News - Travel and Food

Something different in travel and food: my new book, Picnic Crumbs......

.........is a  an anthology of anecdotes and amusing tales, past and present, of picnics and outdoor food and eating on the move which will delight, amuse and possibly appal its readers. Peppered with obscure and historical recipes from around the world, from Bear Steak to Elephant’s Foot, it is dedicated to anyone interested in food, travel and British eccentricities.


Published in July 2012, Picnic Crumbs is seasoned with original illustrations by award-winning figurative artist Peter Haslam Fox which convey the times and spirit of anecdotes from a wide range of writers, including culinary icons like Constance Spry, Elizabeth David and Claudia Roden. Moonlit alfresco banquets or sand in the sausages on blustery beaches; a British Rail ham sandwich back in the day, caviar on a plane; or sustaining soup garnished with dog hair in Siberia; battlefields to romantic evenings; the Summer Season and a lot of quite serious disasters - it's all a picnic of sorts.


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Picnic-Crumbs-Gathering-Picnics-Provisions/dp/0957048130/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337793720&sr=8-1

Colonial residues.

The elegant white buildings that were the backdrop to Zoffany's 18th century portraits of East India Company officials, merchants and adventurers, their wives and servants, have been heavily overlaid by succeeding Calcutta life. Gracious facades nevertheless still stand here and there overlooking the Maidan, cool and calm among grimy brick, dusty steel and glass or shiny new office buildings and the hurly burly bustle of this highly populated city. Old arcades are filled with shops and street traders and it is hazardous to look upwards as much as one would wish in Kolkata to admire buildings both beautiful and extraordinary; it will inevitably mean tripping over a broken pavement or someone whose whole attention is to the task in hand. Under one of the oddest directives so far from Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, that may mean a man carefully painting municipal street furniture blue to fulfil her stated ambition to make Kolkata a blue city - why, nobody appears to know.



Bengalis are intensely proud of their past as leaders of Indian Nationalism. Images and effigies of Ghosh or Bose adorn every junction that is not already dedicated to Vivekananda or Tagore. It is sad, nonetheless that so much of the past continues to crumble away as it did under the long communist rule of West Bengal The nationalists are rightly celebrated but, like it or not, the art and architecture of the colonialists is part of the city's history and is worth preserving for that and for its own sake. It is hard to include the astounding Victoria Memorial in that bracket but since it exists as an extraordinary space, it could be better used than currently. God knows what a man of such aesthetic albeit imperialist sensibilities as Lord Curzon would have thought if he had ever seen his dream in all its weight. If he dreamt of another Taj Mahal he got instead a brute of a building that sank instead of soared - quite literally, given the unsuitability of its marshy site for so vast an edifice.

The collection of Zoffanys, Tilly Kettles and Daniells inside the building is splendid nevertheless and the viewer is all too splendidly isolated by determined barricading from getting close enough actually to see them without binoculars. A shocking waste that could easily be rectified. The historical exhibition from Job Charnock to the Nationalists and Independence is exhaustive and informative but begins to look tired and could do with a revamp. One hears that the whole edifice is riddled with such corruption, and I don't mean rust and mould, that it is impossible for anything sensible to be achieved - it is probably a miracle that the paintings are so well known and well documented that they have avoided quiet sales. Like or loathe its looks, The Victoria Memorial is a tourist draw for locals and foreigners alike and could could become remarkable among the great exhibition venues of the world.



On this occasion my main interest was in the rather grim bronze statue of Queen Victoria herself, outside on the approach to the Memorial entrance. I have been editing the Vicereine Mary Minto's Indian Journals and the stunning bronze panels by Sir Goscombe John on the statue's plinth were originally made to surround that of the equestrian statue of Lord Minto, Viceroy from 1905-10. When his daugher Ruby saw the finished piece in 1911 she remarked on the foreshortening effect of the panels on the whole and Lady Minto later donated them to the Victoria Memorial. The Minto statue has now been banished with other Viceregal bronzes to a happy if secluded resting place in the beautiful gardens of Flagstaff House at Barrackpore, the Viceroys' country retreat. Removing the panels, it must be said, did not have the desired effect, the proportions are all wrong and Minto, Grand National jockey 'though he had been, looks a sadly diminished figure on a cinderella rat of a pony.



Nearby Flagstaff House, once the Private Secretary's residence, the Barrackpore Government House crumbles, its near ruin an almost  defunct police hospital. Its now unkempt gardens stretching down to the river must have been an oasis for the Viceroys and a place for something like normal life after the barracks-like Government House in Calcutta where armies of underemployed staff did nothing to reduce the inconvenience. The Barrackpore gardens, like those at Viceregal Lodge in Simla, gave successive Vicereines the opportunity to pursue their gardening ambitions and decry those of their most immediate predecessors. A great shading tree that was the site for viceregal breakfasts still thrives, and, away from the hurtling buses on the main road outside the gates, it is easy to relax into the peace of this beautiful spot. Governor Generals and Viceroys seldom escaped their work altogether, however, judging by the regularly spaced telegraph towers still stand among the shacks and shops on the edges of the road between Government House and Barrackpore. The final one is immediately adjacent to the house and, since its removal from more public view,to yet another statue of Lord Curzon. He might not have minded in this setting that its plinth is the favoured spot for pi dogs basking in the sun.



