Hill History:

A Review of 'Himlayan Histories' by Chetan Singh

Human migration with all its agony, hardship and hope was responsible for settling the higher hills of Himachal Pradesh. Around those small early settlements, there may have been considerable natural beauty, but that alone could not put food on the table. For all the perceived simplicity of pastoral life in these isolated montane tracts, there was a complex array of relationships and systems that had evolved over centuries. Almost all the seemingly scattered communities were integrated within a broader framework.  These connects were both formal and informal and in turn, they broadly defined the process of living in the hills.

Unlike some of the more prominent and larger settlements that lay alongside rivers, sources of history from the hills are scant. Records that predate the arrival of the British in the nineteenth century are virtually absent. Oral histories – which are not necessarily reliable – and local legends have woven themselves almost seamlessly into traditions and perceived history. Polity drew on religion for affirmation and often, sustenance. When the colonial towns were founded in the nineteenth century, the British settlers often treated these sparsely populated areas as vast blank spaces over which they could write their own story. This added to the myth that barring dynastic changes or battles, these were areas without history. The story of a family would be taken as much the same as that of its ancestors.

As a result, almost nothing was known of the people of the hills. Chetan Singh’s Himalayan Histories is a much-needed study and as the author of a sophisticated volume on the subject, Singh is eminently suitable. A renowned historian of the Himalaya, Singh has impeccable credentials. He knows the ground that he talks of and he is versant with the theoretical frameworks – in both the global and local context – to place and analyse his material. The approach is, expectedly, scholarly and the language carefully structured and each word seems to have been chosen with great care. The construct defines spaces and communities and subsequently moves to the idea of the state as it existed in the area that is today’s Himachal Pradesh.

The study systematically removes the idea that the tiny villages of the hills were totally self-contained and politically and socially isolated. For example, the migration of trader-pastoral communities not only supplemented incomes but also reinforced interdependence and allegiances. The volume also explores the role of community consciousness – as in the role of the ‘Dum’ protests. The fine chapter on polyandry explores customary rights of inheritance and the social relationships built around the pivotal unit of the household and family.

Himalayan Histories comes at a time when the hills are undergoing considerable changes. Within the span of half a generation, connectivity has taken a leap and the environment has taken a plunge. This is an excellent book for both the scholar and the casual reader who wish to understand the history, economy, polity and religious traditions of the hills of Himachal.

 

 Himalayan Histories by Chetan Singh.

Pub: Permanent Black in association with Ashoka University.

Pp. 303. Price: Rs. 895/-

Charles de Russet: Shimla's French fakir

A few days back, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a call from #TheTribuneasking me to do a fortnightly column for the #Himachal section. Under the #tagline 'Jottings from Himachal', this is the first:

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/weekly-pullouts/himachal-tribune/charles-william-de-russet-shimla-s-french-fakir/764165.html?fbclid=IwAR3wHG0Tc-nBvpQDj--_P2Gw4ZLVMat2YmGzGJefy2pYpGjfdniO_GFq9xw 

A View of Pakistan from a Golf Course and Elsewhere

Well over a decade back, Lahore’s golf team came to Shimla to play the local team at the Naldehra Golf Club that is a few kilometres beyond town. I’m not a player as such, but was a member of the club. Someone in the government asked if I could take care of the ‘informal side of things’ for the event.

The players had teed-off long before I reached the course and I parked myself in the club house. There were a couple of men there and the rest were ladies. I settled down for my favourite activity at events like this, melting as best one could into the background and watching the world go by. The ladies from the other side of the border, dripped rubies and emeralds and breakfast was still to be served; the river-rapids and waterfalls of diamonds were for dinner and Jimmy Choo had plugged into a benign market. Ladies from this side, wives of the doctor, the lawyer, the bureaucrat and the soldier were dressed in the way one would expect them to be at a sports event – smartly and sensibly. One only wondered if this little display of a little obvious one-up-womanship had been planned over bed tea.

