Articles on Mussoorie

Articles on Mussoorie

History of Mussoorie (Article © of LBSNAA)

Mussoorie, located some 250 miles north of Delhi, capital of India, is among the most popular hill stations of India, and is called the Queen among the hill stations. It overlooks the sprawling Doon valley and the city of Dehradun, the gateway to Mussoorie and infact to the entire Garhwal.

Mussoorie, a hill resort at a height of around 7000 ft above the sea level, straddles a ridge in the Garhwal Himalayas - a region which is developing into a major tourism destination. The holy and mighty river Ganga is visible from one end of the ridge and another famous river Jamuna from the other, a stretch of around twelve miles in all, from Cloud's end in the west to Jabarkhet in the east.

Although Mussoorie, as a hill station was established only as back as in 1823, it has quite an intriguing past.

Mussoorie was never an official summer capital unlike Simla - a hill station in the state of Himachal pradesh which was the summer capital of the British Indian government and even unlike Nainital - the summer capital of the united provinces government in British India. Mussoorie always remained unofficial - for the affairs of heart. It has always been a gossipy place - with an air of informality and a tradition of romance - The Honeymoon capital of India.

An idyllic stroll through any of the meandering mountain roads of the town on a clear and sunny day will bring you to some of the well known and not so well known spots - each having its own tales to tell - Landour Bazaar, Chaar dukaan, Lal tibba, Gun hill, the Camel Back cemetery, the Mussoorie Library, and of course the hotel Savoy - an historical edifice in itself. You may be able to recognise any or all of the old houses and estates or you may meet some descendant of any of the many well - known families of Mussoorie.

Apart from its own quiet charm, Mussoorie also boasts of spectacular views of the Himalayas. Hill ridges, irregular in shape and partly wooded, form layer after layer to the horizon, where snow peaks are visible as if you can touch them. From west to east, the mighty peaks of Bandarpoonch, Srikantha, the Gangotri group and the Chaukhamba.

The weather is generally bright and clear - except during the three months ( June to August) of Monsoons,- when mists envelope the mountain slopes and paints the sky in a mauvish glow and the woods around - of pine, cedar, birch, oak, rhododendron and deodar - turns greener. There usually is a bright Christmas and the breathtaking view of the snowclad Mussoorie gives it the name - the Queen among hill stations.

There are popular picnic spots in and around the town - Kempty Falls in the west and Dhanolti, further up beyond the town.

History of Mussoorie: It was due to the conquest of the Garhwal and the Dehra in 1803 by the Gurkhas, under Umer Singh Thapa that indirectly Mussoorie came into being. It was natural after that that at some point of time the interest of British security would have clashed with the expansionist policies of the Gurkhas and although the immediate cause of the war was different, the war, inevitably broke out on November 1, 1814 and the Dehradun proper was evacuated of the Gurkhas by 1815 and was annexed to the district of Saharanpur by 1819.

The present site of the town of Mussoorie, before the British came, there were only shepherds whose animals grazed on the 'Mansur' shrub which gives the town its name. It is natural to suppose that the officers locate the hills and eventually climb them here and there in search of sport and recreation. The first house erected on the ridge of Mussoorie was a small hut built on the Camel's back as a shooting box by Mr. Shore, the then Joint Magistrate and superintendent of revenues of the Doon and Captain Young of the Sirmur Rifles in 1823. Soon Captain Young built his large residence called 'Mullingar' as his residence as the Commandant of Landour. The splendid climate and the good sport obtainable gradually attracted other Europeans. As the Doon and the hills to the north became better known in 1827, the Government established a convalescent depot for European soldiers at Landour. The town grew rapidly and a hundred years on it had grown into a major settlement of the home - sick British, away from the heat and dust of the plains. Social life had also become hectic. There were balls and parties in Landour cantonment and Polo, fetes and Riding in happy valley where the Charleville Hotel stood, the present site of LBSNAA academy.

Houses & estates of Mussoorie: Mussoorie has some lovely and charming old houses and estates, usually with names derived from the native places of those who built and lived in them. Today these old houses and estates are owned by well - to - do Indians , many of whom, follow the life styles of their former colonial rulers. In most cases, the old names , have been retained. Some of these old graceful houses are -- Captain Young's Mullingar Mansion, the oldest existing building in Mussoorie, Houses of Irish pioneers - Tipperary, Killarney, Shemrock cottage and the Tara hall, the houses of Scot pioneers - Scottsburn, Wolfsburn and of course the houses of the English rulers - Connaught Castle, Grey castle, Hampton court and Castle hill. There evidently were a lot of fans of the legendary writer Sir Walter Scott as we find old estates of the name of Kenilworth, Rockeby, Waverly and also Abootsford - the name of Sir Scott's own house in England.

