Crumbling splendour

 

 

 Back to West Bengal where a crumbling treasure trove of little visited but once important towns and former trading posts decorate the banks of the Hooghly River north of Calcutta - an obvious tourist draw one would imagine.  As it is the roads are so bad and any sort of tourist infrastructure scant to non-existent that few people beyond Bengal, and few enough of them, ever visit Serampore, Chandernagore, Chinsura or Hooghly; respectively the former Danish settlement;the former French Settlement, still looking today like French colonial towns look from Hanoi to Pondicherry; the former Duth/British settlement and the headquarters of the British East India Company before the founding of Calcutta.  There are others too, each with their own stash of temples, mosques, a Portuguese church here, a cemetery there and Kalna with its spectacular temple complex that we sadly only had time to see at a distance from the road.

Travel time or lack of it  is the greatest problem when attempting to visit those forgotten places of the world that have fallen off the beaten track or indeed where the main road really is not much better than a rutted track. We were heading for Murshidabad, former capital of Bengal after the Nawab, Murshid Quli Khan transferred it from Dhaka at the beginning of the 18th century, the roads are appalling and we were too short of time and the daylight which at least slightly reduces the risk of accidents on dreadful surfaces where everyone is out for himself only. Due to India's east/west distance, the sun rises and sets much earlier in the East than the west and in Bengal darkness comes all too quickly not long after 4.30pm. Before that time we saw what we could of Bengali pastoral life, cattle, goats, rice crops and cotton - the brightly coloured dyed and spun thread drying on huge bamboo spools, piles of heavy read cotton quilts stuffed with real cotton wool, the most obvious locally manufactured product in small roadside shops - the countryside was very pretty too in some areas and particularly so around Murshidabad itself.

It always seems a privilege to be alone in any great historical site. At the same time, it is a shame that tourists to India tramp the same circuit round Rajasthan, Kerala, Goa, with dashes of Mumbai, Delhi and, more occasionally, areas of Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and perhaps a summer trip to Himachal Pradesh or Ladakh for those who crave mountains. West Bengal, starting with Calcutta of course, is packed with unique pleasures, as indeed is neighbouring Bihar, albeit of very different and more ancient forms in the main. Darjeeling gets a sprinkling of visitors but Eastern India has staggering cultural wealth that is largely ignored by foreign tourists when there are few obvious hotels, roads and communications are pretty chaotic, and, as a result, journeys take longer than most brief holidays allow.

It is a serious waste as ignored palaces that have great heritage value crumble quietly away. In Murshidabad
there is a certain amount of renovation ongoing on some of the major buildings – naturally that meant depressing NO ENTRY signs but the beautifully maintained ruins and grounds of the gigantic Katra mosque are cause for some optimism for the rest, likewise the restoration work on the vast imambara by the Hazar Duari Palace, the biggest of all the Murshidabad buildings, designed by Colonel McLeod Duncan of the Bengal Corps of Engineers and begun in 1829 to be a British official residence and now a Museum under the auspices of the Archaeological Survey of India holding an assorted collection of possessions of the former Bengal royal family



Sadly the neo-classical houses that remain in private ownership are suffering the worst as families have presumably disappeared down the rough road to the great cities, seldom to rattle back to deal with horrendous maintenance issues and bills in old family homes. One that has been restored, outside at least, to a positively disneyfied extent is the house at the centre of the Katgola Gardens which belongs now to a family trust judging by the signs.  There is no entry to the interior of the house so there is no telling whether that has been restored to a level to match its alarmingly bright but nonetheless rather splendid exterior - at least it doesn't look as if it will fall down any time soon.  For those with a love of cartoon lions, the palaces of Murshidabad take several prizes with their exterior guardian beasts - they are quite extraordinary

 

For a British visitor, Murshidabad is a series of slightly surreal discoveries with a house/palace round every corner looking like smaller or not so small at all versions of Blenheim or Buckingham Palace. Well really perhaps like Raj Bhavan in Calcutta or Belvedere, former residence of Lord Kitchener when he was Commander in Chief at the beginning of the 20th Century, but they amount to the same thing too and we were the only foreign tourists in the whole town, actually almost the only tourists apart from a handful of small groups of very local visitors. In Serampore and Chandernagore en route we saw Danish and French versions of the same neo-classical style. In Serampore, the old Danish trading settlement, the Danish Church, St Olavs is attended only by goats and falling down; the large mansion that is now Serampore College was built by British Baptist missionaries in the days when missionaries still thought broad education was at least as important as stuffing any form of Christianity down other people’s throats. It must be said that the theology professor who caught us loitering in the grounds appeared to take rather a disappointingly different view but she was kind enough to make sure we took in every detail of the College.

