Early Life, Education in Lahore

Dr Hari Dev Sharma: Mr Jauhar, could you begin this interview with a brief account of your early life?

Shri Surendra Nath Jauhar: I was born in a picturesque village, Vahalee, situated in the valley of the hilly area of district Jhelum, now in West Pakistan, in a family of Chiefs of Punjab. But on the contrary, my own father was the poorest person. The reason was that my grandfather quarrelled with his brothers and retired to Haridwar as a sadhu. After fifteen or twenty years he was traced, brought back and married. My father were four brothers and two sisters. Soon my grandfather died and naturally all of them became orphaned. My father had passed his matriculation from Bhara, district Jhelum, and became a Girdavar Kanungo in the Punjab Settlement Department, getting hardly twenty-five or thirty rupees a month in those days. He had to move after every three or four months from village to village on account of his official duties in the Land Settlement Department. So my education was naturally disrupted.

He became a staunch Arya Samaji. When I was about ten, he made up his mind to send me to D.A.V. High School, Lahore after I had passed primary, naturally in Urdu.

The Lahore D.A.V. High School was probably the only school in the whole country which had Hindi as the medium of instruction instead of Urdu. As I did not know even a word of Hindi, so I was put in a “Special Class” for one year. Quarantine—in which the students were separated from the main stream of the graded students and studied only Hindi—from zero up to class V. Then next year I could join class VI. I was not studious but was quite intelligent. I used to get 150 marks out of 150 in arithmetic and quite good marks in other subjects. In class IX I became very fond of playing hockey and football and was in the First Eleven of the school hockey team. So now I had to go from district to district to play the prestigious hockey matches for the school, and naturally, I could not attend to my studies in a regular and systematic manner and thus became poor in them. I passed my matriculation examination in 1919, getting just 229 marks—the students who got 228 had failed.