City Monument – Anglo Arabic Senior Secondary School, Ajmeri Gate

A Walled City institution.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

When stone is sewn into air, the two elements unite to become a jaali. Such a lattice screen makes a heavy structure look light, as if a strong breeze might lift the structure any moment into the sky.

Some of the capital’s most exquisite jaalis lie preserved inside a Walled City school, where they frame the boundary of a centuries-old grave chamber.

Delhi’s oldest surviving educational institution, Anglo Arabic Senior Secondary School is a world of red sandstones and lakhori bricks, arched doorways and miniature chhatris. (One door has its wooden exterior etched into flowers.) It was also the subject of a scholarly book published two years ago by Oxford University Press—The School at Ajmeri Gate: Delhi’s Educational Legacy.

This afternoon, the school is teeming with hyperactive life. “Mister Sufiyan” and “Miss Javeria,” both class 12 students, are playing badminton near the principal’s office, while others are involved in the customary school-hour action.

The large premises is full of grand trees, including two chir pines, rare in Delhi. A two-storey edifice in the corner, partly raided by a dense green vine, is invoking a kind of magic-realism encountered in the novels of García Márquez and Isabelle Allende. Talking of literature, printed flyers are plastered on the school walls asking students to “submit their stories, poems, essays in Urdu & Hindi to Mr. Mohd Imran, and in English to Mrs. Saba Rehman… write-ups should be original.”

The centrepiece of the school’s architectural history is the red sandstone mosque. It was built by Ghaziuddin Khan, who founded the school as an madrasa in 1692 (he was the father of Hyderabad’s first nizam). The aforementioned tomb chamber, surrounded by the gossamer-like jaali, happens to be Ghaziuddin’s resting place, and lies beside the mosque. This stone enclosure overlooks the windows of class 10 B (very friendly but very noisy boys!) See photo.

The school’s most impressionistic portion is a long corridor embellished with a series of smoothly sculpted arches. These graceful arches give a peculiar character to the corridor, permeating it with a vague sense of retrospection. As if the air inside is mournfully remembering the school’s past, perhaps desiring the resurrection of…. of men like Yunus Jaffrey, Naseem Changezi, Haji Miyan Faiyazuddin and Abdul Sattar. These departed figures were among Old Delhi’s most illustrious Purani Dilli wale, and they all were Anglo Arabic’s “old boys.”

School in history