Few people were as disposed to friendliness or indeed the rather forcibly pressed better understanding of the treasures we encountered with the good professor and we felt unusually alien in Murshidabad where we were clearly curiosities but not in any way ones to be encouraged. We were lucky enough to meet a group of women who took us on a forbidden tour of the interior of one great house with apparently no wish for any more gain than to show us a secret world that was in their purview. With them we felt we had hit real gold. This is beginning to sound like a moan but the truth is I can’t wait to get back to see more of West Bengal and its hidden places. Let’s hope that the new road being built north of Calcutta parallel with the Hooghly opens up the area for the enrichment of its people and future tourists and that all the other required appurtenances of tourism are developed there for it to become another important destination on the map of India. I hope that would be a good thing for all concerned.

There is no reason for Indians to celebrate the Battle of Plassey and the 19th century monument on the battle field sits in a rubbish filled enclosure with a small tea shop nearby to fuel the local card players sitting by its iron gated entrance.  It seems, however, that the prospect of future tourists has not escaped the thoughts of the local authorities as the adjacent inspection bungalow is being renovated, theoretically at least, to be a small museum.  The present 3D plan of the battle field is perfectly understandable and looks like a school project in a glass case with a badly shattered top - the caretaker showed great enthusiasm for the plans afoot to improve the show.

There may be little atmosphere indeed on the field of that extraordinarily important battle but the peaceful graveyard at Cossimbazar on the outskirts of Murshidabad has it in spades.  Here, Warren Hastings first wife and baby daughter are buried beside a handful of soldiers and merchants both independent and attached to the East India Company, short lives memorialised, like in the famous South Street cemetery in Calcutta with huge obelisks and pyramids and hefty blocks of stone.  The nawabi Jaffarganj cemetery just down the road to the North holds the graves of hundreds of members of the royal family from 1760 up to the present day and is somehow a less melancholy spot - these after all are the bodies of those who belonged here whether or not they too had lives cut short by disease or war or childbirth. Several of the graves are decorated with blue and white Dutch tiles interestingly applied, often upside down with no regard to their neighbours but presumably to offer something to all possible viewpoints.

My Mother joined me on this trip, indefatigable in her 80th year and rather better on her feet often than I am with an irritatingly bust up ankle.  She was slightly surprised by the delights of the 'Hindu Kitchen' dhaba on the Murshidabad road where she definitely, to her extreme disappointment, couldn't get a Kingfisher beer and was lucky to find bottled Sprite.  She was rightly horrified by the dining room decor of the 'Sunshine Hotel', virtually the only one in Murshidabad that we discovered, that went in for a line in purple curtains, patterned banquettes and everything clashing in dismal shades that would be hard to exceed for bad taste.I would have classed it as a soggy carpet hotel and expected odours of damp but they had had the sense to settle for tiled floors and the place was spotlessly clean - staff were chilly and entirely uncomprehending. The wedding party we encountered looked stunned in their best clothes and the wedding flowers wilted sadly. Possibly I would have thought a cockroach or two a decent exchange for the dining room curtains but still....The beer was cold, the red wine was positively frozen so we did without it, the food at good basic level was good and basic leaving aside a mistaken line in breakfast.  My blackberry was stolen from my room - more fool me I suspect.