These days, although it is easy to imagine the complications of life in Government House and to empathise with its critics like Bishop Heber, who wrote of 'columns in a paltry style' and 'three stories, all too low', it is impressive for the sheer scale of its ballrooms and banqueting halls and then for the occasional treasures of the past, especially amongst the holdings of the Governor's private library. Of all the great rooms, the most evocative of the past are the still-used council chamber, easily recognisable from hundred year old photographs and the ADCs ante-room, still containing a billiard table and echoes of mild inebriation, high jinks and cigar smoke. In the lower level entrance hall it is easy too to imagine the foggy winter gloom in these 'dreary catacombs' where, according to the Asiatic Journal, the ghastly effect was magnified by the bodies of blanketed palanquin bearers sleeping on the floor like the dead in their winding sheets.



And so back to the beginning, at least of the colonial city, where the visitor may soak herself in the essay like church wall and cemetery epitaphs to the shortlived heroes and suffering heroines of the past, from Job Charnock onwards. Just as size mattered so much in government buildings that stamped the footprint of an invading culture on India soil, the memorials in the cemeteries of Calcutta are on a monumental scale, often in inverse proportion to the length of a life. In the South Park Street cemetery, a child's mausoleum comes as pillared and porticoed as Greek temple. Charnock's mausoleum rests among the earlier and less magnificent graves of his contemporaries and other later notables in the church yard of St John's, the original East India Company Anglican Cathedral of Calcutta. The churchyard also contains Curzon's Black Hole of Calcutta monument, a surprising survivor of Independence given the opposing views of British mythmakers and some Indian historians on the whole episode. Inside the church a recently restored Last Supper by Zoffany glows above a side altar; the improbable models for the disciples, various worthies of his day, and Jesus, the Greek priest. The later, gothic St Paul's Church has since become the Cathedral of the Calcutta diocese of the Church of India, its wonderful stained glass windows by Burne-Jones commemorating another Vicereine, Lady Mayo.



The Bengal Club is another monument to an earlier and very different society. Like old British Clubs the world over it somehow retains an ambience of the past with bearers waiting to launder a shirt or bring tea and biscuits to huge lobbied bedrooms, these days well plumbed and airconditioned, whose balconies overlook the hawkers and shops of Russell street. Members and their guests nod to each other in passages and tea rooms; pre-lunch bloody marys are served in the bars and beautifully dressed women eat in the dining rooms under the forbidding painted eye of whiskered former members. In their day Indians and women were banned from membership - Indians could not even be guests.

At the Calcutta Cricket Club, a perfect green lawn is now surrounded by the high buildings of the modern city. Cricket and tennis go on outside and for cricket in India there is never a shortage of enthusiastic players and spectators. Inside, whisky drinkers sit in the chill of airconditioning at the old horseshoe bar drinking Islay and Jura malts, another reminder, with more solid memorials, of so many colonial Scots tramping throughout Indian/British history.

It is said that when Sir Colin Campbell was marching to relieve the siege of Lucknow in 1857, the rebel bugler, a former sepoy, all unknowing, sounded the only march he knew: 'The Campbells are coming'. A gossipy atmosphere of past and present stories of the Kolkata social merry go round plays out in the bar. One elderly man's wife was slapped by his mistress, a famous singer, in a restaurant many years ago and never went out again. Another aging roué has brought his wife with him to everyone's surprise - she looks miserable and one wonders who is proving what to whom at this stage of their lives. It is hardly obvious to the outsider but the glitterati and the literati mix less in Kolkata than they do in other great Indian cities like Delhi. As for Mumbai, both Kolkatans and Delhiites will tell you that they have no literati there, only business and Bollywood.

Who mixes with whom may be an issue but there is a sense of community in West Bengal that is unusually tangible and exemplified in its charitable institutions, whether a Muslim community group in the slums,a children's NGO like Future Hope, started in in the last 20 years by an English banker, or an older organisation like the volunteer run All Bengal Women's Union, founded by women leaders in the community to help women and children who had been raped, trafficked or were sex workers and had been abandoned by their families. The organisation now offers schooling to slum children and care for elderly women, with variably successful vocational training schemes for their younger sisters. It also has the best cafe serving genuinely and deliciously home-cooked Bengali food in the city for rock-bottom prices.

It is hardly comparable but the Indian Museum, another great white but fittingly proportioned building facing the Maidan, seems also to fulfil community needs. It is a popular place to go, not only filled with enforced school parties but by dallying young couples, determined groups of matrons, the casual wanderer and the curious tourist of any nationality. Its high rooms and verandahs are cool enough and it contains, after all, something for everyone, albeit one might regret the lack of judicious weeding out of the collections and wish for additional spit and polish in their presentation. It seems time-warped and therefore irresistible. In rooms redolent of 19th century collectors and little changed from those early days, this is Kim's Wonder House. Everything is here, from moth eaten Scottish stags heads to ancient religious relics and sculpted stone of whimsical design and poetic beauty,thousands of years old. Anything may be thrown in, apparently randomly,with the confused collections of enthusiastic and often amateur botanists, metallurgists and archaeologists of changing decades and diverse ethnic extraction. The Museum may be another colonial building but it is undoubtedly an Indian Museum containing a taste of every era of India's history, civilisations, tribes, invaders and settlers and seeming somehow to mirror the broad flood of life outside its doors.

