It is customary in many Hindu households to refer to very young children, say up to 6 years of age as Kanu, which is the affectionate way of saying Kanha, a name given to Lord Krishna when he was a baby. My household was no exception, indeed it was a deeply devout Hindu household. Daily Hindu religious rituals were observed with my mother ensuring prayers were said. Holy incense sticks and a diya or holy lamp were lit in the mini temple that was part of every such household. To this day, my house has such a mini temple. The extended family, including cousins, uncles, aunts as well as family friends visiting were only too happy to play with children of such households and bring a smile to their faces. It doesn’t take much to make a child smile.
Young children from such a devout Hindu background are usually sent to their first place of learning termed ‘Bal Mandir’, literally translated as ‘Children’s Temple’. It so happens that Bal applied before a South Indian name also refers to Baby Krishna. I say this as I had two classmates, Balagopal and Balakrishnan.
When my parents put me, aged 6, alone on a plane to India (See letter from Air India) they were obviously under the impression that I was going to a Bal Mandir located in Krishna’s place of birth, India! Sadly they didn’t know until their deaths that a Bal Mandir wasn’t within a billion miles of Lawrence School, Lovedale! It was where the devil reigned supreme and consumed the childhoods of little children just as an appetiser!
So, imagine going from such a devout Hindu household, where the only means of communication was Gujarati to the ‘butchadkhana’ that was Lawrence School Lovedale and being transformed overnight into a totally bogus toy soldier. ‘Butchadkhana’ is a Hindi word meaning slaughterhouse. From day one communication was by beating, shouting, screaming, pushing, pinching and shoving. The fact that a six year old Gujarati boy couldn’t understand what command the matron Miss Teresa was giving was not a problem for her nor for her Tamilian sidekick Rosy ayah. Slaps, hairpulling and painful pinching soon got the results they desired. These two evil characters were what in modern parlance would be called ‘rice bag converts’. ‘Rice bag converts’ are poverty stricken Hindus who, in return for a small gratification such as a bag of rice would be prepared to renounce their Hindu faith and accept Christianity. After all, having nothing in life, they had nothing to lose and embracing Christianity gave them a means to survive. There was, however, not even an atom of Christian compassion or understanding in such people and the resentment they felt at their circumstances was taken out on the young children in their care. Neither Teresa nor Rosy were trained in child care. They got a job done and were paid for it. The amount paid couldn’t have been much. Other posts will show, theft from the children was a perk of the job. I would go so far as describing Teresa and Rosy as vermin. However, the man who allowed such vermin to infest the school was none other than the legendary K.I. Thomas, the revered Headmaster who had been in situ for 8 years by the time I joined!
One of the cruellest people I came across as a 6 year old was Mrs Valerie Enos. Valerie was a name she adopted, her real name was Mary Hilda Enos as the documentary evidence I have attached in my Page ‘The Enos Phenomenon‘ will show. Various honours have been accorded by Old Lawrencians to this dreadful woman as they forget her cruelty and remember only such matters as her reading such nonsense as ‘Child of Grace’. She has, as I write this reached the age of 103. Reaching the age of 103 does not absolve her of the cruelty she heaped on helpless children far away from loving homes and without any loved one to pour their hearts out to! This woman, very much a part of the local Anglo-Indian community was cocooned from what was happening in the rest of India and obviously felt it was her right to be cruel to ordinary native Indians even though in reality she was much darker skinned than the rest of us. She had joined the school in 1948 as an unqualified teacher in what was then a school that had very few Indians, at a time when the objective of the school was to churn out tradesmen. Her Anglo-Indian husband Mr Valentine Enos was part of the band, called Hot Shots that provided the music for the Founder’s dance in 1967. Mr Enos played trumpet and the band, which was entirely Anglo-Indian churned out hit tunes from the 30s!
Mrs Enos should have been booted out when the great churn occurred in the early 50s but somehow she slipped through the net. I recall one episode of this woman’s cruelty as if it happened yesterday. A classmate, a little boy called Venkatramani couldn’t answer a question posed to him. He was made to stand up and, with a wooden foot-ruler Enos kept whacking the calves of his legs until the ruler broke. Venkat knew it was only a question of time before she returned with a new ruler and, terrified at the prospect of further lashings, lost control of his bladder and wet himself. The piss kept flowing while Venkat went into uncontrollable spurts of shivering.
Look at the photos below. Imagine a Gujarati boy, not speaking a word of English being shouted at, screamed at and being severely beaten by a woman wearing a jacket; prior to that I had never ever come across a woman wearing a jacket. Another favourite pastime of this woman was to humiliate little boys by making them kneel and apologise for any perceived wrong they had allegedly done.
Interesting extract from ‘The Journals of Honoria Lawrence India Observed 1837-1854’ Edited by John Lawrence and Audrey Woodiwiss:
The Bernards brought up their own children with others entrusted to them. The nursery and schoolroom were lively but the Bernards were hard and cold with a distorted piety that left deep scars. It was easy to choose the wrong guardians but at a distance of several thousand miles it was not easy to diagnose the mistake and put it right. A generation later this common tragedy of Anglo Indian life is the subject of Kipling’s semi-autobiographical tale Baa Baa Black Sheep. In that case the parents came back five years later and discovered with horror what they had done by entrusting their children to the wrong people. Between her tears the mother cries out , ‘Oh my son ..! It was my fault .. and yet how could we help it?’ Henry and Honoria never saw their sons again in this life and never discovered what they had done to them.
