It must have been hard work administering an empire. The punishing heat of India drove the colonial masters to look for cooler places for temporary respite, and they found them in the north of the country in places like Simla, Darjeeling, Manali and Mussoorie. Few of those subjugated by the sahibs and memsahibs had the luxury of escape, but for the ruling class the hill stations were places of recuperation and recovery. Mussoorie was one of the first hill stations and was settled by the British in the 1820s. Today, there is plenty of evidence remaining of those days. Remnants of estates and houses can be seen from the roads, as well as churches built to serve the British community.
Interestingly, the term is still used quite extensively in India, and still designates those towns where people go to seek respite from the intense heat and the frenetic nature of Indian city life. When I was in Mussoorie recently, I didn’t see a single other Western visitor. Indian travelers, however, were there in large numbers, escaping a period of intense heat that had seen temperatures in New Delhi exceed 40 degrees centigrade.
It is a place of extraordinary natural beauty. The Garhwal foothills of the Himalayas reach 7,000 feet here. I found myself entirely captivated by them, spending hours looking at them from different angles, in different lights, and at different times of the day. It’s a wonderful place for walking and hiking, and the relatively benign climate encourages those things. There is also culture here. The area is important in the history of Tibetans because the Dalai Llama settled for a year here in 1959 before moving the Tibetan government in exile more permanently to Dharamshala. A thriving monastery survives near Mussoorie with several thousand Tibetans living nearby.
Mussoorie, and the adjacent town of Landour, are unmissable for those who love mountains and, of course, those looking for a break from the intensity of India’s fascinating, but occasionally exhausting, cities.
Miscellaneous Musings 