 Past the greens and roughs of the course, a fairly large crowd had gathered from the villages around to witness the big tamasha on the course. One of the ladies learned over to another and said, “How can they allow people like that near the course. This would never have been permitted in Lahore.” Of course, they would not have been permitted. The multiplicity of the ‘us’ and the ‘them’ would become clearer over the following couple of days. It would have taken just one cry from one of those spectators who had left their fields and work, “Why are you playing them? They killed someone of my family in the last war (or in Kargil).” That would have been the end of big tamasha.

 

The Naldehra Golf Course (Pic: Courtesy: Himachal Tourism)

Within a short while, one of the gentlemen from Pakistan – and one with whom I was to spend a fair bit of time over the next couple of days and learn a lot – sidled over. Like me, he was not playing. He just gave his name then. Over the course of the next few hours it came out that he was the secret service man from Pakistan keeping an eye on the brood. As I was also sitting around, seemingly doing nothing, he wanted to check if I was the Indian equivalent.

The Pakistan team was the who’s-who of that country. This was an army, landowning and business elite. They and their brethren called all the shots that needed calling. Between a couple of hundred families (if so many), they not only controlled the country, they owned it. They made no bones about this ownership and the fact came out repeatedly in their conversations. What also came out was that the children of almost all were overseas or were trying to move overseas.

“Will they come back?” someone asked.

“No. Not unless the countries they are in, revoke their visas. There is no future for them in Pakistan.”

Here was Lesson No. 1:  Their stake in their own country was limited if they did not want their own children there.

On all days, liquor was freely available and most of the visitors had carried their own stock from Delhi’s duty-free shop. This provided another revelation. Many could drink us under the table and they did not sip, or even swig, they held a glass of whisky to their lips and knocked it back like there would none again from where that came.

This was Lesson No. 2: If you were a somebody, you could get whatever you wanted and get away with it – and be holier than thou while you were at it. This was subsequently reinforced some years later, when on one of my TV assignments, the British crew came via Pakistan and gleefully shared (complete with sneakily taken live coverage on their phones) of a grand party they had attended. This had been hosted by a person who is supposedly the most important man in that country today and to whom many in that country turn to for succour. The barmen were soldiers in uniform and had machine guns strapped to their backs as they passed the whisky around.     

 By the time we came to the last day of the golf tournament, one had become quite friendly with some of them. They were far warmer than many of us, I may add. On the last official dinner, one of them came up and mentioned how he had never had a drink in a bar. This was something hard to fathom. So off we went. The gentleman was nervous as we entered the bar. “I can drink here? No will stop me? Will I be reported?”  Once he had thawed, he lined up about six shots of the whiskies available in front of himself and lovingly had them all.   

This became lesson No. 3:  These are lives lived while constantly looking over one’s shoulder. If you can get away with something while no one is looking, go ahead.

Some years later, with a reference from my father’s former school in Lahore, a couple came to visit us from that city. The man had lived most of his life in Chicago and business losses had made him return to Pakistan. Before Partition, his father had been with the Punjab government and posted in Shimla; this was where he had grown.

We became good friends over the years and from our numerous exchanges, came Lessons 4 and 5. “Pakistan,” he said “Is a country without heroes. There are only two real ‘home-grown’ ones, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Imran Khan. For others, we have either to borrow them from India and deny our shared heritage or turn to the wealthier and not necessarily desirable images from other nations.”

Every country needs its heroes. These are people you look up to and wish to emulate. This is missing and substitutes were found lacking – or pointed in directions that only suited them.

“For all our friendships at a personal level, will there be peace between our countries,” I asked, if simplistically. 

“No,” was the answer. “India has taken a different trajectory from Pakistan. We got our constitution long after you did. By then, power had been taken and transferred to houses which will never let go of it. Power is also dispersed and uncontrolled. Very importantly, there is no clear power-centre in Pakistan. Who will you make peace with? The army? The ISI? The hard-line religious leaders? The elected government which is weakest link of all? If you make peace with one or two, it does not follow that the others will accept or adhere to it.” 

Not surprisingly, Kashmir came up time and again in the course of our conversations. And whenever one thinks of what he said, it rings true. Especially now. “There has to be definite border. This is here and that is there. As long as the lines are blurred, everyone will exploit them.”