By: Ganesh Sail
On a flat at the eastern extremity of Landour’s Castle Hill estate lie the bleached stones of a church that is no longer a church; in a castle that is no longer a castle (and with apologies to the poet), ‘in a hill station that is no longer a hill station.’ Here the autumn of 1838, the All Saints’ Church saw Frances Bacon marry Capt. Proby Cautley, who would go on to build the Ganga Canal. In the old Mussoorie maps, the young couple’s first home is marked as Cautley’s Cottage; later maps show it as Dumbarnie; and today it houses the Manav Bharati School.
For latecomers, first, a quick recap. The Doab refers to the land between the Ganga and Yamuna rivers. In 1837, a drought led to a famine. If only there had been a canal to harness the waters. Granted that the terrain was tough, seasonal rivers played havoc, and building a canal in an uneven country was, at best, a madman’s dream.
While waiting for official approval for the project, Cautley designed two smaller canals, barely five feet wide, in the valley of the Doon: the eleven-mile-long Bijapur Canal that irrigates 7,500 acres west of Dehradun—where to break the severe slope, he incorporated 96 artificial falls—and the twelve-mile-long Rajpur Canal to bring drinking water to the Doon. It had 10 watermills along its length. These were the forerunners of the Ganga Canal.
Cautley was a Taoist. When his canal could not go under, he built an aqueduct to carry the canal. Imagine a steep gradient where the rush of water increases over a hundred times during the monsoon; it sweeps away everything that comes in its way. Faced with flash floods of the snarling raos, at Ranipur, he went under, while downstream at the Ratmau rao, he had to go under, and downstream lay a swollen Solani river where the canal went over.
He was a lonesome man possessed by a single dream on his lonely rides on horseback along the banks of the canal. He ignored enemies of the proposed project, like leakages that would breed mosquitoes. Instead, he used a unique mortar made of lime, powdered bricks, pulses, and coarse sand to ensure no seepage. Intense lobbying forced the East India Company to grant him a pittance. But he was not the kind to complain, and without much ado, he set out to survey his proposed canal for six months, scouring the jungles, walking the swamps, and measuring levels and distances that he later transferred onto maps.
When the angry priests of Hardwar accused him of caging the Ganga, Cautley left a narrow gap in the dam to let the river flow freely to Har-ki-Pauri. Twenty-six years later, in 1845, his failing health forced him to go home, where he spent his time lobbying with the directors of John Company. He sold his property, using the funds to return to India and start work in earnest. The task was gigantic. With many failures, some 300,000,000 bricks were baked. What would be done with burned bricks? Millions of them were crushed to powder and mixed in the mortar. Ravenous fires munched up 250 square kilometres of forests to feed the kilns. A hundred thousand tons of lime went into the mortar, as did jute, ground lentils, wild herbs, jaggery, and finely ground bricks. It proved to be the ideal mix, more durable than modern concrete.
Most of the work of digging was done by the Oades—the tribal gypsies—but they were lovers of solitude and vast open spaces and refused to dig in populated areas. In such places, scouts scoured the countryside for people willing to dig. Cautley brought out the first steam engine and laid a railway line. Other firsts include setting up the Thomson College of Engineering at Roorkee, which trained civil engineers who worked on the canal.
Men like Proby Cautley do not need memorials or statues to be remembered. A 570-kilometre-long canal is sufficient, and so long as water flows down the canal, it remains a befitting tribute every inch of the way.
Ganesh Saili, author-photographer, has written and illustrated twenty books, some translated into over two dozen languages. He belongs to those select few who illustrate their writing. His work has found publication in periodicals, columns, and journals.
