While reading on the history of Allahabad, and while talking to a few UP-ites who have been taught by luminaries like Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Durgananda Sinha, I stumbled upon this institution called the Kayastha Pathshala College. Founded in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Kayastha Pathshala was, to begin with, a school. Such was Kali Prasad’s zeal that when he died in 1886, he le
ft his estate for the benefit of the Pathshala. In 1895, it became an intermediate college. One of its early principals was the great Bengal-Renaissance gentleman, Ramananda Chatterjee. Chatterjee was an alumnus of the St.Xavier’s College in Calcutta. He moved to Allahabad in 1895—the very year Kayastha Pathshala had become an intermediate college. the most well known student of the Kayastha Pathshala was Harivansh Rai Bachchan. (Bachchan did his PhD in English Literature from Cambridge University. His guide was T.R.Henn and his research was on W.B.Yeats.) In his autobiography, Bachchan writes—‘Education in the Kayastha Pathshala was not a matter of academic study: attention was paid to character building…’ Dr Tara Chand, who was the principal of the Kayastha Pathshala College in the 1920s. Kayastha Pathshala intermediate college and university college along with The Pioneer, The Indian Press, and the Allahabad University laid the foundations of what was called the Oxford of the East—Allahabad. Yes, Allahabad is not just about the Nehrus and the Kumbh Mela (which is also a nineteenth century practice). It is also not so much about the Bachchans as it is about these instituions of learning and knowledge bearing.
