ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE DOON Read online

  A spot that never fails to surprise me is this marvellous waterbody called the Asan Barrage near the sanctified town of Paonta Sahib. In recent years, it has come up with such rarities as the Falcated Duck and the Black-necked Grebe, not to mention Penduline Tits. Now, the tourism department in its wisdom wants to convert these marshlands into a water-sports complex. I feel sorry for the lone breeding pair of Pallas' Fish Eagle that has nested in the same Semul tree for as long as I can remember. A short drive from here lies Karvapani (literally, 'bitter water'), a magnificent stretch of dense and high sal forest, which covers the northern aspect to the Shivalik hills, stretching from Asarori, Malhan through to Timli. The charming forest resthouse was converted into a temporary jail during the infamous emergency in 1975. The temple of Manak Sidh stands close-by.

  Another great stretch of forest and a personal favourite is the Thano forest, which is continuous with the Garhwal hills and connected to the Panduwal–Lachiwala forest in the south. It's a superb spot for observing altitudinal migrants. The river Song and its attendant marshes are great for kingfishers and the occasional Black Stork. The Kalu Sidh Temple is a bonus. Unfortunately, Lachiwala has been converted into a picnic spot and hordes of tourists converge to frolic in the river.

  Other forest blocks such as Barkot, Jhajra and Majaun, too, are under threat from the ever-increasing hunger for land. Be it the timbre mafia, the developers building new homes or the industrialists keen to exploit the tax benefits offered by the government, they are all on the prowl, grabbing what they can and destroying as soon as they possibly can. If this goes on unchecked, the Doon Valley will soon become a polluted wilderness.

  Perhaps, the greatest tragedy is the story of the Rajaji National Park, a large part of which actually lies in the valley, especially the forty kilometre strech from Phanduwala, through to Kansrao and ending up at Motichur. The Chilla block lies across the river Ganga. Fossils excavated in the Shivalik hills show the remains of prehistoric elephants like the Stegodon ganesa, whose tusks were ten feet long.

  Today, their 'lesser' descendants find refuge in this park. Their sanctuary is a fragile asylum, surrounded as it is by the three burgeoning cities of Dehra Dun, Rishikesh and Haridwar. Over 2,000 families, with their 15,000 cattle, live within and in the immediate vicinity of the park, criss-crossed by railway lines, roads and canals. The ecologically vital Chilla–Motichur corridor has been blocked by intense human activity and development, not to mention an army ammunition dump, several villages, the Delhi–Dehra Dun railway line, the Haridwar–Dehra Dun highway and the Chilla power channel. However, conservation of this corridor is not impossible if it gets legal protection. Land for rehabilitation of the village has been identified and funds earmarked for a flyover between Raiwala and Haridwar near Motichur to enable elephants to pass safely beneath.

  Van Gujjars are a nomadic Muslim tribe that has been living in Rajaji for several years. They claim that they first came to the Terai as part of the dowry of a Kashmir princess. The Gujjars are nomadic graziers who move their herd to the upper Himalayas in summer, giving the forests a chance to rejuvenate in their six-month absence. However, over the years, loss of traditional pastoral land has forced them to make Rajaji their permanent home, putting immense biotic pressure on the park. It is not unusual to see these nomads whiz through the park on noisy motorcycles carrying milk cans.

  Following a Supreme Court order to rehabilitate the Gujjars from the designated protected area, efforts were made to relocate them. The painful procedure began in 2002 and after a traumatic year, 193 Gujjar families were resettled to a village, Gaindikhatta. But several thousand Van Gujjars continue to live within the sanctuary. The Chilla block was recently cleared of all Van Gujjars and almost immediately a camera trap set up by the members of the Wildlife Institute recorded a pregnant tigress— the first breeding record in over twenty years. Different matter, she was later killed by poachers.

  The elephant–man conflict is far from being resolved. Man is eating into their land, forcing these gentle giants into the open where they are persecuted, chased and shot at. But there is hope. In the past, there were instances of elephants being run over by speeding trains, especially in the Kansrao area. It took several years to get the railway authorities to agree to reduce the speed of trains passing through this belt. As a result, not a single elephant has been killed since 2000.

