Kangra & Dhauladhar · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya

The small things

A wall with no run-upMost Himalayan ranges rise through foothills. The Dhauladhar does not — it goes from roughly 800 m to over 4,500 m in about twenty horizontal kilometres, with the Punjab plain directly in front of it. Monsoon air has nowhere to go but up, fast, which is why Dharamshala takes close to three metres of rain a year while the Chamba side, a day's walk over the crest, takes a fraction of it.
Four minutes in 1905The earthquake of 4 April 1905 killed around twenty thousand people, brought down Kangra Fort, the Brajeshwari temple and most of Dharamshala, and wrecked the tea estates at the moment the industry was at its peak. Many European planters sold up and left, and Kangra tea has never regained the scale it had that morning. Baijnath temple, built in 1204 without mortar, was barely touched.
Tea that went the other wayKangra's green tea found its market overland — through Amritsar to Kabul, Bukhara and the Central Asian towns, where a light green tea was the local taste. Partition cut the route in 1947 and the industry lost its main customer at the same time as it lost its labour supply. The GI it holds today, registered in 2005, protects a name whose historic market lay outside the country.
A railway built to carry turbinesThe Kangra Valley Railway — 164 km of two-foot-six-inch narrow gauge from Pathankot to Joginder Nagar, opened in 1929 — exists largely because the Shanan hydroelectric project on the Uhl needed heavy plant moved into the hills. Passengers were a by-product. It still runs, still slowly, and still on the original gauge.
The dam that resettled a valley in a desertPong dam, finished in 1974, flooded a large tract of the most fertile land in the region. A great many of the displaced families were allotted land not elsewhere in the hills but in the canal-irrigated desert of western Rajasthan, several hundred kilometres away, and the resettlement claims were still being litigated decades later.
Water managed by an office, not an agencyThe kuhls that irrigate the valley floor are run by kohlis — village water managers, usually hereditary, paid in grain — who allocate turns, settle disputes and organise the annual repair after the monsoon tears the channels apart. Some kuhls run for tens of kilometres and serve dozens of villages under this arrangement, with no state involvement of any kind.
One line from forehead to noseThe identifying mark of a Kangra painting is a drawing convention — the profile is taken in a single unbroken contour from the hairline down the forehead and straight along the nose, with no dip at the bridge. Once you have seen it, you can date and place a Pahari picture from across a gallery.
A rope you wearThe Gaddi dora is fifty to sixty feet of black woollen rope wound round the waist over the chola. It is worn every day, and it is worn because it is needed — as a tether, a load line, a belt and, unwound, a length of rope in a place where nothing else is to hand.
The morels nobody here eatsGucchi morels are gathered wild on the Dhauladhar after the snow goes, dried, and sold on to buyers who move them to metropolitan and export markets. The price they reach means a collecting household will sell the whole season's picking and keep almost none of it.
A government in a hill stationThe Dalai Lama moved to Dharamshala in 1960, a year after leaving Tibet, and the Central Tibetan Administration has been headquartered on that slope since. A former British cantonment now holds a parliament-in-exile, a monastic university, a medical and astrological institute, a performing arts institute and an archive — an entire state's cultural apparatus rebuilt on one hillside inside living memory.
Cricket at 1,450 metresThe Dharamshala ground sits high enough that the ball carries differently and cold enough that play can be called for snow on the outfield in March. The Dhauladhar behind it is the reason it is the most photographed cricket ground in India.

Small local details of Kangra & Dhauladhar — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (11)