Darjeeling

by Jeff Koehler

  The visit in the spring of 1880 by Lord and Lady Lytton, the viceroy of India and his wife, marked the hill station’s arrival. The heavily bearded statesman and poet and his wife, who had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, arrived with a thirty-one-gun salute and departed five days later under another regal salvo into the March sky. Darjeeling had “come of age.”33

  Not every early visitor was impressed, though. “Darjeeling itself is not so striking in its beauty as Lucerne or Chamounix or St Moritz,” wrote John Oliver Hobbes in 1903. “It may be questioned whether it is beautiful at all. The town has no plan, and it straggles apparently over several hillsides.”34 What caught the attention, pen, and hyperbole of Hobbes was the bazaar, with its picturesque elements that Darjeeling’s Swiss and French rivals could never match:

  One could buy skins of beasts, turquoise earrings, silver girdles, prints of the gods, bangles, dreadful drugs from the native apothecary, prayer wheels, rice, maize, yellow ochre and powdered carmine for one’s face, bangles and dress materials. The girls often have their cheeks stained horribly with the blood of goats or chickens, and they wear their wealth in necklaces made of rupees for which they are sometimes murdered.35

  The city remains, as when Hobbes experienced it, essentially a set of tiered landings and switchbacks with steps and steep ramps running between, jammed with buildings, shops, and cafés, and all roads leading up to the long, broad plaza at the saddle below Observatory Hill. The Chowrasta is the city’s flattest point and meeting spot, where four important pedestrian streets come together, and everyone in town seems to pass through at least once during the day.

  “In any town in India the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power,” Orwell wrote in Burmese Days,36 his scathing portrait of British attitudes during their rule of British India (including Burma) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The Club—like the Company—was given a capital C, and often a capital T, too: The Club.

  Their beginnings go back to the early coffeehouses in London, men-only places where every class and trade had a favorite in which to gather. Eventually they set up their own private establishments. Such exclusivity transplanted effortlessly around the Empire. In India, Calcutta’s Bengal Club, established in 1827, was the first, followed by the Byculla Club in Bombay and the Madras Club five years later. After the uprising in 1857, they appeared in nearly every station across India.

  The Club was “a symbol and center of British imperialism,” wrote Leonard Woolf—writer, editor, and husband of Virginia—recalling his seven years as a colonial administrator in Ceylon. “It had normally a curious air of slight depression, but at the same time exclusiveness, superiority, isolation. Only the ‘best people’ and of course only white men were members.”37

  Club membership was based, foremost, on race. A system that would essentially allow any class of white but no class of Indian, no matter aristocracy or Oxbridge education, was ironic and particularly galling. Yet, in a country where Hindu castes were rigid and many Brahmans would not eat food touched by lower castes, such segregation was not unique.38 (The decision, at the end of Britain’s rule, to begin allowing in some Indians divided members—and Empire.)

  Membership was, secondly, based on occupation. Boxwallahs, a rather contemptuous name for all those engaged in trade, fell well down the rank across India except perhaps in port cities such as Calcutta and Bombay, where commerce dominated affairs.39 Those in the army were above nonofficials, but residing at the top were ICS men—generally recruited just out of Oxford or Cambridge. Know as “Heaven-born,” these were “the colonial equivalent of the Hindu Brahmin caste.”40

  “Ironically,” lamented Eugenia Herbert, “in the new order of things, the once-glorious merchants (boxwallahs) and planters ranked virtually on par with untouchables.”41

  Not so in Darjeeling. While ICS, British army officers, and railway officers drank at the Planters’ Club, the planters themselves and burra sahibs—head managers at the tea gardens—were its aristocrats. It was the hub of social life for British working on Darjeeling tea estates.

  Established in 1868, the Darjeeling Planters’ Club was built on a parcel of land donated by the maharaja of Cooch Behar, who was the only one allowed to park his rickshaw on the main porch of the Club. It was a place to meet, swap stories, commiserate, and talk shop.

