As upper-class India changes, a storied prep school sees old ways erode, new money arrive
International Herald Tribune, France
Published: June 14, 2007
DEHRA DUN, India: For generations, the sons of India's elite have gone into the hills, heading to this once quiet Himalayan town, to a small, spartan boarding school hidden behind high brick walls.
And until very recently, a boy leaving the Doon School could expect to find a place in the upper rungs of Indian life.
From this privileged enclave an Indian Eton, modeled on England's most exclusive boarding school it once seemed impossible to fail. The ambitious boys, those with names still found on school award lists, were bound for top positions in the establishment. Many students found jobs through the "Old Boys," the network of Doon graduates working in nearly every important Indian institution.
They became ambassadors and corporate chieftains. One, Rajiv Gandhi, class of 1960, became prime minister.
If all else failed, a few phone calls would be made, a few strings pulled, and a Doon boy now a man could live a quiet, genteel life running a tea plantation.
"There would be a big bungalow, and servants," said Philip Burrett, Doon's deputy headmaster. "A boy knew he could have that, at least.
"Those days are gone," he said one recent evening. "It's a more complicated world out there now."
So it is.
This island of carefully crafted austerity, founded in 1935, has become a reflection of a traditional upper class that is disappearing and a new upper-class emerging to replace it.
India's old class lines have been tangled by an explosion of wealth since it opened its economy in the early 1990s, and once finely drawn social distinctions have been clouded by everything from standardized university entrance exams to jobs reserved for lower-caste Indians.
So today, the sons of diplomats are increasingly outnumbered on the vast Doon cricket grounds by the sons of newly wealthy gas-station owners and factory managers. Established families are being replaced by small-town success stories. Among the 500 or so students, it's no longer bad form to openly strive for well-paying jobs and imported cars.
"This rising class is very ambitious, and they drive their kids hard," said Kanti Bajbai, a Doon graduate and foreign affairs analyst who became headmaster in 2003. "The people who began to make money suddenly felt they could compete anywhere."
They are also growing fast. In 1995, 79,000 households earned more than US$50,000 per year. By 2005, the number was 609,000.
Nouveaux riches, some would call the recent arrivals who increasingly dominate India's boardrooms, its staid British-style clubs and Doon School. Talk informally to some alumni, particularly those from older, well-connected families, and they'll lament the arrival of new money.
But such talk goes over badly at Doon, which is trying, in its own quiet way, to make peace with the country shifting around it.
"Doon mirrors a changing India," said Ashish Mitter, 17, the son of an Old Boy who became a top diplomat. "Doon has the reputation of being an elite school, of having the children of rich families, but that's not what it really is."
To most Indians, the school remains part of a barely conceivable universe of wealth and privilege. Its US$4,800 (3,600) annual fees are more than five times the country's average per capita income.
But, Mitter said, the Doon mystique is rooted in other things in academics, sports and intense friendships nurtured in boarding school isolation. It's about taking pride in being an "all-around boy," as they like to say here. "Doon gives you an education in the true sense of the term," he said.
What it doesn't give you anymore is a guarantee of the good life.
While the school remains among India's best, the unspoken extras that Doon long provided entrance into most any Indian university and connections leading to professional success have largely disappeared.
Today, success in India is most often defined by admission to a handful of exceedingly competitive universities. A diploma from these schools most prominently the Indian Institute of Technology is the most prominent springboard to professional achievement.
But admission is based on one thing: a standardized admission test. And the stellar scores required for entry mean ambitious high school students often spend a year or more in the top day schools or even full-time cram schools that focus on the exams.
Doon students who want to get into those universities normally leave at least a year before graduation, to enter a cram school and prepare for the tests.
Because if there's one thing Doon is not about, it's cramming.
Just ask Mitter.
There are his seven classes a day, the student council he sits on, the weekly magazine he helps edit, the cricket games he plays. He's the school "captain," helping oversee the lives of the other boys.
At Doon, boys are molded into a particular type of man.
Time spent here is not always easy. The classes are demanding and the homework exhausting. The bullying can be pitiless. Former government minister Karan Singh recalled his "four rather unpleasant years" there in his autobiography.
But Doon's imprint is lasting.
It's a place where students read Shakespeare in small, discussion-filled classes, and grow comfortable wearing coats and ties. They take grueling treks into the mountains, cementing friendships that are often carried far into adulthood. They learn to be confident, and well-spoken.
Its austerity is almost monastic: The boys sleep on narrow beds and study in unheated rooms; the floors are rough stone and the lights are fluorescent tubes. Students are rarely allowed into Dehra Dun, once a small town now paved over with construction and pushing up against Doon's red walls.
With its quiet, leafy grounds, its requisite ivy-covered walls, its graceful colonial brick buildings and its increasingly scruffy stuffed tiger in the library, it can seem a place out of time.
Not long ago, when India's elite was a tiny, well-defined community, Doon was simply a part of life for 11-year-old boys of a certain pedigree.
It found its model in Eton, the centuries-old boarding school outside London with deep roots in Briton's upper classes and political aristocracy.
Doon's first headmaster, Arthur Foot, had been a teacher at Eton, and imbued the school with much of its ethos: study hard, play hard, become a leader. Surrounded by the sons of privilege, but horrified by outright snobbery, he urged boys not to mistake wealth for success while encouraging them to "develop that elusive faculty known as taste."
Doon became an enclave of tradition, where money alone didn't bring admission. The boys came from well-educated, well-connected families. Most were high caste. Most grew up speaking English.
"When I was a boy, it wasn't for people like us. It was for big chaps," said Anand Vardhan, a small-town north Indian doctor whose two sons go to Doon but whose own father would never have thought of sending him.
In Doon, Vardhan sees possibility. He knows the diploma won't mean automatic entry for his sons into India's most elite corridors, but it will bring an excellent education.
Then there are other, less tangible, benefits.
A Doon student may not come from an elite family, but by graduation he probably looks as if he does and is comfortable in that world.
"You should be good-looking, well-mannered .... They have to have expression power that must be very good," said Vardhan. "I didn't have that."
"For my sons, things are different," he added.
It's surprising then, when students insist that class really doesn't matter at least not among themselves.
In part, that's the result of the school's aggressively spartan policies.
You can't wear the latest clothes at Doon, or show off the latest iPod. Spending money works out to less than US$3 (2.60) a week.
What you get here, Bajpai says, "is a metal bed, two metal (clothing) hooks and a metal locker."
"We come from different places, different towns, but we're equal at Doon," said Vardhan's 16-year-old son Suhaas.
But it goes deeper than that, according to Mitter. Once someone becomes a Doon boy, his home life his family's money, status and influence is left at the gates.
"We don't ask, and we don't care, who someone's parents are," he said. "We all play together, we all eat together, we all live together."