Anish Kapoor in India

Anish Kapoor ‘s fame is belied by a somewhat shy and self-effacing manner that suggests he would be more comfortable by far back in his studio creating his extraordinary works than discussing them with his public – let alone making speeches on the subject. These days ‘though an artist of Kapoor’s stature is expected to share himself and to be a star, prepared to sell the man as well as his art, however consistently, as in his case, the art sells itself. So, at the opening of his retrospective exhibition in Mumbai last week, the artist did the proper thing: briefly greeting his audience partying in the garden outside the exhibition studio, thanking all those who had helped to create the show and leaving it to the spokespeople from the British Council and Louis Vuitton, the sponsors, further to interpret its importance and that of the return of the artist to his birthplace.

This year I have seen Kapoor’s solo exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, a bizarre juxtaposition of monumental contemporary sculpture and great 18th century rooms that often seemed overcrowded by the works on show. The most memorable pieces there, the great mass of silver spheres in the courtyard called ‘Tall tree and the eye’ that endlessly reflected the moving queues of people heading for the show; the bright pigmented pieces, disciplined bursts of colour reminiscent of Indian temple precincts with their stalls of carefully crafted pyramids of coloured mandala powders – the colours of the festival of holi and of India in general; the crowded room of ‘hive’ pieces, great piles of petrified writhing clay, seen out of the corner of the eye, almost to be living.

For me, the press grabbing red wax works, aside from the shock of the blast of the cannon firing wax balls at a wall, were of curiosity value only in this setting – how much mess could be made on a white wall or a great arched doorway? The impact of the cannon was clearer in the better fitting contemporary space of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao this summer where different mirrored pieces demanded the attention of the viewer and where we were lucky to arrive early to an almost empty museum space – a rare luxury and almost unheard of at a highly publicised and must see exhibition in London these days.

So my fascination in the Kapoor’s work has grown and has also become an inspiration for my daughter’s art ‘A’ level projects involving backdrops of the Guggenheim and Kapoor pieces for photographs of giant bright coloured jellies and heaps of insoluble food colour powder. It took, the Mumbai opening, however, to confirm me as a fully fledged Kapoor groupie, queuing to shake hands with the diffident and somewhat exhausted great artist at his second Indian opening in a week. Sonia Gandhi had already inaugurated the first part of the exhibition in Delhi saying ‘Few artists of our time have captured the imagination of the World as Anish Kapoor’.

In the Mehboob film studios in Bandra, Mumbai, Kapoor’s works showed at their most remarkable in a huge space with high roughcast walls and enough room for most of Bombay and Bollywood high society to meet and greet and show off, high fashion and sparkly images reflected endlessly in the artist’s curving mirrored walls, concave or convex panels and dishes, that reveal, change and consume the viewer; one minutely fractured to create a massive and magical kaleidoscope of its surroundings.

For the first time, unimpeded by the habitual barriers and health and safety hurdles of European galleries, the wax firing cannon not only had its audience jumping but also made sense – for some reason firing wax at roughcast walls is more effective than at smooth paint ‘though why, I cannot tell. The lack of barriers too, just a few polite young people watching out for the unwary or the clumsy backing into a shining surface, allowed a far more personal interaction with every piece and, one imagines, a closer view of the artist’s concept.

For me, overwhelmed by the richesse on show, the most desirable piece was the great spike or spire of polished mirrored steel, apparently pouring endlessly, mercury like, into the floor surface and drawing the eye magnetically from all corners of the room. Irresistible.

A Rajasthan Wedding

‘O for a muse of fire, that would ascend
the brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
and monarchs to behold the swelling scene’

Not in fact a battle but a royal wedding in Rajasthan; attended by former princes galore, at least one monarch and and another ex king, Gyanendra of Nepal. A scene swelling with the fabled colours of the Rajasthan desert and its peoples; gilded by the stars of Bollywood and international rock; a feast of images worthy of the muse and quite other worldly to those more used to lower key European weddings.

The marriage of the Yuvraj Shivraj, son of the Maharajah of Jodhpur, to Rajkumari Gayatri of Askote-Raj, may be one of the last great traditional weddings among the former royal families and was celebrated as such in a state where ‘Bapji’ Jodhpur, is still respected to a degree in keeping with his lifetime of work for Jodhpur and the state of Rajasthan. Noblesse oblige.
This wedding was a celebration too of the bridegroom’s astonishing recovery from an almost mortal injury in a polo match six years ago and an auspicious augury for a continuance in the status quo that few of the population of Jodhpur deeply invested in their historical traditions had dared hope for. Jodhpur was en fete.

