by Ruskin Bond
‘Yes, but there are cinemas there,’ he says, ‘and television, and videos.’ I am left without an argument. Birdsong may have charms for me but not for the restless dish-washer in Nandprayag.
The rain stops and I go for a walk. The pilgrims keep to themselves but the locals are always ready to talk. I remember a saying (and it may have originated in these hills), which goes: ‘All men are my friends. I have only to meet them.’ In these hills, where life still moves at a leisurely and civilized pace, one is constantly meeting them.
Into the Mountains
Great Rivers of the Mountains
THE GANGA DESCENDS
There has always been a mild sort of controversy as to whether the true Ganga (in its upper reaches) is the Alaknanda or the Bhagirathi. Of course the two rivers meet at Deoprayag and then both are Ganga. But there are some who assert that geographically the Alaknanda is the true Ganga, while others say that tradition should be the criterion, and traditionally the Bhagirathi is the Ganga.
I put the question to my friend Dr Sudhakar Misra, from whom words of wisdom sometimes flow; and, true to form, he answered: ‘The Alaknanda is the Ganga, but the Bhagirathi is Gangaji.’
One sees what he means. The Bhagirathi is beautiful, almost, caressingly so, and people have responded to it with love and respect, ever since Shiva released the waters of the goddess from his tangled locks and she sped plains-wards in the tracks of Prince Bhagirath’s chariot.
He held the river on his head,
And kept her wandering, where,
Dense as Himalayas woods were spread,
The tangles of his hair.
Revered by Hindus, and loved by all, the goddess Ganga weaves her spell over all who come to her. Moreover, she issues from the very heart of the Himalayas. Visiting Gangotri in 1820, the writer and traveller Baillie Fraser noted: ‘We are now in the centre of the Himalayas, the loftiest and perhaps the most rugged range of mountains in the world.’
Perhaps it is this realization that one is at the very centre and heart of things, that gives one an almost primeval sense of belonging to these mountains and to this river valley in particular. For me, and for many who have been in the mountains, the Bhagirathi is the most beautiful of the four main river valleys of Garhwal. It will remain so provided we do not pollute its waters and strip it of its virgin forests.
The Bhagirathi seems to have everything—people of a gentle disposition, deep glens and forests, the ultravision of an open valley graced with tiers of cultivation leading up by degrees to the peaks and glaciers at its head.
From some twenty miles above Tehri, as far as Bhatwari, a distance of about fifty-five miles along the valley, there are extensive forests of pine. It covers the mountains on both sides of the river and its affluents, filling the ravines and plateaus up to a height of about 5000 feet. Above Bhatwari, forests of box, yew and cypress commence, and if we leave the valley and take the roads to Nachiketa Tal or Dodi Tal—little lakes at around 9000 feet above sea level—we pass through dense forests of oak and chestnut. From Gangnani to Gangotri the deodar is the principal tree. The excelsa pine also extends eight miles up the valley above Gangotri, and birch is found in patches to within half a mile of the glacier.
On the right bank of the river, above Sukhi, the forest is nearly pure deodar, but on the left bank, with a northern aspect, there is a mixture of silver-fir, spruce and birch. The vally of the Jad-ganga is also full of deodar, and towards its head the valuable pencil-cedar is found. The only other area of Garhwal where the deodar is equally extensive is the Jaunsar-Bawar tract to the west.
It was the valuable timber of the deodar that attracted the adventurer Frederick ‘Pahari’ Wilson to the valley in the 1850’s. He leased the forests from the Raja of Tehri in 1859, and in a few years, he had made a fortune.
The old forest rest-houses at Dharasu, Bhatwari and Harsil were all built by Wilson as staging-posts, for the only roads were narrow tracks linking one village to another. Wilson married a local girl, Gulabi, from the village of Mukhba, and the portraits of Mr and Mrs Wilson (early examples of the photographer’s art) still hang in these sturdy little bungalows. At any rate, I found their pictures at Bhatwari. Harsil is now out of bounds to civilians, and I believe part of the old house was destroyed in a fire a few years ago.
