India’s premier boys boarding schools 2019-20

India’s globally famous vintage boys boarding schools such as Doon, Mayo, Bishop Cotton, Shimla, St. Paul’s Darjeeling are popular as ever with the country’s aspirational new middle class. According to some education savants, single-sex boarding schools are going out of fashion as they’re not quite in keeping with the gender-egalitarian temper of the new millennium. But by all indications, 21st century India is not in step with global trends and norms. India’s globally famous vintage boys’ boarding schools such as Doon, Mayo, Bishop Cotton, Shimla, and St. Paul’s, Darjeeling, seem to be flourishing and are as popular as ever with the country’s aspirational new middle class which values the mix of high-quality academic, co-curricular and sports education they provide in cool climes and unpolluted environments. This is testified by the huge number of admission applications top-ranked legacy boarding schools — modelled on the famously tough boys boarding schools of Victorian England — continue to receive at the start of every academic year. Most of them conduct mandatory written and viva voce entrance tests and are choosy about the boys they admit into their hallowed portals. Within the close-knit fraternity of the country’s top boys boarding schools — most of whom are institutional members of the low-profile but highly influential 77-strong Indian Public Schools Conference (estb.1939), — The Doon School, Dehradun (TDS, estb.1935) towers like a colossus and despite its relatively lesser vintage, has captured the imagination of post-independence India’s aspirational middle class. Promoted in 1935 by Satish Ranjan Das, a prominent Calcutta-based barrister, 84 years ago as a nationalist response to some British raj-era schools in India refusing admission to upper-class Indians, TDS’ first headmaster was an Englishman, Arthur E. Foot, a former science master at Britain’s famous Eton College (estb.1440). Since the early 1940s, this boys-only boarding school set within a 70-acre green campus in the equable climate of Dehradun has earned an enviable public reputation, particularly after Rajiv and Sanjay Gandhi, grandsons of Jawaharlal Nehru, were enrolled as students in the 1950s. Unsurprisingly, TDS has been ranked India’s #1 boys boarding school ab initio since the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) were introduced in 2007. However in recent years, TDS’ dominance has been challenged by several legacy all-boys boarding schools which have jettisoned the toxic bullying traditions of offspring of British army officers of the Raj era, one of whose favourite sports was to don special boots to kick native Indians. In 2014, Bishop Cotton Shimla was ranked the country’s #1 boys boarding school by that year’s sample respondents. This year, TDS is obliged to share the winner’s podium with The Scindia School, Gwalior (SSG), founded by the late Maharaja Mahadeo Scindia of Gwalior in 1897 as The Sardars’ School for the education of the progeny of the princely families of British India. Renamed The Scindia School in 1933, over the past half century it has evolved into a highly-respected private CBSE (Delhi) class VI-XII boys boarding school, which offers a carefully calibrated mix of contemporary digitally-enabled…