For foreign guests, Indian weddings are always spectacular events requiring an unusual degree of stamina and, when among the warrior Rajputs at least, on whom whisky has no more obvious effect than mother’s milk, a hard head and a good liver. A wardrobe is required that extends far beyond the usual and re-usable wedding clothes lurking in the recesses of the spare room cupboard. This wedding, in two cities and multiple venues involved as many changes of clothes in a day as an Edwardian house party, with jewellery and baggage to match. O for a lady’s maid and a Louis Vuitton cabin trunk or two.

In truth, while the Edwardian women of the Raj may, like Lady Curzon in her peacock dress, have competed to some extent with the satins, silks, chiffons and brocades of formal Indian attire, contemporary western style clothing in its poverty of colour and embellishment is hard pressed to shine next to a myriad coloured nine yard turban or a shimmering sherwani with diamond buttons, costume that makes the most undistinguished suddenly regal, let alone a woman’s swirling traditional tinselled and bejewelled ghagra and odhni .

Better then for the foreigner just to relax and revel in a spectacular repast for all the senses. The cheerful discord of the pipes of the Rajputana Rifles combined with folk singers belting out their best known songs from the roof top alcoves of the Rambagh Palace in Jaipur heralding the evening arrival of the barat procession led by a painted elephant, tusks streaming with tinsel and unmoved by red carpet style banks of flash photographers, bringing the bridegroom from Jodhpur to his bride. The bridegroom himself arriving at the last, straight and beautiful, sitting in an antique carriage drawn by Marwari horses who struggled against ruts in ground made marshy by heavy unseasonable rain.

Private family and religious wedding ceremonies morphed into drinks and dinner, guests drifting like petals in the evening breeze, stopping to greet old and new friends or gawp at the world famous such as Mick Jagger and Sting or, and more covetously, the spectacular jewels adorning both men and women; groups ebbing and flowing around the green acres of the Rambagh lawns; the bharat followers remarkably fresh after an all night party on a special train from Jodhpur and an early morning breakfast at a desert tented camp.

A return train trip to Jodhpur the following day gathered up new guests from Jaipur and reunited the men’s bharat party with the women of the bridegroom’s family and their friends, who remained in Jodhpur in keeping with tradition. Any idea that the women had been other than enjoying themselves as hard as the men was dispelled the next day by the improbable sight of kitsch plastic palm trees adorning the Umaid Bhavan Palace gardens as a backdrop, from all accounts, to some serious female partying.

For foreigners, serious shopping too had to be fitted in somewhere and well oiled expeditions to the narrow lanes of the old city encouraged abandonment to the seduction of salesmen luring customers with soft as butter Kashmiri shawls, myriad coloured silks and embroideries reputedly designed for the great fashion houses of the World and being sold, naturally, at a snip of their real price.

The romantic tour de force of the festivities, a dinner and dancing in the Mehrengarh Fort that evening, transported us all to an earlier era. The steep, carefully lit, walk up to the Fort in full evening dress and for safety’s sake on the cobbles, discarded heels, rewarded by a mesmerised sense of timelessness induced by Zilla Khan’s exquisite sufi singing. More temporal desires finally overtaking the crowds in a determined post trance search for the bar at the end of the crowded ramparts as a wave of thirsty people flowed onwards and upwards, the blue city unfolding far below them. The magic was restored by dinner in the courtyard of the ancient and lately restored Zenana building, a fitting setting for a post prandial nautch performance and where the crowds, however many hundred, were dwarfed by the surrounding impenetrable walls. The Nautch was followed by rather less lithe performances on the discotheque floor where we danced or swayed about until dawn.

A sustaining breakfast at Raas, the latest jewel in the hospitality chain in Jodhpur, was followed next morning by much needed mid-morning trays of bloody marys passing generously round the vast halls of the Umaid Bhavan Palace to rejuvenate the jaded and over partied for the culmination of the wedding festivities, the grah pravesh, the arrival of the bride at her new home. The assembled company, once more in their most colourful and traditional costumes with cameras at the ready, watched a procession led by the horses of the Jodhpur Lancers, the bride, more mundanely, bringing up the rear in a white 4x4, to be greeted by her new family. The ceremonial followed swiftly and inevitably by a large and delicious lunch before the bump back to earth began for most of us with thought of trains and planes to catch and the whole greyer reality of daily life, outside this happy, rainbow bubble, to face once again.

The place to stay in Jodhpur

For a change I have been so far off my cockroach scale of hotels, staying in such blissful surroundings that I am still, back in freezing England, basking in the warm glow of remembered comforts. I have a photograph of the former Ras haveli in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, from 1907; the great Mehrengarh fort on its rocky hill, one of the most distinctive backgrounds in India; the cow in the foreground of the picture, one imagines, an ancestor of those that still cluster close to the gate of the erstwhile haveli, now the Raas hotel and one of the newest jewels in Rajasthan hospitality.