  I have spent many happy hours in Rajaji, driving through unknown corners of the park, entering through all its gates. I have stayed in the forest resthouses in Dholkhand, Beribarra, Kansrao and Motichur. I have seen Yellow-throated Martins chase and kill Kalij Pheasants. I have seen a King Cobra slither away and observed a leopard stalk a barking deer. I've been chased innumerable times by irate elephants. It's a lovely forest. And, I can only pray it stays the way it is.

  Doon: Up Close and Personal

  Nayantara Sahgal

  y coffee has the earthy scent and flavour of the clay kulhar I am using instead of a china mug. A Mexican friend taught me to drink it in earthenware and, like tea, it tastes richest this way. I make an early morning ritual of it on the verandah where a luxuriously sal-forested hillside spreads high and wide on my left and slopes steeply down to the boulder-strewn riverbed beneath my garden wall. The dry bed becomes the rushing Bindal river during the monsoon when rain floods the hillside and mist shrouds the garden. But come September, cloud, mist and mystery vanish along with the river as if they had never been.

  At this hour, the sun's just risen rays barely brush the sal treetops but the whole forest will be sunlit by the time I finish my coffee. Facing me, the northern hill ranges south-east to Garhwal. Morning light will lay bare the bald bleached patches on it, left by rapacious limestone quarrying. Though the Supreme Court stopped the quarrying, scars have an uncanny durability, reminding me that Dehra Dun once meant a jail where my father1 and my uncle2 were imprisoned together during one phase of the fight for freedom. The cold cement of the jail offices in Allahabad, Lucknow, Bareilly and Almora, besides Dehra Dun, the grate of rusted iron padlocks, the anguish of saying goodbye to my three parents again and again, hands clinging through unbreakable iron bars, are enduring childhood memories.

  Before we made our home here in 1985, Nirmal Mangat Rai and I used to drive up from Delhi on visits to my mother3, who had come to live here in 1970 after resigning her seat in Parliament. Why did you choose Derha Dun, people asked her, expecting her to say she had chosen the site for its view, the place for its climate and natural beauty, and hearing her say instead that she had an emotional connection with its jail and a nostalgia for her first political assignment. In 1937, she had become the world's first woman cabinet minister and had covered the hills and plains of Uttar Pradesh for the next two years as minister for health and local self-government in Gobind Ballabh Pant's cabinet.

  The house she built, with its gift of hillside and its extravaganza of space and sky and stars, was only a hundred and fifty miles from Delhi, but a world removed from the corridors of power and the atmosphere of jostling ambition which is peculiar to capital cities. In Delhi—recently divorced, hard up, and (for reasons I have recounted elsewhere) living in sin—I struggled to make a living out of journalism, at a time when writing did not pay and political analysis was a male monopoly. I broke through that male bastion to hammer out political commentary in a long relationship with the Indian Express, fanning out to other newspapers and magazines. It was for me the beginning of an impassioned involvement with what India stood for and how she should be governed. In Dehra Dun, far from the din of battle, I sat under a blossom-laden cassia tree on the lawn while the story called 'Crucify Me' wrote itself, and then another called 'Earthly Love', so easily did one shift into another frame of mind that gave imagination free rein.