Punjab observations

On the plains of the Punjab, in the city of Patiala, past glories are crumbling.  How active a restoration plan responsible for the closure of both the Sheesh Mahal Palace and most of the massive Qila Mubarak, the Fortunate Castle, currently is, is difficult to discover.  The great walls of the Qila Mubarak are apparently being worked on, slowly; the galleries in the Sheesh Mahal have been close for 2 or 3 years and are expected to be so for at least the same time again - not much activity there is apparent.  For all that Patiala is a charming place, more like an overgrown village than the second largest city in the Punjab after Chandigarh.  The wide streets and great buildings of the town easily give way to busy, narrow streets in the bazaar, seductive with goods on display. The great abandoned palaces, particularly the Sheesh Mahal with its red towers and improbable  'Lakshman Jhula' suspension bridge stretching across a now dry tank retain a faded romance assisted by a notable lack of tourist traffic. 2 remarkably disapproving statues on Queen Victoria, one minus an arm and most of her nose hold sway in the remains of the garden. On this flying visit we had little time for exploration beyond the purported major sites but the city, within touching distance of Chandigarh airport and wide range of hotels, would bear longer exploration although it might perhaps be worth waiting for the palaces to re-open, if that ever happens during this lifetime...

In the Qila Mubarkah the only room open, without running the gauntlet of the security guards on the main gate as we did, hurrying past them and the no entry signs when they weren't looking, is the Durbar Hall.  In truth braving the enraged but impotent security was hardly worth the effort of walking passages and courtyards with no possibility for interior exploration. The Durbar Hall too is well policed when it comes to photography - utterly ridiculous given current levels of preservation of exhibits which are mainly in any case an impervious collection of swords and similar, massive dusty chandeliers and candelabra on a giant's scale,  with a handful of British royal portraits of the standard description - Kings Edward VII and George V and their queens.  Full length mirrors surrounding the walls make surreptitious photography difficult - it seemed to me that the handful of staff enforcing such strictures would be a good deal better employed in polishing the silver clad carriage, presumably a royal conveyance before the early 20th Century Maharaja, Bhupinder Singh, invested in a fleet of Rolls Royces, which has turned almost irredeemably black.

The deer park, former hunting ground of Maharajas, holds the usual rather depressing collection of caged birds including, improbably, a very sorry looking emu, with enclosures of various deer and gazelles from the ordinary to the more exotic and beautiful black buck.  It is really somewhere that one would rather not go although a mixed collection of rabbits seemed to be doing what rabbits do perfectly happily but oddly, in spite of burrowing huge holes, not apparently effecting their escape. Other gardens such as the famous Baradari botanical gardens will have to wait for a more leisurely visit but one suspects for now that Patiala is not entirely on top of its tourism potential.  Most friends in India were inclined not to get much further than poor jokes about Patiala pegs and excess thereof.

Back in the environs of famously well laid out modern Chandigarh with its modern urban architecture, the attractions are the feted Rose Garden, to foreign eyes just a perfectly acceptable urban space with flowerbeds; Sukhna Lake, a great expanse of man made reservoir much used for local recreation; a plethora of iconic buildings and venues for legislation, entertainment, sport and education.  The most bizarre monument of all, the Rock Garden, was designed by an unknown transport official in his spare time, Nek Chand began to build his extraordinary dream from recycled rubble and rubbish more than 50 years ago. Today this eccentric park covers more than 40 acres, populated by strange imaginary tribes of people and animals made of anything from shards of china and electical fittings to broken bangles and broken rock.  The mangroves and baobab trees, like the great cliffs above meandering paths are made from cement filled sacks pushed into shape before setting permanently.  Waterfalls crash down man made gorges with scaled down villages of pavilions and cottages crouching above as giant out of scale gods glare down from the plateau.above. Vast coloured mosaic walls are a Gaudi mirror image and the Rock Garden, not surprisingly, has become a major tourist attraction and a popular wedding and concert venue where strange mosaic horses look down on proceedings from the top of concrete and sacking arches and a rather sad camel gives rides to unimpressed children.

Punjab university, based in Chandigarh, is a famous institution, its second campus on former slum land, growing fast; its various schools known for excellence in their disciplines.  For a foreigner used to nicely heated classrooms and certainly well heated hostel space, a university like this, is, for all its modernity, quite a shock to the system.  British students would be out protesting on the streets if they had to live in unheated surroundings and the winter in Chandigarh, a chill wind blowing down from Shimla and the mountains that are the backdrop to the city, is cold.  Otherwise the city offers most modern amenities although I am assured by a current student that shopping is not up to much even in modern malls and cinemas are no better than they are in most Indian towns where cinema going is a noisy, smelly, often uncomfortable, crowded and excessively social event only moderately focused on watching a film.  My meanders round the central pedestrian shopping area resulted in new heels for my boots that cost 60 rupees and are unlikely ever to wear out since they appear to have been recycled from good Punjabi tractor tyres.