The hotel is both contemporary in architecture and wholly sympathetic to its 18th century shell and its surroundings next to an ancient step well, amongst the crowded streets and lanes of the old city. An almost aerial view looking down at Raas from the ramparts of the fort shows an oasis with moghul style ponds and cascades, a cerulean infinity pool picking up on the colours of the blue city and cooling patches of green in decorative and kitchen gardens. Green themes of a different variety are clear from above in the banks of solar panels supporting a steady supply of power for air cooling and winter warming and reliable gushing hot water.

‘There’s a place in Rajputana with a fort of old renown
And a liberal-hearted fine old king.
And the traveller who visits that most hospitable town
Hears a lot about Sir Pratap Singh’
(from Rhymes of Rajputana, GH Trevor, 1894)

Nikhilendra Singh, the great grandson of Sir Pratap Singh, Regent of Jodhpur in the late 19th and early 20th century and inspired proprietor of Raas, has left little to chance in this ideal hotel – there are few if any rough edges. The pavilion like dining room with roof top bar offers Indian and European menus of an elegant simplicity to match the carefully spaced linen covered tables, laid with regiments of perfect wine glasses, the better to taste the ever growing numbers of quality Indian wines. Stuffed owls, situated in high alcoves above the tables are one of the few signal failures at Raas, their theoretical object to scare off importunate pigeons whose cooing vibrates regardless through conversation, adding, as they perch cheerfully next to their glassy eyed predators, to the arcadian atmosphere.

Monsoon in Rajasthan has lately continued into the winter, making surprising changes in the Jodhpur desert and adding an unexpected element to high season travel in Rajasthan – gum boots may be required packing. Raas caters for those disinclined to get mud to the knees on shopping trips in the Jodhpur markets with indoor comforts, flat screen televisions in the rooms and a long list of available dvds. There are verandahs attached to rooms that overlook the inner courtyard for reading and relaxing or you can just lounge on your huge bed waiting for room service to keep up the steady supplies of drink and food to your room. Beauty treatments are available or a local tailor will create a new wardrobe or make well fitting jodhpur trousers to be shipped later to your home. There is a spa and a shop selling unusual jewellery, objets d’art and handcrafts a few steps into the courtyard – an umbrella and someone to carry it over you will be available on wet days for those with permeable hairstyles.

The streets of the City are endlessly fascinating, a photographer’s and, of course, a shopper’s paradise. At Raas you are cocooned from the bustle and noise outside by old walls and from the business of the hotel, should you so wish, by movable slatted stone jali screens that concertina shut across the verandahs. At the same time you remain part of the City and only yards away from the life of the market and the hurly burly round the old Jodhpur clock tower. Tuk tuk rickshaws are the best transport, weaving most easily between larger vehicles stuck in a morass of cows, motorcycles and a wedding procession or two – the hotel has its own decorated in Jodhpur blue - cars are best used only for longer journeys and need time to work their way through the streets to the hotel entrance to sweep you up to the Mehrengarh or to other parts of remarkable Rajasthan.

Like the state and perhaps Jodhpur in particular, Raas has a unique character created not only by its bricks and mortar, however beautifully designed, but most of all by its people. The colours of the state may be more muted in the uniforms and calming neutral colours in Raas accoutrements but the charm and flashing smiles of the staff are in keeping with its surroundings and make staying there as easy and friendly experience as staying in a private house whilst knowing full well that professionals are in charge and doing all to make your stay as close to perfection as possible.

A View of Kashmir

This piece was written in 2009 – things have not changed a great deal in spite of recent reports of curfews in Indian Kashmir. Travelers should not be put off. Things on the ground are seldom as bad or as dangerous as the media would have us believe and the Kashmiris, after all, are desperately keen to rebuild their tourist trade and will look after you.



For tourists prepared to ignore the dramatics of the world’s and especially the rest of India’s press stories, the divisions in the state of Kashmir and Jammu are not as obviously the great wound between India and Pakistan but more the difference between the lush and beautiful valley and it’s courteous and dignified people and the barren hills of the plateau of Ladakh. Leh, the capital of Buddhist Ladakh, only a handful of decades out of the relative isolation of an inaccessible kingdom in the Himalayas, has become, for its brief summer season, a tourist and trekking hub, with foreign tourists apparently outnumbering locals in the main bazaars of the town. In the winter, ‘though, carpeted in thick snow, the tourists and the traders from Jammu and Srinagar who cater to them return from whence they came and traditional Ladakhi life once again holds sway as sociable and fun-loving locals drink local beer, chang, and party with friends and family to survive cold so extreme that toothpaste freezes in the tube and changing clothes is out of the question.



Life in Ladakh in the past could hardly be said to be easy but the extraordinary contentment with a subsistence life that revolved around seasons, family, community and religious ritual and festival is still apparent in the villages away from from Leh where work and play continue for the moment with much the same rhythms as the past. NGOs these days struggle here as in every underdeveloped and poor area to improve health, education, nutrition, hygiene and high child mortality rates but awareness of other lives has not so far diminished the good humour and high spirits of Ladakhis. A passionate pride in home place and environment is habitual among Indians, indeed to the extent sometimes that the outsider is left wondering how on earth this vast country holds together at all even without politically inspired problems. In Ladakh this means that most Ladakhis who leave for work or education have return as their goal and remain at all times deeply rooted in their villages and mountains.

