindu, 19 August 2015. 7. Lokapalli, Vijay, ‘Delhi’s Vanishing Sports Tournaments’, The Hindu, 12 December 2019. 8. https://medium.com/@ranaashishsingh/art-is-like-food-to-meravindra-verma-ec49b59219d2 (Accessed on 3 August 2020). 9. True to tradition, the school gave all of them long study leaves to participate in international programmes. Subhika Lal, for example, went to France for a year. Similarly, Ravindra Verma went out on a couple of occasions and had international exposure. Sabiha Hashmi did a doctorate in history of arts from National Museum Institute, Delhi, and also spent a year abroad. Thus, the students were trained by people who had a deep and abiding interest in Indian arts and crafts traditions and were familiar with what was happening in their fields outside of the school. 10. Ishan Khosla has emerged as one of India’s rising designers and has brought attention to tribal designs, which he has used for innovating new design forms. Coelho is a popular graphic designer and someone who has published important works on children’s literature. 11. Jain, Kajri, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Calendar Art, Duke University Press, North Carolina, 2007. 12. Minutes of the MMCMVV, 13th Meeting, 15 December 1980.

13. Later, they also appointed a teacher, Harish Chandra Rawat, trained at Indira Kala Mahavidyalaya, Khairagarh, to teach Kathak. 14. Interview with K.J. Vari, 25 April 2019. 15. When Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice wrote the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, they had never imagined that it would be one of the most popular shows globally. Beginning in 1970 as a rock opera album, it became a Broadway production in 1971, and a movie version, too, came up by 1973. However, its greatest popularity was reserved for its musical adaptation. 16. ‘The Platinum Heritage, Jesus Christ Superstar, A Monumental Production’, Modern School, Platinum Jubilee, Delhi, 1995. 17. There were instances of bullying. In one such instance, the parents of two students had to change their wards’ schools, and the principal’s helplessness in curbing some of these happenings was revealed. 18. The young choreographer Ashley Lobo, who had helped the actors of the West Side Story, teamed up with Lushin Dubey and Bubbles Sabharwal, who were promoting children’s theatre and musicals, to produce the other artistic marvel from Modern—Jesus Christ Superstar. 19. One particular group, Yatrik, stands out. Its founder, Joy Michael, and other members—such as Sushma Mathur (Seth), Rati Bartholomew, Kusum Haider, Roshan Seth, Nagam Prakash, Sunit Tandon, Bhaskar Ghosh, Abhijit Dutta, Tejeshwar Singh, Bhaskar Bhattachrjee—kept alive the dynamism of the theatre world. The groups produced some exceptional plays, such as Salome (1993), Antigone (1996), Blood Wedding (2005), 9 Jakhoo Hills and Metamorphosis (2012), with its team of talented actors like Bhaskar Bhattacharya, Sunit Tandon and Bhaskar Ghosh. See, Bajeli, Diwan Singh, Yatrik: A Journey into Theatrical Art, Niyogi Books, Delhi, 2018. 20. Among the accounts of the period and the people’s theatre movement, see, Deshpande, Sudhanva, Halla Bol, The Death

and Life of Safdar Hashmi, Leftward Books, Delhi, 2019; Ghosh, Arjun, A History of the Jana Natya Manch Plays for the People, Sage, Delhi, 2012. 21. Anuradha Singh, Minutes of the MMCMSVV, 1999; Pradeep Virendra Singh, Minutes of the MMCMSVV, 1999. The daughter of a civil servant with the Government of India, Anuradha Singh grew up in Delhi and different parts of the country. She has brought a very perceptive and practical understanding to the needs and demands of the school. When Pradeep Virendra Singh, the son of Maj. Gen. Virendra Singh, came to the management of the Vasant Vihar school, he was the architect behind making the administration computer savvy and in sync with the changing times in the late 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. An affable personality suited to the governing of the school, his untimely death must have been a great loss to the institution. 22. Minutes of the MMCMSVV, 58th Meeting, 21 August 1995. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. One of the most articulate proponents of universal education has been Anil Sadgopal. See, Sadgopal, Anil, Political Economy of Education in the Age of Globalisation: Demystifying the Knowledge Agenda, Bharat Jan Vigyan Jatha, Rajkot, 2003. 26. The observations are based on interviews and interactions during 2018–2020 with a large and varied section of informed citizenry, educationists, students and teachers. 27. Joshi, Arun, Lala Shri Ram, A Study in Entrepreneurship, Shri Ram Memorial Foundation, Delhi, 1975, pp. 383–388. 28. Ibid., p. 402. 29. See, The Economic Survey of Delhi, 2017-2018, 2018-2019 and 2019-2020, https://delhiplanning.nic.in/sites/default/files/Final%20Economy %20survey%20English.pdf; https://delhiplanning.nic.in/content/economic-survey-delhi2019-20.

