Studying Hindi in the Clouds

If Mussoorie is the queen of hill stations then Landour is the fairy princess, at least according to the neat tourist information signs posted at several locations in Landour. Landour is perched on a high hilltop above the horseshoe shaped ridge of Mussoorie, and due perhaps to its height above the main town, and perhaps due to its continuing association with the military – it was founded by the British in the 1820s as a soldier’s rest home (and named after a town in Wales – thankfully with simplified spelling) and is now the location of the Military Institute of Technology Management – Landour is much quieter and more peaceful than the busy tourist resort below.

I’m not sure why, but it seems that 6000 ft is a magic number in the Himalayas – the height at which malarial mosquitoes disappear, and where the climate, at least when the worst summer heat holds the Gangetic plain in its thrall, is idyllic. The main mall in Mussoorie – a 2 mile road running along the ridgeline, crowded with restaurants, 300+ hotels, and stores selling the kind of chatchkas that Indian tourists like to buy when on vacation – is located just a tad higher than 6000 feet. Again, according to the tourist sign, the top of Landour hill is 7800 feet, although my GPS registers only 2250 meters at my cottage, which seems pretty close to the top. Since the shops in Landour don’t sell mangoes (a major constituent of my diet these days), nor other fruits and vegetables, I have a strenuous walk to go grocery shopping, and a more strenuous walk back loaded down with okra, roma tomatoes, mangoes, and bananas.

Kulri Bazaar, Musoorie

The British really had two criteria for locating their hill stations. First, they wanted to get out of the hot, dusty, malarial plains, and second, they didn’t want to go too far. Mussoorie satisfies both criteria admirably, going a long way to explain its continuing popularity. A 1.5 hour taxi ride, consisting primarily of switchbacks and hairpin turns, separates Mussoorie from the state capital of Dehra Dun, a bustling city that is a scant 6 hour train ride from Delhi. Dehra Dun is famous for two things – the Doon Valley is reputed to grow the best quality basmati rice in the world, and the city is home to the Forest Research Institute, India’s premier forestry school. The British established the Forest Research Institute in the late 19th century and it quickly rose to prominence as the most important forestry research center in the world. In the early 20th century the Indian Forester was the most widely read and well reputed forestry journal in the world, and Indian trained foresters, British, French and German, spread their ideas back to Europe, to other colonies, and even to the US, where Gifford Pinchot followed models tested in India in setting up the U.S. Forest Service. If the FRI has faded from the international scene, it is still a major center for domestic forestry research.

Mussoorie has its own famous educational institutes: the Lal Bahadur Shastri Academy of Public Administration is the training school for India’s most elite civil servants – the Indian Administrative Service, as well as the related Indian Forest Service, Indian Police Service, and Indian Foreign Service. Landour has its own Hogwarts - a boarding high school named Woodstock, which supposedly follows an American model, although it has a suspiciously large number of English place names. Woodstock also hosts an environmental education center, and I’ve seen posters advertising for a Wilderness First Responder course, run by NOLS, to be held there in August. Finally, there is the Landor Language School, which is why I’ve come here – it is reputed to be one of the best places in the world to study Hindi.

Landour, it seems, is elite, albeit small, and is a curious mixture of military personnel, wealthy Indian vacationers, missionaries, and students. The few shops (the ones that don’t carry mangoes) do carry loads of the two things apparently most desired (and most difficult to find) by western travelers: toilet paper and peanut butter. As I mentioned, Mussoorie is filled with shops selling the kinds of chatchkas Indians buy on vacation. There are only a few shops specializing in westerner oriented chatchkas, and they are all near Landour. The chai shops I walk past every day on my way to the language school, at the little market called Chardukan, feature western junk food – fries, pancakes, and pizza – rather than Indian food, and the wealthy Indian tourists, the Woodstock high school students, and the Language school students, gather under the tree to enjoy one of the cleanest, most smog free markets I’ve seen in all of India. Fortunately, I found one shop that offers a veg thali in addition to the western comfort food – which I wouldn’t eat at home so why would I eat it here? By and large, Mussoorie is short on the two things I expected from hill stations – perhaps from friends’ stories from Dharmasala & Manali – Tibetans and western hippies. Although the Dalai Lama’s first exile capital was here, and there are a few Tibetans, this is primarily an Indian resort, run and oriented towards Indians, and perhaps due to the absence of Tibetans, marijuana, and major treks in the immediate vicinity, seems to be off the hippie trail.

Chardukan. Chardukan, incidentally, literally means four shops, so of course, there are five shops in Chardukan.

The church in Chardukan dates to the 1840s, and occupies the largest piece of flat land I’ve seen in Mussoorie. Landour seems heavily Christian – there are three churches (including one which the language school is actually located in – it seems that the language school has taken over the church – I have classes in the belltower - but apparently services are also held there on Sundays), and I’ve met a number of American missionaries, along with some other folks who seemed to be missionaries, but didn’t identify themselves as such, perhaps because it is much easier to get a tourist visa than a missionary one, a tradition that dates back to the British, who wisely saw that making money and saving souls in India were incompatible activities (except in Kerala, the rich people were Hindus and Muslims, while the likely converts were the poor), and chose to focus on the money. Landour’s churches, however, appear to have been, at least originally, built by the British for the British, who were the first permanent residents of the area.