The distance between Nairobi where I was leading a perfectly good life and Lovedale is 2873 miles. So how would my parents have known just who they were entrusting their children to?
Another terrifying woman was a Miss Annama Ninan, a Syrian Christian. She, at least wore a saree and was perhaps a little less intimidating. Her beatings were of a similar type, wooden foot-ruler at the back of the calves until it broke!
Then there was a dreadful remnant from colonial times; a Mrs Fowles. She wasn’t Anglo-Indian but was ‘Domiciled European’. Domiciled Europeans were Europeans too poor to return to the United Kingdom. She was the stewardess, supervising the kitchen and dining room. Just why she was retained was a mystery to me for many years. She had no qualifications whatsoever, the food served was Indian about which she had no knowledge at all, she did not blend in and should have left, bag and baggage with the British at the latest by 1947. However, my research 60 years later reveals all and I have set it all out in a Page titled ‘Mrs Fowles and I’. This dreadful woman with three dreadful children was herself an Old Lawrencian with several brothers who were also Old Lawrencians and her connection with the school went back generations as I have demonstrated in the Page ‘Mrs Fowles and I’. Mrs Fowles, her dreadful children and the rest of the dreadful family could best be described as ‘Parasites in Paradise’ a phrase coined by an African when referring to Britons who settled in Kenya. It is a matter of shame for the school that this parasite survived in the school for nearly two decades after Independence!
So, a little Gujarati Hindu vegetarian boy, aged 6 from a happy home with loving parents, loving extended family, a very comfortable lifestyle and a blissfully happy childhood goes to a torture chamber run by Anglo-Indians, Syrian Christians, and Rice-Bag converts, and remained ensconced there for 11 miserable years. AND COLLOSAL SUMS WERE PAID FOR THIS ‘PRIVILEGE’!
In my Page titled Alternative Schools in Kenya , I will demonstrate that I was leaving paradise to enter hell!
Jitu as baby
Brutality Bullying Cruelty Theft and Torture from Day 1
See also Page titled Mac – The Stalwart Who Never was, in particular Part 5 B – The Enforcers – The Kerala Villagers and Balasingham EVIL EVIL EVIL
My observation: I was leaving paradise and entering hell.
A 6 year old boy arriving at Lovedale on his first day wasn’t given the love and affection his parents thought he would be receiving. Straightaway the boy came into contact with Miss Teressa who had neither sympathy nor kindness in her being, and she lashed out at every opportunity. Imagine a boy who didn’t know a word of English being put in the care of such a monster. Slapping was her first means of communication. Miss Teressa was the matron. She was more than assisted by an ayah called Rosie whose only job was to assist Miss Teressa. Rosie was an utterly filthy, short and squat woman with yellow teeth. Her slaps were far more powerful and she never failed to smirk after administering such violence. Imagine boys of Hindu origin where often children are affectionately referred to as Kanha (Baby Krishna) being violently assaulted by a couple of Christian women. There was nobody to complain to and even if there was, nobody would take the word of a 6 year old against an adult! Neither Teressa nor Rosie could possibly have had any sort of training in child care and certainly, Rosie was an illiterate woman who could communicate mainly in Tamil with a few English words thrown in. That didn’t matter much as her messages were conveyed by slaps.
One would wonder why the trunks (in my case suitcase) of new arrivals were immediately taken away from the boys and put into a locked store-room. The answer was glaringly simple: this was an opportunity for the support staff to steal. My suitcase used to be packed with clothes suitable for a 6 year old, all the clothes being high quality and ‘Made in England’ as Kenya was still a British colony and there was no manufacturing base there. In addition British made sweets and chocolates would be packed. Not a single item would be saved from theft. In those days, the staff and teachers, as well as some of the pupils would, at most have had the luxury of an occasional boiled sweet called ‘Bulls Eye’ sold loose. A wrapped sweet or chocolate would be exceptional.
In 1959, my brother Naren and I were to stay with a local family during the June Holidays. A Miss Maithly, an all purposes teacher of some sort told the headmaster that neither of us were equipped to spend a holiday away as there were no clothes we could wear. Permission had to be sought from my father for us to be taken to Ooty by the said Maithly and clothes purchased. In the following November when we went back to Kenya our parents actually thought we had lost the clothes (forget the tuck)! Nobody would accept the word of a 7 year old that the clothes had been stolen, and that is what the support staff took advantage of. Truth is, apart from fellow East Africans, no children owned the sort of ‘luxury’ clothes we owned. See the photo below. Do my brother and I look like the sort who would go to Lovedale with only the clothes we were wearing? In any case, the school would send a list of clothing items we were to come with. Some of those were stolen as well due to the higher quality compared with local items. Not a single ‘local’ boy had a coat of any sort, forget a suit! Certainly, the Anglo-Indians were dirt poor and hardly possessed even basic toiletries! The adults in charge, servants, matrons and even teachers were on subsistence wages and hence the temptation to steal from helpless pupils was all-pervading! With hindsight, one might ask how on Earth could such a set-up produce good school leavers when the staff were fundamentally dishonest! It must be noted that around 1966, when Mr C Mukerji became the Headmaster of Prep School the first thing he did was allow boys to keep control over their own luggage and this simple act gave him hero status!
