Chapter 10– A Quiet Flame
Date: 3 January 1873
Location: Singham Haveli, Kolar
The morning sun spilled slowly into the quiet corridors of the haveli, its golden hue glinting off the carved brass inlays of teakwood columns. Inside a quiet study near the courtyard, a young child sat cross-legged upon a white cotton rug, a wooden writing board on his lap.
Surya, now three years old, had grown well. Tall, broad-shouldered for his age, his eyes calm but sharp, and his skin glowing with the vitality of the early sun. Though just a child, he had the gaze of someone who remembered too much.
On the desk before him were not toys, nor picture books, but neatly cut sheets of thick ivory-colored paper—paper that had come from their very own Kolar Paper Mill. The first of its kind in southern India.
With a reed pen dipped lightly in ink, he moved his hand across the page in steady strokes—first in Kannada, then in Sanskrit shlokas, then in a script the servants did not recognize: English cursive. But even more strange were the numbers.
> "Ninety-seven is a prime," he murmured aloud.
"So is one-hundred-and-one."
On the next sheet, he drew curious patterns—ellipses, triangles, spirals—each labeled with letters and equations.
> "This is a parabolic arc," he whispered.
"Maximum height at t equals zero… then comes the fall…"
---
The soft creak of an old door interrupted him.
Parvati, his mother, stood silently by the threshold, holding a copper plate with a diya, sandal paste, and tulsi leaves. For a moment, she simply watched her son—the way his brow furrowed in thought, how his fingers handled the pen with the quiet reverence of a temple priest.
> "You're writing again, Surya?" she asked gently.
He looked up and smiled. "Yes, Amma. I'm trying to calculate the area under a curve... in my own way."
She blinked. "Under a what?"
He laughed softly, brushing his inky fingers on a cloth. "Never mind, Amma. Just… numbers. I like numbers."
---
Later that afternoon, Surya wandered into the family library, a long room filled with scrolls, palm-leaf manuscripts, and bound leather books that smelled of dust, turmeric, and oil.
He pulled down a heavy book, older than his grandfather—its title inscribed in fading gold:
"Puratan Itihasa: Kolar Desh ka Vrittant".
As he turned the pages, his mind lit up.
He read about ancient dynasties, the early rulers of Kolar, about gold that once whispered beneath the earth but had not yet been touched. He found faded drawings of temples, maps with faint lines showing ancient trade routes that passed through the hills. He learned of battles, of sages, of forgotten mines and lakes.
> "Kolar was once called 'Kuvalala,'" he whispered.
"A place of lotus and learning…"
---
From the window, Surya could see the outline of a large structure taking shape—wooden scaffolding, stone pillars rising, the faint sound of hammers. The loom factory was not yet complete, only its skeleton standing. Yet it stirred something inside him.
> "We are building paper," he thought.
"We are building knowledge.
And soon, we shall build cloth again—our own cloth, not theirs."
He thought of the looms in Britain—machines powered by steam, precise and heartless. But he did not hate the machines. He only hated how they were used to chain Bharat Mata.
> "Let them have their steel. I will give my people soul."
He turned back to the book.
In its margins, an ancestor had scribbled notes in fine Kannada.
Surya read them aloud, smiling.
> "We were once artisans, warriors, scribes.
We knew how to spin threads of silk and verses of truth.
It is time to remember again."
...
The sun was high now, resting like a golden orb atop the tiled roofs of Kolar. The breeze, heavy with the scent of sandalwood and drying cotton, stirred the white curtains of the inner courtyard.
Surya sat beneath the mango tree, shaded from the noonday light. A copper water pot sat beside him. The stone under him was warm, smooth. A soft buzz of bees hovered nearby, and from the distance came the echo of temple bells, slow and rhythmic like the breath of the earth itself.
He held a manuscript in his lap—an old scroll written in Sanskrit, its ends curled with age. It had been preserved in the Singham library for generations, copied and re-copied by careful hands. The verses inside spoke of planetary motion, the measure of shadows, the arrangement of numbers in a square so perfect it was called Chintamani—the wish-fulfilling gem.
Surya looked up, eyes thoughtful, and sighed.
> "We were once the teachers of the world…"
He whispered the words in Kannada, then in Sanskrit, and finally, softly, in English.
> "Vishva Guru. The World Teacher."
His fingers traced the edge of the manuscript.
> "People came here—from lands now called China, Greece, Arabia… to learn from Nalanda, from Takshashila. We gave them logic, medicine, astronomy, the soul of mathematics. And what did we get in return?"
