Landour, Greater Mussoorie Part 4 (July 2024)

In post 1, post 2 and post 3, I explored upper Landour, which occupies two-thirds of Landour. Now it was time to walk down to lower Landour.

Lower Landour

There are two ways to climb down to lower Landour from Chaar Dukaan. Somewhat unwisely, I chose the shorter route downhill and the longer one uphill. It is a steep walk to lower Landour:

Stop 1: Ruskin Bond's House

Regardless of whether you take the short-cut or the long-cut down to lower Landour, you would come across Doma's Cafe and a rather pedestrian looking white house next door called Ivy Cottage, where the famous Ruskin Bond lives:

I was tempted to climb up the stairs but resisted the urge to wantonly invade the privacy of a residence:

I continued walking down with Mr. Bond's Ivy Cottage behind me (at this point, the short and the long cuts from upper Landour have merged):

Right in front appeared to be a somewhat downmarket area:

This was the beginning of the Landour Bazaar. A walk through lower Landour is mostly a walk through Landour Bazaar, a congested market of around 200 shops. As you walk down the bazaar, you eventually end up at the Picture Palace end of the famous Mall Road of Mussoorie (the other end being the library side).

Stop 2: the Mullingar estate

In post 2, we got introduced to the British army officer Fredrick Young, who in 1825 established the first permanent shelter in Mussoorie (though two years earlier, he had set up a shooting lodge that some people may also count as a shelter). The home that he built was in lower Landour and he named it Mullingar, after an Irish town. Prior to Mullingar, the Mussoorie area was all forests and hills, good for shikaar and not much else! This estate is now publicly accessible and in a dilapidated state:

The Mullingar Estate in fact marks the beginning of the Landour Bazaar. The cantonment area of Landour extends all the way up to the beginning of the bazaar. The distinction between the cantonment and the municipal area is signified not only by the presence of a military checkpoint but also the relatively downmarket feel of the latter. The border between the two was fluid during the first century. In fact, for a considerable period, some estates (including the Mullingar Estate and the Woodstock School) were not being taxed at all because they transcended both and the tax authorities could not be bothered with the calculations!

The Mullingar Estate, in its heydays, served as the summer house of the Young family (they resided in Dehradun during the winter). Fredrick Young, being the most prominent British official in the Doon region must have hosted many distinguished guests at this estate. In the 1840s, after he was transferred out of the Doon region, Colonel Young sold the property and not long after, it stopped being a private residence. Over the years, it has served as a hotel, school, furlough house for British soldiers, and a refugee camp. Today, it is occupied by Tibetan refugees who fled China in 1959, with the land being nominally owned by the government. In India, it's not uncommon for valuable real estate to be inhabited by those too poor to maintain it, making eviction politically or morally challenging. There is also an economic logic to this. The affluent require working class folks to live within their vicinity to staff household services and shops.

Next to this dilapidated portion of the Mullingar estate, there is a nice mansion where the door sign warns aspiring trespassers to Never mind the dog. Beware of the owner:

Stop 3: Baked Goods

The steep climb up from the bazaar to the Mullingar Estate is referred to as Mullingar Hill:

I stopped by the Lotte's Homebaked Goods store:

Lotte is the name of a Dutch lady who lives in the area and the bakery products are made with her recipes. The inside of the place is very warm and welcoming:

The wi-fi is excellent and they have a really clean bathroom. I decided to have a chocolate tart:

As mentioned elsewhere, I am not a big fan of North Indian tea that comes laden with milk. The masala chai at Lotte's great-the milk is in small quantity and sugar is on the side:

On way I out I picked up a couple of packs of their famous Belgian chocolate fudge (recommended by a frequent visitor) and some local coffee.

As you walk down the Landour Bazaar, the shops become more downmarket in their appearance. Nevertheless, the market has an illustrious 150 years old history, beginning its life to serve the needs of the British military officers stationed here and honored to be the title of a book of Ruskin Bond's short stories.

