Dec 7, 1998
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BOOKS Old Boy Networking Doon School as an extension of the licence-permit raj. By Sunanada K Datta-Ray National Chatracter and the Doon School If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, was the Babri Masjid lost on the playing fields of Doon? Sanjay Srivastava suggests as much. Not that Doscos went to work with pickaxe and shovel but as he reiterates the school's secularism, like India's, is "strongly circumscribed within a cultural and ritual framework distinctly redolent of Hindu cultural life". There is interesting scope here for examining the Rajiv Gandhi government's religious-political orientation. That was when the seeds of the Ayodhya controversy were sown; that was also when the school burst upon the general consciousness. Those who started tapping at computer keyboards and evinced a sudden interest in flying also put their sons down for Doon even if they spurned the candour of the Calcutta Muslim tailor who told the author that he was not interested in good schools or top marks but in the material rewards of the old school tie. Doon thus became an extension of India's self-serving, self-perpetuating licence-permit raj elite. Of course, this is not how S.R. Das, law member of the viceroy's executive council, conceived of the Indian public schools system of which Doon was the glittering apogee. But did he really dream of "the terrain of production of a post-colonised modernity -- an Indian 'real'", to quote the text? Srivastava misses the poignant personal ring of the founder's own more modest reference to solving the "problem of the nationality of Indians": having sent his two sons to boarding schools in England, Das hoped to ensure that future generations could receive similar education at home without risking alienation. Also ignored is his persevering widow, Bonolata (Bonnie), herself the daughter of one of the second batch of Indians to join the ICS, who actually raised the money and pushed through the scheme that her husband did not live to see realised. Perhaps such details are too pedestrian for a work that presents the school as a landmark on the metropolitan landscape that is described as the ultimate of post-colonial modernity. Such lofty conceptualising suffers from several drawbacks. It sanctions jargon that makes a well-researched and potentially important book unnecessarily heavy going. It allows the author to ride any number of hobby horses (Roop Kanwar, Bhopal, the symbolism of clock towers in British India) and tilt at all manner of phantom windmills. Worst of all, it distracts attention from the thrusting force of middle-class ambition which is what contemporary Doon is all about. That raison d'etre deserves examination in the context of other schools -- state-funded, private English-medium, missionary, Anglo-Indian -- and of the share of each in India's power structure to understand Zakir Hussain's comment that "excellence which is not universally shared" provokes envy or impatience. The "excellence" too could do with impartial scrutiny. Perhaps Doon's strongest asset is mentioned only in passing. In the public imagination, it is the temple of entrenched privilege. Its original clientele was professional and bureaucratic. Today, however, the Calcutta tailor speaks of a new catchment area of people of humble origin who have made money and are anxious for the social cachet that it can buy. Doon as a symbol of upward mobility in India's essentially arriviste society merits salute. |
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