That was only the beginning of the ordeal. Often times and particularly at night care was left in the hands of servants, once again, with no training whatsoever. The servants in turn frequently left discipline in the hands of the larger boys. One such servant, Persuram delighted in letting an overweight boy called Sunny (real name Madan Talreja, later on known as Atom Talreja the Head Boy) take charge at the age of 9, of younger boys. Sunny’s idea of taking charge was simplicity itself. He would have two of his friends help him. The three would summon 8 year olds, who were fast asleep in the next dormitory, one at a time and the three would use leather belts to administer a sever beating. There wasn’t any reason for this except Sunny felt happy doing it and could get away with it. The servant assigned to look after the boys, Persuram, would be ecstatic; he even had a phrase for the punishment and called it ‘Three Machine Wallop Shot’. The boy who ‘fed’ Sunny with 8 year old boys to be bashed up was my own classmate, a Syrian Christian boy called Suresh Tharakan. Suresh would wake up boys who were fast asleep as their suffering would be greater than boys who were awake and alert. Some of us, desperate to avoid such a bashing but finding it difficult to stay awake would try to at least shake a leg to give the impression of being awake, generally to no avail. More than 6 decades after the event I still have a habit of shaking my leg waiting to sleep. In later life, this Suresh Tharakan became an oddball. His two older brothers (one of whom declared himself ‘gay’ in 2003 when he would have been in his mid 50s) went on to do well going by Kerala standards (they had some sort of seafood business called Sumeru, named after their House in Lovedale). However, even they couldn’t stand their own brother Suresh and exiled him to Kodaikanal. Here, Suresh lived on his own, kept to the fashion of the 60s and didn’t possess even a jacket, wearing a pullover when he was persuaded to come to our 35th reunion and participate in various activities. Under normal circumstances I would describe today’s Suresh as intellectually lacking, however that would be an understatement and this is 6 decades after he left School!
Here are some of the ironies: Sunny went on to be a bully in Junior School, followed by Senior School and indeed was rewarded by being made Head Boy! His life after school was one filled with debauchery and alcoholism. He fathered several children, found ‘Christianity’ and died probably in his late thirties or early 40s. One brother of his, a dodgy senior Lawrence School student called Lalu was knifed to death some years after he left school and another brother, Shyam, a year junior to me made his way to the USA, changed his name to Shaun Taylor to hide his Indian origin and disappeared into the ‘system’. I got to know that there was yet another younger brother, Babloo only recently. I suspect the fact that the brothers’ mother was hanging around school for long periods of time could have encouraged the behaviour particularly as other boys had their parents thousands of miles away! The mother, a Sindhi woman was a refugee from Pakistan. Partition had taken place a mere 11 years previously. This mother wore a thick coating of rouge, which made her look very fair skinned, and even thicker bright red lipstick. She was a chain smoker. At that time, 1958, she did not have a husband, so how was she able to pay for her children’s education at the relatively expensive Lawrence School? To me the answer is obvious, more so now as I am aware what sort of ladies wear such heavy makeup!
Torture at Junior School
In the photo above, you will see a House Photo of Junior School. Look at the Green Circle. That part of the photo is the much talked about 67 steps. At the top of the 67 steps would stand the dreaded prefects. In this photo the little fellows are in their Sunday best. However immediately after lunch on a normal weekday, the little fellows would be wearing their normal uniforms. Imagine if they turned round and looked at the top of the 67 steps and saw the prefects waiting to descend to administer punishment, or more accurately torture on the little boys as described in the illustrations below. The fear of God would be instilled in them! A particularly nasty character was Anglo-Indian Leonard Kennedy, (a complete contrast to his brother Adrian). For reasons unconnected to the torture, Leonard was relieved of his duties and expelled from Lovedale. Decades later, I still don’t know why such torture was administered by the prefects who had nothing to do with the juniors nor why this was permitted by the legendary Headmaster K.I. Thomas.
Here is a photo of the dreaded 67 steps as at today. These should really be called the 67 steps of shame as ‘prefects’ 6 years older that the 10 year old boys they were descending to torture would trot down them as a group, with a glee in their faces. In no other institution would such sadism have been allowed to take hold! Had most parents, included my own known what was going on, namely torture of urchins by teenagers under the acquiescence of Headmaster K.I. Thomas and other academic staff, the school would have been in danger of being shut or certainly K.I. Thomas and others would have been sacked! Over 6 decades after enduring such torture as a 10 year old, I still resent what was allowed and I particularly resent being tortured by the likes of Anglo-Indians such as Leonard Kennedy, characters on subsidised or zero fees from low grade Railway Colonies torturing the children of hard working parents paying a colossal amount in fees!
Below is the illustration of the sort of torture we went through.
So here is the chronology: after Prep School the boys went up to class 5 and Kailash House in Junior School. They were 10 years old. The torture was totally gratuitous. Prefects and other boys, aged 16 or 17 would descend from Senior School to Junior School down the ‘iconic’ 67 stone steps with glee in their eyes. This was on a daily basis after lunch. It was done on the prefects’ own initiative merely because they could get away with it! There was absolutely nothing that the 10 year olds had done to warrant such torture and certainly the prefects could not have witnessed anything requiring disciplinary action as, apart from morning assembly there was never ever a time when the prefects were on the same premises or anywhere near each other so nothing untoward could have been witnessed! In any case, ‘collective punishment’ is abhorrent! The Kailash House boys, 10 years old, would be required to stand in formation on the road leading to the cemetery and as a punishment for no reason whatsoever, made to contort their bodies in various painful ways. This torture would start with the stretching of arms sideways to shoulder height. Within a few minutes the pain would be unbearable and boys tended to bend. This would result in a kick or two. That torture was followed by doing dozens of sit-ups i.e., from a standing position to a squat and back to standing position (called ‘buskies‘ see right in the illustration above). After various other inflictions of torture, the ‘piece de resistance‘: for absolutely no reason at all they would get the boys to put their arms underneath their thighs and then clutch the ears for what seemed endless periods. This form of torture was called ‘murgas‘ (see left above).