  Upper Rajpur Road was truly isolated in those days. My mother had no neighbour on either side. Jungli murghi strutted along the garden's low stone parapet. Once, a deer came calling. One night, a leopard left a flurry of chicken feathers on the lawn. Nirmal and I took walks along the rocky river-bed, or across the bridge toward Sahastradhara, or along the Eastern Canal that carried the Rispana river's waters to the town's homes and gardens and had at one time served the tea estates that had flourished in Dehra Dun. We spent evenings on the moon-drenched verandah facing Mussoorie's hilltop lights, drinking illegal whisky during prohibition. We did our shopping in Rajpur bazaar, a twenty-minute walk up the road, where Ashraf the barber gave Nirmal a periodic haircut. We ate samosas and jalebis at the Sardarji's popular teashop, made friends with the postmaster, and discovered a community of Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Buddists—Indians and Tibetans—who lived up the slope from the bazaar and had known each other over a generation or two. This harmonious mix gave no indication of the religion-mania that was to destroy a historic mosque in this very state in a few years' time. Nor, did this quiet enclave, or Dehra Dun itself, succumb to the long-lasting repercussions of this barbaric event. We came to the conclusion that different kinds of people, practising different customs, worshipping different gods, and celebrating their differences together, are the surest guarantee against racial or religious madness and the claim to exclusiveness that produces it. An individual who is locked up all his life in a cell without light or air will go mad and die. Exactly so do cultures decay and civilisations disappear. The magic of renewal and regeneration is brought about by the stranger who crosses our path, the 'other' who is not in the least like us, and for that reason can breathe new life into our bloodstream. India has long understood this wisdom and prospered by it, acknowledging her debt to strangers through all her centuries.

  The only nuisance I recall during our visits was the blast of a loudspeaker at the crack of dawn from an ashram down the road. I walked down to investigate, expecting to find a congregation praying at the top of its combined lungs but the compound was deserted. I banged on a side door. It was opened by an angry fat-bellied man who must have had to get up from his charpai in the bare room to answer my knock. I guessed that, lying prone on his charpai, all he had to do was stretch out one finger to switch the canned bhajans on or off, probably in mid-snore, without disturbing his sleep. Hitler had famously used this economical technique at his rallies, shutting off the ecstatic hysteria of his Nazi legions with a tiny flick of his wrist. The fat man and I exchanged furious words. The noise shrieked on, until I complained to the district magistrate who took action. Some years later, our area lost the sanctity of silence along with its cleanliness when a temple was built and a bazaar and shops and fast food came up around it. So did noise, brisk commerce, beggars and mounting garbage. We came to another conclusion. Worship is a matter of the heart, not of lungpower, and religion, like love, is a private affair. Make it in public, use it to goad and incite, tack it to a political agenda, and it becomes an obscenity.

  My mother asked me if I would like to settle in Dehra Dun. I put off decision, fearing I would miss the intellectual sparkle and crackle of Delhi. And then, it seemed, decision would have to wait. In 1979, the Janta government appointed me Ambassador to Italy. Nirmal decreed we must marry since an Ambassador of India could not be half of an unwed couple, so we got married. The government tottered. Then it fell, and the new government axed the appointment. I let Dehra Dun wait and took the opportunity of two fellowships in the United States to write two novels. Not every woman has the good fortune to marry a feminist who will reverse roles to shop, cook and clean while his wife gets on with her time-bound novel. So, we did not move to the Doon until 1985 and in recognition of our independent identities we put both our nameplates at the gate. This seemed all the more necessary when the 'hindu nari' image overtook films and TV.

  I had spent enchanted childhood summers in the pine forests of my father's estate near Almora where he grew fruit and flowers, experimented with wheat, set up a village school, beehives and a tannery, and named this paradise 'Ritusamhara' after the Kalidasa poem he later translated from Sanskrit into English. Congress workers held summer camps at 'Ritusamhara'. Friends of the family came to visit, among them, Boshi and Gertrude Sen, add the American artist Earl Brewster with his wife, all of whom had made Almora their home. I did not come across the awesome grandeur of Garhwal's interior until August 1988. The last stop on the road journey I made with friends was Gaurikund, from where I joined straggling lines of humanity to walk fourteen kilometres uphill from Gaurikund to Kedarnath, accompanied by the Mandakini all the way. The climb to nearly 12,000 feet took me seven hours and at the temple, I did what I had never been impelled to do before, offer a puja. Perhaps, it was the lean quiet setting of the temple—so unlike the commotion around Badrinath—which legend had it was built by the Pandavas. Perhaps, it was the sag of pilgrimage: the unending procession of men and women I had passed at every turn, toiling up or making their sodden way down the mountain, some barefoot, through ankle-deep slush on that day of incessant rain.