  “The life of a planter was very lonely,” observed the Club’s current assistant secretary, Shabnam Bhutia, on its open verandah with brilliant white walls and tea-leaf-green doors during a spring day. Dozens of potted purple and white flowers had symmetrically been arranged on a stepped, three-tiered platform beneath sets of mounted horns. Wide wicker chairs were turned toward the midday sun like sunflowers. The planters had little chance for social activity. Gardens were remote, and even ones side by side took time to reach.* With a staff of servants, cooks, houseboys, bearers, and gardeners, life on a tea estate could be comfortable for the planter, but lonesome. Society and even other Westerners were generally too distant for regular contact. Applicants in Europe wanting to work on a tea estate were required to be bachelors, wait some years before marrying, and then secure permission to do so from the burra sahib42—which is to say, approval not just of the marriage but also of the woman, often found among the small Anglo community in Darjeeling.

  Being a planter or a European working on any of the tea gardens obliged becoming a Club member, and being a member was a key part of the social life. Liquor played an important role at the Club, but was governed by an unwritten rule: beer from eleven a.m., gin in the afternoon, and whisky not before sunset.43 Billiards and bridge were offered, and, in the evenings, dancing to songs already out of fashion in Britain, but that hardly mattered. On Club night it was packed: Attendance was obligatory. The Club had a couple dozen rooms available for the planters to stay over, or for their guests. After Mark Twain gave a lecture in Darjeeling, he retired to one of its rooms.

  Most didn’t sleep over, though. The junior members of a tea estate—the assistants and engineers—needed to make the garden’s dawn roll call no matter how late they stayed at the Club. So the men made their way home, somehow, late at night. They would ride back along the network of precarious paths, crossing on horseback streams and rivers whose swollen torrents were dangerous in the rainy season.44

  Until just a few decades ago, horses remained a principal means of transport on a tea garden, and planters received a horse allowance. “Every manager rode his estate, and horses were considered more expensive than wives,” according to Gillian Wright. “Even in 1971, a planter was allowed Rs 300 a month for his horse and Rs 150 a month dearness allowance upon marriage.”45

  While managers now make that late-night drive in a jeep, the roads are frequently washed out by monsoon rains, overrun by streams, and, in most cases, remain just as wild. “Driving home at around midnight from the Club,” Vijay Dhancholia, a member since 1992, recalled, “I saw a leopard on the road with a deer, and it crouched there until we went right next it.”

  Such an evening out today is an anomaly. While most garden managers are members, like Dhancholia, they now rarely go. Planters’ families live with them on the estates, and with Internet, mobile phones, and satellite TV, most planters don’t need the Club for entertainment or even to socialize.

  Today officially called the Darjeeling Club, it has 470 members. In the late 1990s, it opened admission to professions other than planters. Joining is very expensive, although it is currently not taking new members. Yet few come these days. “Just two or three,” said a receptionist on an April evening that had cooled enough to require coal fires to be lit in the guest rooms and a heater turned on at the feet of the receptionist. And before? “Three hundred,” he said flatly.

  At the base of Nehru Road, across from the Planters’ Club, is Keventer’s, a popular, decades-old, inexpensive café with a roof terrace shaped like a ship’s bow. On Sundays it fills with junior boys from Darjeeling’s elite schools ordering cheese-toast sandwic
hes and bottled Maaza mango sodas.

  During the nineteenth century, Darjeeling became famous for its English-style boarding schools modeled on Eton, Rugby, and Harrow. St. Paul’s School was the first. It started in 1823 in Calcutta and opened a branch in Darjeeling in 1864 as the highest school in the world. Located on the outskirts of town, the beefy buildings with peaked, red roofs and a massive quad comprise one of the area’s top institutions, along with St. Joseph’s at North Point, Mount Hermon, and Loreto Convent (where Mother Teresa spent ten years doing her novitiate). They draw students from beyond the hills and also India itself, with scores from Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Thailand (including royalty). The town’s numerous students stroll around in V-neck sweater-vests, slate-gray trousers or long skirts, striped ties, and crested blazers.

