“Inside the Gilded Classroom: How Imported Boarding Schools Are Redrawing India’s Educational Map”, Brhat, October 13, 2025
“When I first visited the campus of a newly opened “British-style boarding school” on the periphery of an Indian city, I found myself walking under archways, across manicured lawns, and among quadrangle facades that evoked English public schools. The students wore ties, blazers, and crisp uniforms; in assembly, they sang anthems; the founder’s portrait hung in the foyer. The visual language seemed borrowed from novels, from colonial nostalgia, from advertising. And yet, the families who enrolled there were not foreigners; they were locals, wanting not just schooling but a symbol.
This phenomenon, elite boarding schools with foreign branding planted in Indian soil, is now becoming more visible. But it is also playing out in various forms across Asia, Africa, and the Global South: in international schools, in hybrid boarding programs, in “prestige” schools that borrow symbols of foreign quality. Rather than treating these as isolated novelties, we must treat them as moments within a broader political economy of education, identity, inequality, and aspiration.
In what follows, I tell a story while also analyzing how these schools arise, what they do, why they matter, what comparative echoes we find (especially in China and other postcolonial societies), and how India might chart an alternative……”
Read full article at brhat.in
