A fireman battles the blaze at Bengali Higher Secondary School on Thursday. Picture by Eastern Projections

Guwahati, Jan. 31: A fire gutted an entire floor of a pre-Independence Bengali school in the Assam capital today, but many were relieved that calamity struck on a local holiday and not a normal working day when the rooms would have been teeming with students.

The fire at Bengali Higher Secondary School, a landmark in Guwahati’s busy Paltan Bazar locality, broke out around 2am and would have spread to the adjacent Bengali Girls’ High School had the firemen not arrived promptly.

Seven fire engines battled the blaze for two hours before the flames died out, but much of the first floor had been gutted by then. The arts classrooms and the science and computer laboratories — 10 rooms in all — could not be saved.

Teachers and students shuddered to think what might have happened had the fire raged on a working day. Today was a holiday because of Me-dum-me-phi, a festival of the Ahom community.

Scores of past students based in the city were in the crowd that gathered outside the campus as firemen tried to douse the flames. The topic of discussion was whether the fire was the result of a short circuit, a carelessly thrown cigarette/beedi or sabotage, though there was nothing to suggest that someone deliberately set fire to the building.

Watchman Lakhan Shah said a resident of the PWD Colony adjoining the school campus was the first to spot smoke billowing out of the tin roof of the building.

Principal Utpala Sinha said the cause of a fire was “a mystery” to her. “I do not think an electrical short circuit was the cause since the mains were switched off.”

On whether she was implying sabotage, Sinha said it was a possibility. “The school building was locked, but sabotage cannot be ruled out.”

Biology teacher Nibedita Choudhury said a drain near the school campus caught fire about a month ago after someone threw inflammable liquid there. “Something similar might have happened today,” she added.

An official of the state Fire Service Organisation said the fire most probably originated in the laboratory. “An electrical short circuit cannot be ruled out even if the main switch was off. We found power circulating through the main switch,” he said.

Workers engaged for repairs may also have had a hand in the fire, albeit unknowingly. “It is possible that one of them threw a beedi without stubbing it and it landed on an inflammable object or liquid,” the official said.

The Paltan Bazar institution was known as the Silver Jubilee Anglo-Bengali High School before Independence. The then governor of Assam, Sir Michael Keane, inaugurated it on April 28, 1936.