How the Ashrama's monks shaped our school days

For former students of Baranagore Ramakrishna Mission Ashrama High School, the memory of any ordinary school day is rarely ordinary at all. Tucked into the rhythm of bells, lessons and playtime was the steady presence of the resident swamis, the saffron and white-robed monks who taught us, corrected us, fed us and, more quietly than we realised at the time, helped shape the adults we became.

Across continents now, alumni often find themselves swapping stories. Many of us settled in Australia, in Parramatta, in the inner west of Sydney, in pockets of Melbourne's eastern suburbs, in Brisbane's Sunnybank, and when we gather through the BRKM Reunion community, the talk usually drifts to a particular swami whose voice still rings in the ear, or a particular monk who patiently repeated a verse until it sank in.

Mornings that began with chanting and discipline

The day in the Ashrama began long before the first period bell. A monk would walk the dormitory corridors with a small brass bell, its sound rising gently through the open windows of Baranagore mornings. Students tumbled out of bed, washed at the long stone troughs, and lined up on the assembly ground. There, a swami would chant the invocation from the Upanishads, and the entire school would respond in unison.

For Australian readers who went through state schools, the closest comparison might be a school chapel service or a chaplain-led assembly, except that at the Ashrama the practice happened every single day. There was no opting out, no casual late arrival. The discipline of standing in straight lines, of folding hands, of bowing to the guru and to the flag, became a kind of muscle memory that followed pupils well beyond the school gates.

The senior monk on duty, sometimes Swami Parameshwaranda ji, sometimes another swami depending on the year, would then give a short talk. These were rarely long sermons. Often they were a single sentence pinned to the day: be honest in your exam, help the boy who cannot afford books, speak gently to your mother tonight. Alumni still hear those one-liners when life presents a familiar kind of choice.

Monks as teachers of scripture and values

The swamis were not only presiding over prayers; they were our classroom teachers for some of the most formative subjects. Scripture periods, moral science, the biography of Swami Vivekananda, selected verses from the Ramayana and the Gita were all taught by monks rather than by lay teachers. The textbook for one year might be the Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita, the next the Upanishads, the next the sayings of Holy Mother Sarada Devi.

In Australia today, the closest curricular cousin is probably the Special Religious Education classes that still run in New South Wales public schools, or the comparative religion units taught in Victorian classrooms. What was different at the Ashrama was the depth. A monk could spend three weeks on a single shloka, drawing out the meaning of each word, asking students to copy it carefully into their notebooks if their understanding had been lazy.

There was also a quiet insistence that values were not separable from intellect. A bright student who cheated in an exam would be called to the swami's room, not for punishment so much as for a long, uncomfortable conversation about what kind of person they wanted to become. That kind of attention, multiplied across a thousand pupils across a decade, is the truest curriculum the Ashrama ever offered.

The dining hall and lessons in mindful living

Few spaces in the Ashrama taught as much as the dining hall. Students sat on the floor in long rows, on hand-woven mats, with brass plates and steel glasses. A monk would carry the serving pots down the line, ladling rice, dal and sabzi with a generosity that sometimes led to waste. The instruction was simple: take only what you can finish, and finish everything you take.

Before the first mouthful, the entire hall would chant a short prayer of gratitude together, a practice asking that the food bless the eater and the eater serve the food. After the meal, pupils washed their own plates at the courtyard tap and stacked them neatly for the next sitting. Whoever left a smear of rice on the floor could expect a quiet word from the swami in charge.

In many Australian schools, especially in the newer multicultural campuses of western Sydney and south-east Queensland, there are echoes of this in the form of shared eating spaces, the Respectful Relationships program and the gentle emphasis on mindfulness that has crept into primary classrooms. What the Ashrama taught us was the daily practice of it. There was nowhere to hide, no meal-delivery option, no eating alone at a desk. Food was community, and community was the swamis' classroom in disguise.

Annual functions and the monks who organised them

The calendar of the Ashrama was studded with functions that broke the routine: Saraswati Puja, the Independence Day celebration in August, the Founder's Day in February, the annual prize-giving in December. Almost every one of these was choreographed, directed and stitched together by a monk working long after the school day had officially ended.

A swami would spend weeks writing out the Sanskrit dialogues for the cultural programme, drilling the senior boys in pronunciation, cutting costumes from cheap white cotton cloth, and walking the younger students through their dances on the outdoor stage. The standard was high because the swami refused to lower it. A poorly rehearsed item was simply cut from the programme, to the genuine disappointment of the children involved.

This kind of quiet, persistent expectation has its cousins in Australian school life. Speech Nights at Sydney Grammar and similar historic schools, ANZAC Day services at state high schools, inter-house athletics carnivals all carry the imprint of teachers and chaplains who refuse to let community ritual slip into mere formality. The monks of Baranagore did the same, on a smaller stage, with far fewer resources, and somehow the productions felt bigger than anything a contemporary Australian school might attempt.

Lessons beyond the textbook: service and compassion

More than any classroom lesson, the swamis taught by what they did with their own hands. A monk would spend his Saturday morning in the Ashrama's charitable wing, sorting books for poor pupils, checking the medicine cupboard of the small medical camp, or sitting with a sick child whose parents worked in the jute mills. The example was never advertised. It simply happened, week after week, and the students noticed.

At the end of every term, the senior swami would gather a small group of senior boys and send them out to the neighbouring villages to distribute old clothes, books and small sums of money collected from the staff and the better-off families. Many alumni remember the awkward thrill of stepping out of the school gates for the first time, in a small team, with a monk walking just ahead of them. The lesson was that learning was incomplete until it was given away.

In contemporary Australia, the parallel is the community service requirement embedded in programmes like the Duke of Edinburgh's International Award, which thousands of Australian teenagers still pursue, or the voluntary hours that some state school certificates encourage. The Ashrama did this in the 1970s and 1980s, not as a line on a transcript but as a habit of the heart, set by monks who lived it visibly every week.

Carrying those lessons into Australian life

Now, scattered across Australian suburbs, alumni find that the Ashrama's monastic formation travels surprisingly well. In a Parramatta office that serves a largely Hindu and Sikh clientele, an old Ashrama boy quotes a Swami Vivekananda line in the middle of a business meeting. In a Melbourne primary school, an alumna runs the breakfast club the way the Ashrama dining hall taught her to see food, as a shared responsibility. A Brisbane doctor volunteers with a free clinic one Saturday a month because a swami once did the same in Baranagore.

The Australian context is, in its own way, a perfect continuation of the Ashrama's classroom. The country prizes the idea of a fair go, a phrase that sits comfortably beside the Ramakrishna teaching of seva, or self-less service. Its multiculturalism, especially in places like Harris Park and the western Sydney corridor, means that a child of the Ashrama can stand in a schoolyard beside a child whose family attends the local mosque or gurdwara, and discover that the swamis' lessons about universal tolerance were never merely abstract.

That is also why alumni gatherings matter so much. Visiting the community's BRKM Reunion portal and signing up to be part of the network is a small way of saying that the swamis' work in us did not stop at the school gate. It travels with us to the cities we have made our own, and it is still quietly shaping the way we live there.