Landour, Greater Mussoorie Part 3 (July 2024)

This post continues from the previous post with the description of my journey around the Chukker (circuit or loop), a 3 kilometer motorable road that circles around the Landour cantonment area. I began my journey in the clockwise direction from Rokeby Manor, the hotel I was staying in and passed the Landour cemetery at the end of the previous post.

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Chukker Stop 7: Kellogg Church

Soon after the cemetery, one comes across the Kellogg Memorial Church:

This church forms the node of the 8 shape formed by the Chukker. While the St. Paul's Church, described in the previous post was set up by the British, the Kellogg Memorial was founded by American missionaries in 1903. American missionaries began arriving in Landour as early as the 1830s. The church is named after Dr. Samuel Kellogg, an American missionary and a Princeton graduate, who along with his colleague, Rev. J.S. Woodside, purchased the Woodstock School in Landour from the British in 1872 and restarted the school. We encountered Rev. Woodside in the first post of this series as a buyer of Rokeby Manor.

Within the church premises, on the green door in the picture below, you can see the board of the Landour Language School, which was established in 1912 and teaches Hindi, Urdu and Garwhali to foreigners:

The missionary women who stayed in Rokeby Manor after it became a boarding house in 1930 studied in this language school. It is fitting that the language school finds a home in a church named after Dr. Samuel Kellogg because of his many linguistic accomplishments.

Upon arriving in India in December 1864, he quickly mastered the local language and began giving sermons in the native tongue. His most distinguished work was a grammar book on the Hindi language, accessible through this link. The British had established Urdu and English as co-official languages of British India in 1837. Given that Urdu was already prevalent in the Mughal administration inherited by the British, its designation as an official language facilitated governance for the British.

However, while Urdu was the language of the Muslim elites, the general population spoke Hindi. Kellogg observed that British officials incorrectly believed that replacing Urdu terms with Sanskritized words would create "Hindi" comprehensible to the local populace. Even today non-native Hindi speakers in India who learnt Sanskrit in school use this strategy. The word- tatsam- refers to words that are borrowed from Sanskrit and retain their original form and meaning in Hindi. But tatsamized Hindi only confuses people and often sounds comical. Dr. Kellogg, to help his British compatriots, authored the Hindi grammar book, which later became a required text for India civil service candidates who had to pass a Hindi language examination.

Following the death of his first wife in 1876, Doctor Kellogg returned to North America but came back to India in December 1892 to aid in the revision of the Hindi translation of the Old Testament. Anticipating that the project would take several years, a house was purchased in the area by the Mission Board in New York for Doctor Kellogg and his family. They spent seven or eight months each year in Landour, residing for the rest of the year in Dehradun, during the cooler months. Unfortunately, Doctor Kellogg could not complete the Bible translation project. On a summer day in 1899, after his customary breakfast of toast and coffee, he set off on his bicycle. Tragically, the wheel of his bicycle swerved, causing him to fall 12 feet to his death. A life of great erudition and of global influence ends with a fall from the bicycle! But then, just six months after defeating the Afghans, the great Mughal emperor Humayun died from a fall down the staircase of his library. Such is the human condition!

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Chukker Stop 8: Landour Bakehouse

With Kellogg's church behind, you can walk towards the Landour Bakehouse, which is run by the Rokeby Manor hotel (now we are walking opposite to the St.Paul's Church side of the 8):

The inside of the bakery is quite cozy:

I comforted myself with a hot chocolate and a savory snack:

The Landour Bakehouse claims that some of its recipes are sourced from the Landour Cookbook edited by Ruskin Bond and the local historian Ganesh Saili. The history of the Landour Cookbook, first published in 1930, traces from the cooking of the homesick western expatriates in this area. The recipes were crowdsourced by enterprising women into a cookbook.

Today's immigrants remain connected to their homeland via electronic communication. But even as late as the 1970s and 80s, one had to work hard to access the comforts of home. The expatriates of 19th and early 20th century Landour relived their nostalgia by building homes in their native country architectural style, giving them suitable names, building places of worship and teaching their native cooks home country recipes.

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Chukker Stop 9: Sister's Bazaar

A short distance away from the Landour Bakehouse is a row of shops that form the Sister's Bazaar (the bakehouse address lists it in Sister's Bazaar) :

The name comes from the British nuns who served the sick military men at the sanatorium where we stopped by in the previous post. The nuns were housed in a dormitory in this part of town and hence the name. A famous store here is A. Prakash & Co, famous for its jams, cheeses and peanut butter. This grocery store was established in 1928. When the American missionaries left India around India's independence, the family procured their equipment and recipe for making peanut butter. I am not a fan of peanut butter as such and cannot attest to its quality here.

To complete the Chukker, from Sister's Bazaar, you can take the loop back to the Kellogg's Church and from there all the way to St.Paul's Church, if that is where you began.

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My sojourn of upper Landour via the Chukker had now come to an end. In the next post, I walk down to lower Landour, which is one third of Landour and less elitist than the cantonment area.