Bygone Doon by Pradeep Singh

source There are times when Geography is subject to political compulsions and in some instances cultural implications are added to these developments. These rare but credible outcomes often metamorphose into creations of a unique landscape. Such monumental occurrences become even more spell-binding when you consider a region as extraordinary as the region of Jaunsar Bawar in present day Uttarakhand. For untold centuries, the region lay in isolation and obscurity that was dictated by its geography. To its north lay the Uttarkashi district and to the east lay Tehri Garhwal and its western boundary abutted Himachal Pradesh. The region was further defined by rough mountain ranges of limestone cliffs with hardly any arable land, which had prompted Captain Frederick Young to observe that there was not one plot of level land of a hundred yards in the entire pargana of Jaunsar Bawar. Jaunsar was the lower portion, while the more rugged and mountainous part was called Bawar but, despite this di...

From being on the high road of an ancient empire to being the capital of a late medieval Indian kingdom and then, finally, receding into obscurity of a rustic hamlet is in a sentence the time travel of Kalsi. When a mighty and enigmatic ancient emperor ruling across South Asia thought of passing his enlightened thoughts for the guidance of the people, he thought of Kalsi as an apt place. Knowing well the shortness of human life and even shorter mankind’s memory, he deemed it proper that his people-oriented and morally surcharged edicts should be etched on a most permanent of God’s elements, a rock. Emperor Ashoka, the lodestar of the Mauryas, who ruled from 268 BC to 232 BC, had the clairvoyance to know that historians would be fickle and the ink in their pens no less delible, hence he left no stone unturned, literally and metaphorically, to see his message inscribed for posterity. Ashoka’s Empire with its Buddhist ethos itself descended into obscurity in the coming centuries and the r...