DAV School, Lahore

Influenced by the Arya Samaj movement under the leadership of Swami Dayanand Saraswati, my father became a staunch Arya Samajist. Instead of sending me to the High School at Behra, he decided to send me to DAV School, after I had completed primary education in Urdu. I was sent to the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic High School at Lahore for education at the age of eleven under duress, where the medium of instruction was Hindi. I had passed the 5th Class in the Urdu medium, crawling and hopping through many different schools on account of the moving and rolling circumstances of my father’s service in the Punjab Land Settlement Department. In the DAV School, I was quarantined for one year to acquire proficiency in Hindi, which would enable me to go to VI Class. In classes VI, VII and VIII, we had a special Dharma Shiksha Teacher (Religious Instruction Teacher), Pandit Ram Gopal Shastri. There was a special chapter against meat-eating and our Dharma Shiksha Teacher used to tell us interesting stories, giving arguments against meat-eating. I was always convinced, but knew not what to do.

During the summer vacations, I would decide that I will not eat meat when I go home. But in the atmosphere of the hens and chickens going round and round in our courtyard and meat being cooked, I would succumb to my weakness and eat meat but it always pricked my conscience. This happened in Class VI and again in Class VII. In class VIII at the age of about fourteen I was a little more mature and gave up meat-eating and since then I have not eaten meat.

I was not studious but I was quite intelligent. I used to get 150 marks out of 150 in arithmetic and quite good marks in other subjects. In IXth class, I became very fond of playing hockey and football and was in the first eleven of the school’s hockey team. So I had to go from district to district to play the prestigious hockey matches for the school and, naturally, I could not pay adequate attention to my studies in a regular and systematic manner. Consequently, I scraped through my matriculation examination in 1919. Then, I joined DAV College, Lahore where I had to take Sanskrit because there was no other option for me.