All Roads Lead to Ganga

by Ruskin Bond

  Early Plant Collectors

  THE FACT THAT THE HIMALAYAS HAD ALWAYS BEEN closed to travellers and botanists from Europe only intensified the desire to explore them. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the barriers seemed to be giving way a little, and Thomas Bogle was able to travel, in 1774, to Lhasa through Bhutan; William Kirkpatrick, in 1793, was received at Nayakot in Nepal; and Thomas Hardwicke went in 1796 on a political mission to the ruler of Garhwal at Srinagar in the Alaknanda valley.

  Thomas Hardwicke (1757-1835) was a soldier who, along with Claude Martin (who founded the Martiniere schools), collected plants around Lucknow and Kanpur in early days. Hardwicke was chiefly a zoologist but was also an active botanist. He was the first European to collect in the north-western Himalaya. This he did on his mission to Garhwal—a journey which he described in Asiatic Researches (1799).

  The plains depended so much on rivers from the hills for irrigating crops that there was a need for exploring the sources of the Ganga and the Jumna. Arrangements were made to send surveyors into the mountains of Garhwal, and a permit was obtained from the Gurkhas who had recently over-run that part of the Himalayas. The expedition was led by William Spencer Webb, an officer of Engineers and a surveyor of the first rank. He had two companions—the Anglo-Indian soldier Hyder Jung Hearsey and Felix Vincent Raper. They reached Jumnotri, where the sources of the Jumna spring; and they fixed the position of Gangotri where the Ganga has its source; but they were hurried out of the mountains by the Gurkhas.

  This expedition did not have any important botanical results, but it showed William Moorcroft (1765-1825), the Bengal Government's veterinary officer, what might be done. Without permission, and with the adventurous Hearsey as a companion, he passed beyond the sources of the Ganga, over the Niti Pass and right to the sources of the Sutlej in the Manasoravar Lakes. They brought back a bundle of dried plants, which was sent to London; these were the first plants obtained from far back in the mountains. Soon afterwards, the British found themselves at war with the Gurkhas, and when peace came again (1816), the Gurkhas had withdrawn their claim to Kumaon and Garhwal.

  This was the prelude to much plant-collecting. Robert Blinkworth and Bharat Singh collected in Nepal and the north-west Himalaya; and in 1818, the first seed of Rhododendron arboreum was sent to Britain. Blinkworth spent most of his life in the Himalayas.

  Residents were placed where trade-routes emerged from the north-west Himalayas—one at Dehra Dun, another at Nahan and a third at Sabathu. The station of Dehra Dun gave birth to the more elevated station of Mussoorie, and the station of Sabathu to the station of Simla, a little higher. In 1827, the Governor-General, Lord Amherst, set the seal of approval on Simla by deciding to spend the hot weather there, and in due course it became the summer capital of British India.

  In 1820, Lord Hastings visited Saharanpur. There he had been shown an old but neglected garden, once the garden of Zabita Khan, son of the more famous Najib-ud-Daula. Hastings restored it, and it soon became an important centre for promoting the knowledge of the flora of the hills. Early surveyors also used Saharanpur as a base. It was then a very small place which Jacquemont, writing in 1830, called 'truly a pleasant place... one of the pleasantest English stations in India'. He would not recognise this teeming city today, were his spirit to come this way again.

  William Spencer Webb (1784-1865) and the three brothers—Alexander Gerard (1792-1839), James Gilbert Gerard (1794-1828) and Parick Gerard (1795-1835)— did much arduous travelling in remote places and collected plants along the watershed of the Sutlej. Their names are commemorated in the coniferous trees, Abies webbiana and Pinus gerardiana

  In France, the leader of scientific thought was the renowned Baron Cuvier, and he was not satisfied with the efforts made by his countrymen to get scientific information from India. He persuaded Victor Jacquemont (1801-32), a young man of 'wonderful vitality and attractiveness', to undertake a prolonged period of travelling.