He stood slowly and walked toward the basin, washing his hands as the words formed more clearly in his mind—bitter, yet burning with clarity.
> "They took our knowledge," he said aloud, "then wiped our name from the books."
He remembered what he had once read—Newton, celebrated for the laws of motion, had studied ancient geometry from texts copied from India. Pythagoras, whose name echoed in every school, had traveled to the East. Even Max Müller, the scholar of Vedas, admitted that the British only began to value India's knowledge once they understood its depth—so they appropriated it.
> "They stole from our granaries of thought," Surya thought, "and then claimed to be the ones who planted the seed."
---
Just then, the old priest from the nearby temple entered the courtyard with slow steps. Surya bowed respectfully, his small palms pressed in namaskar.
"Are you reading again, Surya beta?" the priest smiled, his voice raspy with age.
"Yes, Swamiji," Surya replied, his eyes bright. "I was reading about the sun and the planets, from the Surya Siddhanta. They calculated the distance of the sun thousands of years ago… without machines."
The priest chuckled. "Indeed. We had no telescopes, but we had tapasya and truth."
Surya nodded. "But Swamiji… why do the British say they discovered these things? Why do they put their names on what our rishis already knew?"
The priest sighed and sat beside him. "Because, my child… he who controls the ink controls the history. And for now, they have the ink."
Surya looked down at his palm, smudged with a bit of black ink from his morning practice.
> "Then I will write with my own ink," he said, "and I will remember what they wish to forget."
---
He stood up, and the wind carried the words from his lips like a vow:
> "They say they have come to civilize us. But how can they civilize the land that taught the world how to count?"
> "No, Swamiji. They came to loot—not just gold, but wisdom. And that, I will reclaim."
In the shadows of the haveli, beneath mango trees and ancient scrolls, a child dreamed not of vengeance, but of truth restored.
And in that truth, was the beginning of something greater.
A new Bharat.
A Bharat that would remember.
...
The scent of fresh paper and ink lingered in the air as Surya sat cross-legged in the family's library, surrounded by scrolls, reed pens, and stacks of newly made paper. Golden sunlight spilled through the latticed windows, falling across ancient palm-leaf manuscripts and British-printed books that shared uneasy space on the carved teakwood shelves.
He was only three years old by calendar years, but to anyone who observed him—his strong build, sharp eyes, and quiet seriousness—he looked more like a boy of six.
Surya dipped his reed pen into a pot of dark indigo ink and paused, gazing not at the paper, but out the window where a group of children ran barefoot through the courtyard. Their laughter rang freely, but his mind was heavy, filled with questions not common to children of his age.
"What is being taught to the children of Bharat?" he wondered.
His thoughts, sharpened by hours spent in the library and deep inner reflection, wandered far beyond the walls of Kolar. They traveled through cities and villages, into distant classrooms and narrow lanes—into the very heart of India's shifting knowledge.
He had overheard British officials once discuss the Wood's Despatch of 1854, an education policy that had reshaped India's schools. It was meant to "civilize" Indians, they said—educate them. But Surya knew better.
"They call it education," he thought, "but it is something else entirely."
He had read enough, listened enough. In rural Bharat, there still existed Gurukuls, Pathshalas, and Madrasas—places of learning that taught sacred texts, grammar, logic, astrology, and mathematics in Sanskrit, Persian, or Arabic. Teachers, whether they were Brahmin pundits, Muslim maulvis, or wise village elders, passed on knowledge orally, by memory, by chalk on stone, and ink on leaves.
But those schools were being pushed aside.
"The British call them outdated," he murmured. "They say their 'modern' schools are better."
Indeed, in places like Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, and Shimla, new schools had sprung up—many run by missionaries or government-appointed masters. There, children sat in rows on stone floors, memorizing English alphabets, Queen Victoria's lineage, geography of Europe, and lessons in moral science written by men who had never seen the Ganga.
And all of it—every lesson—was in English.
Surya frowned. Even Indian children were being told that India had no great scientists, no mathematicians, no inventors. Everything was shown to come from the West. From Britain. From France.
"They erased our names," he thought. "They read our Vedas, translated them, then published them under their names. Aryabhata becomes anonymous. Sushruta becomes a footnote. Charaka disappears altogether."
He stood up and walked to a wooden cabinet, retrieving an old British report wrapped in cotton cloth. Opening it, he read the list of prestigious schools that had flourished under the British Raj:
La Martiniere in Calcutta and Lucknow
St. Xavier's School in Bombay
Bishop Cotton in Shimla
Elphinstone High School, Bombay
Madras University, founded in 1857
All were finely funded, heavily English, and open mostly to upper-caste boys, or sons of elite families who wished to serve the empire.