30. https://delhiplanning.nic.in/Economic Survey/ES200506/Chpt/9.pdf. 31. Shukla, Rajesh, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329642818_The Indian Middle Class /figures. 32. National Family Health Survey (NFHS IV) 2015-2016, https://rchiips.org/nfhs/NFHS-4Reports/India.pdf. 33. The manner in which the urban poor negotiate poverty and a desire for education can be seen from some representative writings. See, Banerjee, Monika, ‘Elementary Education of the Urban Poor: Policy Context, Text and Practice in Delhi’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 49, no. 37, 2014, pp. 32– 35; Kumar, Naveen, and Suresh Chand Aggarwal, ‘Patterns of Consumption and Poverty in Delhi Slums’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 38, no. 50, 2003, pp. 5294–5300. For a general trend in urban poverty in the decade from 1993, see, Patnaik, Utsa, ‘Trends in Urban Poverty under Economic Reforms: 1993-94 to 2004-05’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 45, no. 4, 2010, pp. 42–53. 34. Harvey, David, ‘The Right to the City’, New Left Review, vol. 53, 2008, pp. 23–40. For the larger global process of the coming of such associated segments of cities, see, Sassen, Saskia, Cities in a World Economy, Sage, Delhi, 2000 (1994). 35. This is a new phenomenon transcending the process of the formation of ‘enclaves’, earlier seen in cities like Mumbai. See, Sharma, R.N., ‘Mega Transformation of Mumbai: Deepening Enclave Urbanism’, Sociological Bulletin, vol. 59, no. 1, 2010, pp. 69–91. 36. One can see an interesting concept called the ‘exam schools’ in the United States. Finn Jr, Chester E., and Jessica Hockett, Exam Schools, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2012. 37. Gurney, Eleanor, ‘Choosing Schools, Choosing Selves: Exploring the Influence of Parental Identity and Biography on the School Choice Process in Delhi, India’, International Studies in Sociology of Education, vol. 26, no. 1, 2017, pp. 19– 35.

38. Compiled from the census data of different districts of Delhi, https://censusindia.gov.in/2011-provresults/data_files/delhi/3_PDFC-Paper-1-tables_60_81.pdf. 39. Data from the MHRD website. The Delhi government websites says: ‘Delhi had 2,301 primary schools, 590 middle schools and 1,412 secondary/senior secondary schools in 1998-99.’ See, https://tte.delhigovt.nic.in/wps/wcm/connect/doit_planning/Plan ning/Economic+Survey+of+Dehli/Content/Education. 40. De, Anuradha, and Sekhar Chandra Mehra, Estimating Number of Out of School Children, Methodological Problem A Case Study, UNESCO, Paris, 2016 (open access document), https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000245213. 41. For a rich discussion on English and its location in India’s education and other realms, see, Dasgupta, P., The Otherness of English: India’s Auntie Tongue Syndrome, Sage, Delhi, 1993. In the current context of how it served to pushed an idea, see, Mohan, Peggy, ‘Market Forces and Language in Global India’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 30, no. 16, 1995, pp. 887–890. 42. Ramachandran, Vimala, Inside Indian Schools: The Enigma of Equity and Quality, Social Science Press, New York, 2018, p. 67. 43. Minutes of the MMCMSBR, 1947. 44. Faust, David, and Richa Nagar, ‘Politics of Development in Post Colonial India: English-Medium Education and Social Fracturing’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 36, no. 30, 2001, pp. 2878–2883. 45. Singh, Ashok Pratap, Sandesh, 2000. 46. I have borrowed the concept from Liah Greenfeld, who sees the idea of ennoblement as embedded in the idea of nation. In her book Spirit of Capitalism, Nationalism and Economic Growth, where she identifies the old capitalism from the new one, ennoblement seems to be part of the historical phase of capitalism, a time when nation, too, was in its process of emergence. In my analysis of the history of Modern School, we