I’ve often wondered why previous north Indian rulers did not build hill stations. The British were not the first rulers of India to come from colder places. Most of the Muslim invaders, beginning in the 10^th century, arrived via what is now Afghanistan, including most importantly the Mughals, descended from the Timurids of central Asia. All the information I’ve been able to find about past inhabitants of this ridge was that there were migrant pastoralists who grazed their cattle on a bush known locally as Musoor – hence Mussoorie. Perhaps one explanation is that only the British were crazy enough to imagine building towns in a place like this. The road up to Landour is one lane, and all hair-pin turns. In places, they have built walls 30 feet high to guard from landslides, and I’ve seen homes on the downhill side of the road with parking on the roof, and four or five stories going down the hill all in the same building (including the building in which Chardukan’s five shops are located).

A view through the oaks of a typical road. You can see how steep the land is here. There is basically no flat anywhere.

At the moment, Landour seems like paradise. The view from the cottage I’m renting features several stately deodar trees – the Himalayan cedar which is the dominant vegetation in wetter areas here, along with deeply sculpted oaks, reminiscent of California’s live oaks, although the leaves are long and pointy, much like a tanbark or chestnut oak. According to my tree book, deodar can grow to heights of 75 meters and girths of 10 meters dbh, although the biggest I’ve seen are no more than a meter in diameter. Still, their size and growth pattern remind me a lot of Douglas fir, and combined with the steepness of the surrounding mountains, I’m reminded of the interior coast ranges of northern California and southern Oregon, which I’ve always thought were among the most rugged and beautiful places I’ve ever been. Through the trees, one catches glimpses of the city of Mussoorie below, and when it is clear, endless ridges extending to the north and west. I’m told that on very clear days, the snowcapped peaks show behind these ridges, but it has been hazy, and the only glimpse I’ve gotten of the high Himalaya was early morning, jogging on the other side of the mountain, where the snowpeaks are closer. Every night I sit and eat mangoes, review vocabulary, and watch the sunset, until I hear the dusk call to prayer from the mosque down in Mussoorie, the signal I’ve adopted for beginning my evening meditation.

Elsewhere, particularly on drier slopes, I find huge rhododendrons, 30 feet high, whose brilliant red blooms have mostly dropped to the ground. The horse chestnuts are blooming now, and I’ve found trees of many familiar genera, including maple, fir, spruce, walnut, and pine. At 30.5 degrees north, and 7000 feet, it shouldn’t be surprising that the vegetation is deeply reminiscent of the temperate mountains I’ve called home. Blue whistling thrushes warble in the dawn, when the temperature is a pleasant mid 60s, and the other day, while hiking, I was buzzed by one of the largest birds I’ve ever seen – I think it was a Himalayan Griffon Vulture. The temperature does not rise above the low 80s, and it is almost always crystal clear and sunny with a light breeze, although my Sunday hike was interrupted by a big thunderstorm which dropped dime sized hail. Fortunately I was able to take refuge in a little chai shop by the side of the road.

My landlord is a retired professor, who purchased the mostly ruined Wolfsburn Estate as a summer home in the early 1980s, just before Mussoorie was discovered by wealthy Delhites. He tells me he could never afford a place like this now. In addition to repairing his home, he has built seven little cottages, connected by stone pathways and gardens, which he rents to language school students.

My cottage. Note the rain barrel, used for flower watering.

Prior to retiring he taught English literature & applied linguistics in Europe and Ethiopia, where he met his wife who now works at the Woodstock School. After retiring here he taught some classes at the Academy of Public Administration here (I’m hoping he will take me there at some point), but now he spends much of the day attending to his gardens, or perhaps I should say, supervising his gardener, because his arthritic knees prevent him from doing hard labor. One day I watched the gardener spend all day digging up the grass that has grown up between the stones of the stone paths – work that never gets done in my garden, where I can’t afford a full-time gardener. He uses the sun porch of my cottage (a nice place to sit in the morning, but too hot when it catches the afternoon sunlight) to grow petunias, begonias, and sweet peas, so my room is always fragrant.

A gardener learns something new about plants wherever he goes, and here I’ve learned about a new kind of pest. Back home, I have to worry about deer, who can jump high fences. But at least I don’t have to worry about langurs (big monkeys)! The langurs like to eat fruit trees, and have completely defoliated the professor’s plum tree. Obviously, it is fairly difficult to build a monkey fence. The apples are surviving, but only due to the constant vigilance of professor, gardener, and tenants, one of whom has purchased a slingshot to scare away the langurs who hang out in the deodars just out of stone-throwing range, waiting for an opening. The dogs also help chase away the langurs, but the langurs have a dimensional advantage over the grounded dogs. The more aggressive rhesus macaques seem to leave the fruit trees alone, but I did see one eating someone’s house plants this morning, and they will steal food left ungarden, even from inside of your kitchen.

My real reason for being here, of course, is not to revel in the temperate weather, the beautiful hills and trees, nor to chase monkeys, but to study Hindi. I was able to sign up for four hours of daily Hindi one-on-one tutorials this week, and hope to continue for several more weeks. The teachers are experts, and they work out of a textbook that they themselves wrote. Learning a language is hard work, and I’m using parts of my brain that have not been exercised for many years. Already this week I’ve learned most of the 53 character alphabet (but then there are endless permutations of “conjunct characters”, and can say useful things like, “whose red pen is that?” and “the book is on the big table.” I also have figured out why Indians always ask you for your good name (a better translation would be auspicious name), call you sir, and add only to the end of half their sentences. With so many hours of one-on-one time, I feel like I’m progressing very quickly. It is exciting to be on the verge of understanding a language spoken by so many people who I’ve met in the past, but been unable to communicate with. But after hours of trying to piece together a new logic and push my tongue into a new shape, it is a relief to come home and write in a language I already have some mastery of!