The Doon School

The Doon School
Established	September 10, 1935
Headmaster	Peter McLaughlin
Location	Dehra Dun, Uttarakhand, India
Students	480
Masters	67
Motto	Knowledge our Light
Colors	Blue and Gold
Type	Independent school
Homepage	http://www.doonschool.com

The Doon School is an independent school in India, spread across 70 acres (280,000 m²) in Dehradun in the state of Uttarakhand. Established in 1935, it was founded by Satish Ranjan Das. Its first Headmaster was Arthur E. Foot, a former science master at Eton College. Foot had never visited India before accepting the position, and his first action was to recruit J. A. K. Martyn from Harrow as his deputy. Doon's distinctive style and philosophy were set early in its life, as another master, Jack Gibson, summarized in a letter to parents in 1940:

... each boy must train himself to think clearly so that he will be willing to come to conclusions that may be different from what he has expected and may point to something different from what we were brought up to believe to be the accepted order. He must train his body to undergo hardships and be prepared for unexpected discomforts, and above all he must awaken and sharpen his sympathies for and understanding of people outside his own class and circle.^[1]

Jana Gana Mana by Rabindranath Tagore was chosen as the school song in 1935, the song was later adopted by India as the national anthem in 1947. The goal of the school is to provide young Indians with a liberal education, and to instill in them a respect for the ideals of secularism, discipline and equality.

Overview

The School is relatively small: it currently has 480 students, graduating classes number about 80, and the total number of alumni who have graduated, since the School was founded in 1935, is estimated at 5,000. There are 67 teachers in total, of which 15 are women, and the teacher:student ratio is about 1:8. The School offers 120 scholarships, including partial and full financial support, and approximately 25% of the students benefit from financial aid.

The academic year starts at the beginning of February, and the first Term (or semester), known as the Spring Term lasts four months to the end of May. Halfway through the Term, the boys take a one-week Midterm - a rugged trip and/or adventure often through the Siwalik Hills or Himalayas - which senior boys take unaccompanied and which they plan entirely on their own. This includes camping out in tents, cooking their own food and hiking for hours every day. The Autumn Term starts midway through July, and lasts till the end of November, once again with a Midterm break halfway through the Term.

Extracurricular activities and sports are a generally compulsory part of school life for all students: cricket, hockey and football are seasonal sports. Tennis, table tennis, badminton, squash, basketball, swimming, boxing, athletics and gymnastics tournaments are also built into the calendar. There are approximately 23 clubs and societies organized around interests such as debating, chess, etc., and a large number of magazines are published in English and Hindi.

Social work, known formally as "Socially Useful Productive Work", has also an integral part of school life, based upon Mr. Foot's view that "the boys should leave Doon School as members of an aristocracy, but it must be an aristocracy of service inspired by ideas of unselfishness, not one of privilege, wealth or position." Over the years, generations of Doscos have helped teach underprivileged children in the Dehra Dun area, and the School has worked with villagers in the construction of houses, community centers and school buildings; sanitation systems; energy efficiency systems; self-employment and small scale irrigation systems.

Doon has been credited with pioneering mountaineering in India[1], thanks to the considerable talents and efforts of masters such as RL Holdsworth, Jack Gibson and Gurudial Singh, and alumni such as Nandu Jayal. Notable climbs by Doscos include Bandarpunch (6,316 meters) in 1950, Kala Nag (6,387 meters) in 1956, Trisul in 1951, Kamet (7,816 meters) in 1955, Abi Gamin in 1953 and 1955, and Mrigthuni (6,855 meters) in 1958.

Doon has traditionally referred to the different grade levels as 'forms', designated by letters:

• E form = 6th grade (now defunct)
• D form = 7th grade
• C form = 8th grade
• B form = 9th grade
• A form = 10th grade
• S form = 11th grade
• Sc form = 12th grade

The school awards, among other honors: School Colours, sports Colours, the Games Blazer, and the Scholar's Blazer. The school has no valedictorian or commencement ceremony: when they have finished their board exams, the boys just leave.

The boys and campus

Doon follows the House System, with five administrative units, or dorm-like houses, named, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kashmir, Oberoi and Tata. Each house is run by a housemaster, who is assisted by a senior boy known as the House Captain. There is one senior boy who serves as School Captain, and he is assisted by School Prefects from each of the houses. In addition, there are two holding houses, Foot and Martyn, named after former headmasters, where new students typically live for one year before they move into the main houses.