can see the idea persisting in many segments of Indian capitalism. In many senses, therefore, the school and its ethos are not only a part of the ennoblement that Greenfeld makes part of modern nationalism but also a part of capitalism in its historical phase, when mere economic growth did not exhaust its meaning. See, Greenfeld, Liah, The Spirit of Capitalism Nationalism and Economic Growth, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003. 47. Minutes of the MMCMSVV, 15th Meeting, 5 August 1981. 48. Ibid. 49. Minutes of the MMCMSVV, 1997. 50. Upadhayay, Surabhi, ‘International Schools Changing Face of Education’, Times of India, 9 November 2003, accessed 14 July 2020, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Internationalschools-changing-face-of-education/articleshow/274667.cms. 51. Marlena, Atishi, ‘SC Ruling on Private School Fees: Govt Regulation is Important but can’t be Long-Term Strategy’, Firstpost, 9 February 2017, https://www.firstpost.com/india/scruling-on-private-school-fees-govt-regulation-is-important-butcant-be-long-term-strategy-3273652.html. 52. For a discussion on this in contemporary media, see, Punj, Deepshikha, ‘The Great India Education Debate’, New Indian Express, 7 July 2013, accessed 14 July 2020, https://www.newindianexpress.com/magazine/The-greatIndian-education-debate/2013/07/07/article1666702.ece. 53. It has been reported that Ekaterina Gauseva of Zolotoy Pesok School, Russia, thought that India was a land of beggars, impoverished and incompetent people and magicians. However, her perception of India completely changed after she attended the CDLS. She said, ‘The image of India that I had in mind took a complete U-turn. I am amazed by the brimming confidence and exuberance this nation has. Delhi is a beautiful city with rich history and heritage.’ https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/lifestyle/11988-delhi-smodern-school-hosts-youth-summit-future-leaders.

54. The themes of the conclaves over the years are illustrative of the nature of thought that went into making the conclave. The themes have been Leadership with a Conscience (2013); Leadership with an eye on Governance (2014); Simply Glocal (2015); Leadership into the Future (2016); The Cost of War (2017); Dreams and Aspirations (2018); Lead a Ship (2019). 55. Modern students have been excelling in the technological domain in almost all spheres. Shreyas Kapur, for example, won the Intel ‘Google Think Big Award’ at Arizona in 2016. 56. Callan, Eamonn, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy, Oxford University Press, UK, 1997. 57. Habermas, Jurgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, English translation by Thomas Burger and Fredrick Lawrence, Polity, Cambridge, 1989 (1962). 58. A fascinating write up by a young boy, Narinder Singhal, was representative of that generation of Modernites. He presented a rational critique of a ritual that he witnessed at home in his write up in the school magazine. 59. Beteille, A., ‘The Reproduction of Inequality: Occupation, Caste and Family’, in Sharma, K.L. (ed.), Social Inequality in India: Profiles of Caste, Class and Social Mobility, Rawat Publishers, Delhi, 1999, pp. 127–156. 60. Ibid.; Chopra, R., ‘Sisters and Brothers: Schooling, Family and Migration’, in Chopra, R., and P. Jeffery (eds.), Educational Regimes in Contemporary India, Sage, Delhi, 2005, pp. 299– 315; Donner, H., ‘“Children are Capital, Grandchildren are Interest”: Changing Educational Strategies and Parenting in Calcutta’s Middle Class Families’, in Assayag, J., and C.J. Fuller (ed.), Globalising India: Perspective from Below, Anthem Press, London, pp. 119–139; Drury, D., The Iron Schoolmaster: Education, Employment and the Family in India, Hindustan Publishing Corporation, Delhi, 1993. 61. An important contribution on this issue is by one of Modern’s most renowned alumni Geeta Kapur, in terms of talking about the nation as a buffer between the global and the local. If one

