Sriram Mehrotra — lone crusader for Hume

Prof Sriram Mehrotra, historian of the Indian National Congress and former Professor of Himachal Pradesh University (See photo), in his advanced age revisits his youth when somebody speaks of Allan Octavian Hume to him. Allan was the eighth and youngest surviving child of his parents. Born at Kent, England, on June 4, 1829, he was posted to the Bengal Civil Service in March 1849 when he was slightly less than 20 of age. He arrived in Kolkata (then Calcutta) and began studying Hindustani and administration. Collar and Prys-Jones write about Hume: “Although he served his country with distinction, he was contemptuous of the colonial mindset that he held responsible for the uprising of 1857, namely ‘British administrative inaptitude and an increasing tendency to ride roughshod over the wishes of the people instead of consulting and working with Indian leaders’.”

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Allan achieved his most prestigious official position in June 1871 in the Indian Civil Service as secretary of the new Department of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce (See photo). Many may not know that the Agriculture Department was then housed in Holly Lodge, the present residence of the Chief Minister. It was around this time that Allan moved to his summer home in Shimla and acquired that beautiful building called Rothney Castle or Sheeshewali Kothi, built at Jakhu in 1838, where he established his ornithological museum.

He did a wonderful job during his tenure of eight years as secretary of the department. “He encouraged the cultivation of sorghum, groundnuts, cinchona for quinine, mulberry for silk, carob and eucalyptus, agitated for the establishment of model farms across British India, extended the area of forest under protection and replanted eroded land and brought stronger regulation to fisheries. His department supervised India’s first national Census in 1871, promoted the compilation of an Indian gazetteer, established a system for national weather data collection and collation and conducted topographical, geological and marine surveys.” His all-round contribution to improve the nutritional and economic productivity of the land and giving a start to demographic and topographic data collection is commendable, but more commendable is to found the Indian National Congress that won us our freedom.

Sriram Mehrotra laments that despite the Congress party ruling the state for several years, Rothney Castle, where the idea of forming the Congress party was conceived in the autumn of 1884, was never considered to be converted into Hume’s memorial. This building, which served as the official address of Hume in India as General Secretary of the Congress till 1906, went into the hands of Lala Chunamal Saligram of Chandni Chowk, Delhi, and was passed on in 1985 to Rajinder Mohan, actress Simi Garewal’s former husband and descendant of Chunamal. Mehrotra asserts that a fear was lurking in the mind of Rajinder Mohan that the government would, one day, convert it into Hume’s memorial. So he entered into a deal with the big-wigs of the state and raised a company, Castle Inn Company Private Limited. He borrowed a huge amount of money from the Financial and Industrial Development Corporations to convert Rothney Castle into Castle Inn. The move got locked up when some of the officers of the Government of India decided in 1987 not to give a green signal to the construction of a hotel here. Castle Inn Company and Rajesh Mohan, son of Rajinder Mohan, then filed a civil writ petition in the High Court here against the government and the corporations charging the defendants of not fulfilling the promises made and claimed damages for the loss suffered by petitioners. The civil writ petition ultimately was “dismissed as withdrawn” in 1994.

By God’s grace, the hotel could not come up. The present government, Mehrotra wishes, would do a great service to the nation if it or the Congress party bought the building from its present owner and raised a memorial for Allan Octavian Hume here — the man who did not belong to any party, but belonged to the idea of a free India. Mehrotra also wants all to join hands in locating the “pine shrouded grave” of Hume’s wife Mary Anne who rests somewhere in Shimla since March 30, 1890.