This school in Malaysia reveres Mahatma Gandhi every day

Nothing in the nearly 3-hour drive through a vast expanse of lush fields and hills, from Kuala Lumpur to Sungai Siput, a small sub-district of the royal town of Kuala Kangsar, prepares one for this. A simple but imposing Mahatma Gandhi statue ensconced in the reception cum prayer hall of a school has been greeting visitors since 1954.
The Mahatma Gandhi Kalasalai, as the Tamil school is called, is an edifying tribute to India’s Father of the Nation, in the Malayan Peninsula, by the founding father of Malaysian Independence, late V T Sambanthan.

The school reveals a rich history of the close ties between India and the British ruled Malaya in the 1950s; Mahatma Gandhi Kalasalai was inaugurated by Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who was at the time the first woman president of the UN General Assembly.

“Three European plantation managers were shot dead by the communists in 1948, in Sungai Siput, and the town had become a hotbed of communist guerillas. Emergency was declared, and the then high commissioner of Malaya, Gerald Templer, was against this visit for safety reasons. However, Sambanthan convinced him that Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit was the best leader to inaugurate a Gandhi school,” Sambanthan’s wife Uma recalls.

The decision to build a school and name it after Mahatma Gandhi was taken in 1951 but there was no state fund available. The school was shaped up, brick by brick, with passion and dedication of the town’s Indian community.

While immigrants A Veeraswamy and A M S Suppiah Pillay, who had left the shores of India in the latter part of the 19th century, cleared their coconut plantation estate to donate 2 acres of land for the school, it was left to Veeraswamy’s son Sambanthan and Pillay’s son Periaswamy to plunge into the task of arranging funds. They donated $25,000 each for building classrooms, and engaged the famous Danish architect B M Iversen. Responding to the call of educating and liberating the poor plantation workers’ children, the labourers too responded with a total donation of $7000.

The then British district officer of Kuala Kangsar, M J Mackenzie Smith, called it the result of private enterprise and personal sacrifice of the Indians. Today, the school is home to around 600 students, with every first minutes of the morning spent in remembering Gandhi, the great educationist.