 Last week, I was able to revisit a place that's very important to me: St Joseph's convent and mission hospital in the Kashmiri town of Baramulla. The convent now has ten nuns. They run the adjoining hospital and pharmacy, and more particularly the nursing school which currently has about 150 women students, almost all Kashmiris, undertaking a three-year course. The church has been spectacularly refurbished since I was last here seven years ago. It looks wonderful. It gets a congregation of between thirty and forty worshippers on Sundays.  This was where, almost thirty years ago, I stumbled on the story of a massacre perpetrated here in October 1947 by an invading force from Pakistan. The first-hand accounts I gathered of that attack and incursion formed the basis of my book, A Mission in Kashmir, which in turn secured me a PhD by published work., The graves of five of those killed in that rampage lie in the orchard at the back of the convent. They are well kept and now have a metal canopy.  In the Baby Ward of the hospital (not currently in use) there's a plaque in the floor to mark the spot where Sister Teresalina, a young Spanish nun, was shot on 27 October 1947. It's her portrait that's on the wall.  Sister Teresalina is buried in the plot reserved for women religious in the grounds of the convent. Next to her lies Sister Emilia, an Italian nun I met on my first visit here (and on two subseuqent visits) who shared her memories of surviving that attack on the hospital and seeing her friend killed.  For the first time, I also visited the old part of town on the other side of the Jhelum, crossing the bridge which links the two halves of Baramulla.
I stopped at the gurudwara which serves the local Sikh community - an impressive building with a long history. When the invaders approached down the Jhelum Valley Road in late 1947, the cupola of the gurudwara on the other side of the river was the first building in Baramulla they saw. According to some accounts, the raiders believed that they had reached Amritsar! 
We turned up unannounced at both St Joseph's and the gurudwara and we are very grateful to those who made us so welcome.
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 This is, I believe, the highest altitude Anglican church anywhere in the world. St Mary's in Gulmarg, a skiing resort in the Kashmir Valley, stands at a little over 8,500 feet. That makes it a country spire higher than the church in Ethiopia which Wikipedia alleges is the highest Anglican place of worship anywhere. So as you will understand, when we say St Mary's is high church. we're not judging it to be particularly ritualistic. Just up there, high in the clouds, and the snow, and all the rest.
St Mary's was built in 1902, mainly to serve the Brits who came here during the winter for sport of all sorts: hunting, skiing, a bit of how you fancy. It was semi-derelict for a few decades but has in recent years been brought back to life. There's no board identifying the church, no notice of services and the main door was firmly locked. But the caretaker, who was busily clearing the compacted snow from around the church, very kindly let us in through a side door.  He explained that St Mary's only holds services in the summer. There's no local congregation. Those attending consist entirely of tourists. It's part of the Church of North India, and so of the worldwide Anglican communion. Inside the church is charming but bare. There are no plaques or memorials, just some lovely stained glass, which has been adapted in a somewhat sinister manner..  Someone seems to have taken exception to the likenesses of the Virgin Mary and the Archangel Gabriel.  But I hope it's not sacrilege to have taken a photo of myself at St Mary's - who knows whether I'll ever get back there.  The church doesn't have vehicle access. It's a 200 yard trek from the road that loops round Shepherds' Meadow. While we were there, the snow started to come down heavily. When we got back to the road, it was almost a white-out - you couldn't see the church at all.
While trying to find out more about St Mary's, I came across this pen-and-ink drawing of Gulmarg showing the church. It was done in around 1909 by Andrea Lucey who was, as far as I can make out, a teenager at the time. It was for sale, and not for very much. So of course, I've bought it!   This was the view last week from the restaurant at Nedou's hotel in Gulmarg, a ski resort in Kashmir 9,000 feet above sea level. It's a colour photo and, yes, that's compacted snow reaching half way up the windows. Snow was falling incessantly and at times there was close to a white-out, which must have made life tricky for the snowboarders, sledgers and skiiers, and all the other tourists from warmer parts of India who crowd to Gulmarg sometimes to experience snow for the first time in their lives.  Nedou's Hotel in Gulmarg dates back to 1888. It still has a touch of that old colonial=era character - a bar (not clear whether it's ever open) called the Hunters' Bar, sepia photographs on the wall, and a row of splendid silver plate teapots all engraved with the hotel name.