borrows from her idea, it is the nation which allowed one to inhabit a more creative stage than the global in the creative era of India. See, Kapur, Geeta, ‘National/Modern Preliminaries’, in When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practices in India, Tulika, Delhi, 2000, pp. 283–296. 62. Old students of MSVV, like Priti Sood, Sanjeev Chhabra, Yogi Suri and Rajiv Jain, have helped establish a magazine titled Modernites, filled with nostalgia, recollections of batchmates and earnest accounts of how vital the school has been to their lives and careers. Some of the others who have taken an active interest in the project are old students like Pushkar Sood, Ankush Chadha, Manish Wadhawan, Ashish Kumar Gupta, Ankur Rastogi, Ganesh Kejriwal, Gaurav Sapra, Manav Bhargava, Adit Gupta, Gauri Sapra, Anshuman Sod, Arjun Malhotra, Alok Gupta, Gurucharan Singh Bajaj, Eshaan Singh and Sameera Bhalla.

EPILOGUE 1. North, Douglass C., and Robert P. Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1973. 2. Beteille, Andre, Antinomies of Society: Essays on Ideologies and Institutions, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2000. 3. See, Report of the Education Commission, 1964–66, Government of India, Delhi, 1966. 4. See, Banerjee, Samir, Notes From Gandhigram: Challenges to Gandhian Praxis, Orient Blackswan, Hyderabad, 2009, p. 40. 5. Batabyal, Rakesh, JNU: The Making of a University, HarperCollins, Delhi, 2014. 6. This includes the Padma Awards, which have been bestowed upon several of the school’s alumni. Padma Vibhushan: Ustad Amjad Ali Khan (2001), Khushwant Singh (2007); Padma Bhushan: Dr Naresh Trehan (2001), Dr Noshir Shroff (2010); Padma Shri: Shekhar Kapur (2000), Sunita Narain (2005),

Pandit Madhup Mudgal (2006), Dr Syeda S. Hameed (2007), Dr Mahipal Sachdev (2007), Dr Atul Kumar (2007), Barkha Dutt (2008), Dr Kiran Seth(2009), Geeta Kapur (2009), Surinder Mehta (2009), Brig. Arvind Lal (2009), Dr Arvind Soin (2010), Pablo Bartholomew (2013), Dr Pramod Julka (2013), Dr Harsh Kumar (2015). In the previous century, too, a number of Padma Award recipients were Modern School alumni. Padma Vibhushan: Air Chief Marshal P.C. Lal (1972); Padma Bhushan: Dr Bharat Ram (1972), Rajeev Sethi (1986), Dr Arun Shourie (1990), Padma Shri: Shobha Deepak Singh (1999). 7. Major S.K. Dang (1962), Flt Lt Satish Bharadwaj (1965), Capt. Kiran Seth (1965), Tanmaya Singh Dandass (1965), Col Wangchuk(1999). 8. Various teachers have been awarded the Padma Shri: M.N. Kapur (1969), Sukumar Bose (1970), P.C. Chowdhry (1972) and Bishamber Khanna (1990).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. PRIMARY LITERATURE I:

Unpublished Documents

Official/Semi-Official/Institutional

National Archives of India Home Political Files, 1920–1955. Department of Education, Government of India, 1920–1980. Department of Rehabilitation, Government of India, 1947–1950. Delhi State Archives Department of Education, Government of Delhi, 1920–1950. Modern School Archives Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Trustees, Modern School, Barakhamba Road, 1920–2020. Minutes of the Meeting of the Management Committee, Modern School, Barakhamba Road, 1920–2020. Minutes of the Meeting of the Management Committee, Modern School, Vasant Vihar, 1975–2020. Modern School Files, 1950–1960 (select). Unpublished Theses/Dissertations Kayarkar, Jayant N., A Study of the Problems of Public Schools in India, unpublished PhD thesis, Savitribai Phule Pune University, 1991. Khannam, Shagufta, Portraiture of Indian Women in the Work of Arpana Caur, unpublished thesis, AMU, 2014.

Koner, Janmenjay, Physical Education Scenario in West Bengal from 1882 to 1982, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Kalyani, 2002. Kumari, Sangeeta, Development of Women’s Education in Delhi, 1920–1947, unpublished PhD thesis, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2019. Sarkar, Sreela, Technology and Modernity at the Boundaries of Global Delhi, unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2013 Talegaonkar, Vandana, Concept, Process and Influence of Academic Culture in School, unpublished PhD thesis, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, 2004. II: Published Documents School Buildings in India, Government of India, Delhi, 1944. Kirpal, P.N., Education in India, 1965, Government of India, Delhi, 1965. Kothari, D.S., Report of the Education Commission of India, 1964–1966, Ministry of Education, Delhi, 1966. Report of the Secondary Education Commission, October 1952– June 1953 (Delhi 1953), Government of India, Ministry of Education, Madras, 1953. ‘Science Teaching in Secondary Schools In India’, Science Teacher, National Science Teachers Association, USA, vol. 34, no.1, 1967, pp. 32–34. Platinum Heritage, 75 years, 1920–1995, Modern School, 1997.

B. SECONDARY LITERATURE

Books

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Anand, Ela, and Ketaki Sood, A Cut Above: The Remarkable Life of Dr. S.K. Sen, Surgeon Extraordinaire, (1910-1979), The Printers, Delhi, 2004. Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Vintage, New York, 1965. Bagchi, Amiya Kumar, Private Investment in India, 1900–1939, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000 (1972). Bajeli, Diwan Singh, Yatrik: A Journey into Theatrical Art, Niyogi Books, Delhi, 2018. Baker, D.P., and G.K. LeTendre, National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling, Stanford University Press, California, 2005. Bakhle, Janaki, Two Men and Music: Nationalism and the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition, Oxford University Press, New York, 2005. Banerjee, A.K., India’s Balance of Payments: Estimates of Current and Capital Accounts From 1921–22 to 1938–39, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1963. Banerjee, Projesh, Uday Shankar and His Art, B.R. Publishers, Delhi, 1982. ———, Indian Ballet Dancing, Abhinav Publications, Delhi, 1983. Bartholomew, Richard, The Art Critic, introduced by Geeta Kapur and foreword by Pablo Bartholomew, (eds.) Bartholomew, Pablo, Rati Bartholomew, and Carmen Kagal, BART, Delhi, 2012. Basu, Aparna, The Growth of Education and Political Development in India, 1898–1920, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1974. ———, Essays in the History of Indian Education, Concept Publishing, Delhi, 1983. Batabyal, Rakesh, The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches, Penguin, Delhi, 2007. ———, JNU: The Making of a University, HarperCollins, Delhi, 2014. Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, transcribed by Andy Blunden, (ed.) Hannah

