ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE DOON Read online

  I do know the question haunting (!) your mind—do I believe in ghosts? Well, I don't, and yet keep on meeting them. Not far from my house in the Kumaon Himalayas, there is the legend of a British administrator who is sometimes spotted smoking a cigarette in cold winter nights. But that is an exclusive civil service story.

  The Many Worlds of Dehra Dun

  Arijit Banerji

  rom a quiet sleepy backwater to an aspiring with-it town with further ambitions to make it big. This is not really a history, nor even a geography, but a bunch of words to describe the growth of this quite delightful place to stay. The main background is beautiful mountain vistas, cheerful, hospitable, and welcoming people of the hills, and some climate!

  We first have, with apologies, the original inhabitants who, like all original inhabitants are probably on the verge of transformation, if not inundation. They were the agricultural and orchard pioneers, basmati, lithis, tea gardens, and many good things from the bounty of nature. The lands and orchards, which originally belonged to retired British people, have all but disappeared as a result of a process called development. The British sold when they left, and the descendants of the original purchasers have morphed into puppies and yuppies of various hues, slowly getting lost in the beginnings of an urban sprawl, with multi-storeyed buildings faking over from the orchards.

  There were, of course, the original landed gentry and their serfs about which some historian, of whom there are several in this valley, would be better qualified than the present writer to write about. Among the landed gentry were zamindars and maharajas who had holiday havelis set amongst extensive orchards and gardens in Dehra Dun and who would be citizens of the town during the season. I remember, my aunt and uncle had one such, stretching from the Bindal river to the western end of suicide alley. I remember what is now Connaught Place being sold by them when I was very small, and who knows what the selling price may have been—Rs 100 per bigha????

  Then, we had the army, the forest department, the Survey of India, many many other government bodies and their various training establishments. These were the cream of the days of empire and several distinguished officers spent their formative and working years in the town. Before the FRI was built, the present Doon School property at Chand Bagh was the Forest College. The writer's father was at the Forest College (Chand Bagh edition) in 1925 and as a coincidence, most of the family went to the same location in its later edition. The army was, of course, the most distinguished of all the government wings, and we Doonites have always been proud of them. Distinguished to look at, distinguished by their demeanour. (I am an army buff.)

  One particular form of snobbery prevalent in Dehra Dun is trying to claim an association with the town that 'goes back longer than the Jones'. The writer wins eighty percent of the time by claiming an association going back to 1925, of course, long before he was born. This form of pointless banter has frequently put the writer in a spot (twenty percent of the time) for example, when one attempt at showing off was squashed by the adversary who claimed his father had built Ghanta Ghar. Must check this out. Could not have been before 1925.

  The school fraternity has always been a most important part of life in Dehra Dun, and indeed, is probably, what makes us well known throughout the land and outside. We are all proud of the many well-known institutions here and in Mussoorie, and the staff and students of all these schools are a vibrant part of our life and do us proud. Come October, and the superb Founders' Day functions lighten our life, though there are so many of them, that it becomes difficult to take them all in. If you want to know which the best institution is, I will tell you later.

  We now move forward to the Partition, when the gentry of Dehra Dun used to complain for hours every day that there were too many people from a certain part of the world who were inundating and changing the (sleepy) character of the town. However, on balance who knows if this was a good thing or a bad thing (not the people but the influx). This now formed the nucleus of the puppies and yuppies, who gave us laughter, crowds, noise, shops, and similar good things of life. Two generations have passed since then and the influx has now got fully absorbed.

  After the English gentry left, and the large properties and orchards were transformed, an exclusive preserve of the Brits and senior Indian gents, the Doon Club became the lamp round which the new wannabees hovered, soon to be consumed by the bright lights of their new club life. I gather, one of the newer members fired his revolver (into the air) to celebrate being consumed by the club. They had arrived.

  Who else arrived?

