Pre-Partition Era Schools and Education in Bhera:

With special emphasis on

Kirpa Ram Anglo-Sanskrit High School

Gian Sarup

gsarup@verizon.net

Since the early years of the twentieth century, Bhera was well known in Shahpur-Sargodha and adjacent districts for its excellent schools. Its high schools kept sending every year their bright contingents of matriculates to various colleges in Lahore for higher education, further fortifying their academic reputation. The town had two high schools, the King George High School and the Kirpa Ram Anglo-Sanskrit High School. Both the schools are mentioned in the entry on Bhera in the 1908 edition of The Imperial Gazetteer of India (Volume VIII): “The town possesses an Anglo-vernacular high school [K.G. High School, popularly known as Government School}, managed by the Educational Department and an unaided Anglo-Sanskrit high school [commonly known as the Arya School], besides a Government dispensary” (1908, p. 100). Both the schools were the recognized institutions of the Punjab University. Inspection teams from the Punjab Education department used to visit the schools annually to check on their educational performance.

The King George High School (the Government School) had a well-planned campus. Its buildings for classrooms and laboratories (the labs had running water) were spacious and well-equipped. I got to see the Government school when I took there my Vernacular Final examinations (in addition to my Arya School’s exam for the 8^th class) in early 1947 with three other students from our school. By comparison, the Arya school buildings were simple structures. However, its library building was relatively new and bright. The last building to get built on the Arya school campus was the Gymnasium Hall for physical education. The school, which ceased to exist in August 1947, once had a large campus with scores of classrooms, science laboratories, offices, a large assembly hall with a high ceiling, a Persian water well, a small garden, a boarding house (hostel), a central playground, and a second playground (near Bhera’s one-room postmortem theatre, “didh-phaad”). The school was founded by Kirpa Ram Sahni’s family from Bhera who had settled in Rawalpindi and ran two well-known Kirpa Ram Bros. Department Stores of the pre-partition days in Rawalpindi and Murree (after the partition, the family started a store in Shimla). As a private institution, the Arya School was not entitled to any financial support from the Education Department for additions to its physical plant. After the country’s partition, its buildings along the main road appear to have been turned into residences. When my younger brother visited Bhera in 1978, he found the Gymnasium as the only structure being used for educational purposes. It had been converted into a primary school or a madrassa. The hostel building next to the Gymnasium was not there any more.

To the best of my knowledge there was little interaction between the town’s two high schools in the pre-partition era. Each school largely minded its own business. In the early nineteen-forties I had watched our Arya school team playing field hockey matches against the teams from Miani and Malakwal schools. But matches between the teams of our two local schools were rather rare. The students in each school had little or no idea of how well students in the other school were doing in the university examinations. Yet students in each school assumed that their school had better results in the university exams than the other school. It was perhaps our sense of school loyalty that made us see things that way, even when we had precious little information about the academic performance of the other school.

Kirpa Ram Anglo-Sanskrit High School enjoyed a solid academic reputation based on its students’ performance in the exams conducted by Punjab University. Thousands of students from all over the undivided province used to appear at the end of their ten years of schooling for the Punjab University Matriculation Examinations. The pass rate of the Arya school students was high. Almost every year, some of its students ranked among the top positions in the university. Around 1939, one of its students, Satgur Piyarey, from Kot Momin stood first in the university. He secured 792 (93.2%) marks out of a total of 850. Lest the achievements of this caliber be dismissed as no big deal in this day and age of in-house evaluations, objective (true-false, multiple-choice) tests, and perfect scores, we need to know the kind of centralized, province-wide, and essay-format examination system we had in place in those times.

A major feature of the university’s examination system for high school matriculation was to exclude teachers from serving as examiners for students from their own schools. All evaluations were external in these exams. The reason for this policy was to preclude favoritism and obtain a measure of objectivity in grading across thousands of schools all over the province. The university had an elaborate set of procedures to implement its policy of external evaluations and to insure uniform criteria of assessment for all schools in the province (see Note 1).