To house the School, the Indian Public Schools Society acquired Chandbagh Estate in Dehradun from the Forest Research Institute. Part of the estate, where the Central Dining Hall is now located, was once a deer park. The IPSS also acquired an adjoining estate from the descendants of James Skinner, which forms the part of the campus known as Skinner's Field. The Doon campus is currently 69 acres (280,000 m²) in size.

While the grounds are exceptionally beautiful, with numerous gardens and rare trees, life for boys is monastic: they sleep on narrow beds and study in unheated rooms; the floors are rough stone and the lights are fluorescent tubes. It is difficult to describe the food in any charitable terms other than to say that it is apparently nutritious, although this state of affairs has changed for the better in the past few years.

Discipline has always been fairly strict, and the school has not hesitated to expel children from well-known families: in the 1950s then-Headmaster J.A.K. Martyn's suggestion that Sanjay Gandhi finish his senior year elsewhere was unquestioningly accepted by his mother, Indira Gandhi; in contrast, Doon's decision to expel a ward of Chief Minister Nityanand Swami of Uttarkhand in 2001 resulted in threats to cut off power and water[2]. (Nothing came of these threats after Mr. Swami discovered that Doon had stronger political connections than he did.)

Doon has idiosyncratic slang typical of a public school, including tuck shop (for purchasing snacks), change-in-break (a particularly annoying form of punishment), quis-ego, bags (dibs), lend (sycophant), scopat (ambitious to a fault), don't die (just kidding), sneak (tattle tail), vella (idle) and many others. Many boys acquire a nickname which often attaches for life, and can see variations of the same assigned to younger brothers and even sons of those boys who later attend Doon. Class periods are known as schools and evening prep is known as Toye time (an obscure term that originated in Winchester College).

The vast majority of Doscos are Indians, but a dwindling number are from Pakistan: they studied at Doon before Partition forced them to leave in 1947. Relations between Indian and Pakistani Doscos have remained warm over the years, despite the long history of conflict between the two countries.

Bangladeshi boys continue to study at the school, as do boys from Nepal.

Staff

The Housemasters are:

• Hyderabad House: Mr. Biren Chamola, Department of Mathematics
• Kashmir House: Dr. Arvindanabha Shukla, Department of Hindi and Sanskrit
• Oberoi House: Ms. Poornima Dutta, Department of Humanities [History]
• Jaipur House: Mr. Sanjeev Bathla, Department of Commerce, Accounts and Economics
• Tata House: Mr. Arvind Chalasani, Department of Science [Environmental Education]
• Martyn House: Ms. Stuti Bathla, Department of English
• Foot House: Mr. Harendra Chakhaiyar, Department of Science [Environmental Education]

Deans/Director and Heads of Departments (HoD)run the day to day affairs of the school:

• Dean of Studies: Mr. K. Prabhakaran Nair, Department of Humanities [Geography]
• Dean of Sports: Mr. Deepak Sharma, Department of Commerce, Accounts and Economics
• Dean of Activities: Mr. Gursharan Singh, Department of Music
• Dean of Student Welfare: Mr. Ashad Qezilbash, Department of English
• Dean of Social & Community Service: Dr. Mohan Chandra Joshi, Department of Hindi and Sanskrit
• Director of Public Affairs: Mr. Piyush Malviya, Department of Humanities [History]
• HoD of Accounts, Commerce and Economics: Mr. Deepak Sharma
• HoD of English: Mr. Debashish Chakrabarty
• HoD of Hindi and Sanskrit: Md. Hammad Farooqui
• HoD of Humanities: Mr. Piyush Malviya
• HoD of Mathematics: Mr. Pankaj Joshi
• HoD of Sciences: Mr. Rajesh Majumdar

Administrative heads administer the institution:

• Head, Human resource: Mr. Debashish Brahma
• Head of Finance: Mr. D K Srivastava
• Head of Administration: Lt. Col. (Retd) R Pathania
• Resident Medical Officer: Dr. Maj.(Retd) L Amar
• Head of Projects: Lt. Col. (Retd.) D Chaturvedi

Headmasters

• A.E. Foot
• J.A.K. Martyn
• C.J. Miller
• E.J. Simeon
• Gulab Ramchandani
• S.R. Das
• John A. Mason
• Kanti Bajpai
• Peter McLaughlin, current Headmaster

Doon and other Schools

Welham Boys School, from its foundation in 1937 through the early 1980s, acted a preparatory school to Doon and Mayo College. This link ended when Surendra "Charlie" Kandhari, a Dosco and former housemaster at Doon, became Principal of Welhams and transformed it to a high school. As a result, many Doscos from the 1940s through the 1970s are also Welhamites.

