Chandigarh: The recent dedication of a classroom at Aitchison College in Lahore to former alumnus Harcharan Singh Brar, the late chief minister of (East) Punjab, serves as a reminder of the institution’s extraordinary historical reach across the province’s fractured political geography, brutally divided in 1947.Brar, who was Punjab CM for some 15 months till late 1996 and died in Chandigarh in 2009 at the age of 87, spent 13 formative years at Aitchison Chiefs College, its original formal name, before graduating in 1943, just four years before Partition.Thursday’s tribute to Brar, a prominent Sikh leader whose roots lay in undivided Punjab, saw classroom no. 108 in Pakistan’s best-known public school dedicated to his memory. To many on both sides of Punjab’s partitioned border, this may appear little more than a token institutional gesture. Yet it points – however faintly – towards a deeper and increasingly eroded shared historical memory, recalling a world of manners, public service, social confidence and personal relationships that once transcended the political boundaries that divide the region today.A vast proportion of Punjabis – especially Sikhs in India below the age of 65 – are unlikely to be aware, if at all, of the history, influence and prestige surrounding Aitchison College and the singular place it once occupied in the social and educational landscape of undivided Punjab and much of northern India.However, to appreciate the significance of Aitchison’s gesture, one must first understand the near-legendary standing the institution once enjoyed. In the decades before Partition, it occupied a place in the public imagination far beyond that of an ordinary school, becoming synonymous with privilege, influence, academic excellence and social distinction among the native elite of northern British India.Even after the passing of the world that had created it, Aitchison’s reputation endured. As with many institutions associated with a vanished age, memory has tended to embellish its virtues while softening or obscuring some of its less flattering associations with hierarchy, privilege and colonial patronage.Yet, paradoxically, the passage of time has only deepened its mystique.For many older Punjabis, myself included, who grew up hearing stories from parents and relatives who had either attended Aitchison or moved within circles that included its alumni, the College symbolised a world of accomplishment, refinement and opportunity. Whether entirely deserved or partly enhanced by nostalgia, its standing acquired an almost mythical quality that few institutions in the subcontinent could match at the time.Growing up in Punjab during the 1950s and 1960s, many of us encountered former Aitchisonians – or knew of them by reputation. They were a varied lot: administrators, military officers, politicians, judges, diplomats, businessmen, public figures, landowners or simply polished, idle-rich members of the provincial elite. Their visibility in public life helped further sustain Aitchison’s near-talismanic standing.“Aitchison provided an education that extended well beyond the prescribed curriculum,” said Malavika Rajkotia, a New Delhi-based lawyer, whose late father, the agriculturist Jitinder Singh, attended the College in the early 1940s. Among his classmates was Akbar Bugti, the Baloch leader who was killed by the Pakistani Army in 2006.“It was a secular environment in which all faiths were respected, and students were treated fairly and impartially,” she said, adding that her father’s time at Aitchison definitively shaped the rest of his life.Founded in 1886 by the colonial administration and named after Punjab’s lieutenant-governor, Sir Charles Umpherston Aitchison, Lahore’s Chiefs’ College was one of a small network of similar elite institutions established across British India in the late 19th century. These included Mayo College in Ajmer (1875), Daly College in Indore (1870) and the Rajkumar Colleges at Rajkot in Gujarat (1870) and Raipur – earlier at Jabalpur (1882) – in present-day Chhattisgarh. Together, they were created to educate the sons of princes, nawabs, jagirdars, tribal chiefs and landed aristocrats.The designation “College” was itself borrowed from British educational practice. Like Eton College and Winchester College in England, these were schools rather than universities, but the title was intended to convey prestige, exclusivity and their role in preparing future rulers and leaders for positions of authority.Generations of Punjabis, myself included, grew up hearing stories of Aitchison’s sprawling grounds, imposing colonial architecture, distinguished faculty, rigorous instruction and exceptionally high standards of scholarship, discipline and personal conduct. Photo: Hhaarroonn/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0.What is little remembered today – and less often acknowledged – is that these schools in India formed part of a carefully conceived imperial strategy. The British had concluded, particularly after the upheaval of 1857, which shook the Raj and exposed the fragility of their suzerainty in India, that direct rule alone was insufficient to secure the subcontinent. The Empire faced an immutable reality: there were simply too few Britons to govern and dominate India’s vast geographical, social and political complexity.Even by the late 19th century, barely 60,000 to 80,000 Britons were attempting to govern a population approaching 300 million. The Empire, therefore, depended as much on collaboration as on coercion, and recognising the allies among India’s traditional elites, British administrators set about cultivating a class that could act as intermediaries between ruler and ruled, while remaining anchored within indigenous structures of authority.One of the principal outcomes of this strategy was the Chiefs’ College system, a strikingly effective, albeit deeply paternalistic, institutional innovation rooted in British patronage, an ingrained belief in Western cultural superiority and the prevailing imperial doctrine of the “White Man’s Burden”. Inspired by renowned British public schools, these Colleges were designed not merely to impart education but to cultivate a governing class intellectually and culturally comfortable within the colonial order.High-profile inmates were taught English literature, history and administration, but were equally immersed in British ideals of leadership, discipline, etiquette, public service and gentlemanly conduct. Cricket, polo, riding, debating and other pursuits associated with the Victorian ruling elite were viewed as integral to the development of character, leadership and social confidence, often carrying as much weight as academic study.Ideal graduates, after eight to ten years of instruction, spoke fluent English, understood modern English administrative methods, conversed with relative ease with colonial officials, managed their estates and institutions efficiently, and yet remained sufficiently rooted in local society to command legitimacy among their own people.Critics at the time, and many historians later, would dismiss these Colleges as ‘factories’ for producing “brown Englishmen”. The intellectual rationale for such an outcome had been articulated earlier in the century by Thomas Babington Macaulay, who served as law member of the Governor-General’s Council in India from 1834 to 1838 and played a pivotal role in shaping colonial education policy.Macaulay, who also played a key role in initiating the drafting of the Indian Penal Code, which has since been substantially revised and replaced in modern India, regarded much of traditional Indian literature, science and religious learning as being steeped in superstition and absurdities. He regarded Western knowledge as the universal benchmark of intellectual progress and advocated the emergence of a small Anglicised indigenous elite, envisaging a class of persons who would be “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, opinions, morals and intellect”.Several decades later, the respective Chiefs’ Colleges emerged as one of the most visible institutional expressions of this philosophy. Their graduates were expected to inhabit two worlds simultaneously: loyal participants in the imperial order and credible leaders within their own societies.The idealised product of Aitchison or any of the other Chiefs’ Colleges for decades was a maharaja, nawab or landed notable who could dine with a British governor, discuss politics and economics in English, oversee a modern bureaucracy, play polo on Saturday afternoon and still be accepted as an authentic local leader by his subjects. Such a figure for the Colonial administration was infinitely more useful to Empire than a mere imitation Englishman.Within this broader imperial educational framework, Aitchison College occupied a singular position among the select institutions established across India to nurture ‘imperial intermediaries’ upon whom British power became dependent.Drawing students primarily from across undivided Punjab, Sindh, Kashmir, Delhi, the North-West Frontier Province and numerous princely states, it became the premier educational institution of northern India and, arguably, the most influential school in Punjab, a province the British regarded as their crown jewel for its agricultural surplus and strategic military manpower in the two World Wars.Kindred institutions like Mayo College, Daly College (pictured here) and the Rajkumar Colleges, while still standing, have in their own way been reshaped by the contradictions of the societies they serve. Photo: Deepakraobhonsale/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0.Generations of Punjabis, myself included, whose families had migrated from Lahore and other parts of West Punjab in 1947, grew up hearing stories of Aitchison’s sprawling grounds, imposing colonial architecture, distinguished faculty, rigorous instruction and exceptionally high standards of scholarship, discipline and personal conduct.Like many institutions associated with a vanished age, memory has inevitably burnished Aitchison’s reputation over time, amplifying its virtues while softening its less flattering associations with privilege, hierarchy and colonial patronage. Yet, even allowing for such nostalgia, its stature was real for the generation of Punjabis who came of age before and immediately after Partition, when its name still carried an aura of distinction rarely matched by any other educational institution across the subcontinent.Aitchison, however, was by no means unique in this regard.Much the same aura surrounded Mayo College in Ajmer, perhaps the most celebrated of the other Chiefs’ Colleges, which marked its 150th anniversary last November – occupying an equally exalted position in the imagination of princely and aristocratic India.Like Aitchison, Mayo College, named after Richard Bourke, the 6th Earl of Mayo, who served as Viceroy of India from 1869 until his assassination in 1872, was far more than just a school; it was an institution that cultivated a distinctive social ethos, blending inherited aristocratic traditions with the values and assumptions of a colonial education.Personally, as an assistant master at Mayo College for some two years in the mid-1970s, I witnessed this world at first hand. A substantial proportion of the students at the time were scions of hoary Rajput royal families and other landed aristocracies, carrying with them traditions absorbed almost through osmosis, as much inherited as learned.Its grand and imposing marble and red sandstone main building and boarding houses give the entire 190-odd acre campus the feel of a small princely world in itself. In its early years, many students arrived from princely households with retinues of horses, elephants and attendants, reinforcing the ceremonial world from which they came. The boarding houses, each with its own traditions and identity, functioned in my time as tightly ordered communities shaped by discipline, ritual and hierarchy, blending princely inheritance with orderly schooling.The atmosphere of the school then bore the imprint of its late-colonial origins, where etiquette, dress and ritualised conduct were regarded as being as important to character formation as classroom instruction. Wearing different coloured safas for dinner and formal occasions, together with Jodhpurs and bandhgala jackets, was compulsory, reinforcing a codified sense of discipline, status and belonging.All dining room meals followed strict decorum – table manners were closely observed, and conversation and behaviour were measured and restrained, reflecting a carefully cultivated ethos of refinement.Sports remained central to the school’s identity, echoing traditions of many of the families it served, and more recently, horse-riding too has been reintroduced. Inter-house rivalries, ceremonial assemblies and an elaborate code of conduct further sustained a culture that prized honour, probity and above all, decency.These traditions, in varying degrees, were mirrored in institutions like Daly College – founded in 1870 by General Sir Henry Dermot Daly, then agent to the Governor-General for Central India – and the Rajkumar Colleges, where similar blends of aristocratic inheritance and colonial educational practice continued to shape student life long after independence.Collectively, the influence of these schools was measured not merely by their academic reputation but by the prominence of their alumni, many of whom went on to occupy leading positions in government, the military, business and public life across the country.In that context, Aitchison College’s decision to honour Brar is more than a ceremonial tribute. It reaches back to a time when British-created educational networks once bound together a shared elite world across undivided India, before Partition abruptly shattered that world and scattered its alumni across newly drawn and violent borders, breaking a shared order that had once quietly held them together.Kindred institutions like Mayo College, Daly College and the Rajkumar Colleges, while still standing, have in their own way been reshaped by the contradictions of the societies they serve, marking the slow unravelling of that earlier value-driven world from within.