It is impossible to believe that this form of torture wasn’t known by any teaching staff. Frequently, it was carried out under their very noses! Here is what my friend and classmate Viju recalls: Mrs Prince, who was our 5B class teacher was a very kind soul. Once we were having our regular skinning up with Amin and Peacock after lunch in the quadrangle with all the teachers in the corridor after lunch. After 15 minutes or so Mrs Prince was close to tears, “Haven’t they had enough, Amin? They’re such small children!” “ It’s a matter of discipline, Ma’am. Please stay out of it!”
While still in Class 5, mention must be made of an Indian Music teacher called Jitendra Pratap. This character was known derogatively as ‘Goofy’. On alternate days, he took assembly where ‘Indian’ devotional songs were sung. Most of the boys had no idea of the language of the words to the songs or their meaning but that is for another page or post. Back though to Goofy. In order to endear himself to senior boys who regarded him as a joke figure, he would select, at random, up to a dozen class 5 boys and have them stand on the chairs where they had previously been sitting. There was no act of indiscipline that the class 5 boys had committed, but humiliating them delighted Goofy. Far from endearing himself to anybody, Goofy’s image as a joke figure was merely enhanced and he remained a joke figure until the day he left school. I got to know decades later that Goofy was of Nepalese origin and was having domestic problems with his wife Monika. It so happens that one enduring legacy left by Goofy was the Hindi School Song ‘Sub Se Sundar‘. Until Goofy’s time, the School Song was in English and, well, put it this way, somebody had to compose the Indian version. As Goofy was the only one available, he got the assignment. Notwithstanding that the song has been sung for 7 decades at school and at Old Lawrencian get-togethers throughout the world, an analysis of the song suggests it is crap! Further details on this odious character and his composition are in my Post ‘Alleged Glorious Past V Reality Part 2’.
As well as enduring torture from the Senior boys, we in Class 5 were subject to a novel form of bullying. That was in the form of a Class 7 boy called Abraham Verghese (who happened to be the brother of my dear classmate Sara Verghese, who all of us love). Abraham appointed himself our Prefect. This was on his own initiative and there was absolutely no reason for it. Abraham loved to make us obey his commands of marching and getting in line etc. I make reference to him as he could easily have been told to get lost by the Kailash Housemaster, K Jacob but Jacob couldn’t be bothered; after all, the bullying didn’t affect him, just the boys in his care! Abraham was determined to be an authoritative figure but couldn’t manage this in his own class so set about proving himself with younger boys! In later life, Abraham became an alcoholic, got divorced from a lovely wife he treated very cruelly, fell out with all members of his family notwithstanding the help they extended to him and he became a lonely miserable figure. Sadly, he died recently, the effects of alcohol and loneliness having got the better of him. What a contrast he was to his sister Sara who is still the kindest of ladies willing to help anybody in need.
Moving on to Class 6 didn’t ease matters. My Housemaster at Shivalik House was Mr Raina who was never violent himself. Indeed he was amiable. In this house, there were boys of Class 6 and 7. The ‘Prefect’ was a 16 year old boy called Bhojraj, a Badaga tribal who was still in Class 7! Bhojraj should have passed out of school at 16 but he was merely in class 7, struggling and 4 years behind. Thus Class 6 had a boy 5 years older than they were, as their resident Prefect! Bhojraj couldn’t get enough of punishing the younger boys. He would get us up at 5 a.m., get us to dress in our Sunday Kit (which consisted of woollen trousers and jacket with a hooked collar and brass buttons together with black leather shoes), then run to the cemetery and back, a distance of a mile and a half. The reason? He didn’t need any; he could get away with it and he did! Bhojraj was short in height but much taller and stronger than 10 and 11 year olds. As it happens Bhojraj left school after Class 7 because he was too thick to progress. I met him 5 years later when he was visiting by which time I had grown taller and noticed that he was just a dwarf! But that dwarf had caused untold misery! Another vile boy, Radhakrishnan appointed himself House Captain but more of this odious character in a separate Page titled ‘The Kleptomaniac Brothers‘.
Class 7, still in Junior School, matters were a little easier as we had got used to the torture routine. However, the Senior Boys did stamp their authority as the following recollection by my friend and classmate Viju Parameshwar referring to an event of 27 May 1964 will show: ‘Junior School had a skinning up ordered by the Head-boy Jaipal crawling on hands and knees along the cemetery road and back. No one minded the physical inconvenience -we were just impatient to get to Top Flats’. As it happened, Nehru had died that day but there also was a Cricket Match with a team put together by Rajmohan Gandhi (grandson of the Mahatma) and which included West Indies Test Cricketer Conrad Hunte. The match was, of course cancelled in view of Nehru’s death’.
