The 300-year-old Anglo-Arabic School is Delhi's oldest academic institution with history in every stone
Just outside the walled city at the bustling Ajmeri Gate in Delhi, and across the narrow lanes of GB Road, the capital's red-light district, stands the longest running education institution in a quiet contradiction. The Anglo-Arabic Model School, North India's oldest surviving school, built in the late 1600s, rests here like a relic of forgotten grandeur.
Founded by Mir Shihab-ud-Din Siddiqi, a leading military general known by his title Ghaziuddin Khan during the reign of Aurangzeb, this Mughal-era institution is not just a school. It is a symbol of Delhi's complex, layered history.
Inside the gates, history breathes through every stone. Red sandstone walls, Persian arches, jharokhas, and intricately carved jalis frame courtyards where pine trees, rare in Old Delhi, sway gently, offering quiet pockets of green against the city's restless buzz.
A small mosque stands at the centre, welcoming all who come to offer namaz. Beyond these walls, a different world waits, where women sit behind barred windows, and their children, some bearing names the world hesitates to acknowledge, slip quietly through the gates of the academic institution in the hope of a better future.
Principal Mohd Wasim Ahmed does not flinch about the school's location. 'Some of our students come from GB Road. Their mothers are our parents first,' he says. His words carry the weight of quiet defiance.
The school has produced luminaries such as Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Muslim educationist and reformist, hockey Olympian Mirza Masood, Congress politician Meem Afzal, and many others who shaped India's intellectual and political movements. The school, notably, remains grounded, not in nostalgia, but in service to whoever walks in through its centuries' old doors.
Preservation is a matter of priority here. Although the school has adapted to modern needs, the management is committed to safeguarding its historic character. Over the decades, support from leaders including Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Sheila Dikshit helped maintain both infrastructure and the legacy.
'Whenever the school needed help, the government was ready to provide it,' saysbiology teacher Maqsood Ahmad, teaching here since 1992. What started as a boy's school in 1696 was changed to a co-education school as recent as in 2012. However, out of 1,500 students, only 130 are girls. 'It is not even 9%,' says the principal. But he remains optimistic.
'With these tall ceilings and Mughal architecture, we don't even need air conditioners. This space is naturally balanced and so are our students,' he says with pride.
At this historic location, two worlds meet at the edges every day: the world inside, where history breathes with purpose, and the world outside, where women wait behind closed windows, trapped by society's silence. In between stands the school, not as a bystander, but as a quiet force, a place that does not judge, only teaches. In a city that so often draws lines, this school chooses to hold contradictions together.
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