Ganesh Saili’s Mussoorie Medley: Tales of Yesteryear is back, incarnated as a hardcover. Value additionsIJ Several, including the new front and back covers with a liberal sprinkling of fresh anecdotes and new images.
In this book, published by Niyogi Books, Saili brings together from several sources the various accounts people have written about the hill station. The Raj summers in Mussoorie, chintz tablecloths and lace doilies, amateur dramatics of the Mussoorie Theatre Group at the Happy Valley Club: all these are bound together in this book which has more than a hundred photographs.
“In the spring of 1808, Captain Hyder Jung Hearsey and Captain Felix Raper became the first visitors to get a view of the Garhwal Himalayas from the bend near lal Tibba in landour. Though for centuries the Himalayan foothills have been summer retreats where the chaans or temporary thatch-shelters of the local hill folk were the only signs of human habitation. It was left to the British to come up, move in and claim all the credit for founding hill-stations all over India,” writes Saili.
“Very briefly, if you remember, Shimla was the headquarters of the Raj; Nainital, the summer capital of the United Provinces, while Mussoorie, always racier, ended up as a sort of pleasure dome for maharajas and military on rest, recuperation and recreation,” he says.
landour, still in love with its past, has old bungalows clinging on to their names. The roll-call includes Alyndale, Firs, Seaforth, Shamrock, Bellevue, and Oakville. Writes Saili about landour, “Climb up through the narrow bazaar and you emerge in a mountain-top world of deodar trees, church spires, flowering gardens and panoramic views. This is as close as you can get to unspoilt British India. luckily, the army owns all the land. There is a pretty good chance it will stay that way!”
As early as 1838, the indefatigable traveller Fanny Parks in her diary describes her climb to Mussoorie in a palanquin: ‘Such beautiful rhododendrons! They are forest trees, not shrubs, as you have them in England. The people gathered the wild flowers, and filled my lap with them. I could not help sending a man from the plains, who had never seen a nettle, to gather one; he took hold of it, and relinquished his hold instantly in excessive surprise, exclaimed,’ It has stung me; it is a scorpion plant!’
Mussoorie Medley has its own bouquet of stinging nettles where the Himalayan foothills come alive in a fast paced, scintillating account of Mussoorie’s evolution. With the patience of a historian, Saili marshals his facts with long years of research. We find that from humble beginnings of Capt Young’s shaky shooting-lodge, to the stiff-upper-lip diaries of lady Emily Eden, the reader moves down the corridors of two hundred years, a tour de force on Mussoorie where gossip, anecdote, famous landmarks and odd balls enliven this nostalgic walk down history lane.
Down the bridle path, after the aqueduct, before the bend near Wymper’s Pool, stands Sikander Hall. Bought in 1916 by Alice Skinner on the liquidation of the assets of the old Crown Brewery, it has been home to generations of descendants of Colonel James Skinner, patriarch of the family and founder of the legendary Skinner’s Horse. Born of a Rajput mother and a Scotsman, he lived like a Moghul, preferring to be addressed by his formal title: Nasir-ud-Dowlah Colonel James Skinner Bahadur Ghalib Jung. But to those around him, he was simply ‘Sikander sahib’ or Alexander the Great.
A Christian by upbringing, he still managed to keep a harem of Hindu and Muslim wives, and to keep the peace built them in turn a church, a mosque and temple too. Skinner rode at the head of his own mercenaries, an irregular cavalry, with whom he fought for the Marathas and the Moghuls before finally joining up with the East India Company. He raised Skinner’s Horse on 23rd February 1803, choosing for them the bright yellow tunics or the ‘Clothes of the Dead’ as warriors who had sworn that if they could not win; they would do battle and die.
Nobody can better this magnum opus which testifies to the author’s love for the town and the mountains. This lovely, well-designed, eminently readable, illustrated book tells the story of the founding and coming to being of what was once known as ‘the Queen of Hills’.
Ganesh Saili earnestly narrates the disturbing nexus of the builder-contractor which together is slowly but surely ruining the last vestiges of ‘the most beautiful of hill stations of India’.