In the Kashmir valley too there is enormous pride in everything Kashmir has been, beloved of Mogul emperors and as much by the less glamorous invaders of the British Raj. The intensity of pride in the valley means a deep distrust of close neighbours, even the peaceful Ladakhis whose morality and honesty is questioned no less than that of plains’ Indians. Kashmiris are prickly, no doubt about it, but they have been so regularly and endlessly damned by the press and by ill-informed foreign politicians with little understanding and no experience of the people or situation of the valley, that they can hardly be blamed for that. As it is the extraordinary handicrafts of Kashmir, the exquisite shawls and carpets in particular have been ruthlessly exploited by greedy markets and traders, not, it has to be said, all outsiders, to the extent that there is little appreciation these days for pieces once understood as works of art and now merely as commodities. The Chiru antelopes that provided the fine wool for fabled shatoosh shawls for hundreds of years are almost extinct, the effect of an impatient market with no patience with rarity value. Factories in Lubhiana and elsewhere produce thousands of pretty enough machine made and cheap versions of shawls that would otherwise take weeks, months or even years to produce and ersatz versions of Kashmiri carpets are made on looms around the world.



There are those like the Kashmir Loom Company and other determined and foresighted businesses fighting with some success for continued recognition of the old skills that make a handmade shawl or carpet as much to be valued and understood as an old master painting. They are up against other problems as young people dismiss old family traditions and skills in favour of quicker, easier ways to make a buck. It is only to be hoped that the skills can at least be kept alive by the encouragement of a few and the discerning collectors who are their clients. It is hard ‘though, when a carpet made by hand over two years and involving the skills of a dozen craftsmen from 4 or 5 families sells wholesale for a couple of thousand dollars, the price only rising later by hundreds of percent for the retailer’s profit.

Tourism should once again be the other money spinner for the valley but the scare stories and the advice of foreign ministries and offices abroad have created impregnable barriers to most holiday makers. Good value, stunning scenery, excellent food, magnificent fishing, beautiful gardens, remarkable culture and unique shopping, do not, it seems, outweigh the conviction that every delight comes with attached explosions. As it is the houseboats on the Dal and Nageen lakes are fuller than they have been, young Israelis, against all advice of their government are the most apparent nationality both here and in Ladakh, but it is not enough. They are as a rule traveling on a freedom kick after compulsory military service and often more interested in cheap drink and dope than culture and carpets.



Since I was last in Kashmir, three years ago, there have certainly been changes and not only in the weight of motor vehicles in Leh. Perhaps the wheel is turning a little towards a greater optimism. The new, young and energetic Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah, inheritor and emulator of a family tradition, is setting about the infrastructure of the state with a will. The precipitous road through the mountain passes from Srinagar to Kargil and on to Leh is being improved dramatically and even at a relatively early stage the journey time has been cut by some hours. The promotion of skiing and winter sports in Gulmarg and Sonamarg may become increasingly effective against the vast costs of skiing holidays in Europe and as the essential infrastructure for winter tourism grows. Other sports such as golf are being catered for with new international level courses – Omar Abdullah’s Father, Farouk, was not loved for his use of public money to build a perfect golf course in Srinagar at a time of extreme strife, shortage of housing and public works but such extravagance may pay dividends in time.

Meanwhile a razor wired and massive army presence causes the greatest depredations on the state and adds the most visual weight to the doomsayer stories we all read and hear so regularly. Less obvious than it was in Srinagar a few years ago, the people of the valley still detest this colonizing force and the cost of its existence. Whereas, in more laid back Ladakh, a hearts and minds approach of school building and fraternization has created a reasonably easy relationship, mistrust of the political and military centres of Hindu India combined with local pride does not allow any hope of a comfortable compromise in the valley. For the outside spectator the costs of its massive army, a permanent occupying and ill occupied force throughout Indian border territories, is, in the face of extremes of perpetual poverty in rural and urban India, mismanagement at best, immoral at worst.

North East Indian Summer

In the pouring rain, overlooked by dripping hills as you rattle over the great river’s earliest road bridge at Saraighat, you could almost fool yourself you were nearer home crossing the Clyde by Glasgow, but at this, the Brahmaputra’s deepest but narrowest point, its lazy power is breathtaking. Flying in to Guwahati airport, the gateway to India’s North East states, first sight of the river is from the right hand of the aeroplane, a vast lion’s mane of water eating into the land and flooding further each year as the millennial silt of deforested hills fills the depths of its natural channels. It remains a constant if unseen presence during summer travels in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh when water is everywhere. The insistent rain turns trickles to the rivulets that fuel major tributaries in a race from Tibet and the Himalayas towards the confluent rush to the sea.