  Jacquemont arrived in Calcutta in May 1829, and was given every facility for study at the Calcutta Botanical Garden (then in the charge of Sir Charles Metcalfe), a garden that he called a 'magnificent establishment'. The letters that he wrote home (Letters from India, translated into English in 1935), and the diary printed by the Government of France in 1841, give a delightful picture of Calcutta life. When the monsoon rains were over, Jacquemont proceeded up-country to Saharanpur where he was made welcome by John Forbes Royle, the specialist in medicinal plants, who was now in charge of the Botanical Garden.

  Jacquemont spent the summer in the mountains. He went through Dehra Dun and Mussoorie to the sources of the Jumna and the Tons; then to Simla; then to Spiti, and back to Delhi. This was his first season of continuous collecting.

  Among the French officers employed by Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler of the Punjab, was General Allard. It was through his influence that Jacquemont obtained permission to enter Kashmir, being the first botanist to do so. He spent the summer of 1831 in the valley or in the hills that surround it, and at the end of the summer, made his way back to Delhi with a great collection. But his health had not been able to stand up to the rigours of the journey, and he died at Bombay in December, only thirty-one years old. His collection of plants was forwarded to Paris.

  Not all these early plant-collectors were botanists. But the spirit of enquiry was common to all of them. They were seekers of knowledge. And there were many like Jacquemont, who were prepared to risk their health and even their lives in the pursuit of knowledge.

  White Clouds, Green Mountains

  TOWARDS THE END OF SEPTEMBER, THOSE FEW MONSOON clouds that still linger over the Himalayas are no longer burdened with rain and are able to assume unusual shapes and patterns, chasing each other across the sky and disappearing in spectacular sunset formations.

  I have always found this to be the best time of the year in the hills. The sun-drenched hillsides are still an emerald green; the air is crisp, but winter's bite is still a month or two away; and for those who still like to take to the open road on foot, there are springs, streams and waterfalls tumbling over rocks that remain dry for most of the year. The lizard that basked on a sun-baked slab of granite last May is missing, but in his place the spotted forktail trips daintily among the boulders in a stream; and the strident sound of the cicadas is gradually replaced by the gentler trilling of the crickets and grasshoppers.

  Cicadas, as you probably know, make their music with their legs, which are moved like the bows of violins against their bodies. It's rather like an orchestra tuning up but never quite getting on with the overture or symphony. Aunt Ruby, who is a little deaf, can nevertheless hear the cicadas when they are at their loudest. She lives not far from a large boarding-school, and one day when I remarked that I could hear the school choir or choral group singing, she nodded and remarked: 'Yes, dear. They do it with their legs, don't they?'

  Come to think of it, that school choir does sound a bit squeaky.

  Now, more than at any other time of the year, the wildflowers come into their own.

  The hillside is covered with a sward of flowers and ferns. Sprays of wild ginger, tangles of clematis, flat clusters of yarrow and lady's mantle. The datura grows everywhere with its graceful white balls and prickly fruits. And the wild woodbine provides the stems from which the village boys make their flutes.

  Aroids are plentiful and attract attention by their resemblance to snakes with protruding tongues—hence the popular name, cobra lily. This serpent's tongue is a perfect landing-stage for flies etc., who, crawling over the male flowers in their eager search for the liquor that lies at the base of the spike (a liquor that is most appealing to their depraved appetites), succeed in fertilising the female flowers as they proceed. We see that it is not only humans who become addicted to alcohol. Bears have been known to get drunk on the juice of rhododendron flowers, while bumble bees can be out-and-out dipsomaniacs.

  One of the more spectacular cobra lilies, which rejoices in the name Sauromotum
Guttatum — ask your nearest botanist what that means!—bears a solitary leaf and purple spathe. When the seeds form, it withdraws the spike underground; and when the rains are over and the soil is not too damp, it sends it up again covered with scarlet berries. In the opinion of the hill folk, the appearance of the red spike is more to be relied on as a forecast of the end of the monsoon than any meteorological expertise. Up here on the ranges that fall between the Jumna and the Bhagirathi (known as the Rawain), we can be perfectly sure of fine weather a fortnight after the fiery spike appears.

  But it is the commelina, more than any other Himalayan flower, that takes my breath away. The secret is in. its colour—a pure pristine blue that seems to reflect the deepest blue of the sky. Towards the end of the rains it appears as if from nowhere, graces the hillside for the space of about two weeks, and disappears again until the following monsoon.