Well known families of Mussoorie: There are quite a few well - known families in Mussoorie, who over the times have become a part of the history, culture and the landscape of this place : the Rajmata of Jind, Princess Sita of Kapurthala, the Gantzers, the Badhwars, the Barrettos, the Skinners, the Keelans, the Alters, Lala Banwarilal, Ram Chander and brothers, Pooranchand and sons and P.C. Hari's family. Most of the shopkeepres of Mussoorie and Landour Bazaar are descended from the merchant who first came here with the british soldiers and settlers over 160 years ago.

Camel Back Cemetry: Thousands of British graves cling to the steep slopes - a constant reminder of the British presence in Mussoorie. Here lie the hill stations' first pioneers and settlers as well as Generals and common soldiers, memsahibs and their infants, schoolmasters, revered gentlemen and brewers. Here also lies John Lang, the first Australian born novelist who was Charles Dickens' India correspondent and Fredrick Wilson, better known as 'Pahadi Wilson', who married a girl from Harsil. He was the first man to float timber down the Ganga river who lived a life which would have been the envy of kings. One also finds Alfred Hindmarsh, resting here - a survivor of the charge of light brigade during the Crimean War and many other famous names and not so famous names.

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Mussoorie (article © Swagat In-flight magazine)

This is an invitation to do nothing.

We, the citizens of this mile-high hamlet, spreading 2,000 metres above the plains of India, request the pleasure of your company in Mussoorie. Dress : informal, all the time. Time : whenever the mood takes you. Duration : till you're relaxed, refreshed, renewed; or, like us, for the rest of your life.

Come now, right now, after reading this article. If now is spring, mid-March to end-April, bring along cardigans and jackets for the evenings; but relax in sirtsleeves al through the balmy days when the woods are full of birdsong and the flowers are in bud. Summer, May-June, is our golden fun-time. Our Mall is then known as the Drawing Room of Mussoorie because so many people meet so many friends, and so many friends of friends, on this road with the spectacular views in summer. And they go for horse rides, picnics in the green dells where streams chortle, or generally munch peaches and plums and look down at the plains and feel happily sorry for the folk working in the heat and glare down there ! The monsoons, July to mid-August, our green and misty months when the tree-trunks are furred with ferns; and the plains are a sea of cotton-wool clouds out of which the peaks thrust like Never Never Islands in some fantasy fable. Autumn settles blue on our hills nostalgia in the heart, and the succulent crunch of apples. A good time for long, quiet walks on winding, lonely, roads and unwinding in the resinous pinewoods with congenial companions; and back to cardigans and jackets in the crisp, star-bright, evening. Winter, mid-November to mid-March; the long, effervescent, season still awaiting discovery - though the questing Australians seem to have found it before most others have. The days are shirt sleeve warm and the air is so sparkling that if they bottled it they could sell it as champagne ! The hills come much closer in this crystal air, and the nights are warmed by fires in the rooms and the glow of companionship with no one to distrub you. And when it snows, after three days of clouds massing in the high sky, you're snug in the heart of a Christmas card.

Even our airport is a picture postcard with an Enid Blyton name. It's called Jolly Grant and it stretches out over the mountain backed fields of Dehra Dun, 60 kilometres from Mussoories. It's served by Vayudoot, flying in from Delhi. Delhi is also linked to Dehra Dun by the Indian Railway chugging its way through the forests of this lush, sub-Himalayan, terrae.

And when you reach Dehra Dun, look north and up. Mussoorie is a sequin-scatter of houses across the great mountains stretching against the backdrop of the Himalayan blue, sky.

Excitement begins to build as soon as you leave Dehra Dun's 640 metre high valley and start to ascend to Mussoorie's 2,000 metre fastness. At first the road snakes through the famed jalebi-bends. We've named them after our succulent, golden, pretzel-shaped, sweets because they're shaped far more like jalebis then hairpins. This is only about a third of the 30 Dun but already the air has become cooler and clearer.

Between 90 minutes and two hours out of the plains depending on the speed of your vehicle, you'll reach our Mussoorie. Ours is, essentially, a waling town and we believe that only the old, infirm and ostentatious drive down our Mall. We have vehicle terminuses at the two ends of the Mall and if you get off at the Library terminus, you'll see that the Library Bazaar - so called after the venerable old Mussoorie Library - still retains much of the turn-of-the-century character of the town. There is a circular, Victorian, bandstand; street-front shops with their store-keepers' residences above; narrow lanes leading to cottages and mansions some of which have been converted into Mussoorie's 140 plus wide-spectrum range of hotels. All these capture the ambience of an era where customer service was a gracious, personal, avocation and leisure was a finely cultivated art. In fact the pace of life in Mussoorie is so unhurried that we caught an old resident dozing in the sun in the verandah of a restaurant.

