It’s official resurgent British Raj at The Doon School (TDS estb.1935), routinely ranked India’s #1 boys boarding school in the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR), is over. After two expat Britons of no special distinction were successively appointed headmasters of this vintage boys boarding school promoted in pre-independence India by Calcutta barrister Satish Ranjan Das — because the best boarding schools promoted by our erstwhile masters were squeamish about native boys sharing dorms with their progeny — this time round native-born Dr. Jagpreet Singh, principal of the Punjab Public School, Nabha, will take charge as the new headmaster of TDS on July 5. As reported by your editor on this page (https://www. educationworld.in/unlamented-exit) two months ago, the chance of another expat being appointed headmaster was negligible after the previous incumbent of the well-furbished Headmaster’s Lodge, Mathew Raggett was fired by the TDS board of governors in February before the end of his contractual term. Raggett’s initiative to transform TDS into a wholly international school affiliated with the offshore Cambridge International (UK) and International Baccalaureate (Geneva) examination boards, reportedly shook up the somnolent board of this institution born out of nationalist impulses. The consensus within the small minority of monitors of India’s globally comparable private independent schools is that Dr. Singh, a former vice principal of the blue-chip Mayo College, Ajmer who after being appointed principal of PPS, Nabha, in 2011 rapidly transformed it into an EW India Top 10 and #1 co-ed boarding school of Punjab, is a great improvement on his expat predecessors. Meanwhile sheepish members of the The Doon School governing board have advised your inquisitive correspondent that the short-lived return of the British Raj to India’s most admired boarding school is an interregnum best forgotten.
