Cutting class

There’s no sacrifice parents will not make to give their children a better start in life. So, I wasn’t surprised to read in Stephen Glover’s column in London’s Daily Mail that “rich Chinese, Indians and Russians are queuing up to send their children to (Britain’s) best independent schools”. All three societies being in a state of flux, a sound grounding can make all the difference in later life.
A British public school education might even shape the new elite of India’s emerging meritocracy.
This is not quite the kind of education Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, was trying to hard-sell. But he need not fret that Indian boys rebuffed by the United Kingdom Border Agency will take their custom (and money — which is all he wants) to Australia, Canada or America. Himself an Old Etonian, Johnson can’t say it out loud but knows exactly why. The comparison reminds me of an elderly Englishman’s advice when I was trying to do my duty by my own son’s future. “Send him to England for education,” the Englishman said, “and then to America for training.”
But we are not talking of training or university studies. We are talking of secondary education, and the spurt in the popularity among Indians of traditional British public schools. Their annual fees are in the region of £40,000. That’s an awesome `35 lakhs. Indians from India constitute the largest single group in Singapore’s United World College, which charges `9 lakhs annually.
Indian businessmen who send their sons to these places are sometimes themselves Hindi-speaking and have barely gone to school. That’s all the more reason why they want their sons to enjoy advantages they didn’t have. They know, to quote Glover, that Britain’s public schools “are the finest in the world”.
Several questions arise in my mind. I wonder if hallowed Indian schools like Doon, Mayo, St. Paul’s (Darjeeling), and Sanawar, to say nothing of the older Anglo-Indian institutions, are losing their appeal for the emerging elite. If so, is it because their standards have fallen or is British schooling another aspect of globalisation? Is it, perhaps, a variant of V.S. Naipaul’s “craze for phoren”?
I also wonder what the Indian alumni of stately British schools do afterwards. If they go on to Oxford and Cambridge, do they find ways and means of staying on in Britain afterwards? Or would a Marwari Etonian or Punjabi Old Rugbeian come back and put his privileged schooling to work in India?
One immediately thinks of Jawaharlal Nehru in this connection because everyone makes heavy weather of his time at Harrow. But Sri Aurobindo did his entire schooling at London’s elite St. Paul’s School. Mohan Kumaramangalam and his brothers were Etonians, Madhavrao Scindia a Wykehamist. His Nepalese brother-in-law, Pashupati Shumshere Jung Bahadur Rana, went to Haileybury, where the East India Company groomed Indian civil servants.
Though only seven per cent of British children go to public school, their influence is disproportionately high. Dame Helen Ghosh, the seniormost woman civil servant with several firsts to her credit who is now director-general of the National Trust (the Ghosh comes from her Bengali husband), accuses Prime Minister David Cameron of governing through “an Old Etonian clique” that excludes women. A survey shows that 12 per cent of 8,000 people in the public eye went to one of the top 10 schools. They account for 63 per cent of leading lawyers, 60 per cent of military officers and 59 per cent of prominent businessmen.
However, another poll suggests that 57 per cent of British families (average annual income of under £20,000) would send their children to public schools if they could afford to. This should set at rest fears of class war erupting because public school boys are powerful. After all, no one destroys what everyone wants. That only happens in societies where aspiration and reality are so far apart there is no chance of the twain ever meeting. That’s how things were in pre-revolution France and Russia. That’s how they might be here too if supremacy were based only on immutable caste. A shudra can’t become a brahmin. But the Ambanis, Lakshmi Mittal and the Hinduja brothers remind us that people in modest circumstances can acquire riches.
India is experiencing a social revolution. A telephone was an achievement in my childhood. Other status symbols like refrigerator, car, TV and washing machine followed. To be England-returned (vilayat-pherat in my native Bengali) meant studies at a British university. It was an asset to be flaunted on the marriage and employment marts. Those who affected Western ways without visiting England were derided as BNGS (vilayat na giye sahib).
The definition of vilayat was expanded to embrace America. Now, there’s a chance that the original meaning might be restored, and vilayat-pherat also include Indians schooled in Britain. It could in time usher in a new elite, a sort of extension of the Oxford and Cambridge Society whose members are in more decision-making positions (the prime ministership at the pinnacle) than many might guess. But it won’t be an unattainable elitism like the brahmincal order or the invisible U class (as opposed to Non-U) of Nancy Mitford’s Britain.
Not everyone can aspire to live in a fantasy skyscraper in Mumbai or hire Versailles for a wedding. But given the opportunities that globalisation is opening up, more and more enterprising Indians can hope to make enough money to send a son or daughter to a prestigious school in England or Singapore. In fact, I know a shopkeeper in Mumbai whose Indian English betrays no sign of his Marlborough schooling. His young daughter is now studying at the fashionable Cheltenham Ladies College. Father and daughter are 100 per cent desi, yaar!

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author