Class 8, Senior School was when the torture took took an even more cruel turn. Most of the 13 year olds going up to Senior School hadn’t yet even developed pubic hair so imagine seeing for the first time in their lives big 16 year olds with thick growths of pubic hair when taking a shower! And shower is the best place to start. Following games in the evening all boys were, in theory required to take a shower between 5pm and 5.45pm. However, all the boys of all the houses had a limited number of showers available between them and each boy had 3 minutes or less to complete. Seniors got priority and, enjoying the hot water took far more than the allocated time. Thus, there were simply not enough showers to cater for all the boys within the time allocated and there were bound to be boys who were late, and those who were late were administered a beating! In order to avoid this, several boys skipped showering but pretended to have done so.
Defecating was an even bigger problem. For Nilgiri House, there were 4 toilet cubicles constructed from what was a prefect’s room pre 1947. In Britain, the space in which the 4 toilet cubicles were constructed would be described as a box room and thus, it was bound to be a stinking mess! Access was through going out in the open and it it was raining, tough! At night, it was a frightening experience! Wild animals were known to roam around! The 4 were simply not enough to cater for the whole house of around 50 boys and so most of the boys had to make their way to ‘Big Bog’, quite a long distance away and that route was outdoors! If it was raining, well, tough! Here, 20 or so toilets had to be shared by all the boys of all the houses! Given that revele was 6 am and we had to be ready for morning PT by 6.30, there was simply no time to defecate first thing in the morning. So peculiar practices were developed: some went in the morning, others during mid-morning tea break, yet others immediately after lunch and a few found spots in the evening. There were, though many who did not go on a daily basis, many even going every third day! The toilets were Indian Style and there was no toilet paper. Bums had to be hand washed and there was no soap for hand cleaning afterwards. Of course, the constant water shortage didn’t help and further, the water container was usually a discarded, leaky Bournvita tin and that too had to be shared!
As well as taking orders from Senior boys (Class 10 and 11), Class 8 boys were required to perform fatigues (see Page Offensive Terminology). One day, a parent happened to mention to Nilgiri Housemaster Mac (the odious character about whom there are several Pages) that his house was cleaner and tidier that all the other houses. This was probably said in flattery but Mac never ceased boasting about it and the result was Class 8 boys had to get down on hands and knees and scrub the wooden floor using coconut coir and polish. Mac wanted to preserve the image of his house being the cleanest. Reality was that a simple sweeping of the floor of dust was all that was needed and for that, sweepers came on a daily basis! By the time I got to the house, the floor was 80 years old and couldn’t possibly be made to look anything other than an 80 year old floor! Thus, on a Sunday, after breakfast, class 8 boys spent a couple of hours on that back-breaking task while Mac had already left for Ooty! Other fatigues involved dusting, sweeping, tidying up etc., tasks that servants were employed for anyway but without such tasks being imposed on juniors, the seniors felt they weren’t exercising sufficient authority.
Class 8 was the year when Seniors (Class 11) didn’t waste any time. See Page – Mac-Wilfred Joseph McMahon the Stalwart Who Never Was, I have written about C Rajan and Vishwanath. These characters were at their cruellest and administering beatings way past the threshold that would put them in the torture and criminal category. The difference in age and growth (3 years) made them much stronger than their victims but essentially, they were little people with skills only to torture! Obviously they thought that after school none of the little boys would ever take revenge as they would never ever meet again. However, more than 5 decades later matters have changed; social media has rendered their previous calculations invalid. Rajan (brother of my dear classmate the lovely Padma) died on 12 May 2025, and Vishwanath who happened to be a local Ooty boy from a local Ooty family is either dead or has fallen into obscurity.
Extract from the Musings of E.J. John describing an incident from c. 1989
I was then reminded of a remark that Nomita Chandy had made at the Yacht Club I had mentioned in passing: ‘The present-day teachers of Lawrence are petrified by the students”. Could this have been another generalization? If a teacher lacks the moral authority to deal promptly with calculated mischief, then he fails in his role of being in loco parentis to his wards. And that might explain why the students I saw earlier were able to slouch about blithely, in their slovenly casuals. Admittedly, times have changed and we cannot put the clock back. My remarks may, therefore, be construed as passé, but, whatever yardstick you use, you cannot justify the sorry state in which I found Sumeru House dorms when I ‘furtively’ took a peek at it. I could not come to terms with the apparent lack of collective esteem that the members of the house seemed to have. I fear I may not be welcome in Lovedale any more!
My choice of Sumeru House was not accidental. I was the Housemaster of Sumeru for a little over two years from 1969. I had earlier been Sumeru House Tutor for three years. I would like to believe that I gave of my best to the boys, even if I say so myself. There were times, however, when I had to be quite severe, against my better professional judgement, in dealing with bullies. When you are up against hardened bullies, you are frequently flummoxed while looking for a psychological approach to deal with them tactfully. On the other hand, like a red rag to a bull, the instinctive response of ‘retributive punishment’ presents itself to your impulsive nature. Truth to tell, I had succumbed to this kind of knee-jerk reaction on more than one occasion. One such occasion refuses to leave my memory.
One of my wards was found in possession of a camera that did not belong to him. Let him remain nameless. The compulsive bullies in my house who came to know of this act of ‘borrowing’, promptly pronounced him guilty in a kangaroo court of their making, and then without ‘due process’ proceeded to thrash him virtually to within an inch of his life, short of lynching him that is. The news reached me through a school prefect who did not want to be named. And there I was, my head and heart both warring. First, it raised my hackles that my authority as housemaster had been challenged. The perceived hurt to my ego rankled. But on reflection, my training as a teacher cautioned me against a knee-jerk reaction.
