by Aman Nath

St. Stephen's College was founded in 1881, in that wondrous century of transition - the nineteenth century - which was less definitive than the 11th century in India or the 16th century of the Renaissance in Europe. It was a century made hybrid by explorationconfrontation and compromise. Its curiosities were shaped from the fabulous, nebulous effervescence of two different times. Times in motion but warped together into an awkward frieze which was odd - even heavy - on its foundations of the past. But this was unlikely to dovetail into the strictures of modernism shaping on the horizon. It was an open license, a laissez-faire of tastes and cultures, a melange reussi, a carte blanche with a watermark of the past if we look back upon it with a century's hindsight. This 19th century was topped in many cases with the crazy might of imperialism in its full expressive glory or the sheer decadence of monarchy that had lived beyond its tenure and utility. The educational principles of the Nineteenth Century were to shape a new whimsy with its own knowledge of the past and ignorance of the future which would run into India's freedom and a feudo-monarchical, mock-socialist democracy when the 20th century progressed.

In retrospect, who knows if the whole passion and effort to restore Neemrana Fort - Palace- and the several others rubbish heaps and ruins we callously label as our 'heritage'- was not born out of this desire to re-awaken our old strengths? If being born in a post-partition family from Lahore meant recycling all the waste to one's advantage, school had taught a creative ingenuity beyond text books. College derailed us from the usual tracks, taught us that the road we walked could perhaps be the one we made for ourselves.

Five impressionable years is along time of forming. The flashbacks are many. Largely, a guilt of spending more time in the cafe than in the library; of sliding somewhere between India's backward-forward transition. Or was it the intangible strength of our mission college that its nebulousness was preparing us for the unspelled global challenges? The college may well have been set up with a different purpose and long-term agenda. But the times when it was founded had perhaps worked to our advantage.

Who knows of the original mission of the missionaries? In pointing to the skies and helping us Decipher their god among our clouds, they could hardly have imagined how perceptive they would help make the future generations. Far beyond flags, national anthems, boundaries and gods fashioned from our limited understandings would arise the writing force of cyberspace.

A college set in this foundation of time - where its own mission had changed from capital 'M' to multiple m's - could hardly prepare its students for a sedate and static future. It certainly prepared us to shape a mercurial millennium.

Aman Nath was a student of History at College in the early 70s. He is the author of 'The Painted walls of Shekhavati', 'Jaipur' and is currently working on a book on Shiva. He is responsible for the restoration of the Neemrana Fort Palace among other monuments.