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The writing of this book has been made possible with the help of many persons and institutions. I shall be able to acknowledge some of them; there will be many whose support may not find mention here, but I shall ever be grateful to them. The Modern School teachers, in various ways, have been carrying forward some of the historical legacies of the school. In a way, this work is a tribute to all those teachers who in this process have enriched the life of the mind not only of the school but of the city as well. I hope the book does justice to the hard work and dedication they put into their institution. I must express my thanks to the president and the members of the Board of Trustees of the Modern School for reposing their trust in me, giving me access to the institutional resources and unflinchingly giving me their time. Mr Ashok Pratap Singh, the president of the trust when I began my work, was not only a storehouse of knowledge about the city, its people and its economy but also provided me with access to the world of those who were instrumental in founding and developing this institution. This book has been greatly enriched by his inputs. I am also grateful to Ketaki Sood, the current president of the Board of Trustees, for helping me understand the life and times of the people closely associated with the school, which also included members of her family. The principal and staff at each of the schools are in many ways the lynchpin of the whole edifice of Modern. I must acknowledge the support I received from Manju Rajput, the principal of Raghubir Singh Junior Modern School. Her dynamic work made me understand the life and work of a principal in a

junior school, and I must thank her for this. Dr Meenakshi Sahni of Vasant Vihar school was gracious to accommodate the demands of research for the book, making me feel at home despite her tight school schedule. Dr Vijay Datta, the principal at Modern School, Barakhamba Road, has lived with nature across the country and consequently brings an altogether different flavour to the school, which must have also inspired my own thinking on school culture. I must thank him for his support and critical insights that have definitely enriched the work. Abha Sadana and Neetu Blest have been engaged in the all-important work of giving a foundation to the schools at Kundli and Faridabad, and I hope this book provides them with some ideas about the foundations on which Modern School was built a century ago. My thanks to all of them. Ambika Pant’s dynamic presence in the activities of the school and Mira Pradeep Singh’s boundless love for the school in many ways provided me with clues as to how the generations who set up the school must have seen the school as a part of their life’s work. I am indebted to both of them for enabling a historian to explore the school and its evolution. I was also enormously helped by Anuradha Singh, K.J. Vari, Geeta Dudeja, Vineeta Chaturvedi, Neelam Puri, and so many others. My interactions with them have enriched the work, and I am grateful for their valuable insights. I hope the students of the school, past and present, including one of the oldest—Bhawani Shankar of the 1940s batch—will find some answers to their own questions about the location of their school in the changing times; they may, of course, also question many of my propositions in the book. If that happens, it will be a vindication of the spirit of the Modern, which has inculcated in the students at the most formative age an argumentative disposition while instilling in them the need to build a compassionate world. Priyanka Gupta and her colleagues at the office of the Board of Trustees have been extremely helpful all through the work, and I express my thanks to them. Priyanka’s friendly and efficient handling of all my requests have made the research involved in this work relatively easy. Munna Choudhary, Manoj Kumar and

Bhim Bahadur were also never short of cheer, and their help and hospitality made my work at the Modern archives and offices enjoyable. Balbir Sharma headed the administration of the school at Barakhamba Road for a long time, and I am thankful to him for the information and insights that he generously shared with me— not only about the Modern School but schools in Delhi in general. I owe a sense of gratitude to Prof. Mridula Mukherjee, who encouraged me to write this history of Modern School. This I took as her stamp of approval of my earlier work on the history of JNU, an institution where she taught me and where I now teach, and therefore, this came as the greatest joy for me as a student and an academic. I must acknowledge with a sense of gratitude my almost twoand-a-half decade long association with Bhai Vir Singh Sahitya Sadan, Dr Mohinder Singh and Mona, Dr Nina Puri, Raghbir Singh, Dr Amrit Kaur Basra, Major General Joginder Singh, the late Prof. J.S. Neki and the late Dr Amrik Singh. They have given me an understanding of Punjab, both pre- and post-Partition, and of Delhi, which is rich, lived, layered and historical, and have helped me locate the milieu and the people in a better historical context. I am thankful to the archivists and the staff of the National Archives of India, Delhi, for extending their help while I was working there. I must also express my thanks to the librarian and the staff at the India International Centre library, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the Bhai Vir Singh Sahitya Sadan library and the Jawaharlal Nehru University library for their assistance. I must thank Mr Nawal Singh for being ever helpful and especially for the dedication with which he has maintained the Modern School archives, which became the mainstay of my work. The University of Kansai at Osaka, Japan, hosted me during the summer of 2019, and their library provided me with a congenial place to tie up many loose ends. I thank Prof. Morihiro Ogasahara and the department of sociology, and the librarian and the staff of the Kansai University for their help and support.

