Small town lore

Gossip, anecdote, famous landmarks and odd characters enliven this nostalgic survey of a hill station’s history.

Mussoorie is in shock this summer. It is hot enough that people ask for cold water to drink. In the shops are displays of electric fans. Water is in short supply and load-shedding is a hot topic in local newspapers. The old Clock Tower from the 1930s has been pulled down to make space for a new one; so, for the moment, Mussoorie looks like it has lost a front tooth. For once, locals are empathising with the tourists who flee the baking plains for this haven in the hills.

This is a good time to read Mussoorie Medley: Tales of Yesteryear. Its author Ganesh Saili is a retired professor of American literature at the postgraduate college in Mussoorie. His book charts the growth of the town during a time when it was loved for its naughtiness and nicknamed the “pleasure capital of the Raj”.

While official protocol ruled the summer capital of Shimla, Mussoorie was a place to indulge. Saili finds sources to show how this worked, and takes pleasure in doing so — but then everyone in a small town enjoys a good gossip.

He quotes the famous traveller Lowell Thomas: “There is a hotel in Mussoorie (The Savoy), where they ring a bell just before dawn so that the pious may say their prayers and the impious get back to their own beds.” There are other descriptions, too, of women auctioning kisses at charity balls and the Fancy Bazaar, and of how live music in the form of cabarets and mujras made up a big part of the town’s night life. No wonder Mussoorie has more churches than any other hill station!

However, Mussoorie’s days of glory are long gone. Although Saili does indulge in nostalgia, he also has a refreshingly objective take on the town’s recent past and the present — something one cannot say of Mussoorie’s most popular writer, Ruskin Bond, who still writes tales of innocence from the hills. Saili takes on the role of town historian, describing its past; famous landmarks such as the Savoy, Hakmans Hotel, Himalaya Club, Mullingar (the town’s first building, built as a shooting lodge and converted into the Philander Smith Institute, where soldiers came to recuperate); and famous people (few know that Jim Corbett’s parents were married at a church in Landour).

Where words fall short, Mussoorie Medley offers pictures. There are 146 images of photographs and aquatints, some of which the author discovered lying in neglect at the Cantonment office in Landour. The ‘Picture Diary’ section has some rare images — local shops in the 1890s, the majestic Trevelyan & Clark Exchange Building on the Mall, where now a hotel of the same name jostles for space with a bakery and shops selling Kashmiri fabrics and cheap wooden mementos.

Saili is painstakingly accurate. He identifies old mansions long since pulled down, and offers brief descriptions of the few Raj-era people who never went home and are buried in the town’s two cemeteries. The section on local churches is interesting. What might have been a dull local history has cleverly been made fresh by juxtaposing commentary with diary excerpts and scanned letters.

It is a joy to read the letters between Captain Young and the famous George Everest, who spent a decade in Hathipaon near Mussoorie while he superintended the East India Company’s Great Trigonometrical Survey. Young, the Irishman who commanded the first Gurkha Battalion and is credited with having founded Mussoorie, addresses Everest as the “compasswallah”. Everest, who was patiently training young lads in trigonometry (and warding off gossip about having peeped into Zalim Singh’s zenana), started a battle of words. To top this off, the author slips in the mystery of the sightings of the ghost of Captain Young at Mullingar.

The book also offers a study in contrasts, between the town’s past and present. Mussoorie became an economic success, erected garish hotels garnished with fake palm trees and covered up nullahs and streams for wider roads.

Read this book not only as a history but also as a study of what thoughtless commercialisation can do to a place like the once quirky and naughty Mussoorie. Following a clue from this book, I am off to find out just who the woman was who ran a gambling den above her provision store, and seduced men into losing…

[Prerna Raturi is a Kolkata-based freelance writer]