Keeping the flame of learning: the lamp lighting tradition across generations

For thousands of graduates of Sri Saraswathi Vidyapeetham and Shishu Mandir, the lamp lighting ceremony remains one of the most vivid memories of school life. The flicker of a brass oil lamp in a darkened assembly hall, the smell of camphor drifting through the corridors, and a chorus of Vedic shloka rising from the gathered students — these sensory snapshots stay with alumni from their first day in kindergarten to their last exam. Across continents and careers, the ceremony binds former students together with something more durable than a group photograph.

Many of those former students now live in Australia, where the Indian diaspora is one of the largest migrant communities on the continent. In suburbs such as Parramatta, Liverpool, and Glenfield in western Sydney, in the bayside corridors of Melbourne, and across the outer reaches of Brisbane, alumni gather in living rooms, community halls, and temple forecourts to recreate a sliver of home. They pour ghee into small brass diyas, fold jasmine garlands, and call out the names of teachers long retired. The flame, once the centrepiece of a school morning in India, becomes the centrepiece of a Sunday afternoon in the southern hemisphere.

Where the light comes from: origins and meaning of the ritual

The lamp lighting ceremony, known in Sanskrit as deepa prajwalana, predates the founding of the school by centuries. It draws from a wider Indian educational tradition in which any session of learning — a music lesson, a recitation, or the inauguration of a new academic year — begins with the kindling of a lamp. The flame is not decorative. It represents the movement from darkness to understanding, from ignorance to knowledge, from sleep to waking awareness. Teachers and students bow to the lit wick before any exchange of ideas, because wisdom is a light received and passed on rather than claimed and possessed.

For Sri Saraswathi Vidyapeetham and Shishu Mandir, the ritual was woven into school life from the earliest days. Photographs from alumni of the 1970s show rows of children in neat uniforms cupping their hands around small clay lamps while a senior teacher lights the central brass diya. The Sanskrit verses spoken that morning were the same ones spoken at the school's silver jubilee and again at its golden jubilee. Across generations of students, the words barely changed, even as the faces changed entirely.

How the ceremony is carried out at the school

A standard lamp lighting at the school follows an order that alumni can recite from memory. The principal, or the most senior teacher present, leads the invocation. A student — usually the head boy or head girl, sometimes the top scholar of the previous year — receives the lit taper and moves to the central lamp. From that lamp, every other lamp in the hall is lit in sequence, beginning with the teachers' bench and ending with the youngest class. Each lit lamp is then carried to its place on the front row of desks. Once all are positioned, the school shloka is sung, the national anthem is played, and the academic day begins.

The ceremony itself is short — typically fifteen minutes from invocation to anthem — but its preparation runs much longer. Brass lamps are polished the day before. Camphor is measured into small silver cups. Fresh wicks are cut and soaked in clarified ghee. Senior students rehearse the procession, so that no one bumps the central lamp. Even the angle of the cupped palm, fingers tilted just so to shield the flame from a stray breath, is a detail that prefects insist upon.

How the tradition has shifted across the decades

The format has shifted gently over the years, but the spine of the ritual remains intact. Key elements across the decades, as remembered by alumni from different graduating years, are summarised below.

Element	1970s and 1980s	1990s and 2000s	2010s to today
Central lamp	Brass diya with cotton wick soaked in ghee	Brass diya with cotton or synthetic wick	Brass diya, sometimes supplemented by an electric diya for indoor venues
Invocation	Sanskrit shloka led by the senior Sanskrit teacher	Sanskrit shloka with a Tamil translation	Sanskrit shloka with Tamil and English translations
Who lights the central lamp	Head boy only	Head boy and head girl together	A small group including top scholars and alumni guests
Camphor	Loose camphor on hot charcoal	Camphor tablets in copper holders	Camphor tablets, with a fire-safety briefing before lighting
Audience	Teachers and the entire school	Teachers and the entire school	Teachers, the school, alumni, and parents
Photography	A few black-and-white prints kept in the school archive	More colour photographs, some shared with alumni newsletters	Live-streamed for absent alumni, then shared on the alumni portal

The shift from a single head boy lighting the lamp to a small group of scholars and alumni guests is a quiet acknowledgement that the ceremony now belongs to a much wider community than the enrolled students. In the same way, the move from archive prints to live-streamed feeds reflects how alumni in distant cities still want to witness the moment, even when they cannot be in the assembly hall.

Alumni in Australia: lighting lamps at the bottom of the world

For alumni settled in Australia, the lamp lighting is no longer just a memory but an annual habit. Communities in greater Sydney and Melbourne mark the start of the academic year in India by holding a mini-ceremony alongside other cultural events. In a hired hall above a suburban IGA in Blacktown, or in a temple courtyard in the inner west, alumni set up a small lamp stand, light a single diya, and sing the school shloka together. The accent around the room can blend Telugu, Tamil, Hindi, and the broad Australian vowels that locals call Strayan — and that blend has become part of the fun.

A few families take the tradition further. They mark their child's first day of school in Australia with a small home lamp lighting, in the same way that other diaspora communities light a candle when a relative arrives overseas. School alumni WhatsApp groups in Brisbane and Perth now share short video clips of their children's lamp lighting alongside original school footage, allowing a child to see what a parent did at the same age, half a world away. Australia-wide gatherings often include a senior alumnus lighting the lamp for the younger generation — a small way of bridging thirty or forty years and several thousand kilometres.

Beyond the lamp itself, alumni keep their momentum through WhatsApp threads, planning the next gathering over video calls in the middle of the Australian working day. After one recent gathering in western Sydney, a few alumni settled into a quieter corner to try a relaxed hand of blackjack-multihand-online-casino-spelen between cups of filter coffee — the kind of low-key amusement that has quietly joined the post-event repertoire.

Keeping the flame alive: why this tradition still matters

School traditions rarely survive on their own. They survive because someone decides they are worth the effort of repetition. For alumni in Australia, the lamp lighting has become a way of showing children a different kind of Australian childhood — one anchored in a South Asian educational inheritance. Children who have never set foot in the school corridors can still learn the shloka, fold their hands at the right moment, and understand why a small flame matters at the beginning of any learning.

The tradition also carries professional value. In an Australian workplace where Indian-origin professionals now hold senior roles in medicine, technology, finance, and the public service, alumni connections formed at the lamp lighting often grow into mentorships and job leads. A quiet cup of filter coffee after a ceremony is where many an introduction begins. For alumni who want to formalise those introductions and stay visible to the wider network, a little guidance on writing a standout alumni profile for the SVPP directory goes a long way toward making those mentorships last beyond a single handshake.

Spoorthi magazine, the school's long-running alumni publication, frequently features photographs from these Australian gatherings, including the Brisbane lamp lightings, the Perth meetings, and the Sydney community events. Past issues also contain interviews with senior alumni who explain why they still travel halfway across the world to attend the central ceremony when their schedule allows.

A tradition without a deadline

A school tradition does not have an expiry date. It asks only to be remembered, repeated, and handed on. For alumni of Sri Saraswathi Vidyapeetham and Shishu Mandir now spread across Australia, the lamp lighting is both a homecoming and a handover — a return to a shared moment, and a passing of that moment to a generation that did not live it but might still carry it.

Wherever alumni gather, in a Parramatta community hall, a Melbourne cricket club room at the end of a long afternoon of summer play, or a quiet Brisbane verandah on a warm February morning, the flame is still lit and the shloka is still sung. The wider calendar of community events, from SanskarKendra meet-ups to Spoorthi magazine launches, lives on the social activities page of the alumni portal, where the lamp lighting sits at the top each year and the school begins again.