Girls, Surya noticed, were barely present in any records. Only a few schools in Calcutta or Madras had begun to accept them—thanks to reformers like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar or Jyotiba Phule, and rare voices like Begum Rokeya, who believed that women's minds were as bright as men's.
"But here, in our villages, girls still stay home. Lower-caste children are still forbidden to sit beside Brahmins. This is not teaching. This is control."
He clenched his small fist. There was one answer, and he had already spoken it once to his father.
"We must build our own school," he whispered again.
A school rooted in Bharatiya values, not colonial poison. A school where Sanskrit and Kannada, Tamil and Marathi, Telugu and Malayalam could be spoken without shame. Where the achievements of ancient India were celebrated, not erased. Where the future was built by remembering the past—not hiding it.
And where girls would learn alongside boys, equally.
He returned to his writing, now with new purpose. At the top of a fresh sheet of handmade paper, he wrote in careful Devanagari:
सरस्वती विद्याय मंदिर
Saraswati Vidya Mandir — Temple of Knowledge
The goddess Saraswati, with her veena and white lotus, would guide this mission. And from the hills of Kolar to the temples of Tanjavur, from the palaces of Travancore to the coastal towns of Kochi and Hyderabad, a new kind of light would rise.
Not British.
Not foreign.
But Bharatiya.
--
The sun was low on the horizon, casting long amber shadows across the red sandstone tiles of the courtyard. Birds circled above the tiled roofs as servants moved quietly about the haveli, lighting lamps and bringing in the day's final trays of tea. A cool evening breeze carried with it the smell of ink, hot roti, and jasmine.
Ramrajan sat reclining against a carved rosewood bench, thumbing through a business ledger with a calm expression, his spectacles pushed to the edge of his nose. The day had been long — full of decisions about paper production, machinery, and letters from Travancore. But when he saw Surya approaching with folded notes in his hand, he closed the book.
"Come, Surya," he smiled, motioning him to sit. "What does your little mind carry today?"
Surya sat cross-legged at his father's feet, unrolling the notes he had written earlier in the library. He looked up into Ramrajan's eyes, serious and steady.
"Pitaji," he began, "I want to speak to you about the schools."
Ramrajan raised an eyebrow. "Schools?"
Surya nodded slowly. "The schools the British run… they teach children to forget who they are. They use English for everything. They praise their kings, their science, their explorers. But where is Aryabhata? Where is Sushruta? Where is Maharishi Patanjali? Why do they not teach about the Ramayana, or the kings of Bharat?"
Ramrajan listened quietly.
"And girls," Surya said, voice rising. "Girls are kept away. Only upper-caste boys are allowed to sit and read. What about our farmers' children? What about the potter's son or the tailor's daughter?"
He reached into his satchel and pulled out a single sheet of handmade paper. At the top, in bold ink, were the words:
सरस्वती विद्याय मंदिर
Saraswati Vidya Mandir — Temple of Knowledge.
"I want us to build this, Pitaji," he said, laying the sheet on Ramrajan's lap. "Not one. Many. In Kolar, in Tanjavur, in Travancore, Madras, Kochi, Hyderabad. A school where knowledge belongs to everyone."
Ramrajan looked down at the paper. A silence settled between them, gentle but charged.
"And what shall we teach there, Surya?" he finally asked.
"Everything," Surya replied. "Our ancient knowledge and modern science too. Mathematics and Sanskrit, Ayurveda and biology. Kannada and Tamil, English too—but not as a master's language, as a tool. Let them learn to read the Vedas and the stars. Let the girl with the veena sit beside the boy with the hammer."
Ramrajan took a long breath. His chest swelled with something deeper than pride. He saw not just the small boy in front of him—but a torchbearer of a new age.
"You are young, beta," he said softly, placing a hand on Surya's head, "but your thoughts are deep as the ocean. I had once dreamed of building a few schools for our workers' children... but now, I see we must build schools for Bharat."
"And not just for Brahmins or merchants," Surya added quickly. "For everyone. Saraswati does not choose between rich and poor."
Ramrajan chuckled. "Yes... I suppose she does not."
He looked out at the fading horizon. The stars were just beginning to appear.
"We will begin with one in Kolar," he said. "Then the others will follow. But promise me something, Surya."
Surya looked up.
"Promise me you'll never forget where this started. In the heart of a child, with a reed pen and a question."
"I promise," Surya said, and smiled.
.