I stayed in a Marriott Hotel in central Chandigarh - there is a wide enough range of hotels - no surprises in the Marriott and a proper pizza oven to suit entertainment of hungry students. In better range of their pockets and very much to my taste was the splendidly formica clad Punjabi Restaurant (you might need to identify the right one of potentially hundreds of the same name). It is the sort of place, a clone of the best restaurant in Hong Kong, the old Indonesian Restaurant, in Happy Valley, that you know without question will be good - all about food and sod the look of the thing. Full to bursting with locals and students at all hours, this is good honest local food at quite spectacularly good and honest prices. £4 perhaps for double the amount two hungry people could eat including phenomenal tandoori chicken, roti, dal, rice, pickle and so on. Unbeatable.

The Serai, Jaisalmer

The Serai

Unheard of rain fall levels are greening the Great Thar Desert in Rajasthan where all was previously sand. The great fort of Jaisalmer rises today not from dunes but from a rough sea of hardy shrubbery. The sun nevertheless fights back with undying force; if it fails to dehydrate the land so dramatically as in the past it will certainly succeed in dehydrating you and visitors to the remarkable oasis that is The Serai tented camp are strongly advised to drink plenty of water, wear hats and layer on the sun cream. The temptation 'though is to drink more of the delicious range of cocktails on offer and, if the sun gets too much, to retire to a beautifully appointed tent or to the hedonistic luxury of the Spa for a massage with wondrous smelling natural oils. I may have been camping recently on a desert island with no visible amenities or even fresh water and thought it good entertainment but I could get a serious taste for really high class hotels and no cockroaches.

The 21 beautiful tents of The Serai are laid out round a desert garden where the sounds of water, from a reversed stepwell – you go up the steps to the water instead of down – blend with early morning birdsong. Little else breaks what seems an almost other worldly level of peace, especially for those flying in from the traffic mayhem of one of the great Indian cities, aside from an occasional chorus of twilight barking from the local farm dogs. Young staff in white uniforms, small, bright coloured turbans known as poths on their heads, silently lay white cushions on the sandstone seats at the entrance to tents in the early morning and dry steps after a gigantic thunderstorm during the night – the sun in any case is rising and will finish the  cleaning up job, thirstily sucking up the last drops of water.

All here is based on sand and white –  other colours: the olives and emeralds of a desert garden; touches of blue; cushions in the tent ‘s entrance sitting area, a woven rug in the bathroom: serve to accentuate the calm elegance of the overriding scheme that extends even to natural coloured warm shawls to hold off the always unexpected cold of a desert evening. Natural coloured leather covers a campaign style chest holding the mini bar, there is even a leather pouch for the rechargable torches that are barely needed to walk garden paths at night that are otherwise lit gently to detract less from the vast arc of starry sky.  Hurricane lamps hang here and there from trees and pick out the design of water courts and steps. The desk in the outer lobby of each tent is well supplied with a selection of the same antique leather bound books that make up the library contained in a huge circular bookcase in the bar where leather armchairs invite the idle or folding campaign chairs can be moved nearer to tables for a game of chess or an attempt at more focused and less soporific reading. There is writing paper too, sharpened pencils for the important travel journal ready in stone jars and always a bowl of saffron marigolds, potted sunshine.

Blessed warmth for those non-Indians who do not embrace any form of cold as a delightful novelty is provided in winter by healthy numbers of efficient radiators in bedrooms and bathrooms – thank god for not having to share with a husband who always turns everything off. Hot water bottles of course appear miraculously in turned down evening beds besides the excitement of purple tissue wrapped surprise presents left on pillows by all year Father Christmases.  There are a/c units against summer heat and the swimming pool, bright blue and icy cold in winter but welcome in summer in additon to the outdoor jacuzzis in some of the tents.