Stop 4: Castle Hill Estate

Landour Bazaar is modestly congested in the off-season when I was visiting and it gets more crowded the further into it you get from upper Landour:

As you walk down the bazaar, you cannot help notice on your right a sprawling estate:

It is somewhat disappointing to eventually figure out that the estate sprawling over 180 acres is now owned by the Government and not open to the general public:

The name Castle Hill Estate is derived from a mansion, nicknamed the "Castle" that stood atop the highest point within it. A picture of it from 1865 is available in the public domain:

This place has an illustrious history. The estate was developed in early 19th century by Mr. George Bladen Taylor and was used as a playground for local sports like football and hockey. I could not find much about Mr. Taylor except that he was a Master Mariner and had been violently attacked in 1834 by three European hoodlums! Apparently, this case is important in the evolution of how distinctions were made between Europeans and natives in the application of criminal procedure laws in colonial India. For a brief period, even Pahadi Wilson of Rokeby Manor owned it till the estate was sold to the British Government in the early 1850s.

However, the most fascinating aspect of the estate may be its possible association with Maharaja Duleep Singh, who became the last ruler of the Sikh Empire at age five in 1843, following the death of his father, Maharaja Ranjit Singh. His mother, Maharani Jind Kaur, acted as his Regent. After the British won the First Anglo-Sikh War in 1845, they kept Duleep Singh as a figurehead but replaced his mother with a Council of Regency and later imprisoned and exiled her. Duleep Singh didn't see his mother for over thirteen years. In 1849, after annexing Punjab and stealing the Koh-i-Noor diamond from the family , the British formally deposed him and placed him under the care of Dr. John Login, a Presbyterian army surgeon and his wife Lady Login. Due to his poor health, they often brought him to Mussoorie and some historians believe, they kept him at this estate for some time.

Stop 5: The clock tower

Walking down Landour Bazaar, almost towards the end, you come across the clock tower:

The original clock tower was built in 1939 by a local contractor called Ugrasen Verma. The tower was dilapidated and demolished in 2010, despite protests by civil society activists. The new clock tower was inaugurated in 2016. Some people believe that the clock tower forms the boundary between Mussoorie and Landour, while others think Landour ends at the bottom where Mussoorie's mall road intersects. Either way, there is not much to explore beyond the clock tower.

Woodstock School

A trip to Landour would not be complete without a visit to this prestigious international school. The Woodstock School estate is huge and spread over both upper and lower Landour (between 6500 and 7500 feet). While one of its many sides could be accessed through different pathways, I chose to drive down to its main gate at lower Landour:

Nestled among the forests and the hills, this must be an amazing (and expensive) way to spend your childhood:

The dormitories are a long walk away from the school. I wonder how students commute during the winter months.

The school's origins traces back to 1854, when four ladies appointed by the London Society for Promoting Female Education, set sail for India to establish a Protestant's Girl's School. The trigger for sending these women was a request from some Landour based expatriates, one of whom was the American missionary, Rev. J.S. Woodside, whom we encountered in post 1 as the man who bought Rokeby Manor from the Wilsons. One of these women accepted a marriage proposal en-route and hence only three made it to Landour. The school shut down in 1871 because of financial mismanagement but the American missionaries Rev. J.S. Woodside and Dr. Samuel Kellogg sent out a plea of assistance to their Church back home so that Woodstock could be reopened as a school for the children of missionaries . In1872, a cable arrived from the Presbyterian Ladies' Society of Philadelphia that simply said "Buy Woodstock"! The rest, as they say, is history.

My Landour travels were now coming to an end. I am enamored of the concept of slow travel where you spend an extended period of time on a relatively small area. The act of writing forces me to slow down, become curious and absorb the world. It fills me with marvel that without cultivated intentionality, the world and the passage of time is just a blur to us. And since the story of a place is a story of its peoples, the act of writing inevitably makes me reflect on the human condition.

The story of Landour seems to be one of power and purpose. Power, because its current form owes much to the British Raj and the prosperity it brought to people like Frederick Young and Pahadi Wilson. But Landour also attracted missionaries and intellectuals who built churches, gave sermons, set up schools, studied foreign languages, and codified knowledge that the natives had not yet formalized. A cynic might say that both power and purpose are just different forms of power—hard and soft. Yet it's difficult to believe that Dr. Kellogg would learn a foreign language and codify its grammar without a sense of joy from the act itself. Would the four women set sail to establish a school thousands of miles away simply for employment? In reality, we all contain multitudes, and these expatriates too, possibly, had mixed motivations. Regardless of their motivations, we can all relate to their basic human struggle to find something meaningful to do during our time on this planet.