Rishi Valley School

Rishi Valley was born with the idea of starting a world university, conceptualized by Annie Besant, President of the Theosophical Society, in 1925. Three sites near Jiddu Krishnamurti's birthplace, Madanapalle were identified as possible locations for the school. At a site in Thettu Valley a big banyan tree attracted his notice and he built the school in the region surrounding the tree. [2]

In 1926, Jiddu Krishnamurti's colleague C.S. Trilokikar on his request went from hamlet to hamlet by bullock cart, buying land until a 300-acre campus had been assembled. By 1929 most of the land for Rishi Valley had been acquired. Trilokikar named the whole basin Rishi Valley, a name derived from legends about rishis, who were held to have lived in the hills surrounding the valley, thousands of years ago. However, before the land was completely assembled, Besant abandoned the idea of a world university because there were more pressing matters of national importance for her, such as India's Home Rule Movement.[3]

The Guindy School was a school started by Besant in 1918 and was based in Madras. Its first headmaster, G.V. Subba Rao (GVS) was a young theosophist. Space in the Guindy School was limited, the neighbourhood was noisy and crowded and each year the torrential Northeast Monsoon would cause havoc, destroying the school's thatched roofs and blowing down its cottages. [4] After a particularly bad cyclone in late 1930, which destroyed much of the Guindy School, Jiddu Krishnamurti met GVS, and it was decided that the Guindy School would be relocated to Rishi Valley.[5]

The building of the structures was undertaken by the Theosophists who were drawn to Krishnamurti's teachings. Engineers were brought in to oversee construction work on campus, all of whom refused to accept pay. By September 1931, the structures were ready to accommodate the school. Shortly after this, Subba Rao relocated to their new campus with approximately ninety students and their teachers. Just as the move was completed, an unprecedented 50 inches of rainfall graced Rishi Valley's parched landscape and the area was inundated with water. The inhabitants of the surrounding villages thought the coming of the school was a blessing and a sign of prosperity.[6]

By 1934, the basic structures in the school had been built including the Senior School building which is still used today. Oil and petromax lamps were used for lighting the buildings until 1937, after which two dynamos began to provide electricity during the day. Students and teachers also started planting trees in and around the campus during this period.[7]

Subba Rao's decade-long tenure (1931-1941) was a pioneering one, with some of the teaching methods carried over from his experiences at the Guindy School. When he shifted to Rishi Valley, GVS became the first headmaster of an Indian boarding school. At Guindy, Tamil was the medium of instruction; at Rishi Valley, Telugu was added as a language of instruction. GVS laid the groundwork for the school by practicing a simple lifestyle that included meditation, a quiet life, austerity with material possessions, and harmony with nature. The beautiful natural expanse of the valley provides for some quiet retreats for 'nature studies'-outdoor lessons which were a part of the timetable. On the sports field, GVS disallowed prize-giving ceremonies, as he felt it harboured unhealthy competition.[8]

All senses of division were supposed to be eliminated: caste, gender, religion, and that of anything which might cause fractious relationships among students. This was important in a country on the brink of a new era in history—one in which the aim was secularism and social parity.[9]

On 24 June 1941, a police raid was conducted on the school. Magazines and books elaborating communist ideals were seized because under the British these were banned books as they were thought to promote Indian independence. Many teachers were put under house-arrest, fined or were put under probation for three years. The Director of Public Instruction even forced two longstanding teachers to resign. [10] As a result, Subbarao became 'dangerous' for proliferating such material during the heat of the freedom struggle and the wartime constraints Britain was facing at that time. This incident was later found to have been caused by a disaffected senior student who tipped off the police about the presence of communist literature on campus. This event ended GVS's tenure as principal.[11]

The resignation of GVS had consequences that brought the school to a standstill: expenditures were cut back sharply, co-curricular activities were curtailed and some of the best teachers left. This was a period of transition at the school as several principals - Y.K. Shastri, K.A. Venkatagiri Iyer, Narayana Iyer and K. Srinivasa Raghavan came and departed.

At this time, Krishnamurti was in the United States and was only able to return to India in late 1947, after Indian independence. During this period Muriel Payne, an associate of Krishnamurti gave a new direction to the school. She came to Rishi Valley, influenced by Krishnamurti, in an attempt to revive it.[12] Along with five others, she set up a group in 1948, which tried to gauge the situation and get the school back on track. This experiment ended abruptly, and in July 1949 Rishi Valley stopped functioning as an institution.[13]

Ms. Payne's experiment might have failed, but her interest in the school had not waned. She was instrumental in restarting the school under a new administration with F. Gordon Pearce, a noted educator, at the helm. Krishnamurti took a renewed interest in the school. New people were getting involved and a new kind of school emerged.[13]

In July 1950, the school was reopened, with 15 pupils. The fees were reduced to a low level to attract a wide range of students even though it put some pressure on the budget. To ensure a good start, the staff agreed to a lowered salary until the school became stabilized.[14]It was up to Pearce to revitalize the school as its finances were low.[15]

