Hill Capers

Since its sleepy beginnings in the early-nineteenth century as a convalescent depot for British soldiers, Mussoorie has had an interesting life, its history replete with scandal and intrigue, and a goldmine for the nostalgist. Long-time resident Ganesh Saili has more or less assumed the mantle of chief mythologist and, over the years, delivered some memorable tomes. He covers a lot of familiar ground in this book—some of it a bit too familiar, recycled as it is from earlier efforts.

The prose rambles, not unlike the hill station. A chapter devoted to Sir George Everest segues into obscure details about the Mussoorie Library. A chapter promisingly titled ‘Nutty, Naughty Mussoorie’ zeroes in on cholera outbreaks, before turning to the princely homes that grace these hills. Careless editing doesn’t help (p.93: ‘the Indian middle class had not yet bludgeoned’). Most infuriating is the perverse tendency to strangle words like ‘where’ and ‘who’ with bracketing commas at every opportunity and this will bother at least a few readers, diminishing as their tribe is.

Make no mistake, there is some lovely material here (the chapter on Mussoorie shutterbugs, for one), but it needed to be tamed. Take this gem on the Savoy hotel from Lowell Thomas, c. 1926: “There is a hotel in Mussoorie where they ring a bell just before dawn so that the pious may say their prayers and the impious get back to their own beds.”

What salvages this volume are two, sadly slim, sections, where the past speaks sans mediation—one offering extracts from the first guide to Mussoorie (published in 1884 by Thacker, Spink and Co. of Calcutta), the other a sprinkling of rare archival photographs. For these alone, this is a book worth coveting.