Krishnamurti’s Hill of the Rishis
With its spirited commitment to a better planet, the Rishi Valley campus, is a realm of modern day rishis
Annie Bezant, president of the Theosophical Society, proclaimed in 1920, that Jiddu Krishnamurthi, a young man of Madanapalle in Andhra Pradesh, India, was an emerging spiritual leader of the world. Krishnamurthi as he popularly came to be known, was far too wise to be trapped in the robes of a Messiah. He soon broke loose, and began a life that made him a world renowned teacher. But this story is not about his life. In 1925, he had motored through villages beyond Madanapalle. He came upon a splendid banyan tree and stopped right there. Here he would found a centre of learning. He did that, and it is today the Rishi Valley School.
Dominating Rishi Valley where the banyan stands even today is the Rishi Konda or Hill of the Rishis. Legend has it that rishis (seers) had lived up its slopes in grand isolation. Folk memory even recalls that a line of flaming torches could be seen up there on some nights as rishis and their students made from one cave to another.
Somehow, that legend of rishis, and the metaphor that a banyan stands for, have a relevance to the story we are about to tell. Ours is the story of this valley's modern day rishis. Rishis of yore lived for the success of this planet. So too, do the people we will meet in this story. They are promoting conservation, restoration and adoration of nature.
Although the Rishi Valley School dates itself back to 1932, it was not until the 1970s that it entered a mature phase and began to resemble what it is today. For the first forty years it was more a series of experiments under several teachers rather than a system of teaching with an identity all its own. Krishnamurthi's dream of extending the greening program beyond the campus inched a little further in 1980 when the Andhra Pradesh government ceded to the School's care, some 150 acres on the south hills. For years the School had been trying to regenerate these hills.
Padmanabha Rao and Rama are both in their early forties. They met while at university in Hyderabad and discovered they were both looking for something they couldn't define. They were certain though, that conventional careers were not for them. What drew them together was their search for a worthwhile mission. They got married and went away to a village to try their hands at farming. In 1984 when the Raos began to teach at the rural school that Krishnamurthi had established in 1976, it had nothing to distinguish itself, though because of its association with the Rishi Valley School, the poor thought it provided 'quality' education. It was not uncommon for the students to walk over an hour to come to the school. Soon, however an opportunity set the Raos on the road to a discovery that is now impacting primary education in over eleven states in India and is even heard of overseas.
In 1986, the Human Resources Development Ministry of the Government of India in New Delhi, approached the School enquiring if it would help increase the density of village schools. In 1986, the first satellite school, named Valmikivanam started in Eguvaboyapalle, a village of woodsmen. Since Valmikivanam, 15 more satellite schools have come up in a 25 km radius of the River Campus. They form a network and teachers from these schools actively participate in developing new learning materials.
In Chennai, V Shantaram, a chartered accountant in his late twenties, walked out of a secure career path to enrol in the Salim Ali School in Pondicherry to study ecology. He became an ardent ornithologist, his study of woodpeckers earning him a doctorate in 1989. He arrived at Rishi Valley to teach. Dr Ajith Gite had came over to be the School doctor. His wife Nalini hailed from Pune, but had spent her youth among tribals in the Dang district of Gujarat. She was an Ayurvedic doctor qualified at the Aryangla Medical College, Satara but says she learnt her pharmacopoeia from an Awary tribal chief in the Dang jungle. Ajith was a workaholic and died at the School in 2002. Nalini is creating a comprehensive herbal conservatory now. M S Sailendran is another chartered accountant seduced by nature. He came to the School as an internal auditor and stayed on. He is the School Bursar and a keen conservationist. Jayant Tengshe graduated from the prestigious IIT, Powaii. Instead of riding the conveyor belt to Silicon Valley, he surrendered to the gravitational pull of Rishi Valley. He teaches mathematics and works with Nalini in increasing the diversity of her collection. More recently young medical doctors Dr Kartik Kalyanram and his wife Dr Vidya Kartik have settled here to build the Rural Health Centre. Let us meet them briefly for now and move on. Their individual lives and works, as we shall soon see, will synergize and lock together with precision.
There is no cause to imagine that the satellite schools are a life apart from the Rishi Valley School. To persist with the banyan metaphor, the original 300 acres in which the tree stands, having extended to 450, vines have struck root over a 25 km radius in which the satellite schools are located. Around each rural school active village communities have formed. Nalini and Jayant are propagating the value of cultivating herbs and medicinal plants, for health, nutrition, and also for income generation. Sailendran regularly leads teams of students from Rishi Valley to interact with the villages and help them plant their community gardens. Sailendran says, "We discovered how much more profitable is cultivation of Jamun and Custard Apple trees. Villagers get tempted by exotic cropping ideas and forget old native trees." New groups of enthusiasts have formed around Madanapalle inspired by the now green south hills. Sailendran counsels them and arranges for planting materials. Kartik and Vidya run a dispensary at Rishi Valley and also tour the villages. "Most of the ailments are due to poor nutrition. Tuberculosis is only a layer away," he says. He is creating a database to map the health profile of the villages. With Nalini's help he is prescribing diets that include leaves and grains, now fallen in people's esteem. You can discern a convergence of all these seemingly unrelated initiatives. The focus of Rishi Valley School's work with rural people is on restoring their pride in their own worth. The purpose of education ought not to be in preparing people to be cogs in the modern economic machine, but to teach them to live sustainably, profitably, proudly, creatively, supportively whatever their habitats.
