The Oriental Seminary started in 1829 by the educator Gour Mohan Addy, was the earliest privately ran, first-rate school for children of Hindu parents in Kolkata (then known as Calcutta).^[1][2] It was open only to boys of Hindu parents.^[3] It was possibly India’s first fully private school, as even Hindu School, Hindu College, and Hare school had to abide by certain government guidelines.^[1] In earlier days, students wanting to study English had to go to the missionary schools, where they were subject to substantial religious influence. The establishment of a school for learning English, free from religious influences was a major contribution of Addy.^[4] Traditional Indian education centres which taught Sanskrit and/or Persian had started fading out.

Gour Mohan Addy (20 January 1805 – 3 March 1846) founded the school without government funding. He appointed teachers to each class level by their ethnicity: Eurasian teachers for junior classes, Bengali teachers for intermediate classes, and Englishmen or Bengalis for upper levels. He died in a boating accident on the Hooghly river, when returning from a trip to Serampore to hire a teacher.^[4]

Currently the principal of the primary section is Rina Basak Halder.^{[citation needed]}

Oriental Seminary was the earliest school Rabindranath Tagore attended.^[5] The first experience of school aroused in the youngster the yearning to be a teacher. Wielding a stick, he used to teach from the railings in the big veranda of the palatial Jorasanko Thakur Bari.^[6][7][8]

Among the list of other notable alumni are Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati,^[9] Krishnadas Pal, Girish Chandra Ghosh, Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee, Sir Gooroodas Banerjee, Sambhunath Pandit, Vishwanath Datta, Amrita Lal Basu, Akshay Kumar Datta, Sudhindranath Dutta,^[10] Jatindranath Sengupta, Swami Abhedananda, Bankim Ghosh, Malay Roy Choudhury and Mithun Chakraborty.^[4][11][12]