V.K. Karthika undertook to publish the book with the élan only she is capable of. My gratitude, as always, to her. I am thankful to G.S. Ajitha and her editorial team, including Dipanjali, who worked with a sense of appreciation on this book. Many a times, editors are not very tolerant about the historians’ innate caution and hesitation in making bold assertions or claims without a range of supportive data sets, which often clutters language and style. Shougat Dasgupta, in particular, had his hands full in trying to do justice to the historian’s rigour while remaining conscious of literary tastes. Saurabh Garge has been a wonderful designer. I thank all of them for owning this book in the production stages. Sneha Ganguly and Prerana Purnima Roy, two budding historians, have not only assisted me at every step of the research but have also shared my excitement as the ideas unfolded. I express my thanks to them for their dedication and enthusiasm. Some friends are always there—whether in moments of high or low morale. Ravi Singh, Vivek Menon, Swapna Liddle and Gaurab Banerjee were always there when I needed them. Avijit Pathak, Sovon Sanyal, Susmita Dasgupta, Madhusree Banerji, Sarabjit Kaur, Kasturi Bhashyam, Baldev Singh, Ravindranathan, Resmi Bhaskaran and Sanjay Mohan have been a great help in thinking through life and times. My wife Mahalakshmi was quite often my sounding board on many ideas during the writing of the book, and her constant reminder that the ideas in the mind should also be conveyed in a manner that they reach a larger audience may be visible to a discerning reader. My sons, Ramakrishna and Vishnuvardhan, have actually given me inputs about how they relate to the ideas I was discussing with their own experiences in their respective institutions. If I ever met someone who loved teachers and thought that education was India’s civilisational issue and transcended both the political and economic, a person who spent his entire life thinking, working and intervening in debates, discussion and reflection on Indian education, it was Dr Amrik Singh. For him,

being a teacher was of the utmost importance, and he cared enough to mentor anyone in whom he saw the potential to be a teacher. In our first chance meeting in 1995, when I was myself a student, he told me that I should write on education. I demurred. He persisted in making that demand when we met some years later, just after I had finished my PhD, and I once again expressed my reluctance. It is another thing that I ended up writing the history of two premier institutions in Delhi, JNU and now Modern School, after he passed away in 2010. This could be pure coincidence, and yet this may have something to do with the inspiration that he provided. It is his birth centenary this year, and I humbly dedicate this book to his memory.

The founder of Modern School, Raghubir Singh, his wife, Premvati, and three children, (standing l to r) Virendra, Ritavari and Pratap.

Raghubir Singh welcoming Lady Linlithgow, wife of Viceroy Linlithgow, at Modern School, Barakhamba Road, at the inauguration of the gymnasium, 2 February 1937. The group includes the trustees Sir Sobha Singh, Lala Hanuman Prasad and Lala Shri Ram.

A music programme at Modern School, Barakhamba Road, attended by the trustees and other eminent Delhi residents, 1937. The chief guest was Lady Linlithgow.

Modern School staff marching from Daryaganj to the new premises on Barakhamba Road, 4 January 1933.

Building plans, May 1929.

Sanatorium, Modern School, Barakhamba Road, 1937. It now functions as the office of the board of trustees.

Swimming pool under construction at Modern School, Barakhamba Road, 1936.

The iconic red-brick structure at the heart of Delhi: Modern School, Barakhamba Road.

Raghubir Singh Junior Modern School began functioning from a ‘modernist’ building on Humayun Road in 1961.

New-age structure: The Modern School, Faridabad. The school was started in 2016.

The imposing new facade of The Modern School, ECNCR, Kundli. The school was started on 1 July 2014.

Founder’s Day being celebrated at the Modern School’s premises at 24 Daryaganj, 1931.

