KARACHI CHRONICLE: St. Joseph's Convent School's 150th year

St Joseph's Convent School's 150th year was celebrated with a reunion dinner on Saturday 11 February. It went unnoticed by the media because, unfortunately, my young colleagues in the press and television channels are not interested in the social history of Karachi. St Joseph's is exclusively a girls school. It is a point to ponder that there were schools for girls here one and a half centuries ago, and that in this particular school the medium of education was English.
If English medium schools are flourishing today, it is not surprising because English is the preferred medium, but it does seem curious that it was preferred in those bygone days. In the 19th century Karachi Muslims were highly conservative, yet the majority of students at St Joseph's were Muslim girls, according to my mother who was a student 90 years ago. (She is 95-year-old now).
When we were children my mother told us a funny story about her first days at school. My grandmother had passed away when Mummy was a baby. When she was five years old she and her two older sisters were sent to school. There was no school uniform then and my grandfather, who had no clue how to dress girls for school, had the tailor sew their frocks in velvet in bright, ghastly colours. The headmistress was shocked and told Nana, "Sheikh sahib this will not do." Highly embarrassed, Sheikh sahib explained he was a widower and asked the nuns to dress his girls.
Nana was a typical brown sahib in the colonial mould. If he chose a convent school for his girls it made sense, but not all the Muslims were colonial in their way of life. They were conservative and yet many of them also preferred to send their girls to St Joseph's. Some Muslim students belonged to communities such as the Bohri and Kutchi Memon in which education of girls was generally not encouraged, let alone in an English medium school. But Karachiites then, as now, had their peculiar way of thinking. Unlike Muslims in other cities in colonial India, they did not think the nuns and priests running missionary schools were bent on converting the students to Christianity.
Karachi developed as a city entirely under the British rule. It was a centre of trade and commerce and the natives, both indigenous and migrants, conducted their business according to colonial law. They flourished, and this gave them a respect for English culture. They saw the advancement of their children to be through British education system. They were not worried by the fact that the missionary schools were run by Christians.
St Joseph's is unique because it flourished in a Muslim majority province of the British Raj. Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were the only Muslim majority provinces. This point is important because of the education of girls. Who would not have thought that a province in which the predominant culture was Muslim would promote the radically modern system of English medium education for girls?
After Independence St Joseph's gradually acquired a patina of Muslim culture. The uniform, for instance, included dupatta and shalwar. Urdu language was taught. Previously there had been no official school holiday for Eid and even Milad was held in the school hall. This shows there was no attempt to impose a Christian culture on the students. However, the study of the Holy Bible was offered as an optional subject called Scripture. I am glad I took it because later in life it helped me in doing a comparative study of religions.
The interaction between Christian teachers and Muslim students and, of course the school policy, is largely responsible for the broadmindedness and religious tolerance in the educated Muslim middle-class and upper-class that is still the hallmark of Karachiites, most of whom have gone to missionary schools.
It is not because I am a former student of St Joseph's that I have high regard for it, but because it is an institution which has maintained excellence in education. There is real education, not the current frenzy merely to produce passers of exams. How many school offer sports and other extra curricular activities? A well-rounded education today is a rare thing.
The school has had to struggle hard to maintain high standard of education. It has suffered financially, as which enterprise has not? It has had massive interference in the choice of syllabus and has been forced to accept poorly printed, poorly written textbooks. This is not just an old school. It is part of the history of this city.