The Schoolhouse on the Ganga I Never Saw

My grandfather Guruswami was one of the first civil engineers to come out of Guindy — the College of Engineering, Madras — in a generation when that meant something specific. India was being wired and bridged and tracked by a small cohort of Indian engineers working under British firms, and the work took them wherever the work was. For Guruswami through the late 1930s, the work was the Howrah Bridge. Braithwaite, Burn and Jessop Construction Company — known in the family simply as Jessop — was riveting twenty-six thousand tons of steel into a cantilever span across the Hooghly, in three eight-hour shifts, racing the war. He was on it.

That is why the four children ended up at Rajghat.

Guruswami and my grandmother Vedambal had four to raise — Jayam and Moham, the two older sisters, then Paddu, my father, then Chotu, the youngest, whose home-name simply meant little one — and a profession that placed the family in whatever remote site the bridge or the railway or the dam required. Day school was not possible. Boarding school was the only answer. They placed all four in the same hostel at Rajghat Besant School on the banks of the Ganga at Benaras, and the children came home for summers and returned to Rajghat for the rest of the year, through high school.

I learned this in pieces, the way one learns most family facts — late, by accident, when something else was being discussed. My father had mentioned Rajghat over the years the way people mention the weather, without ever explaining what it was. It was just where he went to school. The way some people went to St. Stephen’s or Doon. It took me decades to understand that Rajghat was not that kind of school at all — and longer still to understand that the choice was not really a choice. It was a logistical answer to a working engineer’s problem. The formation came afterward, as a gift no one had purchased.

There were three older children too — Cheenu, Ramu, and Vishu — who had grown past school age by the time the work travel intensified, and so were never part of the Rajghat cohort. Seven children, raised across two formations by the simple accident of when they had been born. The older three came up through the conventional south Indian route, then went into the major cities as adults — into the modern professional life that post-independence India was building, into accounting and the other services that the new institutions required. The younger four went north to the hostel. Same parents. Same household values. Same Iyer lineage. Two utterly different formations, imposed by the timing of when each child reached school age relative to the bridge work. That fact alone is worth holding onto, because it tells you that formation is something institutions deliver, not something parents transmit by intention.

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But Rajghat was the second formation, not the first.

Before the train north, the four younger children were raised in Thiruvidaimarudur, the agraharam in Thanjavur district that the family was from — Cauvery delta country, Mahalingaswamy temple, deep Chola lineage, ritual scholarship in the air. They were raised there by their grandmother. Her name was Savithri. Paati to the children. She fed them yoghurt rice that she had set the night before in a mud pot, kept cool overnight by the breath of water moving through clay walls, ready for them in the morning at exactly the temperature a child should eat in the heat of the Cauvery delta. Thayir sadam from a mann paanai — appropriate technology, in the deepest sense, before anyone had a phrase for it. Climate-responsive nourishment delivered by hand, by someone who loved them, in a village that had been doing it this way for two thousand years.

This is the formation that arrived first. Before Krishnamurti. Before the Ganga. The grandmother’s hand and the cool curd rice and the agraharam morning. The temple bells in the distance. The Tamil that was the language of food and prayer and ordinary life. The rhythm of a household where ritual marked the hours.

The village school they attended held its classes outside, in the sand, under the trees. The children carried slates. They sat on the ground. They recited multiplication tables aloud, and worked through math problems aloud, and the price of an error was a quick pinch of sand from the ground the child was sitting on, pressed onto the forearm or the thigh. A small piece of grit pushed into the skin. Then the recitation continued. The ground itself was the disciplinary instrument — the teacher reached down for what was already there. It was harsh but it was not cruel. The error was registered on the body, not on the child’s standing among the other children. There was no ranking. No comparison. No shame in front of the class. Just the pinch, the corrected answer, the next problem. Consequence without humiliation, which is something contemporary education has almost entirely lost. The body learned because the body had felt the cost of the error. By the time my father was eight or nine years old, the multiplication tables were in his fingertips. The Sanskrit recitations were in his throat. His body had been taught how to hold knowledge, even before he had been taught what to do with it.

Both were the village. Paati’s curd rice in the morning. The pinch of sand under the tree in the afternoon. The grandmother held both. The grandmother was both — the same hand that fed him cool yoghurt rice would also, when it came her turn to teach him a verse, expect it back word-perfect. The Cauvery delta had been forming children this way for two thousand years. Loved and disciplined in the same courtyard, fed and corrected by the same hands, the body enrolled as the medium of memory from the earliest age. This is the formation that arrived first. It is not the formation contemporary education would recognize as benevolent.