Amongst other things, Wilson introduced the apple into this area, and ‘Wilson apples’—large, red and juicy—are sold to travellers and pilgrims on their way to Gangotri. This fascinating man also acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of the wildlife of the region, and his articles, which appeared in Indian Sporting Life in the 1860s, were later plundered by so-called wildlife experts for their own writings.
Bridge-building was another of Wilson’s ventures. These bridges were meant to facilitate travel to Harsil and the shrine at Gangotri. The most famous of them was a 350-foot suspension bridge over the Jad-ganga at Bhaironghat, over 1200 feet above the young Bhagirathi where it thunders through a deep defile. This rippling contraption of a bridge was at first a source of terror to travellers, and only a few ventured across it. To reassure people, Wilson would often mount his horse and gallop to and fro across the bridge. It has long since collapsed but local people will tell you that the hoofbeats of Wilson’s horse can still be heard on full moon nights! The supports of the old bridge were complete tree-trunks, and they can still be seen to one side of the new motor-bridge put up by engineers of the Northern Railway.
Wilson’s life is fit subject for a romance; but even if one were never written, his legend would live on, as it has done for over a hundred years. There has never been any attempt to commemorate him, but people in the valley still speak of him in awe and admiration, as though he had lived only yesterday. Some men leave a trail of legend behind them, because they give their spirit to the place where they have lived, and remain forever a part of the rocks and mountain streams.
In the old days, only the staunchest of pilgrims visited the shrines of Gangotri and Jamnotri. The roads were rocky and dangerous, winding along in some places, ascending and descending the faces of deep precipices and ravines, at times leading along banks of loose earth where landslides had swept the original path away. There are still no large towns above Uttarkashi, and this absence of large centres of population may be one reason why the forests are better preserved than, say, those in the Alaknanda valley, or further downstream.
Gangotri is situated at just a little over 10,300 feet and on the right bank of the river is the Gangotri temple. It is a small neat building without too much ornamentation, built by Amar Singh Thapa, a Nepali general, early in the nineteenth century. It was renovated by the Maharaja of Jaipur in the 1920s. The rock on which it stands is called Bhagirath Shila and is said to be the place where Prince Bhagirath did penance in order that Ganga be brought down from her abode of eternal snow.
Here the rocks are carved and polished by ice and water, so smooth that in places they look like rolls of silk. The fast-flowing waters of this mountain torrent look very different from the huge sluggish river that finally empties its waters into the Bay of Bengal 1500 miles away.
The river emerges from beneath a great glacier, thickly studded with enormous loose rocks and earth. The glacier is about a mile in width and extends upwards for many miles. The chasm in the glacier, through which the stream rushes into the light of day, is named Gaumukh, the cow’s mouth, and is held in deepest reverence by Hindus. The regions of eternal frost in the vicinity were the scenes of many of their most sacred mysteries.
The Ganga enters the world no puny stream, but bursts from its icy womb a river thirty or forty yards in breadth. At Gauri Kund (below the Gangotri temple) it falls over a rock of considerable height, and continues tumbling over a succession of small cascades until it enters the Bhaironghati gorge.
A night spent beside the river, within sound of the fall, is an eerie experience. After some time it begins to sound, not like one fall but a hundred, and this sound permeates both one’s dreams and walk
ing hours. Rising early to greet the dawn proved rather pointless at Gangotri, for the surrounding peaks did not let the sun in till after 9 a.m. Everyone rushes about to keep warm, exclaiming delightedly at what they call gulabi thand—literally, ‘rosy cold’. Guaranteed to turn the cheeks a rosy pink! A charming expression, but I prefer a rosy sunburn—and remained beneath a heavy quilt until the sun came up to throw its golden shafts across the river.
This is mid-October, and after Diwali the shrine and the small township will close for the winter, the pandits retreating to the relative warmth of Mukhba. Soon snow will cover everything, and even the hardy purple-plumaged whistling thrushes, lovers of deep shade, will move further down the valley. And down below the forest-line, the Garhwali farmers go about harvesting their ripening paddy, as they have done for centuries; their terraced fields form patterns of yellow, green and gold above the deep green of the river.
