Since the unlamented departure of Brits from Indian shores 74 years ago, India’s legacy boys boarding schools have thrived and developed their own unique personalities, notably distinct from the indelible snobbery of their British counterparts Although the almost 200 years (1757-1947) of British rule over India divided the subcontinent into two mutually hostile nations, and ruined the material prosperity of the region which right until the early 19th century contributed 20 percent of global GDP — annual GDP growth averaged a mere 1 percent during the Raj era — Brits did leave behind some valuable legacies — railways, a functional police and justice system, and the unifying English language. To this list add the country’s vintage boys boarding schools normatively sited in salubrious hill stations and modelled on imperial Great Britain’s famous public (i.e, private, exclusive) boys’ boarding primary-secondaries such as Eton, Harrow, Winchester which nurtured the enduring British upper class that ruled the largest empire in global history. Since the unlamented departure of Brits from Indian shores 74 years ago, India’s legacy boarding schools have thrived and developed their own unique personalities, notably distinct from the indelible snobbery of their British counterparts. This is evidenced by the continuous domination of the boys boarding school league table by The Doon School, Dehradun (TDS), promoted in 1935 by Calcutta-based nationalist barrister S.R. Das as an alternative for Indian upper middle class households whose children suffered racial discrimination from older, vintage boys boarding schools sited in the hills of Darjeeling, Shimla, Ooty and other summer watering holes of the British Raj. Although to their credit these vintage boys boarding schools of the colonial era have also evolved and developed their own Indian personalities, with unique blends of East and West, TDS has captured the imagination of post-independence India’s upper and upwardly mobile middle classes who believe in the proven benefits of away-from-home boarding school education. However, during the past decade, the board of governors of TDS blotted the school’s nationalist credentials by ill-advisedly appointing two expatriate British educators — Peter Mclaughlin and Matthew Raggett — educators of no special merit, as headmasters of the school. Evidently, these revisionary appointments didn’t go down well with the K-12 education savvy sample respondents of the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (estb.2007) which over the years has matured into the largest and most sophisticated schools rankings survey worldwide. In 2014, TDS lost its premier #1 rank to Bishop Cotton, Shimla and in 2019-20 it was co-ranked #1 with the Scindia School, Gwalior (SSG) and in 2020-21 it was ranked #2 after SSG. Evidently, this demotion of TDS from its customary presiding position at top table didn’t go down well with the high-powered board of governors of the school. In March 2020, Raggett was sacked while vacationing in Europe midway through his second term. And after a nationwide (cf. previously global) search, in July Dr. Jagpreet Singh, a former housemaster of TDS and high-ranked Mayo College and at that time principal of the superbly equipped Punjab Public…