  Even when there is no chance of rain, and Darjeeling is suffering from drought, the boys of St. Paul’s still carry their ubiquitous black umbrellas. Asked why they had them on a sunny day when it hadn’t rained in weeks, one tall boy with a fuzz of hair just appearing on his lip said, “Tradition, sir!”

  “What if you get caught without an umbrella?”

  “We wouldn’t be able to come into town, sir.”

  “How often can you come into town?”

  “Once a month, sir.”

  “Really?”

  “Tradition, sir.”

  * * *

  * They still do today. Traveling from the manager’s bungalow on the Bannockburn Tea Estate to the one on the neighboring Ging Tea Estate takes close to an hour by jeep. This is rather standard.

  CHAPTER 11

  Nostalgia

  If there is a hint of what V. S. Naipaul called mimicry on the Indian side in the school crests and clubs with hunting trophies, dress codes, and the same elitist rules that once excluded them, there is nostalgia on the Anglo side. It’s located in the heritage hill station hotels with snuggeries displaying steam-train memorabilia, the solid, gray-stone buildings with wisteria, and the evocative smell of coal smoke in the evening air. In Darjeeling, no one traffics better in nostalgia than the city’s most exclusive hotel, the Windamere.

  Established in the 1880s as a cozy boardinghouse for bachelor English and Scottish tea planters, it was converted into a hotel by the father of the current owner, who bought the property in 1939. Strung across the narrow back of a hummock, with stunning views dropping straight down on both sides and a royal guest list, the old-fashioned, self-contained Victorian cottages, annexes, and planters’ suites are the only buildings on Observatory Hill. Rooms have spacious closets (one had to dress for dinner) and a second, smaller room (to change perhaps, or for an attending footman). Full meal plans are obligatory, menu cards typed out daily on an old machine, and waiters breeze among tables wearing white gloves even to serve breakfast. The porridge is memorable, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding are served on Sundays, and desserts lean toward British public-school staples—which is to say Raj standards—such as bread-and-butter pudding with plump golden raisins, sponge cakes, and jam roly-poly, all smothered in hot custard. When evenings are cool, which is most of the year, coal fires are lit in the rooms while guests are down at dinner, offering heat along with soothing sounds of embers shifting in the grate as they burn down during the night. A hot-water bottle wrapped in flannel is surreptitiously tucked into the sheets, too.

  “This place isn’t just a throwback to the early 20th century,” wrote the Canadian journalist Muhammad Lila. “It is the early 20th century.”1

  The tug of nostalgia pulls the firmest at afternoon tea, which, every day at precisely four p.m., is offered fireside in Daisy’s Music Room.

  The Windamere’s tradition began seventy-five years ago by copying the British fashion and has carried on with little change since. A server wearing a frilly lace pinafore and white gloves pours out tea from a silver pot and offers platters of macaroons, Bundt cake with candied cherries, and scones to slice open and generously spread butter and clotted cream across their soft crumb face. Arranged in orderly layers on silver platters are petit triangular sandwiches that have been filled with cucumber, boiled egg, or cheese and had their crusts shaved off with a long, serrated knife.

  The music room is not overly large, and with the curtains drawn and a fire blazing, it becomes intimate and cozy. Stacked on the piano among candelabra are heavy, black-boarded photo albums of past Windamere celebrations. Lovingly separated by sheets of onionskin are treasured images of New Year’s Eve bonfires, dances, and dinners with Christmas crackers and shiny party hats. On the wall, frames encase regimental ware, portraits of long-dead royalty, and notes from famous guests. A card from Jan Morris contains this handwritten ode:

  As the glow of Kanchenjunga

  Faded with the passing of each year—

  When the whistle of the Toy Train

  Dies at last upon my ear—

  In my heart I still shall cherish

  Dear old Windamere.