You can even 'do' Mussoorie with unmatched regality. Ours is one of the few places in the world were the old hill rickshaws still ply. Rickshaw rides down the Mall, and around the wooded road of Camel's Back with its timeless views of the northern ranges of the Himalayas, are a pleasure which is virtually unique to Mussoorie.

Younger, and younger-at-heart, people prefer to amble down the Mall. And, in keeping with our informal atmosphere, it is fashionable to eat roasted peanuts while you amble. These are bought from barrows and little roadside vendors who keep them around little terrocotta gharras - pots filled with glowing, smoking, faggots. One of the barrows offers a bonus; it stands beneath a hoarding depicting Mussoorie's attractions so that you can get the lay of the land while you crack-crunch-relish.

And if you're even more active, you can mount a sturdy little mountain pony. Their shaggy looks often reveal their Tibetan ancestry; and they're tough, patient, and quite used to cosseting the most inexperienced equestrians from the very large and ungainly to the very small and courageous !

Speaking of Tibetans, we have a large settlement of them here. They came following their priest-king, his Holiness the Dalai Lama when he fled from Lhasa. These gentle, smiling, people have thier own temple with beautiful murals in Mussoories' Happy Valley, their Tibetan Homes Foundation, a restaurant and a handicrafts' shop. Their roadside stalls, set up all over Mussoorie, are a colourful diversion for visitors shopping for woollens, sports shoes, overnight bags and interesting trinkets like copies of the famed Swiss Army Knives. Even people from the mountain villages of the Himalayas, the women dressed in bright skirts, blouses and head-scarves, find good buys at the Tibetan stalls.

Another must-do thing in Mussoorie, apart from shopping, is a ride in the 'Ropeway': the cable car that carries visitors from the roundabouts and snackbars of the Childrens' Playground on the Mall to the heights of Gun Hill. Around its flat top are snack stalls and over a hundred photographers who snap visitors in glittering 'hilly girl' costumes, as brigands with ferocious moustaches and turbans, and as country-and-western stars with guitars and straw-hats. But quite apart from these 'souvenirs' of your Mussoorie visit', Gun Hill also offers excellent all-round views of Mussoorie, Dehra Dun, the eternal snows of the higher Himalayas and the wooded slopes of the sister- town of Landour.

Landour is a pleasant morning's walk away, the other side of a clock tower.

If you walk past the clock tower and look between the plains and the rising slopes of Landour, you'll see a road that leads to the green meadows and deodar forests of Dhanolti, 24 kilometres away. There's both a forest bungalow and a tourist bungalow and a tourist bungalow at Dhanolti and its a delightfully lonely place to spend a weekend from Mussoorie. But you can also do it as a day-trip taking in the hill-top temple of the goddess Surkhanda Devi. The temple is approached by a rather rugged, but safe, path and if you look back through the temple's gate you'll see the sort of view that has inspired many of the ordinary people of India to renounce the world and retire to the seclusion of the great mountains.

But if you're not quite ready for such seclusion, take the western trip out to Kempty Falls, a 15 kilometre drive from Mussoorie. Also served by regular buses and taxis this perennial cascade is a mountain stream which has cut and sculpted its way through great boulders and down rock faces offering a stimulating, drenching, shower when it reaches a sandy basis before rushing on. Here there is snack bar and bridge and, inevitably, a few photographers. The journey down is a 20 minute stroll, the way up is a 30 minute trudge, and you should allow half an hour or so at the base of the falls. But if you want a fairly lonely place for a picnic, climb the steps leading up from the road along the course of the stream. You'll find yourself in a little, rocky, dell cleft by the stream and cooled by water gusing through boulders where a pair of dippers flutter and dive. The wooded hills rise steep in front of you and above them there is only the sky where a lone eagle circles, circles, circles...

It's a wonderful place to unwind, soothed by the sound of the rushing, gushing, chortling, bubbling, foaming, swishing, Himalayan stream, and do what Mussoorie encourages you to do to your heart's content. Absolutely, uninhibitedly, nothing.........

Reproduced with permission from Swagat Inflight magazine published by "Media Transasia (India) Pvt. Ltd." No alterations whatsoever have been made to the original text

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