Rajni Kumar: Educator who gave the Capital a new model

Rajni Kumar has passed into an eternal spring dale. But the Springdales Schools that she founded in Delhi shaped, educated and nurtured hundreds of thousands of girls and boys over the decades. And each of them carry a bit of Rajni in their minds and hearts. Because Springdales was more than a school, it was place for developing creativity, thinking humanity, loving science, making art.

In Rajni’s Sprindales morning assemblies are the songs of Indian nationalism, studies are student-teacher interactions, art is self-expression, sports is team work, activities are what you want to be. Moreover, you get to know the world-- the world of liberation, of the global South, of the ideas of progress and humanism. And you get your best friends and your favourite memories.

That was Rajni, born English as Nancie Jones, a student of the London School of Economics who met and loved a fellow Indian student Yudhishter Kumar when they were both 23. Yudhishter suddenly left England in the middle of his studies. Nancie would not believe he could do that without reason. She followed him to India only to discover that he was in a sanatorium in Shimla as a TB patient. She tended to him in the Shimla winters, carrying coals to keep him warm in the bare sanatorium, till he was well, and soon became Rajni Kumar.

Her first assignment in 1950 was in Salwan School. That’s where my mother, a young refugee with the trauma of Partition and displacement, met her and they became friends. When Rajni left Salwan School, Yudhishter a practising advocate, encouraged her to start a little primary school in a rented house in Patel Nagar in 1955. Patel Nagar was a sprawling refugee colony. Hundreds of thousands of Punjabi refugees lived in camps and were allotted little spaces of land to build homes. Springdales became part of rebuilding the future of the second generation of refugee children.

It was here that these children were introduced to spoken English, to express ideas freely, to learn the rigours of education. And learn they did, as their excellent careers show. Meanwhile, Springdales grew from a nursery school to senior Cambridge and secondary school on Pusa road with several branches in Patel Nagar.

But Rajni was more than an educator; she worked with the pioneers of the progressive women’s movement, was a supporter of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, of the ideas of socialism across Europe, of the struggles of anti-colonialism. All of which were suffused into her students. She engaged with the literacy movement in Delhi and enthusiastically supported the ‘economically weaker section’ of students, brilliantly executed in Springdales today.

Rajni was awarded the Padma Shri in 2011, among other awards, including one by the government of South Arica on International Woman’s Day in 2005. Rajni’s crowning glory, however, was her daughter Kiran Jyoti, who looked after her as she did her father, who had been unwell for several years. Kiran Jyoti, or Jo to me, follows Rajni’s footsteps in running the second Springdales School in Dhaula Kuan.

Many across the world remember Rajni and thank her for making them who they are today. But most of all, the institutions she created and the ideas imbued here continue to be nurtured by Kiran Jyoti and her team, who carry on this stupendous work of education as the first critical steps of citizenship and learning in this country.

Professor Anuradha Chenoy, XXX, is an alumna of Springdales School