  Hordes of retired people. All shapes, sizes, ages, colours, backgrounds, careers, interests, prejudices. Some play golf, some do not play golf, some cannot play golf. Some play cards, or maybe, most play cards. Some garden, some sleep, some read, some do NGOs, some try to write, and some wonder what to do, and maybe, are still wondering. All are, of course, experts in their various fields and wait for people to ask them for free advice. Alas, as Abraham Lincoln implied, people are smart most of the time and manage to escape the offers of free advice most of the time.

  You have the services retirees. Smart, clipped, distinguished. You have the government retirees. Smart, unclipped, distinguished. You have the company retirees. Smart. These worlds mingle and coalesce among much banter and jollity. The age spread here is sixty plus to ninety plus and as you, wise reader, can well imagine, this is not unlike a procession going, you know where. In the meantime, however, there is much to be done if one could only get down to doing it. If not, does it really matter?

  A major problem for retirees in spending time is that there are no children here to chastise. Even youth of twenty-five think they have grown up and do not need any free advice. If they only knew. They usually live so far away in the big bad world that they need to be informed about all aspects of life away from home. The injustice of it all is compounded when they decide to inform the poor parents about how to behave in the big bad world, when to have medicine, eat, sleep, walk, (drink?). Comparing advice from various children takes up much quality time of the Dehra Dun retired population. They probably listen.

  Not having become an industrial town, and unlikely to become one, the business community here are shopkeepers and traders, all getting richer by the minute, as the town grows and India shines. They keep long working hours, but come weekends and they are off to Mussoorie, to jostle and shove on the Mall, along with hundreds of other colleagues. The fun is in crowding and jostling, eating and drinking, buying and spending, seeing and being seen, and bringing infinite joy to their brethren in Mussoorie who eagerly await these visits. Indeed, they live for them.

  Then comes the season, when rich pappays from Meerut, Ghaziabad, Muzaffanagar, the wild west of western UP, (dare I say, Delhi), and the jat set in general descend on us (climb up to us?) and we all revel in how much good this does to our economy. It does not do much good, of course, to our roads, traffic, pollution, noise, litter, road rage, but at least we get to learn new sartorial trends, new behavioural norms, new and snazzy gadgets, and it gives us natives a chance to gawp at the glitz that we are missing out on. The graph grows ever onwards and upwards and this brings more and more food shops, hotels, jams, tree felling, vanishing orchards, vanishing forests, and new 'kaloneys'. The smarter visitors get taken in like the rest of us by the beauty of the valley, and buy land and buy more land. The town spreads sideways and upwards.

  Then, one fine morning Dehra Dun became, from a sleepy UP backwater, the Capital. This transformed everybody into people of importance, and the emphasis shifted from what you know to who you know. This was a good thing, and gave the retirees and everybody else much more to talk about. Traffic took on a glitter that it never had. Cars with blue flashers, red flashers, (which are higher in the heirarchy?) beacons, sirens, uniformed policemen pushing cars and citizens out of the way, and important looking people looking important sitting in their cars. From the length of the processions and the amount of noise generated, one could estimate whether the main occupant of the main car (one person) was equivalent to the Emperor Shah Jahan or a lesser mortal. This must surely have influenced his son, the Emperor Aurangzeb, to take a greater interest in Dehra Dun and thus remembered to send Guru Ram Rai here to start a settlement.

  In any case, what was always evident in these cavalcades was the urgency with which they had to zoom. Uttarakhand being a border state, there is always the chance of an emergency, an invasion, or an infiltration, which makes it essential in the national interest to go as fast as you can, whether you are going towards the problem or running away from it. There is an added blessing here—the public get to see many policemen even though they are only guarding the cavalcades, glaring at everybody, and not catching criminals. That is a different department.

