Bygone Doon by Pradeep Singh

Coming of the sons and daughters of soils of Punjab post Partion ( in 1947) to Dehra Dun is well known and there are still some present who recall the traumatic upheaval that scarred their lives with inerasable memories. But less well known is the historical fact that Dehra Dun has an over a three century old connect with two prominent sons of the Sikh Gurus. Doon Valley was a portal to the holy places of Hindus and the spiritual alma mater of many a luminary that sought the higher reaches of the Himalayas for effacing their material desires and elevating their consciousness. Even the gentler Siwalik ranges that enclosed the Doon Valley were no less attractive to men of God for which reason they were at times referred to as “Siddh Pahara”. The developments in the second half of the seventeenth century in the Sikh Panth,far removed from the then almost unknown Doon Valley, had outcomes that were soon to see their manifestation in this remote tract of land in the Siwaliks. Guru Har Rai t...

The decade from 1804 to 1815 was perhaps the most tumultuous in the history of Dehradun. In the space of ten years, three sovereign powers juggled the fortunes of the Valley. The dice of destiny finally came up trumps for none other than the British East India Company, which was glad and more relieved that the doughty khukri wielding Gorkhas had withdrawn beyond the Kaali River across the frontiers of Uttarakhand. But this did not happen without the British losing face after several bloody reverses in the mountain fastness of the Himalayan ranges. For all the splendid isolation the Doon Valley had experienced for centuries, the start of the nineteenth century catapulted the region into the maelstrom of unbridled imperialistic pursuit by two adversaries, neither of whom was native to India. The East India Company juggernaut heading north westward from Bengal was ponderously moving across the Gangetic Plain, subduing by force or subterfuge the local chiefs and rajas. Their grip on the af...

Railways came to the Doon Valley in 1900 and in more than one way their coming ushered in a new phase in the growth of the district, particularly the central part of the valley. The once logistically challenging travel that visitors to Doon had always found irksome, if not outright daunting, became a thing of the past, evaporating like the steam from the labouring train engines that hauled the bogies to Dehradun. The coming of the railways also brought in its wake a wide spectrum of people to Doon. The salubrious climate and the fabled beauty of the valley and the spell-binding vistas of the snow peaks on the northern horizon had already become a part of folk lore through the memoirs of travellers to the valley like J.B Fraser, F.V Raper,Emily Eden and Fanny Parks. Now the valley became doubly attractive to all manner of Indians especially the British from different walks of life: traders, hoteliers, missionaries, retiring civil servants and army officers who sought to be posted here. ...

The bond that baking made with nature’s prime element, fire, from the very early days has proved to be one that has endured ever since. The sparks that emitted from flintstones sparked more than a small revolution in the way homo-sapiens would chart their course on planet Earth. The humble dough placed on the stones by the camp fire in smoky caves not only baked into an edible crust but left an alluring aroma, an aroma that has captured the senses of man ever after. The campfire that was keeping dangerous wild animals at a safe distance was also warding off the bigger threat of hunger. The rudiments of baking that helped wandering bands of hunters and gatherers to gradually settle down have evolved beyond recognition over the millennia with each settlement and hamlet having its own batch of baking delights. Over a period, the humble home bakes went on to create gastronomic wonders with jealously guarded secret ingredients and recipes. Tradition wood-fired oven Closer home, the Indus Va...

The laboured conquest of the subcontinent, albeit piecemeal, by the English East India Company did not sit comfortably with the motley crew of the company-walas comprising the Scotts, Irish, Welsh and, of course, the English. Nothing had prepared these seekers of fortunes for the backlash of Hindustan and the driving home of a hard lesson that conquest of climate did not come with conquest of the land. Besides consolidating their commercial interests, the other preoccupation for the British was the search for congenial stations for their families and also for their personal summer retreats. Thus Darjeeling, Shimla, Ooty, Mussoorie, Nainital and their like started dotting the lower Himalayas and the Nilgiris in the first half of the nineteenth century. For the successful establishment and sustenance of these hill stations, a number of foothill towns were set up at Kalka, Haldwani, Mansingudi, and Rajpur in the Doon Valley. These foothill towns were literally and metaphorically the scaff...

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...