Everything works, from electric plugs to the most flattering mirrors ever - how clever to make everyone look tall, thin and glamorous and how fitting in this most glamorously low key place that runs like the best country house or the greatest of old-fashioned Italian hotels where service was what counted.  Of course, at The Serai, perfect service, invisible until needed when staff, seemingly with skills of bilocation miraculously appear, is the icing on the cake of wonderful design, management and the extraordinary engineering that has somehow floated, or so it appears, a dream hotel on 100 acres of sand. The sand has borne further fruit in an organic vegetable garden growing rocket, herbs, cabbages, carrots, and shortly oranges and artichokes besides a field of wheat and other ingredients to be translated in the kitchen into homemade herbed breads and almost anything you could want to eat from this continent to Europe and SE Asia. It all starts with eggs benedict for breakfast and, for those minded to diet, temptations go from bad to worse, although it would be quite easy to live here on the freshest and most delicious salads straight from the garden.

Tents are astonishingly private, spread well apart round the garden, only their roofs showing from the central path and little indication, except an occasional dining room, bar or evening camp fire encounter, of any other guests staying at all. There is space to breathe and more and expeditions to be made for those inclined.  Tea and a sundowner on the dunes means a drive, racing chinkara gazellles skittering away in the distance or nilgai, blue bulls, nervily standing to watch the jeeps approaching.  After that a camel or camel cart ride to a virgin sand dune that looks as if it has been raked, the perfect markings the product of wind and sun not man. It has to be said that for the novice or the unwary a camel ride can be unexpectedly bumpy - T E Lawrence didn't ride across Arabia without any practice. Once safely relieved of camel responsibility one is revived by sandwiches, cakes and biscuits, all home made of course and more importantly even than tea, pink champagne to match the glowing evening sky before a return in the final minutes of twilight to a welcoming bar, bath and dinner.

Visits to Jaisalmer city are also suggested entertainments and give a taste not only of the glories of the Rajasthan past but also the massive development of the past few years that will continue speeding the desert  into the future. Where once the city was inside the walls, now it spreads across the desert plains where windmills and pylons march across the land and every village is punctuated by mobile telephone towers all too closely clustered by the newly built stone houses of inhabitants who have not yet realised the perils of too close an association with the machinery of this brilliant means of communication.  Neither have the downsides of ever useful plastic bags yet fully been realised in India in spite of efforts in some districts - the rubbish is appalling and indestructible - the digestive systems of goats and camels may thrive on thorn bushes and god knows what natural rubbish but not on plastic and nobody including any government service finds its removal to be their responsiblity.

The intricacies of the stone carving of the great havelis and jain temples, the massive walls of the fort still make Jaisalmer worth seeing but this is a town now with other aspirations and ambitions that look to the future more than the past. Nowhere and nowhere better perhaps have those aspirations come to fruition than in the story of Lakshmi, the uneducated vegetable seller who threatened a a film maker with a mouli when he tried to photograph her 40 plus years ago.  That young woman is now a great grandmother, her son the Sarpanch, head of a village panchayat council and a man of stature and dignity whose children are university students or graduates in professions including medicine and dentistry.  Lakshmi herself is a strong woman not above threatening importunate photographers with a mouli still but these days not in earnest as she produces a feast of local food for friends, including that documentary maker of years before, that rivals the food in The Serai. O dear, the badri and ghee, the mirchi and the beans, desert fruit, the roti - I can taste it still.....

Development inevitably means losses that balance the gains, young people aspire to changing lifestyles. Village life revolves less round the cycle of seasons and agriculture leavened in the past only with home grown entertainments and more on the availability of communications, transport, education possibilities and daily involvement with wider contemporary issues, local and national. Old skills are no longer so valued and long held traditions here will become part of history, preserved only as distant folk memories and in museum cases.In the case of the ancient music of  the Rajasthan desert,  the hereditary skills passed down through the Manganiyar or  Langha communities, the Muslim musicians of the desert, may disappear in the rush to other entertainment and occupation and perhaps live on at best as taught skills for theatre performance.  Even the Whirling Dervishes of Egypt perform their rites more often these days as staged entertainment than as true religious ceremony. For now, as some of the great Manganiyar performers, like Sakar Khan, the honoured and revered Koraicha player, slip into old age, the music hangs on.  A firelit performance by a group of musicians at The Serai is an unforgettable and highly emotional experience that inexplicably affects the deepest corners of the mind and spirit and which one can hardly bear to end.