By Ganesh Saili
There is a castle, that is no longer a castle and to a casual observer, there are no signs of it. As you walk through the bazaar, you have no inkling what the hillside hides behind shops of all kinds, petty dealers in fruit and vegetables, grain merchants, traders and merchants of all sorts and sizes, cloth merchants, money-lenders and native bankers. It was, and still is, one of the best-stocked bazaars in India.
If you peer through the surrounding frieze of trees, sometimes at the witching hour, you might just about get a glimpse of the place that once was a summer home for Maharaja Duleep Singh. Undisturbed for years, gregarious deodar trees have simply taken over.
On the left as you enter the gate, you will find embedded into the wall a brass memorial plaque. For years, as a child, I walked past it fascinated and intrigued by it. It commemorates the contributions of Hazrat Ali, a surveyor of the Survey of India who was murdered near Langchow on 21st June 1909 while employed on Survey work under Mr R.S. Clark. Munshi Hazrat Ali rendered excellent services in the Survey of India. On the bottom is a line inscribed almost as an afterthought: it mentions that the department gave his widow employment.
The Castle Hill Estate, totalling 182 acres, was developed by the master mariner, George Bladen Taylor, on the hill at the mouth of Landour. Originally it had two houses: Woodcroft and Greenmount.
Later, Frederick E. Wilson (or Pahari Wilson) bought the estate, when one of Mussoorie’s fluttering banks collapsed. A tedious litigation followed. Wilson engaged Henry Vansittart, the Superintendent of the Doon ‘to watch his interest’ but he ended up owning it himself, reportedly for ‘a mere song’ in the 1840s.
In the early 1850s, the Government purchased it,and renovated the buildings at considerable expense as a summer residence for Maharaja Duleep Singh. He was here during the summers of 1852 and 1853. Then the estate briefly lapsed into private ownership until 1908 when it was acquired by the Survey of India. Today it has eight falling apart houses listed as Dunedin. Dunedin Cottage, Fowl House, St. Rogue, Hazeldene, Cragnish, Abbotsford, and Melrose. Of course these names are a testament to the popularity of Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels.
The Gazetteer tells us, ‘the Castle Hill Estate was vacated in 1932’ but it must have been a temporary arrangement, as the Survey of India continues to occupy the property. Last evening, as I walked past the gate, I noticed a new signboard had been put up: ‘Uttarakhand Geo-Spacial Directorate, ’ – in a brilliant move, government agencies shall be housed here.
Long ago, on Taylor’s Flat, a teenaged Maharaja played cricket with the boys of the Mussoorie Seminary, who lived far west in Lyndale. His English minders, Logan and his wife, taught him the ways of the white man, as they tried to erase from his memory all traces of his heritage. He had a playing field levelled in St George’s Manor House where he played cricket. By then, work had started on levelling a part of the hill to make the Survey Field into a larger playing field – all our big hockey, football and cricket matches have been played for years. It is known as Taylor’s Flat.
Who said life was all cricket?
Two years later he was packed off to England, never to return, where he became the blue-eyed boy of Queen Victoria. I don’t think he ever forgave his dowdy benefactor for not returning the Koh-i-noor diamond he remembered wearing as a child.
Sometimes I wonder what it must have been like for him, to be torn away from his mother, his home, from the familiar, and left to weave a forlorn tapestry of memories? Often human history can be like the floodwaters of a river in spate: a blind, ruthless, insensate force carrying everything before it.
At day’s end, all we have in hand is:
‘Sceptre and Crown must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made,.
With the crooked, Scythe and Spade.
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 recognition worldwide.