Doon has long had a familial relationship with Welham Girls School: several families who chose to send their boys to Doon also chose to send their daughters to Welhams, and many Doscos over the years have married alumni of Welham Girls. An annual "dance social" with Welham Girls was the highlight of the senior year for many Doscos.

In 1998 The Chand Bagh School was established by Pakistani Doscos approximately 40 km north of Lahore, Pakistan, and modeled on the general structure of Doon.

Since the 1990s, Doon's national prestige has sparked a huge increase in the number of schools located in the Doon valley, many of which were named in a deliberately confusing manner: Doon Global School, Doon Presidency School, Doon International School, Doon Preparatory School, Doon Cambridge School, Doon Girls School, Doon Public School, and even a Doon College of Spoken English.[3]

Doon in Fiction

• In Salman Rushdie's anthology of short stories East, West, the characters Zulu and Chekhov are Doscos.
• In Kiran Doshi's Birds of Passage the central character Abhay is a Dosco.
• Vikram Seth used his own experiences of being bullied at Doon, to model the character of Tapan in A Suitable Boy.
• The title character in Aminuddin Khan's A Right Royal Bastard is a Dosco.

Doon in research

• Doon School Chronicles: one of a series of ethnographic films made by David MacDougall between 1997-2000 that study the culture of the school.
• Constructing Post-Colonial India: National Character and the Doon School by Sanjay Srivastva is a detailed sociological study of the school's culture and how it has influenced India's national character.
• The Waffle of the Toffs by M. Prabha makes a case against writers from Doon, arguing that "the more affluent a writer, the less significant his writing."

Notable alumni

Rajiv Gandhi (Class of 1960)

Old boys of the school are known as Doscos, although the more correct term is ex-Doscos since within Doon itself current pupils are known as Doscos and alumni are referred to as ex-Doscos or, more simply, as Old Boys. The term Dosco is a contraction of Doon and School.

From the very beginning, Doscos have gained respect within their fraternity as much for their social and intellectual contributions as their success in politics, government or commerce. This view was inculcated by Doon's first headmaster, A.E. Foot, when he wrote in 1942:

When you leave the school you have probably already decided on the next step in your career. What is going to be your outlook? Are you going to use your equipment and your opportunities in order to secure as much as possible of wealth and power and influence with the great? Is it your ambition to be a successful member of an acquisitive society? Do you hope your education will enable you to get more from your country or give more to it? Will the monument you leave behind you (for you cannot take it with you) be a palace on Malabar Hill or will it be built up in the hearts of the people you have served?^[1]

Doscos have achieved prominence in politics, government service, and the armed forces of India and Pakistan, as well as commerce, journalism, and literature. They include former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, nine Cabinet Ministers, two Chief Ministers, several members of the Indian Parliament and state Legislative Assemblies; a well-known Naxalite; nineteen generals, two admirals and the former heads of the Indian Air Force and the Pakistani Air Force; and twenty-eight Ambassadors (including those from India, Pakistan, Nepal and the United Kingdom).

The writers Vikram Seth, Ramachandra Guha and Amitav Ghosh, journalists Prannoy Roy and Karan Thapar, film actors Roshan Seth and Chandrachur Singh, social worker Bunker Roy, and sculptor Anish Kapoor are all Doscos. The first Indian Rhodes Scholar was a Dosco; the first Indian to win an Olympic gold medal (Abhinav Bindra) was a Dosco; and India's pioneer mountaineer was a Dosco (Nandu Jayal).

External links

• Official wWebsite
• Official website of the Doon School Old Boys Society
• The Dosco Network on Ning
• Pictures of Doon on Flickr
• The Indian public schools
• Remembering Jack Gibson

Doon in the Press

• A storied prep school sees old ways erode... Associated Press June 16 2007.
• The Andover of India? Graduates From Doon Score Top U.S. Jobs The Wall Street Journal June 3, 2006.
• Class Up at Doon Outlook Magazine, April 17, 2006.
• Liberal Streak Financial Times January 2, 2004.
• Climb Every Mountain The Hindu Feb 24, 2002.
• India's Old School Tie: The Harrow by the Himalayas The New York Times November 12, 1985.
• Private world of public schools The Tribune October 3, 2006.

References