People · Latur · Education
Remembered in Latur as Raja Sahab
His father spent the 1940s giving Latur schools. That solved one problem and created another: the pupils grew up, and the town still had no college. Narayanlal was among the ten citizens who answered it.
The Inheritance
Narayanlal Puranmal Lahoti was the son of Seth Puranmal Surajmal Lahoti — the man who in 1940 helped Latur’s Marwadi community start a school, in 1946 helped start a girls’ school, and in 1952 took a seat in the first Rajya Sabha of the Republic.
A generation of schooling produces a generation of school-leavers, and by the late 1950s Latur had a problem it had not had before. Its children could now finish school. There was nowhere in the town for them to go afterwards. A degree meant Hyderabad, Pune or Bombay — which for the child of a farmer or a labourer meant no degree at all.
His father built the schools. He built the place the pupils could go next.
That is the shape of this branch of the family across two generations: primary and secondary education first, then higher education, then technical education. Each answered the gap the previous one had opened.
May 1961
Institutional histories name Raja Narayanlal Lahoti among the public-spirited citizens of Latur who established the Dayanand Education Society — and he is still named in the founder lists its colleges publish today, more than sixty years on.
The money came from an unlikely place. Farmers gave one rupee each as they sold their produce at the market, collected by Manikrao Sonavane, who chaired the market committee. Arts, commerce and science began as a single combined college.
A campus that now teaches ten thousand students was paid for in single rupees, by people who would never study there.
It grew into eight independent colleges on twenty-two acres in the middle of the city, spanning arts, science, commerce, law, pharmacy and architecture. Its colleges are credited with originating the “Latur Pattern” of intensive teaching that made the town nationally known.
The family’s association did not end with the founding. Two later generations have served on the Society’s management — a continuity that makes Dayanand unusual among the family’s institutions, most of which were endowed and then handed on.
1961 · Latur
Eight colleges, ten thousand students, and three generations of the family across its founding and management.
The Society →Since 2006
President of the Society for close to two decades — the custodian of what the founders began.
The profile →1954 · Latur
His father’s technical institute, handed to the Government of Maharashtra on one condition — that it keep the name.
The polytechnic →2009
In 2009 the Raja Narayanlal Lahoti English School opened at Signal Camp in Latur — a CBSE-affiliated senior secondary school established under the Shri Marwadi Rajasthan Shikshan Sanstha, the same educational movement his father had helped begin in 1940.
There is a neatness to that which is worth pausing on. The man who spent his life making sure Latur had colleges is remembered by a school — and it stands under the society his father served as first president, seventy years earlier.
He is not commemorated by a plaque anywhere. He is commemorated by a building full of children.
That is the family’s consistent preference, and it is the reason this branch is legible at all today. The Puranmal–Narayanlal line left almost no private memorials: what it left was a polytechnic, a college society, a school movement and a girls’ school, each carrying a name and all of them still open.
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The Latur Branch
Seth Puranmal, Seth Bankatlal, Laxmiraman and the rest of the Marathwada line.
The people →1952
His father’s seat in the first Rajya Sabha, between a conferred title and a French order.
The honours →1860s to Today
Where the Latur institutions sit in a hundred and sixty-five years in the Deccan.
The timeline →