Did you know that electricity arrived in Mussoorie well before it did in Lucknow? Or that there was suggestion that Mussoorie was in the running alongside Shimla to become British India's summer capital?
Or that a king of Nepal named one of his sons 'Mussoorie'? Or even that there was a language school set up in Landour in 1800s to teach Hindi to newly arrived missionaries?
These along with many more rare nuggets of historical information about "noisy" Mussoorie and "quiet" Landour are now available in a well-researched new book that provides a window to the "glory days" of the "Queen of the Hills".
Titled 'Mussoorie and Landour: Footprints of the Past', the 300-page book, richly illustrated with rare archival images and supplemented with elaborate end-notes, is a scholarly work, a guidebook, a city diary and a postcard collection, all rolled into one.
While Mussoorie since its inception in 1820s remained the "pleasure capital" of the Raj, a "carefree station away from officialdom", but according to 'The Hills', the first newspaper to be published in Mussooorie, the hill station might also have been in the running to become the "summer capital" of the British India.
"Now that there is talk about removing seat of Government to the Himalayas, a sanitarium like Mussoorie, offering as it does peculiar attractions on score of climate, and centrically situated with respect to the Presidencies of Calcutta and Bombay, stands a fair chance of becoming, perhaps at a no distant date, the chosen residents of the Rulers of India," the 'Hills' reported on December 12, 1861.
While the "Edinburgh-in-the-hills" did not become the summer capital, but like other sanitaria, it reached its apex during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) and enjoyed a significant growth after the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny.
And, the book goes on to credit the "progressive" municipality of the station for lighting up the streets to "great envy of Lucknow".
"On 24 May 1909 - celebrated at that as Empire Day - the electric lights of Mussoorie were switched on, no doubt to the great envy of Lucknow. For it was the progressive Mussoorie Municipal Board that, as a sole proprietor had taken up a state-of-the-art hydroelectric scheme to address the need for both water and electricity," the book says in the chapter "Building the Bolthole".
Authored by US-based father-daughter duo of Virgil Miedema and Stephanie Spaid Miedema, the book goes to say how the station "flourished and grew under the lavish patronage of the Indian rajas."
The then royal families from Baroda (Dunseverick) to Rapipla (Rushbrook Estate/Padmini Niwas) and Jind (Oak Less) to Nabha (Claridge's Hotel) to Tekari (Eric's Own) built fabulous houses, making the 'queen of the hills' indeed a 'resort of the kings'.
