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Chandigarh: The recent dedication of a classroom at Aitchison College in Lahore to former alumnus Harcharan Singh Brar, the late chief minister of (East) Punjab, serves as a reminder of the institution’s extraordinary historical reach across the province’s fractured political geography, brutally divided in 1947.

Brar, who was Punjab CM for some 15 months till late 1996 and died in Chandigarh in 2009 at the age of 87, spent 13 formative years at Aitchison Chiefs College, its original formal name, before graduating in 1943, just four years before Partition.

Thursday’s tribute to Brar, a prominent Sikh leader whose roots lay in undivided Punjab, saw classroom no. 108 in Pakistan’s best-known public school dedicated to his memory. To many on both sides of Punjab’s partitioned border, this may appear little more than a token institutional gesture. Yet it points – however faintly – towards a deeper and increasingly eroded shared historical memory, recalling a world of manners, public service, social confidence and personal relationships that once transcended the political boundaries that divide the region today.

A vast proportion of Punjabis – especially Sikhs in India below the age of 65 – are unlikely to be aware, if at all, of the history, influence and prestige surrounding Aitchison College and the singular place it once occupied in the social and educational landscape of undivided Punjab and much of northern India.

However, to appreciate the significance of Aitchison’s gesture, one must first understand the near-legendary standing the institution once enjoyed. In the decades before Partition, it occupied a place in the public imagination far beyond that of an ordinary school, becoming synonymous with privilege, influence, academic excellence and social distinction among the native elite of northern British India.

Even after the passing of the world that had created it, Aitchison’s reputation endured. As with many institutions associated with a vanished age, memory has tended to embellish its virtues while softening or obscuring some of its less flattering associations with hierarchy, privilege and colonial patronage.

Yet, paradoxically, the passage of time has only deepened its mystique.

For many older Punjabis, myself included, who grew up hearing stories from parents and relatives who had either attended Aitchison or moved within circles that included its alumni, the College symbolised a world of accomplishment, refinement and opportunity. Whether entirely deserved or partly enhanced by nostalgia, its standing acquired an almost mythical quality that few institutions in the subcontinent could match at the time.

Growing up in Punjab during the 1950s and 1960s, many of us encountered former Aitchisonians – or knew of them by reputation. They were a varied lot: administrators, military officers, politicians, judges, diplomats, businessmen, public figures, landowners or simply polished, idle-rich members of the provincial elite. Their visibility in public life helped further sustain Aitchison’s near-talismanic standing.

“Aitchison provided an education that extended well beyond the prescribed curriculum,” said Malavika Rajkotia, a New Delhi-based lawyer, whose late father, the agriculturist Jitinder Singh, attended the College in the early 1940s. Among his classmates was Akbar Bugti, the Baloch leader who was killed by the Pakistani Army in 2006.

“It was a secular environment in which all faiths were respected, and students were treated fairly and impartially,” she said, adding that her........

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