  Though our little city has grown to the point where Skoda Octavias and Hyundai Sonatas are passe, and one sees Mercedes, Audi, and BMW on the roads, the King of the Road remains the caparisoned white Ambassador, with red and blue flashers and ear-piercing sound effects. It could be the inspector of animal husbandry rushing to Haridwar to check if the cows have been properly inseminated, or a similar problem of urgent national importance.

  Having said all this, the presence of government was a blessing to anyone who had problems, and one did not need to go to Lucknow or other places to solve them. It is a moot point whether their presence created other problems—the jury is out on this. But roads, power supply, telephone connections improved and land prices zoomed up faster than the VIP cavalcades. This zooming continues, which has brought another class of people here— persons of wealth (and eminence?) who buy land either to build and live or not build and keep. This is, of course, a blessing for all the locals, but not much of a blessing for ordinary people with aspirations to
live in Dehra Dun.

  All these worlds or their equivalents obviously exist in all cities, but in the bigger cities one tends to live in one's own chosen little world with nary a thought for the rest. Since Dehra Dun is anything but large, all these worlds are in close proximity, and mesh and move and mingle more than in most other places. There is little social climbing in a big city sense because there are really no great social heights to climb, but our residents do indulge themselves in trying to move around these various worlds to see if any of them offers any chances of climbing. Alas! the answer is usually no.

  For a town as small as Dehra Dun we have a large number of NGOs but here again, alas, the major component of membership seems to be retired people, sometimes up to the age of eighty and beyond. This leaves us woefully short of actual field workers for the average NGO, and we have to suffer from the syndrome of too many chiefs and not enough Indians. In spite of this, a lot of good work is done. For example, the Rajaji National Park has been practically cleared of human habitation and a very effective rehabilitation programme put into effect by the joint efforts of Government and NGOs. The regeneration of the forests in the park, the increased green cover after lopping stopped, and the removal of pressure on forest grasslands from the thousands of erstwhile residents' cattle have all contributed to a rebirth of the park, an increase in wildlife, including the tiger. There are many other examples of NGOs contributing to the improvement of our lives.

  It is, probably, not known that the Rajaji National Park is the northern-most range of the Asian elephant. Encroachment into forests and the spread of habitation took away the elephants' natural habitat, leaving the animals no choice, but to stray into human settlements which led to conflict. By humans intruding into their traditional range, the elephants were left with no alternative but to try and cross the main railway line that runs through their reserve, resulting in tragic cases of elephants being run over by speeding trains. Concerted action by citizens, government, and railways seems to have reduced this tragic problem.

  A special attraction of Dehra Dun was the abundance of bird life and wildlife within the limits of the extended town. With the rapid spread of the town, we see less and less of our former companions. The more's the pity. There is no answer to this unfortunate result of progress and urbanisation, but spare a thought for the thousands of animals, whose habitat we have taken away. Nocturnal visits by leopards were quite frequent in the outskirts of the town some years ago but have become very rare of late. Jungli murghi were sighted very often, but as the days go by, this is becoming less and less often. One still sees hares at night and we hope these gentle creatures are not destroyed by our progress.

  Dehra Dun has always had good eating houses, starting with Kwality which was born in Dehra Dun, and good bakeries and confectioners. This tradition continues with the old eating houses maintaining their standards and new eating house constantly coming up. Nirula's is ever popular, and McDonalds is a recent entrant. With the growing tourist trade, industrialisation, new educational institutions, new hotels, and the exodus away from the crowded dusty plains to our Dehra in the Dun, the town grows. It is our job to see it improves as well.

  Not easy, but so far there is a lot to be said for Dehra Dun (rhymes with fun).

  How Green was my Valley?

