Woodstock: Past Forward A Quarantine Story Ashoke Chatterjee, Class of 1951
The roots of the present day lay in the past and so I made voyages of discovery into the past ever seeking a clue in it, if any such existed, to the understanding of the present.
A
s I write, educators and learners are returning to our hillside after the incredible disruption of Covid-19. Everyone up there is praying that things will work out according to plan. There are other plans as well: plans for Woodstock’s 175th anniversary celebrations. Over the coming years each Quadrangle will culminate in a very special 2029 issue, and a third volume of Woodstock’s published history. Monica thinks that as an alumnus entering his ninth decade I should have something to contribute to all this. She has a point, and it’s not just about survival.. For everyone on the planet, Covid 19 and all that comes with it has demanded confronting mortality and what we consider of value. What we value reflects where our memories are rooted. Things taken for granted suddenly acquire new meaning, like the Woodstock that dwells within us. How did that get us to where we are? Each of us is participant in a strange saga of a far-flung tribe bound together by what the Quadrangle represents: loyalty to a hillside perched on the tallest mountain range on earth that burst out 50 million years ago from cataclysmic collisions of landmasses floating on a primordial sea. So should our history begin with a plunge into the evolution of the mighty Himalaya, etched into fossils discernible to this day on rock-faces along the Tehri Road? Should we acknowledge Neolithic settlers on these hills 10,000 years before Woodstock? You can read all about it in Stephen Alter’s brilliant rediscovery of these mountains. A Woodstockwallah, his knowledge is deep of a Himalaya that has cradled one of the world’s great civilisations. Its legends, dreams and prayers offer a sanctity that has endured within these hills for thousands of years. Later histories of war and conquest would link the region to Nepal and Afghanistan and to the biggest empire of them all. When Britain’s East India Company set to work on its plunder of India, Biblethumping missionaries were just behind. The stated intention was to save the heathen from
hellfire while India’s new rulers hoped that submission to a ‘foreign’ god might translate as loyalty to the British crown. 1854, the year of Woodstock’s founding in Mussoorie, witnessed on the plains below the seizure of Nagpur, Oudh, Chhatisgarh and even the domain of the Rani of Jhansi whose valour would one day enliven Hindi classes at Woodstock. Earlier, in 1823 as other conquests were well under way, a certain Col Frederic Young built a shooting box in our vicinity. Two years later he constructed Mullingar. That landmark brings familiar terrain into the Woodstock story which actually begins beyond Kulri at Caineville House before arriving at its ‘proper’ place. Apparently Woodstock almost did not make it. In another great book , we learn that in 1871 Woodstock had fallen on tough times, and property was put up for sale. Then Rev Samuel Kellogg and another missionary intervened, leading to a historic 1872 cable that crossed the oceans from distant Philadelphia: “Buy Woodstock”. (Had I known that years ago, I may have forgiven those long hikes up from dorms to Kellogg Church every Sunday). Early School history may begin with British conquests, but it would soon blaze another path into these hills. Education which started by serving the needs of Bible-toting parents evolved into India’s introduction to American education, including scandalous notions in Victorian India of a co-educational boarding school and to pedagogical practices incomprehensible to prevailing ideals of British public school discipline. Another century would find “Woodstock, known over all the land, sung of on every hand”’, once Alan and Irene Parker arrived from California in the 1920s to guide the unfolding of Woodstock’s important transformations. I was part of that. My own Woodstock history began some twenty years later. In 1942 I arrived in Upper Kindergarten, having been ‘dishonorably discharged’ from a school in Allahabad. Fortunately the Parkers, who were family friends, had come down for a break
at the time of this catastrophe. Delinquent Ashoke was taken to them for counseling. “Nothing wrong with Ashoke” Allen Parker is said to have advised my parents, “He knows a bad school when he sees one. Take him to Woodstock.” Other reasons made 1942 a tumultuous year. The Landour community was sheltering refugees fleeing from Hitler in the west and Japanese invasions on the east. Mahatma Gandhi launched the ‘Quit India’ movement that would bring India its independence in just five years. As India’s freedom fighters were dragged into British jails, Woodstock became a shelter for their children. Among them, Jawaharlal Nehru’s nieces Nayantara (author and herself a Distinguished Alumni) and Chandralekha. Both would add Woodstock memories to published accounts of growing up in such turbulent times. Padmaja Naidu, a heroine of the freedom struggle, was appointed governor of Uttar Pradesh (no longer His Majesty’s United Provinces). She arrived at Parker Hall to share gratitude to Woodstock and the Parkers for protecting her daughters while she languished in prison. Woodstock was now a bridge between a colonial past and a new era in which the School would emerge as another thread in the tapestry of a new nation, torn apart by a brutal Partition yet committing itself to diversity, inclusion and an ability to stand on the shoulders of the past and to learn from it. Each of the thousands of lives that have gone through Woodstock’s halls over 170 years will have a history of its own. What we share together is the incredible coincidence — or divine plan? – of being thrown up together on a Himalayan hillside by the tides of fortune, members of a community that we may take for granted while others can find us amazing to behold and often impossible to comprehend. Even for us, it can be easier to regard our moorings as DNA rather than attempt
19