The teachers on the staff of K.R.A.S. High School were a distinguished faculty. Many of them were recipients of gold medals from the University for topping in their subjects for their Bachelor degree exams. Until 1944, Mr. Harvansh Lal Vohra was the school’s headmaster. He had a very impressive personality for an administrator who commanded immense respect from the school’s teachers and students alike. When he left the school to accept a similar position in Lyallpur, he was succeeded by Mr. Pindi Das Chopra who had already served as the Second Master of the school for many a year. After the partition, both Harvansh Lal Vohra and Pindi Das Chopra worked as teachers and school administrators in New Delhi schools. It made it easier for the Arya School’s old-time matriculates (high school graduates) in Delhi to get their “character certificates” from these two ex-headmasters. Such certificates were often required in support of applications for jobs and admission to colleges. Among the teachers who were on the staff of the Arya school until the partition were Mahasha Hans Raj (Math), Master Kundan Lal Vij (History & Geography), Master Kundan Lal (Persian), Bakhshi Ram Rakha Mal (English), Master Teerath Ram (Drawing), Mr. Joginder Nath Kapur (Physics & Chemistry), Kazi Saheb (Urdu), Master K. L. Choudhary (Physical Training/Education), Master ? Khanna (Math) who was the author of a series of popular books, titled “Algebra without Tears,” “Geometry without Tears”, etc. I cannot get the name of a young science teacher who came to Bhera in 1945/46 from a big city and introduced the game of cricket to a group of students in our school (see Note 2).

The Government (King George) High School had a large and equally distinguished teaching staff, led by Wali Mohammad Saheb, the Headmaster. Among its teachers in 1947 were: Master Ahmad Khan (English), Pandit Ghegi Ram (Hindi and Sanskrit), Maulvi Zubair Saheb (Arabic and Persian), Master Farman Shah (Math.), Master Mulakh Raj (Math.), Master Faqir Chand (English), Master Hans Raj (History), Qazi Sadeeq Saheb (English), and Master Mohammad Fazal Ilahi (Drawing). These names of the faculty members were kindly shared by the late Mohammad Fazal Ilahi Saheb’s son, Hamid Ullah Malik, a student of Class VIII in August 1947. Two of these faculty members, Masters Mulakh Raj and Faqir Chand had previously taught in the Arya School. .

Most teachers kept their teaching strictly limited to the subject matter of their courses, but a few went beyond the syllabi to talk about life in general. Master Pindi Das Chopra, a mathematics teacher and a staunch Arya Samajist, often lectured on the irrationality of common superstitions. In that part of the world, a cat crossing one’s way to any important task was considered a bad omen for failure. He used to tell his students that poor preparation for a task was a more credible cause for our failures than a poor cat crossing the street. He would recount his own experience when a cat happened to cross his way when he stepped out of his hostel room in Lahore to take his B.A. Mathematics final exam. He not only passed the mathematics exam, but also topped in the entire university that year. “Had more than one cat crossed my path that day, it would have helped me to set the university record,” he averred. In our sixth class, Master Kundan Lal Vij, another Arya Samajist, once questioned the efficacy of excessive praying. He told our class that we, Hindus, were essentially pestering God by praying to Him day and night. We toll the temple bells at all hours; we chant loudly with drums all night long in our vigils (jagrans), and we never tire of reciting the ever-multiplying names of our gods, etc. No wonder, God was very unhappy with us; we were getting on His nerves. God was not going to grant us the things we seek from Him. By contrast, look at the Englishmen. They pray only once a week; that too, for a few hours when they go to their churches on Sundays. God grants them every thing. He is pleased with their measured worship! Although Master Kundan Lal Vij’s exhortation had more rhetoric than logic (see Note 3), his eloquent strictures were nevertheless a liberating influence on some of us.

Corporal punishment was quite common in the schools from class I through class VIII while it was far less frequently dispensed in the 9th and 10th classes. In our primary school, a fairly common form of punishment was to order a student to “turn into” a murgha (a rooster). It was a cruel punishment which involved making you squat on your feet (without allowing your buttocks to touch the ground), bending your torso forward to bring your head between your knees, and then looping your arms from behind and through the bent legs to hold on to your ears with your hands. After a few minutes in this posture, legs would start shaking and then hurting. One had to continue sitting in this posture until the teacher told you that your punishment was over. The only saving grace for this form of punishment was that you were not asked to crow like a rooster! In all probability these teachers were not sadists; they were simply living up to the prevalent belief that punishment alone can make children mend their ways. These teachers ended up instilling more fear than respect for themselves in the minds of their students.

