Saturday, November 14, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
EDUCATION-SOUTH ASIA: Privileged Flaunt Old School Ties
Mahesh Uniyal
- The spectators cheer as the batsman drives the ball past the fielder’s outstretched hands and over the boundary of the field where a school cricket match is on in this small north Indian town.
However, the game under the balmy, late autumn sun and its setting — the neat, sprawling grounds of the ivy-covered Doon School building — owe their origin to far away Britain.
Like cricket and parliamentary democracy, this public school which imparts education in the English language and way of life, is an enduring mark of colonial British domination of the South Asian subcontinent.
The region’s well-to-do crave for expensive public school education which confers social exclusiveness. The Doon School, in the foothills of the Himalayas, is one of the South Asia’s most exclusive.
The gathering here of old boys, called Doscos, over the weekend to mark six decades of the school, included some of the most influential people in Pakistan and India. Political and military leaders, top entrepreneurs and bureaucrats from the two countries matched skills with present boys on the cricket field.
The school also moulded young minds from Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bhutan, but the majority of the foreigners among Doscos are Pakistani. They were actually Indian till Britain split the subcontinent into India and Pakistan during independence in 1947.
Over the decades, the Doon School has provided the cream of the ruling establishment in the two nations. The school’s elite image was at its peak in the mid-1980’s when India’s then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and several members of the national government and parliament, proudly flaunted their old-boy status.
Now the Doscos in Pakistan are starting their own Doon School.
Named Chandbagh, after the estate on which the school is located here, the school on the outskirts of the city of Lahore will open for admission next year. Doon old boy Ghulam Zilani Khan, a former army general and governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, is the president of its board of governors.
Meanwhile, the Doon School here has approached SAARC (South Asian Association For Regional Cooperation) for instituting South Asian scholarships. “We feel that many (in Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) who send their children to western countries would prefer India because it is less culturally- alienating,” says the Headmaster S.R. Das.
“The greatest thing in Doon School was that it was secular, with no caste or creed feeling,” recalls a nostalgic Miangul Aurangzeb, a prominent opposition member of Pakistan’s parliament.
Aurangzeb, of the class of 1945, and a close associate of former Pakistani premier Nawaz Sharif, thinks the old boy ties helped create better understanding between the two countries that have gone to war thrice, the last conflict in 1971 breaking up Pakistan to create Bangladesh.
“I have many friends in India. Hatred is created by politicians and priests, by people with small minds,” he says. Aurangzeb fears that the growing clout of the clergy in his country could undermine religious neutrality in public schools. He says the government in Islamabad is likely to insist on religious instruction in the Chandbagh school.
“They are very nice to me in Lahore. I find it difficult to understand, how they (Pakistanis) can hate us,” muses the pipe-puffing S.N. Talukdar of the class of 1943 and a former consultant to India’s oil exploration industry.
The lessons learnt in the elite public schools of South Asia, most of them in India, have helped mould generations of the region’s prominent personalities.
“At 14, a boy should have constructed a framework of competence in language, in mathematical ability and in social behaviour. After that age he is, as it were, filling in a design on to the framework. In short, he is learning to exercise taste,” observed Doon’s first Headmaster A.E. Foot in an article in the school magazine.
The Doon enforces a strict regimen, which has its 450-odd young charges scrambling out of bed at six in the morning for physical exercise, followed by classroom lessons, compulsory games and back in bed at 9.30 at night.
Boys cannot keep money on them and parents can give them no more than Rs 50 (about one and a half dollar) a month which is kept in the school bank. Like the school-supplied regulation uniforms, this is meant to ensure equality among the boys, a large
number of whom come from very affluent families.
But all this has failed to dispel the image of elitism. Even Doon teachers lament the growing dominance of wards from moneyed families who manage to find ways to break rules stipulating a spartan lifestyle.
“Today looking back from a distance, regrettably, the school has not managed to produce the sort of boys Holdy (nickname of a popular, former Headmaster) perhaps dreamed of. The School is good at producing disoriented celebrities — certainly not men of character, of compassion, of humility…,” writes old boy Bunker Roy of the class of 1962 who won Asia’s own Nobel prize, the Magsaysay for rural development.
However, present Headmaster Das, a grandson of Doon’s founder, thinks the critics are not being fair. “The school was always supported by the middle class and those who were interested in good education,” he points out.
The school insists only two out of every 10 students who join every year come from very rich business families. The rest are children of professionals, and those in government and the military, some of whom are on scholarships for students who cannot afford the high tuition fees.
But there is no dispelling Doon’s impression of elitism, a label that according to its stoical headmaster “a successful institution always acquires without its wishing to do so.”
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EDUCATION-SOUTH ASIA: Privileged Flaunt Old School Ties
Mahesh Uniyal
- The spectators cheer as the batsman drives the ball past the fielder’s outstretched hands and over the boundary of the field where a school cricket match is on in this small north Indian town.
(more…)
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