Last week as I drove along the picturesque lake in Uttarakhand’s premier hill station it occurred to me that I had first visited this place 50 years ago. Of course, the realisation further underlined my age, since I was just six years old then. Over the decades I have visited this town easily a dozen times, not counting the occasions I must have driven through en route to or from Delhi to my half-ready hill retreat at Satbunga near Mukteshwar in the Kumaon Himalayas.
As I drove past the Everest Hotel on the Mall, memories flooded in, for I have been a reasonably close witness to the hill station’s emergence from a quaint, sleepy town to an overgrown semi-urban settlement, overcrowded and over-constructed. Naini Tal’s evolution in many ways symbolises the haphazard growth India permitted in its hill regions and also the phenomenal rise in middle and lower middle class tourism especially since the 90s.
For example, traffic coming into the town from the foothills at Kaladhungi, erstwhile home of the legendary Jim Corbett, is no longer allowed on to the Mall between 4 pm and 10 pm but diverted down a narrow, winding path, insufficient for two vehicles to pass each other. I have spotted a signboard announcing a 6.7 km long Naini Tal bypass for the last seven years, but am yet to see any evidence of it being built. Meanwhile hotels have come up on every square centimetre of space available. The town has grown along the steep hillside, particularly on the right hand side of the glacial lake. As a result, parking is next to impossible anywhere. The vehicular population has exploded in the last 20 years with its attendant evils of fuel and noise pollution. Instead of inhaling rejuvenating mountain air, people in Naini Tal are compelled to breathe burnt diesel most of the time; cars have windows mostly shut with the AC switched on to keep out unhealthy fumes.
Naini Tal was developed as the Summer Capital of the former United Provinces of Agra and Oudh in the early decades of the last century. Governors John Hallett and Malcolm Hailey nurtured it in the 1920s and 30s and it became a mirror image of Shimla, designated as India’s Summer Capital after the British moved the headquarters of the Raj to Delhi 1911 onwards. Apart from the magnificent, sprawling Governor’s House (now Raj Bhawan), Naini Tal was gifted with an architecturally stunning Court House. Around the same time Metropole Hotel was built at a slope on the way to these two landmarks for British visitors to savour “home weather”.
Fortunately, I had an occasion to stay at the Metropole in 1972 a few years before it shut down, having been taken possession of by the Government after it was deemed enemy property. The rundown building now stands forlorn with its once manicured lawns abused as a municipal parking lot. The property technically belongs to the surviving Raja of Mahmudabad, a fine specimen of a Brown Sahib who is battling to regain possession, provided the Enemy Property Bill gets Parliament’s assent. That will allow people like him who have returned to India after their parent’ flirtation with Pakistan, to get their erstwhile palaces back.
I happened to engage the Raja in a conversation at Cedar Lodge in Ramgarh where I used to stay before my Satbunga villa became partially habitable. He came in immaculately dressed in a three-piece suit, complete with a bowler hat and brolly for breakfast, as a Jeeves-like figure took his overcoat and hung it on a rack. The Raja introduced himself and claimed he had interacted with me in 1997, although I have no recollection of the meeting. I told him that as a scholar of history, I came across many references to his father, a leading light of the National Agriculturists’ Party of Oudh (NAPO), a group of taluqdars patronised by the British to counter the rising tide of nationalism.
When I told him of the grandiose plans of the new owners of Savoy Hotel, Mussoorie’s counterpart of Shimla’s Cecil and Darjeeling’s Windermere, to revive their lost glory, the Raja showed visible irritation. “Wait till you see what I do to Metropole. It will put these upstarts in the shade. I will rebuild the ballroom and refurbish the hotel till it becomes the best hillside resort East of Suez”, he grandly declared. Much as I remain an opponent of the Enemy Property legislation proposed by the Government, as it is primarily aimed at restoring the Mahmudabad family’s 164 dubious claims on lucrative buildings all over UP, I wished the Raja well in his attempt to reinstate taste in Naini Tal, whose new hotels now cater to the Pappu community from uptown Delhi. Sadly three years later, Metropole stands exactly the way it stood in 1978, the third time I visited Naini Tal.
Despite its overcrowding, the decrepit, ramshackle new buildings and appalling pollution, Naini Tal is still a beautiful place especially in winter. The lake, whose depth, according to folklore cannot be measured, but believed to be around a phenomenal 700 ft., is emerald green and ripples in the breeze even in the worst of times. A boat ride remains invigorating. It reminds me of Jis gali mein tera ghar na ho baalma (Kati Patang), one of the rare Mukesh-Rajesh Khanna numbers. Another powerful but not so commercially successful film shot here was the Dharmendra-Mumtaz starrer, Jheel ke Us Paar, a Gulshan Nanda novel I remember plodding through in school in a bid to improve my Hindi!
Way back in 1961 when I first visited Naini Tal with my parents, the journey from Kolkata was a gruelling, two-night trip that entailed a long stopover in Lucknow. We weren’t affluent enough to travel AC 1st those days and it was June, frightfully hot in heartland India. By the time we checked into Everest Hotel after the long journey, we were pooped for one full day. But Naini Tal looked resplendent. It revived us in no time.
Just about a decade later, I recall the classy, teak wood cabins of the AC 1st compartments of the Kathgodam Express, that run on metre-gauge tracks as the steam engine huffed and puffed to the foothills. Sadly, trains have become so sanitised now that the excitement of journeys is all but gone. Naini Tal was showing signs of fraying by then, worse by 1978 and thereafter. Well, it’s still not as bad as Manali, which I think has surrendered to the palak-paneer/chicken-tikka crowd completely by now.
Observing Naini Tal over five decades, I believe India must do something about its hill stations. First it must stop unchecked construction. Second, it must regulate permits to hotels in the heart of the towns. Third, vehicular traffic has to be regulated by building bypasses. If the British could build roads and railways with 19th Century technology, why can’t we do better in the 21st? I still love Naini Tal. Mercifully it is out of Lucknow’s venal control. Gen BC Khanduri is a good man who is not tied to any lobby. I hope he leads the way in formulating a hill station policy that preserves the hills while enabling tourism without infringement of the environment.
