Sanskrit at dawn, the computer lab after: the Chiraigaon school where 170 children board free

Head north out of the city towards Chiraigaon and, in Taraya village, a seven-acre campus has been quietly building a different kind of school. Sarvaved Sanskrit Secondary School opened in April 2021 and today boards 170 students in Classes 6 to 12 — children who have come from Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh, from tribal, Dalit and general families alike. Everything is free: the teaching, the hostel room, the meals, medical care, even the uniforms. What has drawn attention is how easily the two halves of the timetable sit together. Fourteen teachers take the students through Sanskrit, the sixteen sanskars, ritual practice, Vedic texts and Indian cultural studies — and also through Hindi, English, mathematics and science. The campus has smart classrooms, science laboratories, a computer lab with eighteen machines and its own playing fields; yoga and pranayama start the day, traditional games close it. Visitors come away describing children who recite in Sanskrit and then switch into fluent English, or work a computer without hesitation. The principal, Acharya Shailendra Dwivedi, says a session is set aside every fortnight for Varanasi itself — the city's heritage, the Ganga Aarti, Indian traditions and the lives of people worth learning from. Admission is not walk-in: families apply online and children are chosen through interviews. In a district where a Sanskrit school is often assumed to be looking only backwards, Taraya is making a quieter argument — that the old syllabus and the new one can share a desk.

Compiled by HelloBanaras from public sources: Amar Ujala — Varanasi