DHARAMSALA 1Tibet’s lost and foundBy Sheela ReddyIn all these centuries, in all its reincarnations, Dharamsala — or the Pilgrims’ Rest House — has unfailingly lived up to its name, welcoming tired travellers in search of spiritual bliss; providing a brief, noisy, colourful, hectic respite before the snow-clad Dhauladhar Range beckoned them onwards. It was the pilgrim’s last temptation: a final backward glance at all the pleasures they would forgo for the hard climb ahead. But somewhere along the way, in less than 40 years, it has reinvented itself from halting station to destination: this is the end of the journey. Dense rows of brightly lit hotels with their fake Lhasa rooftops and bazaars now seem to dwarf the giant deodar pines and oaks that split it into upper and lower towns, perched like a spiritual Las Vegas on a spur of the Himalaya. And the town — especially the upper half, better known as McLeodganj — is still celebrating its total conquest of the pilgrim’s soul.
The upper reaches of the Kangra Valley are a curious mish-mash of cultures: Tibetan and Kashmiri curio shops, pizza shacks vying with alu chaat and tandoori dhabas, Tibetan hippies and American monks, prayer gongs and Hindi film songs, quaint English and Jalandhar mod. And dominating it all, as pristine as in its original home on the other side of the Himalaya, a brand new Lhasa — Dalai Lama, summer palace, temple, monasteries, and all.
The British first discovered the little hill station some 150 years ago, when they were searching for a suitable place in the district to which they could shift their civil administration and cantonment. McLeodganj, at that time, was a dozen or so scattered English homes, each perched precariously on the ridge above the cantonment for the best view of the spectacular snowcapped Dhauladhars. These sturdy wooden country houses preserved their very English privacy behind walls of giant deodar pines and rolling green lawns. All roads led at that time to Nowrojee & Sons.
Established in 1860, five years after the British administration shifted here, this 3-storeyed, glass-fronted kirana shop of the Raj Cantonment still stands where it was, balefully watching over the town’s transformation. Business began to dwindle when the British shifted themselves and their offices to Lower Dharamsala, after the devastating earthquake of 1905. But the Nowrojees battled on, keeping the shop going on the few pensioners and missionaries and the odd summer visitor, selling everything from newspapers and medicines to arms and ammunition, even running their own dak service — until India’s Independence drove even these few customers away.
It was the customer-starved Nauzer Nowrojee — an eccentric who ruled over the family shop for 63 years, the inspiration behind the unbending shopkeeper in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance — who, in 1960, persuaded the exiled Dalai Lama to settle down here. Fleeing from the Chinese, his people dying in the heat and dust of the Indian plains, the 14th Dalai Lama found the perfect refuge in this little pine-covered spur of the mountains, with snow peaks round the corner. From the day the Dalai Lama stepped into his temporary home, the abandoned summer mansion of one of Lahore’s gentry (Rai Bahadur Gopal Das) that is now the Indian Mountaineering Institute, McLeodganj has never looked back.