LORD AND LADY DUFFERIN, DEHRADUN AND A GHOST!!

Lord Dufferin and his wife Harriot Georgina Rowan, interest me a great deal. Lord Dufferin  was a British public servant, who was born in Florence Italy, and educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford and was a prominent member of Victorian society. He was the Viceroy of India between 1884 and 1888 and it was during his Viceroyalty that the Indian National Congress was formed, which, he rather contemptuously termed as a “microscopic minority”. He also invited its first delegates to his residence for a tea party.

Lady Dufferin who came with her husband, was asked by Queen Victoria to initiate a plan to improve healthcare for women in India. Understandably numerous ‘Lady Dufferin‘ hospitals and clinics  were established, and there are still few medical colleges and midwifery schools named after her in the subcontinent.

Why do Lord and Lady Dufferin interest me so much? After all, there have been numerous Viceroys and their wives who had come and gone from India.

Here is the answer.
Lady Dufferin was an avid traveler and visited Dehradun twice with her husband and has left  interesting and detailed accounts about her travels in the form of travelogues.

Two in particular interest me, especially what she wrote about the then village “Dehra”.

The Dufferins’ first visited Dehradun on 27th October 1885. According to her journals, they entered Dehradun from Nahan and crossed the Yamuna roughly at what is today Poanta Sahib on a pontoon bridge which had specially been built for the Viceroy and his travel party. She wrote that Dehradun got prettier as they neared it and Mussoorie appeared nearer than what it actually was. They stayed at the residence of the Officer in Charge of the Governor’s Body Guard, Captain Onslow. This bungalow is now identified as “Rashtrapati Ashiana” so named by the late President Fakruddin Ahmed who once spent 10 days in it, and which now forms part of the Estate of  the National Institute of Visually Handicapped. She left a detailed account during their stay in it.

The Dufferins came back the second time to Dehradun in March 1887. Lady Dufferin wrote thus :

“We have taken a bungalow here from a native lady who married a white man and who is now enjoying his fortune as a widow. The country around us is lovely. There are mountains quite close and all roads are beautifully wooded.”

The property referred to by Lady Dufferin, belonged to the widow of Pahari Wilson, and was at the northern end of Astley Hall connecting Rajpur road to old Lytton Road.!!!

What interested me most was the route that the Dufferins took on their way back. This interest stems from the fact that I travelled (more or less) the same road day after day– going to, and coming back from school in the school bus. The route that the Dufferins’ took was probably through present day Saharanpur Chowk, past present day Patel Nagar, after which they crossed the Bindal River near what was Kashmir Silk House, and stopped for a cup of tea at the Niranjanpur tea estate adjacent to General Mahadeo Singh Road. Of course – none of the present landmarks were there in the 1880s and they must have traversed through a thick foliage of trees. Lady Dufferin further wrote:

“We left Dehra at nine in the morning having a drive of 45 miles before us. A little way from the village (Dehradun was a village !!) we stopped to see a tea garden. It belongs to Sir MacPherson and is on a smaller scale where the tea making is done by hand. We got through our long drive well and reached Saharanpore soon after tea”.

The tea garden referred was the erstwhile Niranjanpur Tea Estate on Saharanpur Road. As a schoolboy I used to see the Niranjanpur tea gardens every day- with their low, thick, compact, glossy leaved bushes. It is now completely urbanized.

My interest in Lord Dufferin stems for a different reason. Lord Dufferin often told a tale of how he once saw a ghost which saved his life. Late one night in 1849, while staying in a house in Tullamore, County Offaly, Ireland, he heard a hearse draw up, and looked down and saw a man walking across the lawn carrying a coffin on his back. The man stopped and looked up at Dufferin and their eyes met for a moment, before he continued on into the shadows and disappeared. Dufferin thought the whole event might have been just a bad dream, but the next morning his hostess assured him that the next time he saw the apparition, he would die.

Some years later Dufferin –at this point, the British ambassador to France – recognized the lift operator at the Grand Hotel in Paris as the man he had seen in the garden in Ireland. He refused to get into the lift and a moment later it crashed, killing the occupants including the mysterious man, who had only begun work at the hotel that morning.

Could what Lord Dufferin say be true ? I would tend to believe him. After all he was a distinguished scholar and successful human being.

However a more recent investigation by BBC researcher Melvin Harris demonstrated that the story was an urban legend which Dufferin improved upon by telling as a personal anecdote.

The story itself has been retold by many and makes sure Lord Dufferin is never
forgotten!

As for Lady Dufferin, she gave an insight into what Dehradun was like in the late 19th century. If she were to revisit it now – she would feel like an alien here. But then things change and as the song goes
“Guzra Huvaa zamana, aataa nahin dobaraa, Hafiz Khuda Tumhara!”

(Kulbhushan kain is an award winning educationist with more
than 4 decades of working in schools in India and abroad. He is a prolific writer who loves cricket, travelling and cooking. He can be
reached at kulbhushan.kain@gmail.com)