‘You have reached your destination!’ my GPS awakens me. Certainly not the pleasantest kind of thing to hear outside the lychgate of a cemetery. Let me warn the reader that we have reached the Camel’s Back Cemetery where under a forest of cypress trees rest the bones of the minions of the empire.
In front of the caretaker’s shack is the impressive tomb of Sir Henry Bohle dated 1851. He was a wealthy brewer, and is credited with starting the Bohle’s Brewery below Lyndale or Bansi estate – our first brush with beer.
Below the first bend in the road lies John A Hindmarsh, one of the hundred survivors from the Charge of the Light Brigade. On 16 April 1890 he was in his 59th year, when he was laid to rest by just two undertakers – Mr JC Fisher and Mr HE Hathaway. Both later declared that if only they had known, ‘they would have marshalled the whole station to pay final tribute to this gallant survivor’.
Pic Courtesy: T A Rust
To this day, no one knows what Hindmarsh was doing in Mussoorie or where he lived.
The inscription on his grave reminds you that he was ‘One of the Six Hundred’. The reference is to the Crimean War of 1854, where at Balaclava, misinterpreting a command, the cream of the British cavalry charged to certain death to the boom of Russian guns. We have Tennyson’s immortal lines commemorating the moment:
Cannon to the right of them,
Cannon to the left of them,
Cannon behind them,
Volleyed and thundered;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well,
Came thro’ the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of the six hundred.
Six years later, his wife, Amelia, came to rest beside him.
Pic courtesy: Tulika Singh Roy
Who would dare creep past the grave of Gulabi, a girl from Mukba (a village along the Bhagirathi), who married Frederick E Wilson, also known as the Rajah of Hursil, (he minted his own coins). She had been baptised as ‘Ruth Wilson’ to ensure that she would be buried on consecrated ground in 1899. Her husband had left this world a few years earlier on 24 July 1883, aged 66 years and 7 months.
On a knoll facing the rising sun is buried John Lang, the Australian born author and barrister, who spent the last years of his life in Landour and is remembered for his defence of the Rani of Jhansi in her case against the Doctrine of Lapse with the Company. She had rewarded him with: ‘A thousand guineas, besides such presents as shawls, dresses, ornaments and presented him with a mosaic portrait of the Rani in precious stones.’
‘Who was this Hooper?’ asks Professor Vidya Sagar Sharma, five years my senior in Allen Memorial School. ‘Why is our assembly hall named after him?’ he asks, not expecting an answer, as so far all Vidya’s efforts have elicited is a standard form letter stonewalling him: ‘Unfortunately, records from the past are sketchy or often non-existent.’
I am intrigued. Usually, I don’t take much interest in plaques bearing the names of those gone before. They reveal, if at all, so little. It is just not my kind of thing.
This time, while trawling the hill station’s history, I find quite a few rare gems. Born in 1837, Reverend William Hooper was a man for all seasons: a Boden Sanskrit Scholar from Oxford University, who went on to become the Principal of Allahabad’s Divinity School. In his fifties, he arrived in the hill station and spent thirty-two years here, authoring his Hebrew-Hindi and Greek-Hindi dictionaries until he passed away in 1922, aged eighty-five years, having lived out his last years in the parsonage next to the church that is no longer a church, in a castle that is no longer a castle, and in a hill station that is just another hill.
Of course, there are twenty lakh graves just like these that are scattered across this subcontinent. They are permanent reminders that men and their matters perish.
These mountains, however, will remain forever.
(Ganesh Saili, born and home-grown in the hills, belongs to those select few whose words are illustrated by their pictures. Author of two dozen books, some translated into twenty languages, his work has found renown worldwide.)