  When I see the first commelina, I stand dumb before it and the world stands still while I worship. So absorbed do I become in its delicate beauty that I begin to doubt the reality of everything else in the world.

  But only for a moment. The blare of a truck's horn reminds me that I am still lingering on the main road leading out of the hill-station. A cloud of dust and blasts of diesel fumes are further indications that reality takes many different forms, assailing all my senses at once! Even my commelina seems to shrink from the onslaught. But as it is still there, I take heart and leave the highway for a lesser road.

  Soon I have left the clutter of the town behind. What did Aunt Ruby say the other day? 'Stand still for five minutes, and they will build a hotel on top of you.'

  Wasn't it Lot's wife who was turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back at the doomed city that had been her home? I have an uneasy feeling that I will be turned into a pillar of cement if I look back, so I plod on along the road to Devsari, a kindly village in the valley. It will be some time before 'developers' and big money boys get here, for no one will go to live where there is no driveway!

  A tea-shop beckons. How would one manage in the hills without these wayside tea-shops? Miniature inns, they provide food, shelter, and even lodging to dozens at a time.

  I tackle some buns that have a pre-Independence look about them. They are rock-hard, to match the environment, but I manage to swallow some of the jagged pieces with the hot sweet tea, which is good.

  The Dehra I Know

  FORMALLY, IT'S KNOWN AS DEHRA DUN, BUT IN THE 1940s and '50s, when we were young, everyone called it Dehra.

  That's where I spent much of my childhood, boyhood, and early manhood, and it was the Dehra I wrote about in many of my books and stories.

  It was very different from the Dehra Dun of today— much smaller, much greener, considerably less crowded; sleepier too, and somewhat laid-back, easy-going; fond of gossip, but tolerant of human foibles. A place of bicycles and pony-drawn tongas. Only a few cars; no three-wheelers. And you could walk almost anywhere, at any time of the year, night or day.

  The Dehra I knew really fell into three periods. The Dehra of my childhood, staying in my grandmother's house on the Old Survey Road (not much left of that bungalow now). The Dehra of my schooldays, when I would come home for the holidays to stay with my. mother and stepfather—a different house on almost every visit, right up until the time I left for England. And then the Dehra of my return to India, when I lived on my own in a small flat above Astley Hall and wrote many of my best stories.

  While I was in England, I wrote my first novel The Room on the Roof, which was all about the Dehra I had left and the people and young friends I had known and loved. It was a little immature, but it came straight from the heart— the heart and mind of a seventeen-year-old—and if it's still fresh today, fifty years after its first publication, it's probably because it was so spontaneous and unsophisticated.

  Back in Dehra, I wrote a sequel of sorts, Vagrants in the Valley. It wasn't as good, probably because I had exhausted my adolescence as a subject for fiction; but it did capture aspects of life in Dehra and the Doon valley in the early fifties.

  I had returned to India and Dehra when I was twenty-one, and set up my writing shop, so to speak, in that flat above Bibiji's provision store.

  Bibiji was my stepfather's first wife. He and my mother had moved to Delhi, leaving Bibiji with the provision store. I got on very well with her and helped her with her accounts, and she gave me the use of her rooms above the shop. I think it's only in India that you could find such a situation— a young offspring of the Raj, somewhat at odds with his mother and Indian stepfather, choosing to live with the latter's abandoned first wife!

  Bibiji made excellent parathas, shalgam (turnip) pickle, and kanji, a spicy carrot juice. And so, romantic though I may have been, I was far from being the young poet starving in a garret, nor was Bibiji to be pitied. She was Dehra's first woman shopkeeper, and she managed very well.

  Bibiji was of course much older than me; heavily built, strong. She could toss sacks of flour about the shop. Her son, rather mischievous, kept out of her reach; a cuff about the ears would send him sprawling. She suffered from a hernia, and was immensely grateful to me for bringing her a hernia-belt from England; it provided her with considerable relief.

  Early morning she would march off to the mandi to get her provisions (rice, atta, pulses, etc.) wholesale, and occasionally I would accompany her. In this way I learnt the names of different pulses and lentils—moong, urad, malka, arhar, masoor, channa, lobia, rajma, etc. But I've never been tempted to write a cook book or run a ration-shop of my own.