In the Arya high school (Classes V through X), one teacher who taught us arithmetic in the V and VI classes always carried a small, slender cane with him when he went from one classroom to another. The punishment he meted out to the students who failed to do their homework was to hit them with his cane on their open palms. He used to describe his strikes as laddu-perrai (two common Indian sweets/desserts) and ordered us to outstretch one hand to receive the “just deserts” (and also the “desserts”) for skipping on our homework! Of course he was generous enough to let us alternate our hands for receiving the full quota of his bountiful strikes. Teachers like him believed that they had to personally inflict the torture to make the punishment effective. In the Government school a teacher, who taught English in the 5-th class, was very particular about good handwriting. If a student’s handwriting did not come up to his standards, he would punish the student by putting a pen between his two fingers and then squeezing tight the “pen-between-the-fingers” vise. By contrast, a sixth-class teacher in the Arya School found it onerous to personally slap a student for failing to correctly translate Urdu sentences in English or vice versa. Instead, he would ask the student monitor to administer the specified number of slaps to the “defaulting” student for him.

The town’s Muslim students generally preferred to attend the Govt. School, just as Hindu and Sikh students were gravitated to the Arya School. Not very many Hindu students attended the Government school which had virtually become a “Muslim” institution by default. Likewise, very few Muslim students attended the Arya School. I had only three Muslim students for my class-fellows in the Fifth through Eighth classes in the Arya School. Nazir Ahmad was the son of an official (aihl-kar) of the Bhera Sub-Tehsil Court, Ghulam Jillani was the grandson of our school’s senior gardener, and Allah Ditta Baloch happened to be a neighbor of our school’s Second Master. In our seventh class we came to have another Muslim student, Masood, who was the son of the town’s newly arrived Tehsildar.

Although the Kirpa Ram Anglo Sanskrit Shool was an Arya Samajist institution, its religious orientation did not express itself beyond the prayer song at the start of classes in the morning. One class-period a week in the school’s time-table was reserved for Ved Paath (Recital of the Vedas). Attendance in the morning prayers and the Ved-Paath classes was not required for non-Hindu students. But, the class never met for the Hindus. During my four years of studentship in the school from 1943-1947, I did not find a single class meeting for Ved Paath to attend.

Even with very few Hindu students on its rolls, the Government school had a teacher for its Hindi and Sanskrit classes. The Arya School had enough enrollments in its Urdu and Persian classes to have a Muslim teacher (Kazi Sahib) to teach us Urdu and a Hindu teacher, Kundan Lal, for instruction in Farsi (Persian). Besides being the medium of instruction, Urdu was a required subject for everyone up to the sixth class and an elective in the seventh through tenth class.

As late as 1940, generations of Hindu students from neighboring towns like Malakwal, Miani, Pind Dadan Khan, Phularwan, Bathuni, Kot Momin used to attend the Arya school and stay in its hostel on the school campus. Muslim students from the neighboring towns opted for the Government School and its hostel near the Civil Hospital in downtown Bhera. The Arya school hostel served only vegetarian food, while the Government School hostel residents had the staple offerings of non-vegetarian meals at the Naanbai eateries across the street. Most students living in either boarding house brought with them canisters full of desi ghee for use in preparing individual tarka bases for their lentil, vegetable, and meat dishes.

The relations between the two schools and for that matter between the town’s Muslim and Hindu/Sikh communities were not the least affected when two groups of students, one from each school, started having running skirmishes on the way to and back from their schools between 1943 and 1945. One group from the Government school was known as the party of Pirachas, and the other as Shubh’s party from the Arya School. Shubh’s party was headed by Shubh Sahni, while the Piracha’s party was led by one of the Piracha young men, probably Ehsan ul Haq Piracha who was at that time of the same age and in the same grade as Shubh Sahni’s. Sometimes there were pitched battles between the two groups, but more often there were instances of one group waylaying a lone member of the other group. They would beat each other up with sticks fashioned from the branches of Khaji palms. In one instance, bicycle chains were used to hurt each other. In another episode, a knife was flashed to ward off a charge from the antagonists. When an Arya school student was mistaken for Shubh Sahini, the poor fellow was chased by the Piracha group. The fathers of these two “party” leaders were influential persons in the town and knew each other quite well, but it is not known whether they were aware of the running strife between their sons. If they knew of it, they did not seem to consider the conflict as serious enough for them to intervene. Around 1945, the physical confrontations between the groups ceased suddenly and completely with the departure of the two young leaders for Lahore to pursue their higher studies in colleges there.

Back in those days, we did not have school uniforms in Bhera. Only boy scouts had them for their formal gatherings. Students in junior classes used to be dressed in knickers (shorts) and shirts, while the seniors mostly wore shalwar-kamiz or pajama-kamiz outfits. No students wore pants to their schools. The young men who went to attend colleges in Lahore felt free to dress in pants there. On their return trips from Lahore to Bhera by train for vacations, those in pants switched to shalwar-kamiz at Malakwal Railway Junction before catching the train for Bhera.

