ABSTRACT
It is from within the celebrations of modernity-in its manifest forms of the nation and the citizen-that the Doon School elaborates its existence. The morning assembly at the School that marks the formal inauguration of the academic day, is, on reflection, a curious affair. For it gathers upon a shared temporal and spatial zone all the constituents of the hierarchical, academic, order of the school, i.e. Headmaster, senior masters, other teachers, and students of all classes. For that fleeting but recurrent moment in the school’s life, heralded by the pealing of the school bell and animated by a vocal harmony-the singing of songs and the chanting of prayers-the School is, in principle, one. The hierarchy of every-day existence on the campus, around which are based the punctilios of daily staff-staff and staff-student interaction, is here, fleetingly, absent. Though the students enter the hall class-wise, with the most junior classes filing in first, inside the hall there are no obvious signs of privilege which distinguish the space occupied by the ‘juniors’ from that of the ‘seniors’: the latter, for instance, do not stand near the front of the hall; the senior and junior masters, too, stand together in an undifferentiated manner. The ‘image of [the] communion’ (Anderson 1986:15) of the School is fixed, therefore, in a horizontal rather than a vertical plane-everyone sings the same songs, all stand together in the same physical space as well as sharing a temporal space where the actions are simultaneous rather than sequential, or even concurrent.