  I was quite happy cooking up stories, most of them written after dark by the light of a kerosene lantern. Bibiji hadn't been able to pay the flat's accumulated electricity bills, and as a result the connection had been cut. But this did not bother me. I was quite content to live by candlelight or lamplight. It lent a romantic glow to my writing life.

  And a lot of romance went into those early stories. There was the girl on the train in 'The Eyes Are Not Here', and the girl selling baskets on the platform at Deoli, and Aunt Maram's amours behind the Dilaram Bazaar, and romantic episodes in places as unlikely as Shamli and Bijnor (Pipalnagar). However, as my intention is to give the reader a picture of Dehra as I knew it, the stories in this collection are all set in Dehra Dun and its immediate environs. I was writing for anyone who would read me. It was only much later that I began writing for children.

  Some favourite places for my fictional milieu were the parade-ground or maidaan, the Paltan Bazaar and its offshoots, the lichee gardens of Dalanwala, the tea-gardens, the quiet upper reaches of the Rajpur Road (non-transformed into shopping malls), the sal forests near Rajpur, the approach to Dehra by road or rail, and of course the railway station which is much the same as it used to be.

  When I was a boy, many of the bungalows (such as the one built by my grandfather) had fairly large grounds or compounds—flower gardens in front, orchards at the back. Apart from lichees, the common fruit trees were papaya, guava, mango, lemon, and the pomalo, a sort of grapefruit. Most of those large compounds have now been converted into housing-estates. Dehra's population has gone from fifty thousand in 1950 to over seven lakhs at present. Not much room left for fruit trees!

  Some of the stories, such as A Handful of Nuts' and 'Living Without Money', were written long after I'd left Dehra, but I think the atmosphere of the place comes through quite strongly in them. When a writer looks back at a particular place or period in his life, he tries to capture the essence of the place and the experience.

  During the two years I freelanced from Bibiji's flat (1956-58), I produced over thirty short stories, a couple of novellas, and numerous articles of an ephemeral nature. I managed to sell some of the stories to the BBC's Home service programme—The Thief, Night Train at Deuli, The Woman on Platform 8, The Kitimaber—others to the Elizabethan, Illustrated Weekly of India, Sunday Statesman (over the years, a few have been lost.) In India, Rs 50 was the most you got for a short story or article, but you could l
ive quite comfortably on three or four hundred rupees a month— provided your mode of transport was limited to the bicycle. Only successful businessmen and doctors owned cars.

  My stepfather was an exception. He was an unsuccessful businessman who used a different car every month. That was because, before leaving Dehra, he ran a motor workshop, and if a car was left with him for repairs or overhauling ('oiling and greasing' he called it) he would use it for a month or two on the pretext of trying it out, before returning it to its owner. This he would do only when the owner's patience had reached its limit; sometimes the car had to be taken away by force. Occasionally my stepfather would relent and return the car of his own accord—along with a bill for having looked after it for so long!

  His talents went unappreciated in Dehra. When he moved to Delhi he became a successful salesperson.

  Some of the characters in my Dehra stories were fictional, some were based on real people; Granny was real, of course. And so were the boys in 'The Room' and 'Vagrants'. But did Rusty really make love to Meena Kapoor? It's a question I have often been asked and must leave unanswered. It might have happened. And then again, it might not. I prefer to leave it as a sweet mystery that will never be solved.

  One thing is certain. Dehra played an integral part in my development as a writer. More than Shimla, where I did my schooling. More than London, where I lived for nearly four years. More than Delhi, where I spent a number of years. As much as Mussoorie, where I have passed half my life. It must have been the ambience of the place, something about it, that suited my temperament.

  But it's a different place now, and no longer do I feel like 'singin' in the rain' as I walk down the Rajpur Road. I am in danger of being knocked down by a speeding vehicle if I try out my old song-and-dance routine. So I keep well to the side of the pavement and look out for known landmarks—an old peepal tree, a familiar corner, a surviving bungalow, a bookshop, the sabzi-mandi, a bit of wasteland where once we played cricket.