Some sartorial changes were in the making, though. A few students had started wearing khaki sola hats (once worn by Englishmen in Africa) in summer, while turbans of the earlier years were becoming increasingly less common among students. Most preferred to stay bare-headed. Men of our father’s generation would not step out of the house without a turban or a cap on their head.

Peer pressure in Bhera discouraged students from talking in English in public. Anyone who dared speak in English was ridiculed as AngrezoN ki aulad (Progeny of Englishmen) and also labeled as Paada (a pompous snob). Even a convent-educated boy, Vinay Bhusahn Anand, had to switch to Punjabi from his fluent English when he joined our VII class in 1945. He came to Bhera from Rawalpindi to stay with his grandmother so as to continue his studies when his widower father, a Colonel, had to go to the front toward the end of Second World War.

Most students used to walk to their schools; a few used bicycles. Both the high schools were located outside of the walled city, close to the town’s railway station. It meant that some students who lived in the most western neighborhoods (e.g., PirachiaN da mohalla or ChopriaN di mandi) of the town had to walk at least three to four miles each way to get to their schools.

There were no shops or eateries near the Arya School, nor did the school have any canteen/cafeteria for students to buy refreshments. Almost all its students brought with them the lunch (flat breads, cooked vegetables, and pickles) their mothers prepared and packed for them. They could buy cooked chholay/channays (garbanzos/chick peas) from a vendor by the name of Dewan to eat with their prathas. Diwan used to bring a huge tray (chhabri) of his deliciously prepared white channays and set up his wares on a small mound in one corner of the school’s ground. Dewan’s counterpart in the Government school was Nadir Khan (Mama CholeyaN wala). He was known for his delectable Chikkar cholay (mushy garbanzos). After the country’s partition, Dewan Chand chholaian walle opened a regular shop in Chuna Mandi (near Imperial cinema, Pahar Ganj) in Delhi and had a thriving business far larger than he ever had in Bhera.

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Bhera had one or possibly two booksellers (near the town’s old hospital) and a couple of stationers. Old timers recall two names; some recall Bogha Ram as the owner’s name, while others remember Amar Nath Suri as the owner of the other or same book shop. Foremost among the town’s stationery shops was that of Ralla Ram’s in the main bazaar not far from the soda water shop of Ameen. You could buy notebooks, packaged ink powder, takhaties (flat wood tablets), pens (nib-holders), bronze-color “G”-nibs and zinc-color zed-nibs for writing in English, etc. For writing in Urdu, you needed a qalam fashioned from a reed. First, one had to chisel the reed with a sharp knife and then make a slanting cut at the chiseled end for good penmanship (khush-khati). In the early stages of learning how to write, pencils were used to outline Urdu and Hindi alphabet letters and words on takhaties to serve as blueprints for writing over (tracing) them with a qalam dipped in black Indian ink. We had to carry our inkpots with our satchels and takhaties to our primary school Classes I through IV. When we moved to the high school in class V, our desks had built-in inkpots which saved us from frequent ink spills on our clothes from the carry-on inkpots of our primary school days. Fountain pens were not allowed even for writing in notebooks; moreover the fountain pens (Parker, Swan) and the ink (Quink) were expensive in those days.

The town had two primary (Grade I through IV) schools and a few madrassas for boys. Besides the Kirpa Ram Primary School (the Arya Primary School) in MiaN da mohalla (near the SahniaN da mohalla), there was another primary school run by the town’s municipal committee in the western part of the town. The Arya primary school was essentially a feeder school for the Arya High school. It had an average enrollment of nearly 300 Hindu children, and had four teachers: Lorind Chand, Fourth-grade teacher and Headmaster; Channan Shah, Third-Grade teacher; Diwan Chand, Second-Grade teacher; and Darshan Singh, First-Grade teacher. On the day of my admission to the first grade, my father introduced me to Master Darshan Singh, gave him by way of tradition a tray full of sweets (batashas), and then stayed for a while in the classroom to make me feel “at home.” After he left, I kept crying until Master Darshan Singh shouted at me to shut up!

