Kayastha Pathshala

In India, and especially in Bengal and the hills of Nainital, Simla and Mussoorie and the capital of Delhi, there is a great degree of nostalgia that veers around our alma-maters. The colonial institutions with their European collonades, white-skinned Indophile teachers and their illustrous alumni become a reference point in our careers—right from getting a job to a wife. The more local institutions face neglect. While reading on the history of Allahabad, and while talking to a few UP-ites who have been taught by luminaries like Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Durgananda Sinha, I stumbled upon this institution called the Kayastha Pathshala College. Founded in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Kayastha Pathshala was, to begin with, a school. A leading lawyer of Oudh, Munshi Kali Prasad Kulbhaskar, had established the school in 1873. It was born out of a zeal to position the kayasthas on a platform equivalent to that of the Bramhins. Such was Kali Prasad’s zeal that when he died in 1886, he left his estate for the benefit of the Pathshala. In 1895, it became an intermediate college. One of its early principals was the great Bengal-Renaissance gentleman, Ramananda Chatterjee. Chatterjee was an alumnus of the St.Xavier’s College in Calcutta. He moved to Allahabad in 1895—the very year Kayastha Pathshala had become an intermediate college. Ramananda Chatterjee would later go on to establish the Modern Review—a magazine that operated out of Calcutta. One of his students at the college was Narmadeshwar Upadhyaya—a member of the bar of the Allahabad High Court. Narmadeshwar, a lawyer by profession, wrote almost Dickensian prose. One can sample his writing by picking up The Last Bungalow: writings on Allahabad (ed.) Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.
Perhaps the most well known student of the Kayastha Pathshala was Harivansh Rai Bachchan. (Bachchan did his PhD in English Literature from Cambridge University. His guide was T.R.Henn and his research was on W.B.Yeats.) In his autobiography, Bachchan writes—‘Education in the Kayastha Pathshala was not a matter of academic study: attention was paid to character building…’. Elsewhere he writes: “Moving from the Unchamandi School to the Kayastha Pathshala High School was like moving from a pigeon-coop into the open air…..there were expansive grass lawns and maidans to play on…and for each subject there were separate teachers who would come to class at the hour shown on the time table.”
Vande Materam was the assembly song in the Pathshala. It had established its credentials as a nationalist institute quite early. Sociologically, the kayasthas are an intermediate caste given to clerical and literary pursuits. This was a caste that was best equipped to negotiate with the English on issues of power through the subterfuge of co-operation. The mutineer's radicalism was fraught with problems caste and religion. In fact, western education came to the plains of northern India only after the mutiny of 1857 had been quelled, Oudh and Agra had been united under a single province that would be called the United Provinces. The Kayastha Pathshala and the trust that ran this great educational endeavour ensured that Northern India made the essential transition in its politics from the feudal to the bourgeoisie. The baniyas and the kayasthas joined hands in Allahabad and Lucknow (unlike in Bihar where they rarely inter-married) and the Agarwalas and the Sinhas and Saxenas took the Indian middle class of Northern India to be the rulers of post-independence India. In fact the Kayastha Pathshala was the breeding ground of bhadralok (genteel) intellectual-ism that survived outside ninteenth century Calcutta. I do not agree with the many western sociologists like Christophe Jafferlot and Susan Baily that the Kayastha Pathshala was a casteist ghetto that functioned within the larger circumference of Hindu revivalist aspirations. I believe that the individual geniuses of its faculty and alumni are easily missed if such an analysis is allowed to acquire precedence over the more romantic history that needs to be preserved. The kayasthas were nationalist Hindus and both in Lucknow and Allahabad they ran publishing houses, educational institutes and newspapers, wrote poetry, and taught generations to come—tehzeeb. Interestingly, in 1916 there was a deliberation for separate representation for Hindus and Muslims in the United Provinces. While the Kashmiri Bramhins, Tej Sapru and Motilal Nehru supported separate representation, Kayasthas from eastern part of the UP also supported the bill. While it is easy to dub the oppsers as communal (and Brijnandan Prasad, was indeed communal) it is difficult to understand why Gokul Prasad who was a trustee of the Kayastha Pathshala needed to vote against the bill. He did not fear Muslim majority in the bar—many of his clients must have been Mohameddans. He was a member of the Hindu Sabha but to the extent that a trader or a lawyer could be—it was a social group that reaped professional rewards. I have a feeling that he did not want to dispute the leader of the group and had hardly any significant stake in the debate.

The first president of the Kayastha Pathshala trust was Munshi Hanuman Prasad. Hanuman Prasad belonged to that generation of self-made men who reminded us of the Renaissance gentlemen of sixteenth century. He had given up his job at the court of the Maharajah of Beneras following his differences with the ruler. He came to Agra and became a lawyer. When the court was established in Allahabad in 1866, he moved to Allahabad. Hanuman Prasad, learnt English when he was forty-five! Gokul Prasad was his grandson. He was the last honorary Vice-Chancellor of Allahabad University and before that a towering judge of the Allahabad High Court. (It was difficult in those days for non-Europeans to rise so high and natives with extraordinary judisprudence were allowed such positions). Another illustrous member of the same family was Munshi Ambika Prasad, whose saintly demeanor is legend in the annals of the bar of the Allahabad High Court. Munshi Ambika Prasad also served as the President of Kayastha Pathshala.
I shall end my post by talking of one Dr Tara Chand, who was the principal of the Kayastha Pathshala College in the 1920s. Rajeshwar Dayal, who was an illustrous civil servant, a member of the family to which Ravi Dayal—the great publisher who first published Amitav Ghosh and had brought academic publishing to Indian shores as the managing director of Oxford University Press, India—belonged, and who most importantly was Dag Hammerskjold’s special representative to Congo on behalf of the United Nations was Tara Chand’s student at the Kayastha Pathshala. Dayal, with his upper class origins hated his Kaystha Pathshala. In his autobiography, A Life in our Times, he writes of his intermediate college: “There was an air of langour and neglect about everything”. Yet, as he survived his intermediate in science barely managing a second class and went on to study at the Kayastha Pathshala University College he seemed to love his alma mater. He writes: ‘Dr. Tara Chand had moved over to be the head of the college. The new college attracted good students and athletes and soon acquired a fine reputation.” Tara Chand had his D.Phill from Oxford. He was scholar par excellance. In his work called Influence of Islam in Indian Culture , this enthusiastic scholar and educationist writes: “Indian culture is synthetic in character. It comprehends ideas of different orders. …. It eternally seeks to find a unity for the heterogenous elements which make up its totality. At worst its attempts end up in a mechanical juxtaposition, at best they succeed in evolving an organic system.” Tara Chand, an early-twentieth-century scholar, had a rare insight.

Kayastha Pathshala intermediate college and university college along with The Pioneer, The Indian Press, and the Allahabad University laid the foundations of what was called the Oxford of the East—Allahabad. Yes, Allahabad is not just about the Nehrus and the Kumbh Mela (which is also a nineteenth century practice). It is also not so much about the Bachchans as it is about these instituions of learning and knowledge bearing.