A passage to Himachal

Raaja Bhasin

AS we get older, we seem to repeat the same old stories and foist them on unsuspecting victims or the long suffering listeners. One of my oft-repeated stories concerns the time when my father was a child — and this was one of his much-told stories.

In the 1920s, when he was around seven years old, my father travelled from Lahore to Thanedar-Kotgarh, which was preparing to transform itself into Himachal’s apple-growing heartland. He had accompanied my grandfather’s older brother, Bihari Lal, a well-known educationist of Punjab. Bihari Lal was helping Samuel Stokes, who later changed his name to Satyanand, set up a school in Thanedar. Uncle and nephew would take the broad-gauge train from Lahore up to Kalka and then, change to the ‘toy train’ bound for Shimla.

From Shimla, they would get on to the grandiosely named ‘Hindustan Tibet Road’, which was little more than a bridle trail. In combination of walking or riding on mules or ponies, they would reach their destination three days later. The same journey, from Shimla to Thanedar, in optimal traffic conditions, takes around three hours now.

Some years after India gained Independence, the still somewhat disjointed state of Himachal Pradesh had an area of approximately 22,000 sq km. Today, this is around 57,000 sq km. As colonial rule ended, the total length of motorable roads in the entire state was less than 40 miles. The Kalka-Shimla road, tarmacked stretches in Kangra and a few other patches still formed a part of Punjab and, later, of PEPSU.

The first lot of commercially successful apples from Himachal came from the Kullu region and these were English varieties like Granny Smith and Pippin. As table varieties, these were not as successful as the ‘Delicious’ hybrids that were brought from the US at Stokes’ insistence.

In kiltas, the iconic backpack basket of the hills, the apples from Kullu would be carried over the temperamental Jalori Pass and were transported by train from Shimla. The crates that they were shipped out in were the size of small dining tables. It was only some years after Independence that Kullu got its first motorable access through the Larji gorge that lies past the town of Mandi. Farther still, the Rohtang La, which led to Lahaul, held considerable dread. The very words, ‘Rohtang La’ loosely translate as the ‘Pass with Dead Bodies’. Today, thanks to Atal Tunnel, the police placed the number of vehicles going into and leaving Lahaul over the Christmas weekend at 28,210. Meanwhile, the highway beyond Parwanoo resembled one long gridlock as the highway narrowed itself towards Shimla.

While broad-gauge lines now brush by the outer boundaries of the state and provide better access to the wide world outside, for years, there were only the narrow-gauge Kalka-Shimla line and the Kangra Valley Railway. The first, an undoubted engineering feat of its time, was completed in 1903 and connected Shimla, the ‘summer capital’, to the rest of the British Empire in India. This is now a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site. The Kangra Valley Railway became functional in 1929 and was primarily built to ferry material to the hydro-electricity project located in the former princely state of Mandi.

Air connectivity has always been a challenge in the hills. At the end of World War I, an intrepid flyer managed to land a plane on Shimla’s glade of Annandale, which now functions as a helipad. Some years later, in 1925, the Number 28 Squadron of the Royal Air Force operated an experimental air mail service between Quetta (now in Pakistan) and Shimla. These remained mere flashes in the pan and it took decades before a reasonably reliable air service came into being.

If the areas around and beyond Shimla were barely developed, the town itself was perhaps the original ‘smart city’, with exceptional civic order by the early 20th century, which has plummeted in the 21st. While these facilities and services were intended to benefit the colonial elite, some measure passed on to the local population. The telegraph and telephone systems are one such example. Commissioned in 1921, one of the world’s first automatic telephone exchanges was in Shimla and the telegraph dated back to the mid-19th century.

In 1909, the short stretch of the Shimla Railway Extension to handle goods was completed. A ropeway followed and in the brief period of its existence, the ropeway ferried goods up to the wholesale market, the Ganj. Then, in the 1920s, there was a passing mention of building a ropeway from Kalka into the hills. It seems that this was planned more to move timber and goods, than to ferry humans. As we know, nothing came of this. In 2017, a short aerial lift connected Shimla’s highest point, Jakhu. Twenty-three ropeways are now proposed in different locations of Himachal.

Going by the images one is seeing, Himachal seems to be successfully scraping the dregs off tourism’s barrel and prepares to launch itself as a Bacchanalian wonderland. Like tourism’s double-edged sword, better communications also seem to be sharpening both edges of the blade.

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