Our Arya primary school had a small compound surrounded by four large classrooms, one for each class level. The compound was large enough for the morning assembly for a prayer song, but was never used for any games for the young children. In any case, games were never a part of, nor were they ever a needed diversion from, the school’s daily curriculum. In one corner of the compound there were two or three hand-pumps for students to drink water from and to wash their takhaties and to apply a thin layer of gaachi mud thereon. None of the classrooms had any desks; instead each had jute-runners laid as parallel rows for students to sit on. We had to carry our inkpots on us to the school along with our books wrapped in a square piece of cloth (basta). In our first class, we had to learn to count up to hundred and master the Urdu alphabet and a few words from our Qaeda, a slender first-reader. Those were the times when the word, Qaeda, only meant a primer for us.

The town also had a middle school (Grades I through VIII) for girls (Putri Pathshalla: “School for Daughters”) near the Ganj Mandi and SahniaN da mohalla. Its students were Hindu and Sikh girls. There was also a Khalsa primary school for girls, named after one of the Sikh gurus. It was located in a street off the road between the Chitti puli wala darwaza and Jethu di khui. Its students were also Sikh and Hindu girls. Punjabi in Gurmukhi script was taught in this school. The younger of our two sisters was a teacher in this school for a while before her marriage. She had attended the Normal Teaching Course in Gujarat after completing her eighth class from Bhera’s Girls middle school.

Although the Arya high school was a school for boys, it did admit a few female students from time to time. Because the school for the Hindu girls in Bhera was only a middle school, the Arya school offered opportunities for high school education to the girls whose parents wanted them to continue their education beyond the 8th grade. At one point in time around 1943, there were four female students who as a group attended the school’s 9th and 10th year classes. This cohort of young ladies included: Mohini Vohra or Pushpa Vohra, one of the two daughters of the school’s headmaster (Mr. Harvansh Lal Vohra); Swarna, the daughter of Dewan Inder Raj Sahni; Mohinder Kaur, the daughter of the then Railway Station Master of Bhera; and Kamala (Anand) Malik, daughter of Malik Suraj Kaul (Anand), Honorary Magistrate of Bhera. (Kamala was later married into a big land-owning Sahni family of Salam near Bhera, became Mrs. Kamala Sahni, and stayed back with her in-laws family in Pakistan). These four students were probably the first (and certainly the last) batch of pioneering girls to matriculate from the Arya school.

Occasionally there would be one or two girls in the Arya high school’s junior classes as well. When I was in my fifth class, we had the younger daughter of the newly arrived Station Master of Bhera as a student in our class. She was assigned a two-seat desk for her individual use in the classroom, because no boy was allowed to sit next/close to her. This Hindu girl’s primary education had been in Urdu because of the towns where her father had been posted earlier. She did not know how to read and write Hindi well enough to get admitted to Bhera’s middle school for girls where Hindi was the medium of education. The Urdu medium of instruction at our Arya high school suited her background for continuing her education in Bhera. Also, one section of the 7th class in 1945-46 had two female students, one of whom was the daughter of the school’s Head Clerk (Office Superintendent). There is a sad story of a young boy, an eighth-grader who fell in love with this pretty girl.

The parents of this boy, Sant Ram, had moved from Bathuni to Bhera a few years earlier and his father had set up a successful business as a cloth merchant in Guru Bazaar. Sant Ram was the only child of his parents. He was a good looking fellow with a muscular built, but had a stammering problem. He was older in years and socially more mature than other students in our VIII class. His family had moved in the Chhota SethiaN da mohalla where the school’s Office Superintendent also lived with his family. The two families got to know each other as neighbors. Initially the parents of the 7th class girl did not mind when Sant Ram started escorting the girl each morning from the mohalla to our school, but at some point in time the girl’s parents put a stop to this routine. The girl’s father started bringing his daughter with him to the school.

One day in the winter of 1946, our Urdu class met in the sun on the school’s play ground. Much to other students’ surprise, Sant Ram started discussing with our Urdu teacher as to what a lover (Aashiq) is supposed to do in the event of a forced separation from his beloved (Mashooq)? Sant Ram alluded to the story of Heer Ranjha. Most of us felt uneasy by this discussion in the class as we were not supposed to talk with our teachers about girls and love. After awhile, we noticed Sant Ram lie down on the ground and doze off. At about the same time we were perplexed to see a tonga (the horse-driven two-wheeled carriage) speeding toward our open-air class on the school ground. The moment the tonga came to a stop, Sant Ram’s father along with Hari Om Bhusari, a neighbor and friend of Sant Ram, jumped down from the tonga and speedily lifted and carried a limp Sant Ram in the tonga and sped away. We learned later through hush-hush rumors that Sant Ram had swallowed a lot of opium to commit suicide. The doctors were able to flush the opium from his system and save his life, and his parents were able to save Sant Ram on grounds of insanity from being arrested by police for his suicide attempt. He never returned to our school. Several months later, one night he barged into our Mohalla in a state of utter delirium, shouting things that made no sense. Unkind people accused him (though, not on his face) of acting crazy to “authenticate” his claim for being insane. Such were the perils of a coeducational encounter in those days!