Monsoon season is not the popular choice for travel in the North Eastern states of India. Cherrapunji in the state of Meghalaya, the ultimate goal for Alexander Frater in ‘Chasing the Monsoon’, wears the dubious garland of the wettest place on Earth. Weather aside, travel here at any time of year may not be for those India lovers who favour the palace hotels of the North or the comfortable resorts of the South. It is an adventure and one likely, with Lonely Planet returning this year to update and evaluate their scant information on the region, to become a tourist goal, if initially for the more spartan traveller. It is a promised land for the naturalist, the birder and the determined amateur anthropologist desperate to see the residue of traditional tribal existence before it is entirely lost to concrete and plastic, tee shirts and television. It is not an easily achieved destination; the years of insurgent activity in a sensitive border area have led to a strong Indian Army presence and extreme difficulties over travel permits for the various states. These complications have negated the need for a tourist and travel infrastructure beyond the most basic and the hope for the best.

Assam is most developed for travel and tourism with well-know wildlife camps, much patronized in the winter months; elephants; fishing; Indian rhinos, rare birds and famous tea stations. In spite of problems in the far North and extreme antipathy to a reverse river of Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh, all tarred with the Jihadi brush of those few demanding a North Eastern Muslim state, entry here presents few bureaucratic problems. Meghalaya and little Tripura, almost inside Bangladesh, are equally relatively uncomplicated; Arunachal Pradesh more difficult on paper than in reality. Nagaland, Mizoram and Manipur require hard won permits issued by the Home Affairs Ministry in Delhi on the basis of varying restrictions including, theoretically at least, the necessity to travel as part of a married couple in a group of at least four people. Unless you enjoy camping in Lutyens ministry buildings, it is essential to have a good travel agent in the North East fighting your case. Even with those good offices we finally received notification of our permit less than twenty four hours before we were due to present ourselves at the Nagaland border.

We travel on straight if corrugated roads through miles of flooded jute fields; echoes of South East Asia in the stooping figures in shocking green paddy, triangular faces under wide woven hats; ploughing bullocks and endless fish and duck ponds. Ribby goats and cattle saunter down rusting railway lines; overwhelming pylons take giant strides across land and time to bring hydro power from Silliguri to West Bengal; tall brick kiln chimneys are, in contrast, like ancient tombs, smaller cousins of the Qutab Minar.

Assam has a problem with unemployed elephants due to recent logging bans and reductions in plywood production. Many elephants lived semi-wild in the dwindling forests, lured in to work with opium bribes by the families with whom they shared a traditional labouring relationship. Decreased elephant opportunities has put them in conflict with man over scarce resources, forcing the government to take action to catch them for training or re-training by equally reduced numbers of old-style trainers, for patrol duties in National Parks. Jobless elephants may still find a role in tea gardens or, like their displaced human colleagues, engage in illegal logging in the thousands of square miles of jungle too remote for officialdom to penetrate. Unemployed or untrained elephants, like other long-term jobless everywhere, can be seen in the vicinity of national parks standing on the side of the road, eyes half-closed, just watching the traffic.


The importance of a calm and experienced driver on these roads becomes increasingly obvious as we leave the paddy plains and pass laid back state border police into Arunachal Pradesh, a country of drenched jungled hillsides, voracious rivers, bamboo forests and clouded valleys. Roads disappear over cliffs and under landslides and we thank our stars for Sinha with a steady hand on the wheel. To our guide and, we quickly realize, our lifeline:
‘What would happen, Hemanta, if we had a crash?’
‘You have to hope it is your lucky day and an army truck comes along’.
‘Would anyone else help us?’
‘Not unless you were their people.’


Hemanta shares our foreign status in remote villages but after years in the business he has the friends and the influence we need to get through the door of official government guest or circuit houses; in several places the only habitable option. Hemanta’s hospitality choices, where there is a choice at all, are delightfully ruled by his stomach. He is a gourmet with a strong preference for the Italian food he ate on a one time trip to Europe and a craving for parmesan cheese. Parmesan cheese, had we thought of it, would prove increasingly welcome. An impression of plenty in crops and livestock is, once beyond the relatively cosmopolitan sophistication of Assam, disappointingly translated to food on the plate of unmitigated dreariness and lack of seasoning or savour. Traditional tribal food is another matter altogether and one to be approached with caution and a thought to the curiosity that killed the cat.

The Mithun or bos frontalis, are the semi-wild cattle traditionally prized as sacrifice or currency in bride price or fine; the celebratory feast meat of choice in tribal areas and, interchangeable with the cockerel, emblem of Nagaland. In variegated orange and black, with forbidding horns, they are if approached, keen to be sociable; their mistake in areas where nothing edible is left uneaten. In the Hong village at Ziro, said to be the largest tribal village in Asia, the Apa Tani inhabitants, volubly intoxicated on sweet and yeasty rice beer, were preparing for the arrival of the sacrificial mithun for a feast for 300. Anticipation of a magnificent beast was disappointed by the arrival of a skittish adolescent led by two small boys towards a sharp dao blade and an ignoble end in a pot of boiling water enlivened but nothing more than a handful of chillis.

Life is changing rapidly for the Apa Tani as for most tribes but missionary led Christianity has not removed all traces of the old social practices and the rituals of shamanism and animist religion. Clan banners and woven bamboo fetishes, embellished with egg shells, feathers and flowers stand in front of bamboo stilt houses, now generally roofed with corrugated iron. Traditional festivals in honour of the natural cycles of sun and moon, sowing and harvest, are observed by families with open hearths for cooking and a carefully covered television, the most prized possession.

