School Of Lies & The Boarding School On Screen

A Cinematic Institution

Boarding schools located in the hills have often been cast as the site of painful adolescent realities fleshed out in the skin of elite ritual, writes Manik Sharma, on School of Lies.

“AT best, it’s compulsion. At worst, it’s prison,” a student tells his counsellor about his school, in Disney+ Hotstar’s School of Lies. Boarding schools located in the hills have been here before, often cast as the site of painful adolescent realities fleshed out in the skin of elite ritual. For a country that struggles to drag most of its kids past the finish line of literacy, these idyllic, exclusive institutions serve as cultural islands... Places that are unsusceptible to the chaos and strife of the outside. It obviously makes tactical sense to then build such schools in the hills, away from the burdens of mainland India. It allows for insulation, and as School of Lies argues, a compendium of other ailments. As someone who has spent a decade in similar pastures, I can vouch that while this accusatory portrayal might verge on the excessive at times, it also has some basis in reason.

WATCH SCHOOL OF LIES

'DORM'ANT THEME

School Of Lies Has A Familiar Setting For The Gothic Horror Of Adolescence

By Manik Sharma

IN School of Lies, the lens is cast on the adults. The young boys are merely reflections of a culture of abuse that goes unchecked, uncorrected. It’s a culture codified into the world-building exercise of elite schooling institutions. In Nagesh Kukunoor’s landmark Rockford, a diminutive Rajesh Naidu (Rohan Dey) is sent to a boarding school where he must man up, both metaphorically and literally. Cut from the cloth of harmlessness, he traces this journey with kindled charisma and a supportive teacher looking over his shoulder (Kukunoor himself). Most of the anguish in the film echoes Naidu’s own nervousness. He is bullied — almost sexually assaulted — but allowed to grow over it all as a rite to passage; he emerges on the other side of it at-home, even capable of romanticising the misery of his recent past.

School Of Lies Review: The Story Of A Lost Child Becomes A Tale Of Lost Childhoods

In Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan, boarding school is a form of escape, a reprieve for an oppressed boy who doesn’t like the idea of going home to an abusive father (also echoed by School of Lies). It’s a side of the story I grew up witnessing. Boys sent away, to blind them to things. Things that make elite boarding schools a sort of constructive departure. There is, however, no returning from not wanting to return. In Vandana Kataria’s Nobleman, a far too literal portrayal of the culture of bullying, young boys train their competitive eyes on a shy, fragile teenager. Art becomes a form of warfare, when nomenclature itself upholds a sense of competition: Houses, masters, annuals and the eventual crowning of a winner, everything designed to instil that spirit of rivalry.

There is obviously a quasi-religious backdrop to these stories. Catholic schools serve as the ideal backdrop for the gothic horror of adolescence as a violent process. A process through which the mind confirms that which the body questions. Sexuality and desire are voyages, the shores of which are never quite visible from the sea. You just have to float, flap your arms and allow the ocean to either hit you or drive you to a point of self-realisation. It’s why boys-only boarding schools foster a culture built around discipline. Discipline that normalises the ‘rule’ of seniority, interpreting democracy as a monarchical conceit. I’ve been there, convinced that it was probably the only way to prevent riots from taking place every other day, to prevent hormonally confused young men from compensating for all that ‘compulsion’ in the most horrifying of ways. It was probably the only way to survive. It also, as School of Lies argues, doesn’t always work.

Young adult storytelling has now graduated to the point where harder questions can be asked. Intimacy is queried, violence analysed and this culture of vain, at times cynical militarism, questioned. In School of Lies, the unsparing nature of tradition becomes the cloak under which abuse becomes cyclical hell. Sure it’s woke. There is a counsellor on campus, to begin with, compared to the times when seniors and teachers practically asked kids to ‘walk it off’ or ‘rinse it in the evening PT sweat’. Nothing perhaps pushes a young man to turn manhood into a conquest than the casual implication that he might not have been born with any to begin with. It’s a fight some of us, some more than others, have contested or at least contemplated at some point in our lives. Imagine trying to do it in a school full of bullies masquerading as boys. The tragedy here lies in their own inability to distinguish one from the other. It’s what this new series gets right.

Also Read: Hansal Mehta's Scoop Broadcasts The Cost Of Being A Female Journalist

Boarding schools make for compelling case studies of adolescence because they themselves are symptoms of a sort of social fracture. Not everyone comes here from broken homes but they do represent an experiment, where the very abandonment of tools echoes a kind of heritage. Isolation thus is bound to seed contempt for both rules and the adults those rules represent. And yet there is this culture of building a world within a world, a kind of dystopia that runs on the edgy nerve of authority and competition. Where friendship and love are nefarious by-products; seniors, a diffused version of the absent parental figure; exile, a form of bandage keeping a fragile idea of reality from falling apart. No wonder then that these fantasies of control and regimen appear bleak in the rearview mirror. That too after, like me, you’ve travelled far enough from them.

Stream Rockford and Udaan.

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