Mussoorie Medley: Tales of Yesteryear

In the spring of 1808, Captain Hyder Jung Hearsey and Captain Felix Raper became the first visitors to get a view of the Garhwal Himalayas from the bend near Lal Tibba in Landour. For centuries the Himalayan foothills have been summer retreats, where, the chaans or temporary thatch-shelters of the local hill folk were the only signs of human habitation. It was left to the British to come up, move in and claim all the credit for discovering hill stations all over India. In the early nineteenth century, Capt Young, an intrepid official of the East India Company arrived in Landour, was charmed by the gentle climate—an indispensable relief from the heat of the plains down below—and built a shooting lodge in Mullingar. ‘Like meat, we keep better here,’ gushed Lady Emily Eden… ‘The climate! No wonder I could not live down below. We were never allowed a scrap of air to breathe…The air is a cool sort of stuff, refreshing, sweet and apparently pleasing to the lungs…I see this as the best part of India.’ The Raj summers in Mussoorie, chintz tablecloths and lace doilies, amateur dramatics of the Mussoorie Theatre Group at the Happy Valley Club: all these are woven together with long years of research. Ganesh Saili’s Mussoorie Medley: Tales of Yesteryear takes the reader down nostalgia lane to evoke the mystery and magic of the times gone by.

Ganesh Saili

Ganesh Saili was born in Mussoorie, Uttarakhand. Growing up in the hills of Garhwal, from an impressionable age, he has trekked the high mountains recording in words and pictures the magic of his beloved peaks. Numerous periodicals, columns, journals and several books translated into over two-dozen languages are a living testimony of this love for the sheer swiftness of the wind and the magic air from his perch in the Himalaya. In this book, he takes the reader, ever so gently by the hand, through the hills in search of the footsteps of those wanderers who, down the centuries, have walked this narrow path and left their hearts behind forever. With more than fifty years of research as his base, this quintessential free bird, weaves a mesmerizing tapestry in images. What emerges from these pages is a voice of the Garhwal Himalaya.