The neo-neoclassical superstructure on the frayed edges of Gurugram, complete with pediment and pillars, but also surveillance cameras and electronic-access classrooms, bears scant resemblance to that stolid, cash-strapped establishment run by Christian nuns across India — the convent school. Looking around this expansive and expensive campus, one can’t help wonder if the wimpled sisters have finally found a better business model? One that can pay for full air-conditioning. Hallelujah!But scan the astroturf, look behind the electronic blackboards, beyond the kindergarten treadmills, and — not a nun in sight. Wherefore art the blessed sisters of Alpine Convent School?Turns out, Alpine Convent, while functionally a school, isn’t literally a convent. At least not in the way Oxford Dictionary spells it: ‘A Christian community of nuns living together under monastic vows’. This ‘convent’ was in fact founded by an enterprising couple from Haryana, the Sharmas, who knew a promising name when they saw one.Having built a significant chunk of the bedrock of education in colonial India, Christian missionary schools gained credibility for their discipline and progressive culture, and acquired a distinct cachet that conflated ‘English education’ with Westernised, upward mobility. No surprise that they’ve also inspired a school of imitation. For every kosher St Xavier’s and St Anne’s in the country, there is a clone claiming kinship.Alpine Convent School started as a home-bred startup in 1996, with around 15 students in Sector 15, Gurugram. “My father was in the education department of Haryana, and had opened a charitable school in Old Gurgaon in 1974. It was what inspired my wife and me to start a school of our own,” explains D K Sharma, the founder of the school.Like Jesus’s loaves, one school multiplied into four, and 15 students, into 2,000, following CBSE and Cambridge boards. The school’s latest installation in Sector 10 are robotics and 3D printing labs and panic alarm buttons in every classroom (what you’d least expect but perhaps need in a real convent).But why ‘convent’? “My wife and I had visited schools in Dehradun and Mussoorie and knew that a convent stood for discipline and a traditional value system. Alpine was to suggest heights of excellence,” explains Sharma. “But we are a secular institution,” he insists. Perhaps to emphasise the point — and in keeping with the times — the school is mulling over replacing the word ‘Convent’ with ‘International’.“There’s little we can do about it,” rues Fr Sunny Jacob S J, secretary of the Jesuit Educational Association (JEA), South Asia, an association of Jesuit schools and colleges around the world.Despite watching a faux crop of Loyolas, St Mary’s and St Xavier’s rise, the Jesuits haven’t challenged the doubles as the names are not trademarked. In 2015, this duplication led to the vilification of Christian priests when the lay principal of an unaffiliated St Xavier’s High School in Mumbai was charged with molesting a six-year-old student. But there’s little the priests can preemptively do.“The Jesuits have been here for 500 years. We have assigned different saint names to our schools; we can’t trademark them all,” Fr. Jacob points out.Their educational methodology, called Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm , encapsulates their identity and mission and prescribes the template for teaching and learning in a Jesuit institution, a unique feature, says Fr. Jacob, of a Jesuit school. That’s on the inside. On the outside, the school must visibly state its affiliation to the JEA, or identify itself as a Jesuit institution, bearing its logo. “Such is the reputation we now have that parents will immediately spot the difference,” says Fr. Jacob.Or will they? The website of St Xavier’s High School, Gurugram aligns it with ‘The St Xavier’s Group of Schools’, but it lists only two branches in Gurugram, at Sectors 49 and 81. It also claims affiliation to ‘The St Xavier Foundation’ that has ‘been in the service of rural and urban Indian education since its inception’, offering it ‘subsidised or free of cost for the needy’ (a charity most schools can now claim thanks to RTE).The school, according to a CBSE directory, was founded in 2013 and is managed by the Shanti Janak Educational Trust, based in Jhilmil Colony, Delhi. The school did not respond to TOI’s requests for an interview.Of course, appropriation of a popular and unlicensed name is no crime. Unlike some unfortunate parents who hadn’t done their due diligence, Gunjan Chaudhri was well aware of St Xavier’s ‘secular status’. “I was only concerned with the school’s performance, not with its name or affiliation. And I was convinced with what I’d heard,” she says. “The school has excellent staff and a great extra-curricular programme. They are completely secular.”Indeed, the clones are just part of the problem. The greater competition for convent schools comes from private schools that offer English-language schooling, and features befitting a holiday resort.“There is no comparison. The education we impart is superior, and character formation is still at the heart of our teaching,” insists Provincial, MK Devassy, head of the Northeast Province of the Montfort Brothers of St Gabriel, the society that runs around 150 schools in India, including the popular Montfort schools. Incidentally, when the brothers set out to establish their first Montfort in Mizoram (Montfort Academy), they found someone had already beaten them to it with a Montfort School, and a couple of malapropistic ‘Monforts’. “We have registered Montfort School as a trademark, but others can change a letter or two,” the Provincial says, adding that these knockoffs usually pop up in places that lack a sizeable Christian population. All the better to go unreported. “There are also Christian laypeople running private schools named after our schools, and I’ve even heard of lay teachers made to wear uniforms to look like nuns. We don’t have a monopoly on names, but people usually know the difference,” he believes.Not least when it comes to schools like Lord Jesus Public School, and Hindu Don Bosco Matric. Higher Secondary!