 There was hardly anyone around when we popped in, so that gave me the opportunuity to take a peep.  The hotel was established by Michael Nedou, a Slovak from Dubrovnik (then Ragusa) who travelled to India in the 1860s. Once here, he married a British woman, Jesse. He opened Nedou's hotel in Lahore in the 1870s, followed by the Gulmarg hotel - the only one still in business as a Nedou's hotel (and still in the family) - and then Nedou's in Srinagar in 1900. Nedou's Srinagar hotel was the grandest in Kashmir and it's still standing though there haven't been any paying guests for decades. I blogged about it a decade back. There seems to be renovation work underway so perhaps one day it will spring back to life.   This photo on display in the hotel is of Michael and Jesse's eldest son, Harry Nedou, and his family. He shocked his parents by marrying Mir Jaan, a Gujjar woman from near Gulmarg who had apparently rescued him from a bear. Harry converted to Islam and took the name Sheikh Ahmed Hussein. Thier daughter, Akbar Jehan, married Sheikh Abdullah, the commanding Kashmiri nationalist political leader of the last century. She herself had a high public profile and was twice elected to the Indian Parliament to represent a Kashmiri constituency.
The hotel dining room - with its mounted horns and zebra skin and huge furnace-style heater - feels as if it hasn't changed in decades. Mollie Kaye wrote Death in Kashmir in the 1950s about spying and skulduggery on Gulmarg's ski slopes and this was very probably the hotel she had in mind when writing the book. It was so nice to be able to commune with an aspect of Kashmir's past.   Here's a 360 degree view of the Kashmir Valley taken from Pari Mahal, the Mughal era palace and gardens overlooking Dal Lake and the Kashmiri capital, Srinagar.
Pari Mahal, the fairy palace, was built in the mid-seventeeth century and is one of the most charming and magical spots in a very attractive city. I hope you enjoy the view.  The land adjoining the college where I teach in Chennai was waterlogged when I arrived. It's only just dried out. But that temporary wetland was a magnet to birds who love ponds. Two open-billed storks were regular visitors; and lots of great egrets; I saw a couple of cobalt blue glimpses of a kingfisher; and the water attracted plenty of pond heron, also known as paddy heron. One of these, let's call him/her Paddy, made themsleves very much at home on the lawns of the college. These are watered at least twice a day, and Paddy was very happy to gorge on the worms that surfaced to take advantage of the moisture.
The pond heron is a non-descript brown, shorter than the herons you see in the UK - but its wings are broad and largely white, which makes them quite striking in flight. They are shy, but Paddy became sufficiently comfortable to come strolling round the outdoor seating at the college, and drinking from the tank. I'll miss you, Paddy!  But the storks were the big thrill - large elegant and intensely shy. I'd never seen storks around the college before. And I suspect they have flown now the waterlogging has evaporated. In this video you can see storks, great egrets and paddy heron - from a distance, but what a lovely vista from just over the college boundary wall. But let's leave you with Paddy on a tour of his estate.  This is the building universally known in Chennai as the MH - the Maternity Hospital. And it's always, always busy, with about sixty births a day.. That's more than 20,000 babies a year. The formal title of this institution is the Government Hospital for Women and Children, Egmore. It dates back to the 1840s and was the first allopathic maternity hospital in India, indeed it's been described as the oldest such hospital in Asia. The hospital moved to its present site in the 1880s and has been much expanded as the demand for its services has increased. The first woman head of the hospital was appointed as recently as 1984.  I was introduced to the hospital while on a heritage walk organised by Madras Inherited along Pantheon Road in Egmore. The hospital houses a small museum including an array of old, and rather sinster, obstetric devices, and jars of 'specimens' of malformed foetuses. (So you can see why I gave that a miss!) The hospital was a pioneer in training midwives, with an exhaustive course ending in a formal qualification in practical midwifery recognised by the Central Midwives' Board in London. And the training really was 'hands on'. As you can see, Jane Bullock who qualified in 1909 (and thanks to Ashmitha Athreya at Madras Inherited for sharing the certificate below) conducted forty births, assisted at six more, and was present at another sixty during her six months training. It would be reasonable to assume that perhaps as many as a thousand people alive today are descended from men and women whom Jane Bullock saw being born.   For three decades, Jayalalithaa dominated Tamil politics. When she died in office in December 2016, she had been chief minister of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu for 15 of the previous 25 years. She was capricious but decisive and a very effective politician. Her regime perhaps wasn't without graft, but she had a reputation for getting things done. Her home - not an official residence but her private home - was on Poes Garden, a broad, exceptionally quiet street in central Chennai just a stroll from where I am staying. It's the white house visible over the tall boundary wall on the left of the photo above. And that's Jayalalithaa on the right of the poster nearby.  Eight years after her death, Jayalalithaa's nameplate is still on display. After a legal battle, her niece moved into the property towards the end of 2021. Jayalalithaa's photos are on show at the security booth outside the property - but what was once a power centre is now becalmed. Poes Garden is no longer the epicentre of Tamil Nadu. 