I was later told that a school prefect, who happened to be one of my wards, was also involved in it, and that proved to be more than I could condone. It would seem he had aided and abetted the perpetrators of this act of cowardice instead of restraining them. I summoned him to my office straightaway and without waiting to hear his version of the incident and throwing caution to the winds whacked him with my bare hands so hard that I could easily have been charged for causing grievous bodily harm had he decided to complain in a court of law. He did not. The rest of that gang also received the same treatment. Initially I had only wanted them to have a taste of their own medicine, but I lost my head when once I had started. I realized that I had gone too far only after I had regained my composure. What is that about hindsight being a perfect science?
View Page E John
See my Page:Headmaster Lahiri – Parades and Bullying
Extracts from the chapter ‘Beneath the Beauty’ of Lahiri’s Book With A little Help From My Friends:
In the midst of all this martial ardour, a very sickening tradition, masquerading as part of the military ethos, had crept in. That was bullying. The seniors thought it their God given right to hit juniors with hockey sticks at the slightest excuse, so much so that bones were broken on a regular basis. The worse sufferers were the students of class 9 which was the junior most class in Senior school (classes nine to twelve). In the Middle school (classes seven and eight), students of class eight bullied those of class seven. The Prep School (classes four to six) was not afflicted by this tradition, and neither was the Girls school (the boarding where all the the girls resided).
Among the boys there was a codified system of favours by which seniors could ask a junior to do anything for them at anytime. Each class twelve student had a ‘Piza’. This was a title sanctified by tradition denoting the equivalent of a personal slave. I came across Pizas sneaking across the campus in the dead of the night to fetch clothes for their masters from the dhobi-ghat which was located at one end of the campus. Often Pizas had to sit by the bed of their master to wake him up at the appointed hour. Failure to live up to the senior’s expectations invited serious retribution. There was at least one case of a boy being branded with an electric iron!
One particular incident will haunt me till the day I die. I was about three months into my tenure when one morning an enraged mother of a class seven boy stormed into my office. She took off her son’s shirt and showed me huge red welts on his back. The boy had been systematically thrashed in the night by the boys of class 8 with wet towels. His fault? He had dared to defeat a boy from the class above in the finals of a prestigious school tennis tournament called the ‘Rob Roy’ tournament, ironically sponsored by a well known alumnus.
The mother’s word still ring in my ears, ‘I may be able to cure the scars on his back but what about the scars on his soul?’
As I started to spend time with the boys, I realised that they were not the savage vicious creatures one might expect them to be, especially in view of the horrific incidents of bullying the the campus kept witnessing. On the contrary they were courteous, well-mannered and all from very respectable families. There was obviously something wrong with the environment they were in. This observation started giving me some insights into how to tackle the bullying problem.
It is my view that not only is bullying completely morally reprehensible, it also creates an atmosphere of fear that stifles creativity. Not only are the victims often scarred for life, but whilst at school they are unable to achieve their potential as they spend the better part of their best years covering in fear. In my view as Head of school, I owed it to every child entrusted to my care to provide a level playing field so that all could grow and explore their talents and strengths with a sense of joy and abandon.
Bullying was not the only problem staring me in the face. One of the problems that plagues our education system in general and the public school system in particular, is the woeful shortage of good teachers. It is a sad fact that most of those who opt for teaching, particularly in remote boarding schools, rarely do so as a first choice. The head of the school very rarely has the privilege of being able to choose from a large catchment area of trained teachers, in the same manner that a corporate head does, in terms of his personnel requirements.
Whilst Lawrence School was singularly blessed in some of the teachers it had, it too shared the problem endemic to most residential schools. The fact that this body was seriously fractured, only added to my woes. Some suggested that it was a Tamil v Malayalee problem. Being from North of the Vindhyas, I was blissfully unaware of this divide, which was just as well because it allowed me to ignore these divisions even if they did exist. The better teachers in the faculty seem to have been thoroughly deflated by the indiscipline that prevailed in the school. Most felt threatened by the senior boys and with good reason. Private property such as scooters and cars were frequently vandalised, particularly if a teacher reported an act of indiscipline to the authorities.
Then there was a problem of a near complete breakdown of administrative procedures. Almost as soon as I had taken over, the District Forest Officer (DFO) called me up to inform me that someone involved in School security was selling timber from the school forest. The kitchen staff could load as much food as they wanted in their ‘tiffin carriers’ and take it home. This resulted in them cooking much more than what was required for any given meal. All that was left over was theirs for the taking! Every single department suffered from some such serious infirmity.
The infrastructure was in shambles. The school went without electricity for days at a stretch particularly during the monsoons as there was no generator backup. The toilet for the senior boys called ‘Big Bogs’ was my idea of what hell must be like. One visit there was enough to make me want to throw up. The gymnasium was a shell of a building with virtually no equipment. There were no decent tennis courts. The list was endless and to my mind this was a backdrop to the atmosphere of indiscipline that prevailed in the school.