Yes, the Bhagirathi is a green river. Although deep and swift, it does not lose its serenity. At no place does it look hurried or confused—unlike the turbulent Alaknanda, fretting and frothing as it goes crashing down its boulder-strewn bed. The Alaknanda gives one a feeling of being trapped, because the river itself is trapped. The Bhagirathi is free-flowing, easy. At all times and places it seems to find its true level.
Uttarkashi, though a large and growing town, is as yet uncrowded. The seediness of over-populated towns like Rishikesh and Dehra Dun is not yet evident here. One can take a leisurely walk through its long (and well-supplied) bazaar, without being jostled by crowds or knocked over by three-wheelers. Here, too, the river is always with you, and you must live in harmony with its sound, as it goes rushing and humming along its shingly bed.
Uttarkashi is not without its own religious and historical importance, although all traces of its ancient capital called Barahat appear to have vanished. There are four important temples here, and on the occasion of Makar Sankranti, early in January, a week-long fair is held, when thousands from the surrounding areas throng the roads to the town. To the beating of drums and blowing of trumpets, the gods and goddesses are brought to the fair in gaily decorated palanquins. The surrounding villages wear a deserted look that day as everyone flocks to the temples and bathing-ghats and to the entertainment of the fair itself.
We have to move far downstream to reach another large centre of population, the town of Tehri, and this is a very different place from Uttarkashi. Tehri has all the characteristics of a small town in the plains—crowds, noise, traffic congestion, dust and refuse, scruffy dhabas—with this difference, that here it is all ephemeral, for Tehri is destined to be submerged by the waters of the Bhagirathi when the Tehri dam is finally completed.
The rulers of Garhwal were often changing their capitals, and when after the Gurkha Wars (1811-15) the former capital of Shrinagar became part of British Garhwal, Raja Sundershan Shah established his new capital at Tehri. It is said that when he reached this spot, his horse refused to go any further. This was enough for the king, it seems; or so the story goes.
Perhaps Prince Bhagirath’s chariot will come to a halt here too, when the dam is built. The 246-metre high earthen dam, with forty-two square miles of reservoir capacity, will submerge the town and about thirty villages.
As we leave the town and cross the narrow bridge over the river, a mighty blast from above sends rocks hurtling down the defile, just to remind us that work is in progress.
Unlike the Raja’s horse, I have no wish to be stopped in my tracks at Tehri. There are livelier places upstream.
BEAUTIFUL MANDAKINI
To see a river for the first time at its confluence with another great river is, for me, a special moment in time. And so it was with the Mandakini at Rudraprayag, where its waters were joined with the waters of the Alaknanda, the one having come from the glacial snows above Kedarnath, the other from the Himalayan heights beyond Badrinath. Both sacred rivers, both destined to become the holy Ganga further downstream.
I fell in love with the Mandakini at first sight. Or was it the valley that I fell in love with? I am not sure, and it doesn’t really matter. The valley is the river. While the Alaknanda valley, especially in its higher reaches, is a deep and narrow gorge where precipitous outcrops of rock hang threateningly over the traveller, the Mandakini valley is broader, gentler, the terraced fields wider, the banks of the river a green sward in many places.
Rudraprayag is hot. It is probably a pleasant spot in winter, but at the end of June it is decidedly hot. Perhaps its chief claim to fame is that it gave its name to the dreaded man-eating leopard, who, in the course of seven years (1918-25), accounted for more than 300 victims. It was finally shot by the fifty-one-year-old Jim Corbett, who recounted the saga of his long hunt for the killer in his fine book, The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag.
The place at which the leopard was shot was the village of Gulabrai, two miles south of Rudraprayag. Under a large mango tree stands a memorial raised to Jim Corbett by officers and men of the Border Roads Organisation. It is a happy gesture to one who loved Garhwal and India. Unfortunately several buffaloes are gathered close by, and one has to wade through slush and buffalo-dung to get to the memorial-stone. A board tacked on to the mango tree attracts the attention of motorists who might pass without noticing the memorial, which is off to one side.
The killer leopard was noted for its direct method of attack on humans; and, in spite of being poisoned, trapped in a cave, and shot at innumerable times, it did not lose its contempt for man. Two English sportsmen covering both ends of the old suspension bridge over the Alaknanda fired several times at the man-eater but to little effect.
