The School That Stayed

Few addresses in Pakistan have taught continuously for a hundred and twenty-two years. This one has. A school opened here in 1904, raised by Rawalpindi's Sanatan Dharma Sabha — founded in the city in 1882 — beside its mandir; the Main Block went up in 1913 and still holds classes every morning, its walls carrying, alongside Hindu motifs, a crescent, a crucifix and Sikh symbols. Dawn once called the building a symbol of Rawalpindi's pluralistic history.

On 1 October 1948, the Government of the Punjab took over the premises and raised the school into the first government college of the Rawalpindi Division. The Sabha's own story continued in Delhi, where its successor college records that soil from the old Rawalpindi institutions was carried across and poured over the new campus. Somewhere in Delhi there is earth from this ground.

Affiliation with the University of the Punjab followed in 1963, with postgraduate classes in five subjects at once — English, Urdu, Mathematics, Economics and Geography. Note the last name on that list: what happened in that department became the heart of this college's reputation. And in January 2026, at a ceremony on campus, the Federal Minister for National Heritage and Culture formally recognised what the city always knew.