See Headmaster Lahiri – Parades and Bullying within you will find Gul Panag’s Review of Dev Lahiri’s Book:
I was in school at a time when the menace of bullying had not even begun to be tamed. I routinely came to class to find boys with black eyes, bruises, even fractures. This is the awful baggage that old-world public schools carry and which no one wants to talk about. One of my batchmates had such a severe fracture to his wrist – from ‘hockey stick shots’ – that even the Military Hospital in Wellington refused to admit him and recommended a better-equipped institution for his treatment.
“We were bullied, so why shouldn’t we return the favour? It’ll make a man of the boy.” I’m not sure that’s what Rudyard Kipling had in mind when he said, “Send him to Lawrence and make a man of him”, a sentiment Mr Lahiri echoes in his memoir.
From the start, he was very, very tough on bullying. The year he took over, my husband was the Head Boy. He was taking a principled stand against bullying too, which made him less than popular with some members of his batch. His brother, still in class 9, bore the brunt of this stand.
Years later, when my own brother became Head Boy and picked up the same agenda to eliminate bullying, he met with the same resistance. But the wheels of change Mr Lahiri set in motion (starting with counselling, leading to various sticks and carrots, and finally suspending repeat offenders) did eventually move things forward. At Founders’ Day last year, I saw the ninth-standard boys – always the worst victims – lounging on the senior-school lawns, just feet away from the Super Seniors! We had come a long way from standing at attention every time a senior walked by.
Note From Jitu Savani See extract of tract from Ashok Malik ‘s Review of Lahiri’s Book within my Page: Headmaster Lahiri – Parades and Bullying
In a school proud of its martial traditions, the biggest challenge was bullying, which was particularly vicious at Lawrence. This was the first battle Lahiri fought, and largely won. It was when he sought to taper the elaborate founder’s day events and parade, preparations for which took several months and clearly affected examination results, that Lahiri ran into the school’s equivalent of a religious orthodoxy: the powerful alumni body, which had romanticised the past and Lawrence School’s supposedly “manly” rigour.
Tattling
One of the first matters ingrained into us was that tattling was taboo. Tattling is defined as telling or reporting on somebody’s wrongdoing against oneself or against others. This may have been a practice in British Boarding Schools but was totally inappropriate in India particularly as the wrongdoers refined the practice to include thefts, assaults, damage to school property and any wrong one could think of. Further, such tattling was forbidden even to parents during holidays. There was no reason for this practice to continue and pro-active measures should have been taken so that tattling was the norm rather than the exception. Thus, Mac (see detailed Pages about him ) was not tattled on for his absence from his duties for most of the day every day of the week, including weekends. Thus, he was able to turn a Nelsonian blind eye and omit seeing the torture his 16 year old enforcers were inflicting on other, younger, boys. This suited Anglo-Indian Mac to the core as he could pretend that he never knew about the torture that was happening under his watch! I cannot envisage any circumstances under which any parent would have tolerated such abuse. Certainly, not my parents who spent a fortune sending their three children from far away Nairobi, Kenya! Any parent would have chosen a local school where such degrading practices wouldn’t have been allowed particularly as the costs wouldn’t have been as exorbitant as was the case in Lawrence School, Lovedale.
Although tattling is frowned upon in most schools among students, in Lawrence School, Lovedale this was taken to another level. Thus, an untrained, illiterate Badaga tribesman servant, Perusuram actually supervised a 9 year old boy Madan Talreja, then known as Sunny Talreja and his three friends to administer severe beatings with leather belts on younger boys. Nobody, particularly young boys, urchins, would say a word to anybody. Not even parents could be told as the only means of communication was by letter and those were censored. In any case, the ability to set out what was happening by an urchin in a letter would be severely restricted as at that age English was just about becoming a first language.
Imagine the difficulty of communicating to parents thousands of miles away that severe beatings were being handed out by matron Teresa, ayah Rosie and servant Perusaram. Such a practice of not ‘tattling’ continued until the last day at School 11 years later!
The ‘omerta’ relating to tattling was however very selective in its application as far as the bullies were concerned. Thus the obnoxious Kalli Jacob would consider it perfectly alright to threaten to disclose that he saw me smoking but it would be unacceptable for me to tell anybody about the beatings he was administering. A Sri Lankan (Ceylon then) Mestizo character called Ravindra Balasingham (See photos below) actually made me tattle on myself whilst quietly keeping his collaboration the previous year with the the aforementioned Kalli Jacob to himself.
Article on British Boarding Schools
This article brings to the fore the BRUTALITY of elite British Boarding Schools. I am appending it to my Page Brutality Bullying Cruelty Theft and Torture from Day 1. The similarities in terms of brutality and exorbitant charges made for the ‘privilege’ of enduring such treatment between Lawrence School Lovedale and British Boarding Schools are remarkable. Legendary Headmaster K.I. Thomas wanted to emulate British Boarding Schools as evidenced by this extract from his Founder’s day speech of 1950: ‘As in the past, British people serving in India and elsewhere sent their children to Eton, Harrow, etc. for their education, sooner or later our School will also come to occupy the same position with regard to Indian parents working abroad.’ Little did he know! There was never any British Boarding School tradition in Lovedale, past British staff had no British Boarding School experience but were down-market, virtually uneducated, simple employees. In reality, the school never got beyond being a glorified Anglo-Indian Railway Colony where the likes of Mac (see various posts on him) held sway. There is no way in which Mac, with his penchant for abandoning his wards in the custody of his chosen prefects (thugs) would have survived in a British Boarding School. One cannot imagine a British Boarding School housemaster being away most of the day 7 days a week ensconced in a gambling club and thereby bringing the school into disrepute.