Older women wear distinctive black bamboo noseplugs and facial tattoos, symbols of their married status that disfigure delicate, high-cheekboned faces; the young, tee shirts with traditional home-woven sarongs. Old men weaving baskets wear their hair in a skimpy knot on the forehead, clan chiefs a steel spike of office twisted through the topknot. Young men lounge in jeans, always with daos, the traditional heavy knives, used for everything from chopping wood to peeling fruit and carried in plastic and bamboo tied scabbards at their hip. With free primary education for all, the prosperous look forward to university places and urban careers. There is little gender discrimination and polygamy is seldom now practiced but the endlessly busy women inevitably get the thin end of the wedge in their daily work.


The Apa Tani are intensive agriculturalists, growers of rice, reapers of their pine forests and the bamboo so essential to their lives. Their tradition is to replant and replace leaving mature trees for successive generations and making the Ziro valley a fertile oasis. But as forest reduction from outside encroachment encourages men to look for more lucrative work, women are left with the lion’s share of domestic duties, paddy cultivation and weaving. On a Sunday they are in the neon green fields bending endlessly up and down in the rhythm of rice replanting; walking double under the weight of 25 kilo government rice rations carried in beautiful conical bamboo baskets, secured by forehead straps; chivvying chickens, dogs, pigs and children; everywhere in the wet and muddy streets. The villagers are no longer entirely self- sufficient and women queue for store supplies in cheerful gaggles under their constant umbrellas. Families leaving services at the local Baptist church, stroll back to the village to join the preparations for feasts honouring animist gods. Men loiter, drink, socialize, set fish traps in paddy streams, and wait for the main party to begin.


Beyond Ziro on the road to Daporizo and Along, pine gives way to exuberant deciduous jungle, trees and ferns incestuously intertwined, punctuated by the new shoots of banana palms poking up from the chaos of vegetation like enormous furled umbrellas. Hills are marked by the patched effects of slash and burn or 'jhum' agriculture as we pass through tribal areas; Nishi, Hill Miris and Tagin; shacks of migrant road workers from Bihar and West Bengal; busy, dirty, villages skirted by bamboo granaries. Everyone carries something; backloads of fire wood; vegetables; a baby; and always an umbrella, often with frills. On the road to Saddle, in a land of clouds, white poinsettias, orchids and flowering shrubs strive energetically to reach the light and water pours through bamboo pipes to disperse down precipitous hillsides to the endless rivers. The circuit house in Daporizo is full; every politician in the country is on the road ahead of the vote on the Indo/American nuclear pact. Likewise in Along, where, late in the evening, Holiday Cottages hotel is the unappealing option, complete with flooded passages and flying cockroaches, for tomorrow’s visits to prosperous Gadi Along villages with their own schools and football pitches. We buy electric orange and yellow sarongs from women weaving on loin looms, one praying for a sister for her three sons: ‘Boys are useless'.


In Passighat, a market town and centre of local industry and government, en route for the Brahmaputra ferry, we find nirvana, a new hotel with impossibly clean bathrooms, egg sandwiches from room service and a shop selling Cadburys chocolate and Colgate toothpaste. Back on the Assamese plains we drive at dawn on embanked roads over barrierless bridges towards the river, evidential in advance in the endlessly flooded farmland. Morning life is in full swing, people and animals busy on the fertile land, kingfishers and flocks of black drongos watching from perches on posts and wires. The car ferry is a country boat, in style the small fishing boat found for hire in Cornish villages for lobster potting or mackerel. Cars and passengers board via two carefully spaced planks. The reassuring and friendly mutual curiosity of tourist and village inhabitant in tribal areas is superseded here by our new disposition as mobile photographic curiosities, the newest show and tell, for other passengers and onlookers. The engines rev and, under a Scottish sky once more, we progress some ten miles or more on the grey pelagic sweep of fast flowing water towards an invisible bank.

An unexpected final hundred yards of shallow flood is accomplished on two canoes, three planks and an excess of authoritative local advice, and is an experience amusing only in the retrospective glow of a stupendous lunch in the comfort of the Chowkidinghee Heritage Bungalow in the tea gardens of Dibrugarh. We luxuriate in an expanse of teak floors and heavy furniture, a pile of dry towels in a spotless bathroom and the offer of fast laundry service. The sun shines on tea-pickers working under the feathery shade of acacia trees, their hands a blur as they pluck the bud and two leaves from the tops of acres of bushes. We are shown round the Dibrugarh Planters Club, en fete for the ‘Mid-rains Dance’, to which invitations are issued by a young but portly chairman puffed with the slight dignity attached to his status over a membership of 95. The neighbouring church has broken windows and the graves of British planters to whom Dibrugarh now would be unrecognizable; the old town claimed by the acquisitive river. Silk buying in a weaving co-operative, ‘Big Ones’ icecream and we have our permits for Nagaland at last. Then evening sun over the gardens, tea leaf pakoras and hot peanuts with onion, cold beer, television and a set of travel monopoly where Mayfair costs 200 rupees.