It was not long before the leopard acquired a reputation among the hill folk for being an evil spirit. A sadhu was suspected of turning into the leopard by night, and was only saved from being lynched by the ingenuity of Philip Mason, then deputy commissioner of Garhwal. Mason kept the sadhu in custody until the leopard made his next attack, thus proving the man innocent. Years later, when Mason turned novelist and (using the pen-name Philip Woodruff) wrote The Wild Sweet Witch, he had as his main character a beautiful young woman who turns into a man-eating leopard by night.
Corbett’s host at Gulabrai was one of the few who survived an encounter with the leopard. It left him with a hole in his throat.
Apart from being a superb storyteller, Corbett displayed great compassion for people from all walks of life and is still a legend in Garhwal and Kumaon amongst people who have never read his books.
In June, one does not linger long in the steamy heat of Rudraprayag. But as one travels up the river, making a gradual ascent of the Mandakini valley, there is a cool breeze coming down from the snows, and the smell of rain is in the air.
The thriving little township of Agastmuni spreads itself along the wide riverbanks, and further upstream, near a little place called Chanderpuri, we cannot resist breaking our journey to sprawl on the tender green grass that slopes gently down to the swiftly flowing river. A small rest-house is in the making. Around it, banana fronds sway and poplar leaves dance in the breeze.
This is no sluggish river of the plains, but a fast moving current, tumbling over rocks, turning and twisting in its efforts to discover the easiest way for its frothy snow-fed waters to escape the mountains. Escape is the word! For the constant plaint of many a Garhwali is that, while his hills abound in rivers the water runs down and away, and little if any reaches the fields and villages above it. Cultivation must depend on the rain and not on the river.
The road climbs gradually, still keeping to the river. Just outside Guptkashi my attention is drawn to a clump of huge trees sheltering a small but ancient temple. We stop here and enter the shade of the trees.
The temple is deserted. It is a temple dedicated to Shiva, and in the courtyard are several river-rounded stone lingams on which leaves and blossoms have fallen. No one seems to come here, which is strange, since it is on the pilgrim route. Two boys from a neighbouring field leave their yoked bullocks to c
ome and talk to me, but they cannot tell me much about the temple except to confirm that it is seldom visited. ‘The buses do not stop here.’ That seems explanation enough. For where the buses go, the pilgrims go, and where the pilgrims go, other pilgrims will follow. Thus far and no further.
The trees seem to be magnolias, judging by the scent and shape of the flowers, and the boys call them champa, Hindi for magnolia blossom. But I have never seen magnolia trees grow to such huge proportions. Perhaps they are something else. Never mind; let them remain a sweet-scented mystery.
Guptkashi in the evening is all a-bustle. A coachload of pilgrims (headed for Kedarnath) has just arrived, and the tea shops near the bus-stand are doing brisk business. Then the ‘local’ bus—from Okhimath, across the river—arrives, and many of the passengers head for a tea shop famed for its samosas. The local bus is called the bhook-hartal—‘hunger-strike’—bus.
‘How did it get that name?’ I ask one of the samosa-eaters.
‘Well, it’s an interesting story. For a long time we had been asking the authorities to provide a bus service for the local people and for the villagers who live off the roads. All the buses came from Srinagar or Rishikesh, and were taken up by pilgrims. The locals couldn’t find room in them. But our pleas went unheard until the whole town—or most of it, anyway—decided to go on hunger-strike. That worked. And so the bus is named after our successful hunger-strike.’
‘They nearly put me out of business too,’ said the tea-shop owner cheerfully. ‘Nobody ate any samosas for two days!’
There is no cinema or public place of entertainment at Guptkashi, and the town goes to sleep early. And wakes early.
At six, the hillside, green from recent rain, sparkles in the morning sunshine. Snow-capped Chaukhamba (23,400 feet) is dazzling. The air is clear, no smoke or dust up here. The climate, I am told, is mild all the year round. Okhimath, on the other side of the river, lies in the shadow. It gets the sun at 9 a.m. In winter it must wait till afternoon. And yet it seems a bigger place, and by tradition the temple priest from Kedarnath passes winter there when the snows cover that distant shrine.