In the case of Lawrence School Lovedale, the brutality was inflicted by untrained ancillary staff like Matron Teresa, Servant Rosy Ayah, Servant Perusram, Catering Steward Phyllis Fowles, Teacher Enos and remarkably, by other boys and thugs masquerading as Prefects, House Captains and Monitors. There is no way on Earth those who endured the torture emerged 11 years later with any prospect of achieving high political office, unlike as was the case in Britain.
Now read the article:
The Economist May 28th 2023
The moment when his chemistry master pulled a pistol, declared it loaded and waved it in the air was “probably”, says Justin Webb, a broadcaster, the worst moment of his boarding-school career. Winston Churchill would remember the floggings, done until pupils “bled freely” and screamed loudly. George Orwell was beaten so violently that his headmaster broke his riding crop on him and “reduced me to tears”.
That British boarding schools are odd places is not news. For several centuries and for fat fees they provided the English upper classes with a ripping blend of architectural beauty and physical discomfort; with neoclassical corridors and cold showers; with lashings of Latin and just plain lashings. The pupils they produced were an equally idiosyncratic mix of the sophisticated and the childlike, mingling precocious brilliance with speech that never quite left the classroom. It was a heady brew and Britain was intoxicated by it: of the 57 British prime ministers, 20 went to Eton. As Boris Johnson, one of their number, might say: “Crikey!”
Boarding schools are not yet in trouble. Their pupil numbers are relatively constant—around 70,000, owing partly to lots of boarders from abroad. But their charms may be becoming easier to resist. Elite private schools are a less secure route into the most coveted universities than they were. In 2014, 99 pupils were accepted from Eton to Oxbridge; in the 2021-22 academic year, it managed only 47. In contrast Brampton Manor Academy, a state school in London, had 54.
That raises hard questions about value for money. Annual fees for Eton were a mere £861 (around £10,000 today) a year in Mr Johnson’s era. Today, its fees are £15,432 “each half” (which, as Eton’s website explains, means thrice yearly; £46,296 a year apparently does not stretch to an understanding of fractions). For this, Etonians enjoy one pool; two chapels; three “theatre spaces”; a composer-in-residence; a filmmaker-in-residence; a pet pianist; and a director of “inclusive education”, who notes that to promote diversity at Eton it is important “to enable people to talk about uncomfortable things”. Like, say, those fees.
Perhaps the most profound threat to boarding schools is more fundamental. And that is the idea that to send a child as young as seven or eight away from home is not privilege but brutality; that even if this education goes well—no abuse or bullying; first eleven for cricket; scones for tea; huzzahs all round—it will still have been very wrong. Older adolescents might well find the whole experience much less cruel, perhaps even a relief. But as John Bowlby, a psychologist who was the father of attachment theory, put it: “I wouldn’t send a dog away to boarding school at age seven.” Richard Beard, a writer who lacerates private schools in his book, “Sad Little Men”, echoes the theme. The architectural beauty and bells and whistles of boarding schools, he says, are like the label on a dog-food tin which “isn’t for the dog; it’s for the person buying it”.
Send your offspring to boarding school, agrees Alex Renton, an author and campaigner who was abused at his prep school, and “you’re putting your child into care. You’re just paying for it.” Psychologists increasingly argue that posh care leads to bad outcomes. In 2011 the term “boarding-school syndrome” was coined by Joy Schaverien, a psychotherapist, to cover a series of symptoms such as depression, emotional repression and serial broken relationships. A group called “Boarding School Survivors” provides therapeutic help to former boarders. Since its foundation in 1990 it has treated hundreds.
Their defenders argue that boarding schools have changed. To extrapolate from the experiences of children 40 years ago is “obtuse”, says Gavin Horgan, headmaster of Millfield School and chair of the Boarding School Association. “It’s a completely different environment.” Whereas once pupils were sent away for months, many young boarders are now weekly; they can video-call home each day. Attitudes are different, too: today boarding-school teachers talk not about stiff upper lips but safeguarding and mental-health first aiders. Moreover, boarding-school syndrome is posited rather than proven by hard data.
But critics say that this is partly because no one has bothered to gather the information. Snobbery and a national obsession with old stone mean that it is still a struggle to see people in Palladian mansions as deprived. Mr Webb thinks he and his fellow-boarders were not privileged. “If anything, the opposite…they should’ve been at home, having tea with mum and dad.” To send him away was, he says, “a crime”.
The cruelty of this system was deliberate, not accidental. Victorian Britons, believing that the battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing-fields of Eton, set about creating new fields and new Etons (each a “gimcrack copy” of it, wrote E.M. Forster) in order to mass produce the upper-middle classes. Children, removed from the “softening” influence of mothers, were put in uniform clothes, in uniform beds, in uniform dorms, where they spoke uniform vocabulary (“Topping! Pax! Sneak!”) with an increasingly uniform accent: the clipped tones of Received Pronunciation (rp) are thought to have emerged as part of this school-led standardisation of the upper-class self.
The empire might have been happy with the results, its children less so. Churchill, Orwell, C.S. Lewis—all write viciously, and brilliantly, about their schools. One of the best arguments in favour of boarding schools is the quality of the prose attacking them; one of the best arguments against is its content. As John Le Carré put it: “The British are known to be mad. But in the maiming of their privileged young, they are criminally insane.”