Hill, Vale & Many A Tale

hen authors write about their hometowns,  they are prone to hyperbole and nostalgia.  Ganesh Saili’s tribute to Mussoorie is a portrait of a Himalayan hill station, told in the first person, but without an excessive word-count or self-indulgent reverie. Perhaps the reason is that Mussoorie itself doesn’t carry a metaphorical chip on its municipal shoulder. As Saili explains, the town’s status as a colonial retreat had none of the bombastic weightiness of power resorts like Shimla or Nainital, where burra sobs of the Raj ascended ceremoniously into the mountains for the summer, carrying with them their files and formalities. Nor did it have the overblown romance and cloying charms of Kashmir. Instead, Mussoorie has always been unpretentious, with a slightly shabby dignity. In its heyday, the town enjoyed a lascivious reputation, as a place where young widows and malaria-stricken subalterns clutched sweating palms in shadowy corners of the Mall, or wrestled with eye-hooks and garter belts amidst beds of maidenhair ferns.

In the interests of full disclosure: this reviewer is a Mussoorie resident who has known the author for more than 30 years. If I were to be anything but complimentary, I might risk being thrown out of the Writers’ Bar at the Savoy, which is worse than being  blackballed at the old Himalaya Club. Almost everyone who lives in Mussoorie knows each other, and Ganesh Saili adds plenty of discretely suggestive gossip.

The book is divided into three sections. The first is a series of anecdotal chapters recounting Mussoorie’s history, including tales about early personages like Captain Young, who built the first house at Mullingar, in 1823, and Sir George Everest, who used his 600-acre estate near Clouds’ End as a benchmark for mapping the Himalayas. Another important figure from the early years was Frederick ‘Pahari’ Wilson, who scandalised Anglo-India by marrying a Garhwali woman and carving out a  kingdom along the upper reaches of the Ganga. According to Saili, Young introduced potatoes to the region, while Wilson brought apples to Garhwal. There are stories of churches and nightclubs, of legendary hotels like the Savoy, of schools and of graveyards full of mouldering bones, including those of John Lang, the Australian author, lawyer and entrepreneur (a dangerous combination), who is buried in Camel’s Back cemetery.

The second section consists of a reprint of John Northam’s Guide to Masuri, Landaur,  Dehradun & The Hills North of Dehra, first published in 1884. The third section is a pictorial diary, with sepia photographs of Mussoorie buildings and landscapes from a century ago.

Saili writes with a deft and probing pen—no leaky ballpoint this one, nor dainty, feathered quill (neither is it a bile-poisoned nib used by one cowardly writer in town, who struggles with his own wretched anonymity). He narrates his story at a calm, unhurried pace. My only minor complaint with this book is that it dwells too heavily on the British period of Mussoorie’s history.

There is a suggestion that the town has gone downhill since Independence, which isn’t entirely true. Of course, many old buildings have been razed or cannibalised and some of the quainter charms have vanished. All of us are guilty of retrospective regrets, but if I honestly asked myself, would I rather have lived in Mussoorie during the 1920s, or today, when there are more egalitarian pleasures, I’d choose the present tense. Plenty of recent stories remain to be told. Saili alludes to one in his introduction, describing the pseudonymous “Chachi”, who ran a gambling den in the bazaar and trumped many local hearts; or Chatter Singh Negi, who came to the Savoy as a 10-year-old bellboy and retired 70 years later as the manager. Perhaps the next book on Mussoorie will celebrate these colourful, contemporary characters.

The photos are well chosen and carefully reproduced. Mussoorie Medley costs slightly more than a taxi up the winding road from Dehradun railway station to Picture Palace bus stand, certainly a bargain for anyone who wants to travel two centuries back and enjoy the leisurely ambience of yesteryear.