  Four years ago, when life-after-Nirmal began, I embarked on it with the caution of an invalid learning to walk again, doubting that I ever would. Dehra Dun had meanwhile, become the capital of a new state and was caught up in the throes of transformation, with all the growing pains that accompany change. Empty space was fast disappearing and hedges had become history as houses sprang up along upper Rajpur Road, barricaded behind high iron-spiked walls, and more houses behind them. There were sentry boxes, night watchmen, burglaries— one in my own house—and spectacular car crashes as traffic grew too big for roads and ignored rules. In town glass-fronted shops sold imported brands from shoes to virgin olive oil, eyelashes, lotions and potions at globalised prices. Huge, new, heavily guarded jewellery stores, some specialising in diamonds, arrived in glittering profusion. I hoped that olives at least—or some equivalent benefit—if not diamonds, would reach the mountains whose people had fought for statehood and the better life they believed it would bring them. I also hoped that with health, beauty, and the fountain of youth ours for the taking in the Himalayan herbs growing wild on our hills, Uttarakhand would patent and profit by this abundant miraculous yield before some foreign brand did.

  Two additions to the new state were a matter for pride. One is the Centre for Tibetan and Himalayan Studies in Sahastradhara with its magnificent Songtsen Library, just fifteen minutes' drive from my house. It was opened by the Dalai Lama is 2003 and like all the Buddhist institution, I have seen it is immaculately maintained and inviolably serene. The other is Yog-Ganga at the top of Rajpur bazaar where two inspired students of B.K.S. Iyengar carry on the priceless tradition of hatha-yoga. But this is not one more school of hatha-yoga. Here, the laziest and most reluctant anatomies are trained to perform asanas of mathematical precision and perfection using a variety of props that distinguish the Iyengar school of yoga from other schools. Both the Tibetan Centre and Yog-Ganga attract scholars and students from all over the world and are reason enough for the Doon to be on the world map.

  It took me longer to catch up with the community of 'outsiders' from other states and other countries now resident in Dehra Dun—the influx of strangers with whom every society needs to renew and revitalise itself. Different subjects entered conversation. Food and drink became more enjoyable. I found that learning to walk again was not an insurmountable problem.

  There are still reassuring reminders that some things need not change: roasted coffee beans from Paltan bazaar, freshly baked brown bread, puri-tarkari, and the comfort of beautifully stocked bookshops where every request is met and fulfilled with a most unbusinesslike affection. My hillside is still here, too, still thickly wooded, I hope for all time.

  ————————————

  1 Ranjit Sitaram Pandit

  2 Jawaharlal Nehru

  3 Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

  The Net and Nostalgia

  Ramachandra Guha

  friend of mine complains that I am somewhat opportunistic about my use of the term 'home town'. Depending on the context, and my own interest, I use either the town I was born and reared, or the city where my forefathers came from and to which I have since returned. I plead guilty to unprincipled opportunism, but also to an honest confusion. Just as some men have two wives and other men have two nationalities, I have two home towns. Why must I choose between one and the other?

  My conscious memories of Bangalore/Bengaluru go back to the year 1962. For the next thirty years, I visited the place once a year, sometimes twice, staying for a few weeks or a few months each time. Since 1994, it has been my permanent and full-time home. Still, although I think of it seldom, in my dreams my other (and original) home town pops up every so often. Its dense and crowded bazaar figures, but more often I dream of the valley in which the town is set: of its pine forests, its swift-running streams, its views of the hills, and its birds beautiful and grand, from the Paradise Flycatcher to the Red-billed Blue Magpie.

  Recently, however, the town and the valley have come to occupy my waking hours as well. This is because I have been asked to contribute to a new website devoted to its favourite sport, football.

  The Indian city with which football is generally associated is, of course, Kolkata. As it happens, one of Kolkata's best-loved footballers was a man from Dehra Dun. His name was Ram Bahadur, who—most unusually for a mercenary on the Maidan— played for one club alone, East Bengal. As a thrusting half-back, he helped his club to several league titles, and to several IFA Shields and Durand Cups. He was capped many times for India, playing in the Rome Olympics of 1960 and in the gold-medal winning team at the Bangkok Asian Games in 1962.