Within two years the school was running well with 110 fee-paying boarders as well as a waiting list for admissions. The student population was growing more diverse with 80% of students coming from northern, western and eastern India as well as some from overseas.[16] Two of the best teachers at this time were David Horsburgh and Sardar Mohammad.[17]

A lot of practices were also introduced during this period that are still followed in the school. Students could learn classical North Indian and South Indian music. Local folk dancing was brought in by David Horsburgh. Hiking, trekking and camping were also encouraged and teachers would often accompany students. One of Pearce's long lasting innovations at Rishi Valley was his introduction of 'astachal'. Children would gather together every evening, to sit quietly while the sun was setting on the Astachal hill. It was a time which gave children the opportunity for quiet reflection.[18]

Pearce resigned in October 1958 due to differences with the Rishi Valley Trust as well as Krishnamurti and went on to found two more schools in India - The Blue Mountain School in Ooty and the Sandur School. Sardar Mohammad joined Mr. Pearce in Blue Mountain School after he left Rishi Valley. David Horsburgh started his own school Neel Bagh in Kolar district - about 100 km outside Bangalore.

S. Balasundaram was made a member of the Krishnamurti Foundation India in December 1955, and took charge of the Rishi Valley estate while simultaneously teaching at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. It was decided by Krishnamurti that Balasundaram should be made the new principal of the school, after Pearce resigned in October 1958. He was principal of the school for almost two decades, until March 1977.[19]

It was during this period that Rishi Valley expanded in numerous ways. It was decided that Rishi Valley would be made a self-sufficient community in terms of food grains, fruit and vegetables, which would be grown on the agricultural land attached to the school, and also in terms of milk production through reorganizing the school's dairy. The administration felt that Rishi Valley should not live in isolation from neighboring communities, and that a Rural Centre be formed which would help the surrounding villages with housing, health, adult education and also provide schemes for them in agriculture and dairy farming.[20][21] Other efforts were made to provide schooling even to those who could not pay school fees with the help of government schemes.[22]

International folk dancing was introduced to Rishi Valley in 1963 by David Young, a teacher from the Happy Valley School in California.

It was also during Balasundaram's tenure that Rishi Valley's fabled dance dramas in Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu, were produced, year after year, for J. Krishnamurti, under the Banyan Tree, in the Pandanallur style of Bharatanatyam. [23]

In 1980, 150 acres of adjoining hillside were leased to Rishi Valley School by the government of Andhra Pradesh for reforestation. The aim of this lease was to grow an abundance of trees on the hills. As a first step, a fence was constructed around the South Hills, to keep away grazing sheep and cattle. An arrangement was reached with the surrounding villages, to take fodder from the hills.[26] Despite this, relations with the surrounding villages remained tense for several years, during which time the reforestation drive on the South Hills began in earnest. Almost 20,000 trees and shrubs and thousands of seedlings were planted by students of the school during these years, although their efforts were thwarted to some extent by prolonged droughts in the region during the 1980s. In 1988, the state government of Andhra Pradesh helped the school finance a percolation tank on 20 acres of low-lying land on the campus of the school. The large basin was to collect rain water from surrounding hills and service through underground channels the dry wells throughout the valley and beyond.

Work began on identifying and cataloguing bird species in the valley in 1990. Mr. Rangaswami, Bursar of Rishi Valley School from 1973 to 1977, Honorary Chief Warden of the Rishi Valley Bird Preserve and a bird lover who popularized birdwatching among students had spent several years in Rishi Valley in the 1970s, when a checklist of local birds was first drawn up. In 1990, when a superficial survey of bird species in the valley was conducted, it was noted that the number of bird species had risen considerably. By March 1993, 170 bird species, which is approximately 40% of the bird species recorded in the state of Andhra Pradesh, were identified in Rishi Valley, including the rare and endemic yellow-throated bulbul (Pycnonotus xantholaemus).

The yellow-throated bulbul (Pycnonotus xantholaemus)

Perhaps the most spectacular comeback has been that of the yellow-throated bulbul. Recorded from Rishi Valley in the early 1990s, this bird had not been seen on the campus, and its immediate vicinity, with certainty, ever since. The birds could however be regularly seen in the foothills of Horsley Hills, just three kilometers or so, at the western end of the valley. This event was reported to the International Council for Bird Preservation (ICBP), and as a result, Rishi Valley was included in the Biodiversity Map and Computerized Data Base maintained by the council at its headquarters in Cambridge, England, as one of the areas in the tropics for global conservation, whose response was: "We have little recent published information on the distribution of this species in the ornithological literature, despite that fact that it is unique to India and apparently rather a scarce bird. Your record is therefore extremely valuable to the Biodiversity Project."

In 1997, Rishi Valley set up an Institute for Bird Studies and Natural History, which monitors bird populations in the vicinity and currently runs a Home Studies Course in Ornithology