Men of Stone:

A Reflection on Richard Simon's Thomia

- BY PRIYAN DIAS

Richard Simon’s monumental two volume history of S. Thomas’ College runs into 869 quarto-sized pages, inclusive of endnotes but excluding front matter and indices of subjects and persons.

The book is extremely well written, in a very erudite but engaging style, and unique in that the history of the school (founded in 1851) is interspersed with that of Lanka (i.e. its political, economic, ecclesiastical and educational landscape), covering the 200 years, from 1801 to 2001. In fact, the book is subtitled, “The entangled histories of Lanka and her greatest public school”. I cannot, in this article, hope to be truly representative of Simon’s magnum opus, but will focus on aspects and themes that struck me. Apart from being purely illuminating and both sobering and inspirational, history can also serve as a critique of the present, and I make some attempts at this, too.