Rex Vijayan Scholarship College — 1870s ((link))

7:00 AM: One handful of rice. One cup of buttermilk. The older boys say that Vijayan once made a boy eat his own slate for complaining. I believe them.

And the Raj could not afford to ban its own future clerks. The Rex Vijayan Scholarship College still stands today (now a coeducational engineering college), but its 1870s golden age remains a legend. Of the 143 scholars who passed through its gates that decade, 41 became district judges, 22 were elected to provincial legislatures, and 9 were hanged by the Crown for sedition. All of them, the hanged men included, continued to pay their 20% tithe until the trust was dissolved in 1947. rex vijayan scholarship college 1870s

The inspector—a Mr. Algernon Ffolkes of Balliol College, Oxford—failed spectacularly. He could not translate a simple Greek epigram. He did not know that the square root of 2 is irrational. And when asked to name three botanical families native to the Malabar coast, he said “rose, daisy… and perhaps the banyan?” 7:00 AM: One handful of rice

Critics called it indentured learning. Vijayan called it “skin in the game.” I believe them