Modern School boys and girls participating in the Republic Day pageant, 26 January 1952.

Students with their easels in the art room at Modern, Barakhamba.

Block printing session.

Children’s art work on display.

Students engrossed in their pottery class, c. the 1950s.

C.D. Deshmukh, education minister, being shown the batik work done by students, by Principal M.N. Kapur, 1954.

Communication minister C.M. Stephen, guest of honour at a school function at Modern, Barakhamba, 1980.

Art exhibition at Modern School, Vasant Vihar.

Young minds at work—listening, writing and reading, c. the 1950s

Assembly in session.

Mahatma Gandhi’s historic visit to the Modern School and his interaction with students, 1935.

Children seek blessings of Rabindranath Tagore, on his visit to Modern, Barakhamba, 1936.

His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, seated in the Hall of Religions, Modern, Barakhamba, 1957.

Mother Teresa graces the school with her presence, 1995.

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the education minister, at Modern, Barakhamba on Founder’s Day, 20 October 1950.

Vice President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan at Modern, Barakhamba, 1953.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, chief guest, Founder’s Day, 1968, interacting with students.

Dr Rajendra Prasad, the first president of the Indian republic, on a visit to Modern, Barakhamba, 20 October 1951. He is interestedly inspecting the laboratory equipment at the school.

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurating RSJMS, 20 October 1961. Here, seen with Smt. Vijayalakshmi Pandit and Principal M.N. Kapur, admiring the art work of students.

President V.V. Giri, chief guest, Founder’s Day, 1970, with the president of the Radio Club.

The school orchestra.

Orchestra practice with A.K. Khastgir.

Music class.

Girls practising ‘Jala Kanaka’ for the first ‘public performance’ outside Delhi, at Maharani Gayatri Devi School, Jaipur, 12 April 1953.

Dance class with Narendra Sharma.

Ashad ka Ek Din, staged on 1 September 1969.

Dinkar’s Kurukshetra, staged by Modern, Barakhamba students.

Jesus Christ Superstar, staged on 23–24 September 1994.

Sports Day, Vasant Vihar.

Kapil Dev addressing the excited audience in Modern, Barakhamba.

Horse riding.

The first meeting of the board of governors of the National Institute of Sports, 1960. Principal M.N. Kapur was a member of the council.

Ajit Pal Singh, the captain of the Indian hockey team, with his team members visiting Modern, Barakhamba, after winning the World Cup 1975.

Hockey game in progress.

Chess competition, Vasant Vihar.

The NCC’s army wing, 1960-1961. It was commanded by Anand Virmani.

Modern’s famed swimming team of the 1950s, with Lala Raghubir Singh.

Girls on the football field, MSVV.

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau with Principal Vijay Datta at Modern, Barakhamba, 22 February 2018.

Mary Kom planting a sapling, RSJMS.

All eyes on the basket: a basketball game in progress on a beautiful cloudy day, RSJMS.

President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, chief guest on the occasion of Founder’s Day, 2000, at MSVV.

Shri Ratan Tata at MSVV, November 2013. Seated from left to right: Geeta Rawat (Headmistress, MSVV), Manju Rajput (Principal, RSJMS), Lata Vaidyanathan (Principal, Modern, Barakhamba), Ashok Pratap Singh (President, Board of Trustees), Ratan Tata (Chairman, Tata Sons), Anuradha Singh (Member, Board of Trustees), representative of Tatas in Delhi, Meenakshi Sahni (Principal, MSVV), and Mira Pradeep Singh (Member, Board of Trustees).

Teachers of RSJMS with Principal Doris David, c. the 1980s.

The president of India, Dr Shankar Dayal Sharma, at the concluding function of the platinum jubilee celebrations of Modern School, 21 October 1995.

Former principal K.J. Vari visits MSVV, 24 April 2019.

Principal Goldy Malhotra with teachers of MSVV.

Community Development and Leadership Summit, Modern, Barakhamba, an annual event since 2006.

Young Leaders Conclave, MSVV, 11 August 2019.