  [Wildlife and Forests of Dehra Dun]

  Bikram Grewal

  he Dehra Dun Valley is cradled between two mighty mountain ranges: the west Himalayas in the north and the Shivalik range running parallel in the south. To the west it is bordered by the holy river Yamuna, and to the east by the even more hallowed Ganga, on whose banks rest the sacred cities of Rishikesh and Haridwar. Perennial streams like the Asan, Suswa, Tons, Song and the Jakhan water the valley, turning it into a verdant carpet of green. Half of the valley is covered by pure and mixed forests dominated by the soaring sal tree (Shorea robusta). The rest is a mix of cultivated agricultural land, agro-forestry plantations, old tea gardens, orchards, urbanised areas, cantonments and riverine scrubland. The British hill station of Mussoorie looks down imperiously on the forests below.

  It is, therefore, appropriate that the British should decide to set up the Forest Research Institute in this lush valley. Established as the Imperial Forest Research Institute in 1906, it was located in Chand Bagh, where the elite Doon School is now located. But the institute ran out of space and had to be moved a few kilometres down where its new building was inaugurated in 1929. This glorious Greco-Roman building was designed by the architect, C.G. Blomfield and built by Sardar Ranjit Singh, a contractor who also built Lutyen's Delhi. To me, it is the finest building in India, even more magnificent than the Rashtrapati Bhavan in the capital. Spread over hundreds of acres, it houses a charming botanical garden and five museums.

  Another important institution in Dehra Dun is the Wildlife Institute at Chandrabani. Set up in 1982 and given autonomy in 1986, it has produced some of the finest research in the field of environment. Today, it is the conscious keeper of the environmental movement, often correcting and exposing wrong-doing by the state forest departments, like the fudging of tiger census figures.

  Dehra Dun has had a close call. In the early Sixties, the hills were scarred by the greed of the limestone quarry mafia. This coterie of well-connected and powerful people managed to obtain licenses to extract the lucrative limestone. The hillsides reverberated with the sound of dynamite, causing havoc to the land, the wildlife and the inhabitants. The natural limestone aquifers were close to extinction. A growing concern among the residents led them to approach the Supreme Court and, after a bitter fight that went on for five long years, the court ordered the closure of these mines. Aided by the abundant rain that the valley is blessed with, the scarred hillsides slowly regained their pristine look.

  But now, there's a new threat. The city has been declared the capital of the newly-formed state of Uttaranchal (now, Uttarakhand), a decision that has accelerated the crass urbanisation. The city is expanding and creeping into the pristine forests.

  It was during the glorious green days of the Nineties, after the mining ban and before the urbanisation, that I decided to become a part-time resident of Dehra Dun. It was a sleepy town with litchi orchards and fields of basmati rice and people lived in old bungalows. Dalanwala was not the slum it is now. There were no supermarkets and no night clubs. Life was gentle, and the pace languorous. I bought a quaint house near the Malsi Deer Park and started a love affair which over the years has been endured. Soon, Malsi became too crowded and I moved further and deeper into the forest, and acquired a hillside on the river Tons. This is where I plan to finally hang my boots and await the call.

  After a misspent life chasing and writing about birds, I thought I would start a quiet study of the birds that inhabit the valley. It was a tough act to follow, for my predecessors included the venerable B.B. Omaston who first published an article entitled 'Birds nesting in the Tons Valley' as early as 1897, and continued doing so till the publication of his definitive 'Birds of Dehra Dun and the adjacent Hills' in 1935. There were others like J. George and M.D. Wright who continued to contribute to the study of the valley's avi-fauna. The mantle has now fallen on the young but competent shoulders of Dhananjai Mohan and A.P. Singh.

  The valley is a birder's paradise for it covers a variety of habitats, and this is reflected in the very impressive checklist of more than four hundred birds, including twenty-three 'globally threatened' avian species. If you include the surrounding hills the count crosses a staggering six hundred. One day, in my garden on the Tons, Bill Harvey, Nikhil Devasar and I were ringing some birds and found a strange and unfamiliar looking small bird which was clearly a member of the Wren-babbler family. We consulted all the available literature and to our immense joy, it turned out to be a Nepal Wren-babbler, a bird only recently discovered by science and hitherto thought to be endemic to Nepal.