Few of us saw it coming, but an unsung finale was imminent for the Kirpa Ram Anglo-Sanskrit School. When its classes were dismissed for summer vacations in May 1947, none of us thought that the school would never reopen. By mid-August the circumstances had moved fast and taken a grim turn that ended in the exile of the town’s entire community of Hindus and Sikhs. The community the school used to serve had to leave the town en masse and the school instantly ceased to function (woh shaakh he na rahi jis peh aashiana tha). After half a century of its educational mission in Bhera, this institution, a precious gift from the Kirpa Ram Brothers to the people of their ancestral town, had to be abandoned without a farewell. At about the same time, the town’s three other educational institutions, Putri/Kanaya Pathshala (Girls middle school), the Arya Primary School for boys, and the Khalsa Primary School for Girls also expired in unison to mark the end of an era!

(This article is to be found along with other articles on related topics at: www.bhera.com)

NOTES

Note 1. Each examination center had a Superintendent (usually the school’s headmaster) and a number of teachers acting as invigilators (proctors) who took their role very seriously. On any given day of examination, the first task of the Superintendent was to open in the presence of at least two invigilators the sealed packages of question papers for various subjects. The invigilators had to attest that the university seal embossed in lac (maroon resin) was intact before the package was opened in their presence. Question papers for each subject had been set earlier by a confidentially appointed head-examiner somewhere in Punjab, printed in the university’s security press, and dispatched by the university in sealed packages to the Superintendents of Examination Centers in schools. After the invigilators had distributed the question papers along with answer books to the examinees, their main task started; they had to be vigilant against possible cheating to stop it. Some students tried to sneak in crib notes and employed other techniques to cheat, but the invigilators often caught them red-handed. The punishment for cheating led to an overall fail and also a disqualification from appearing in the next year’s exams. Students’ written answers for each exam were sent to the university which in turn forwarded them (with a superimposed confidential roll number for each examinee) to its duly appointed examiners in schools of other towns. Their evaluations were then centrally compiled by the university for each candidate after restoring his/her original roll number at this stage. The final results (each examinee’s total marks out of 850) were published in English language newspapers like the Tribune. There used to be a lot of anticipatory excitement (to be followed by quite a few heart breaks) in each town on the day results were published and the newspaper arrived.

A score of 510 (60%) marks (or higher) placed a candidate in First Division; marks falling between 420 (50%) and 509 earned a Second Division; marks between 340 (40%) and 419, a Third Division; and any score of less than 340 marks was a Fail. Failure in either English or Mathematics also brought an overall Fail, regardless of how well one had done in other subjects. A sizable percentage of students used to fail each year. Except in Mathematics and classical languages like Persian and Sanskrit in which one could earn a 100% score, there were guidelines from the university to the examiners on the approximate percentage of students who could be awarded 60% or higher marks in other courses. If you wrote an English-essay worthy of publication in a magazine, you would be lucky if you earned a score of 70 out of 100 under the university guidelines from a distant, unknown examiner. Exam answers in other subjects used to be in the form of essays that afforded enough latitude to the examiners for complying with the university’s guidelines for “divisions” in grading.

Note 2: The game of cricket had earlier connections in Bhera. In an article titled, Bhera, in the April 2002 issue of Urdu Digest on Tourism in Pakistan, we are told that Dr. Kishan Singh Bedi, father of the ex. Skipper Bishan Singh Bedi of India’s cricket team, introduced the game in Bhera when he served as Surgeon in the town’s Civil Hospital. Likewise, Lala Devi Das, father of the well-known Indian cricket figure Lala Amar Nath, was a Science teacher in the Government High School of Bhera (p. 351). The article was made available to the author by Kalim Malik.

Note 3. Pushing his argument further for an inverse relationship between praying and its dividends (the more you pray, the less you get; or the less you pray, the more you get from God in life), Master Kundan Lal Vij used to ask us, “Do you ever wonder why we get famines in India while they do not in England?” Now he never mentioned the terrible famines that took place in neighboring Ireland. Following his thesis, he would have argued that famines afflicted Ireland more often than they visited England, because the Irish prayed longer and more often than did the English! It never occurred to Vij sahib that the high incidence of misfortunes may cause people to pray more often!