  The British tradition of afternoon tea originated with Anna Maria, the seventh Duchess of Bedford (a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria), in the early nineteenth century as she began having a little pick-me-up between the then-standard two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. At first private affairs, afternoon teas moved to the drawing rooms of the fashionable set—ladies only; the men had their clubs and pubs—and soon after to teahouses and hotel dining rooms. In some ways, this was a beginning of women’s emancipation. Starting in 1865, the year the luxurious Langham Hotel on London’s Regent Street opened and began offering afternoon tea in their dazzling Palm Court, ladies had a place to go out together in public without risking society’s moralizing gossip.

  As with many British fashions, afternoon tea became popular on the subcontinent, too. In Victorian India, tea was drunk as in Britain, with milk and sugar, though that sweetener might have been jaggery,2 a dark brown sugar made by evaporating the sap of palm trees. Some Brits enjoyed tea Mughal style, with spices, and The Raj at the Table offers a rather baroque recipe that includes palm starch (sago), almonds, cardamom, rosewater or dried rosebuds, milk, sugar, and “just sufficient tea leaf.”3

  In gardens of hill stations during the summer social season, and in the sunny winter down on the plains, tea was served along with sweets—tiffin cake, dholi buns, Bombay golden cake, and gymkhana cake, which included plums and currants. Baking in British India was not without its challenges, even for experienced cooks. High-quality flour was hard to come by and butter difficult to keep fresh. Yeast was perhaps the trickiest ingredient to obtain, so cooks often prepared homemade versions from cookbooks “using ingredients as diverse as potatoes, hops, bananas, barley, toddy (palm sap) and a fruit flower known as mowha.”4 Even if a cook could whisk up all of the ingredients, ovens were primitive and formed a final obstacle to pulling off a decent cake.

  Beforehand, the lady would most likely have checked her well-thumbed copy of The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook. The fourth edition, published in 1898 at the height of the Raj, contained forty-three chapters that instructed on every element of housekeeping and colonial life on the subcontinent, from getting a piano to the Himalayas for the summer to throwing a perfect garden party. “Cakes and bonbons suitable for tennis parties are legion, and, as a rule the one thing to be observed in selecting them is to avoid stickiness or surprises,” advised coauthors Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner. “It is not pleasant to find the first bite of a firm looking cake result in a dribble of liqueur or cream down your best dress.”5

  For afternoon tea, the two ladies recommended serving warm slices of Ferozepore cake, named for the ancient town in the Punjab that under the British housed one of the largest military garrisons on the subcontinent. To the standard quartet of flour, sugar, butter, and eggs, the recipe adds almonds and pistachios steeped in cream and, to tart it up, lime, which they exotically called “green citron.”

  To be sure, if the hostess had consulted Mmes. Steel and Gardiner for her menu, she would have been firmly discouraged from
serving anything beyond cakes and scones to accompany the tea. “In England, the fashion of having various kinds of sandwiches at afternoon tea has of late gained ground but as it means a necessary disregard of dinner, it is not to be encouraged by any one who sets up for being a gourmet.”6

  The Mesdames did, however, yield—even if slightly—to fashion and offered a handful “of the latest” sandwiches, albeit “given in the proper place,” at the end of the book. (The penultimate chapter, added only “by request,” contains eight “native dishes” that the authors warned “are inordinately greasy and sweet.”)7 The limited selection included an eternal standby, egg sandwiches. But little else. “Almost anything can be made into sandwiches, so it is unnecessary to give more recipes,” the book drily noted.8

  Lovely sandwiches can be found at afternoon tea in the Elgin Hotel. Built as the summer palace of the maharaja of Cooch Behar, the Elgin has a snug interior bedecked with etchings and lithographs, period teak furniture from Burma, oak floor paneling, plush red sofas with ample throw pillows, and fireplaces that crackle in the winter. In the well-lit drawing room that runs across the ground-floor front of the stout, white building, the Elgin’s waiters—clad not in frilly lace but turbaned, regimental uniforms—serve afternoon tea on the heavy, polished wood side tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Among the monogrammed cups and saucers and silverware covered in a gossamer of spidery patina, waiters set down a stacked tea tray (known in Edwardian days as a curate), with three hoops to hold plates of delicacies and a loop handle on top to carry it.