In 1873, 152 years ago, Dharmarathnakara Rai Bahadur Arcot Narrainsawmy Mudaliar, known as the ‘merchant prince of Bengaluru’ founded the first free English primary school in Bengaluru on Commercial Street. In the following decades, Mudaliar would go on to start many more institutions focused on serving low income, first-generation learners from marginalised caste-class backgrounds for whom the barriers to accessing an education were sky high, including one for girls. It is to celebrate him and his vision that RBANM’s educational charities hosted their Founder’s Day celebrations on May 14, held at the newly-renovated Sabha, Kamaraj Road, which was once an RBANM school.
Advocate and RBANM’s secretary Arvind Narrain, walked an audience of Mudaliar’s family members, staff from RBANM’s institutions, and other guests through the founder’s journey of establishing schools, orphanages, and technical institutes at the ‘high noon of colonialism’. Narrain said, “The founder himself did not know English but understood the importance of an education in English. It [his institution] was the first place where Indians could learn English,” Interestingly, the first principal was social reformer and freedom fighter Bipin Chandra Pal, who was associated with the Brahmo Samaj. “Brahmo Samaj encouraged the education of women, campaigned for widow remarriage and was against the system of caste. In terms of his vision, the founder wanted a principal who embodied that way of thinking about education being for all people,” added Narrain.
In between addresses by the president of RBANM’s educational charities and prominent surgeon Dr Nandakumar Jairam and Narrain’s lecture, teachers from different institutions read original poems in Kannada, Tamil, and Hindi. An alumnus, Professor K Gnanamurthy, too, took to the stage to share his memories of studying at an RBANM’s institute in the ’50s. The event concluded on a musical note with researcher and musician Smitha Mudbi introducing the audience to the Yellama folk tradition practised in several regions of North Karnataka by the jogathi community of trans women, through song and storytelling set to the sound of the ‘chowdki’, a stringed folk instrument. Introducing her,
Sahana Das, director of RBANM’s First Grade College, said, “Society is defined by culture but when you look back, you realise culture has its own politics and so much of what we revere excludes many other forms of poetry and performances. So I thought it was appropriate, in paying tribute to the founder on his birthday, we have a small performance of a folk tradition, sincerely researched and beautifully presented by Shilpa Mudbi. The yellamma tradition is not only by people who are marginalised and almost forgotten but are also trans and therefore, have another layer of discrimination and hardship.”