 Jayalalithaa's succession planning wasn't too great. On her death, after a protracted illness, her confidante Sasikala moved to fill the void. The nature of the relationship between Jayalalithaa and Sasikala is not clear and much of the lurid gossip is probably inaccurate. But Sasikala was certainly Jayalalithaa's closest friend, someone whose loyalty she relied on and who became increasingly politically powerful towards the end of Jayalalithaa's life. But within Jayalalithaa's party, the AIADMK, Sasikala was not popular. The two main factions united to freeze her out. Sasikala was expelled from the party and then jailed for having 'disproportionate assets', so in essence for corrption.She was released in January 2021.  But the warring factions of the AIADMK - led by veteran politicians with strikingly similar sets of initials, OPS and EPS - have brought the party to a low ebb. At the moment, it has no seats in the Lok Sabha, the elected chamber of India's Parliament, and just 62 of the 234 seats in the state Legislative Assembly. It may improve its standing in next year's state elections, but that's far from certain.  What's striking in the posters on display outside Jayalalithaa's old residence is that Sasikala is given almost equal billing to her old boss. That's Sasikala, palms together, in the top left of the image above; Jayalalithaa's on the top right. It's said that Sasikala now lives in one of the imposing houses nearby and the posters suggest that she believes she still has some political sway. I'm not so sure about that.  Jayalalithaa, like so many prominent Tamil politicians, had her roots in the local film industry. And if there is to be an effective challenge to the current governing party, the DMK, it may well come from new figures in the movie industry who have in recent years turned to politics. So the trend which Jayalalithaa so epitomised - using an on screen reputation as political capital - may well remain an important part of public life in Tamil Nadu.   When Queen Victoria died in January 1901, the Brits named pubs after her -like the one in the fictional Albert Square where so much of the action of Eastenders takes place. In India, they went to town and built huge memorials. This is the one in Chennai (then Madras). It's in the grounds of the Government Museum in Egmore and is now a National Gallery.  This ornate sandstone structure is described as in the Indo-Saracenic style. But far from being a fusion of British and Indian styles, this is a straight lift from Mughal India. It was designed by Henry Irwin, an Irish architect, and based on the Buland Darwaza or "the Door of Victory", built by Akbar more than 300 years earlier in the abandoned city of Fatehpur Sikri near Agra.  The Buland Darwaza, Fatehpur Sikri India's most commanding memorial to old Queen Vic is tha vast, shimmering white, Victoria Memorial in Calcutta (Kolkata). The foundation stone was laid by the Prince of Wales, late King George V, on 4 January 1906, and it took fifteen years to complete.  The Victoria Memorial, Kolkata Just under three weeks after laying that foundation stone in what was still then the Indian capital, George was in Madras to lay another foundation stone to another memorial to his grandma.
The Victoria Memorial Hall was built relatively speedily - in just three years. It was for a long time in poor repair, but it has been done up, with the sandstone made good, and is now simply spectacular.  But it's not Victoria's statue, or George's for that matter, that stands outside Chennai's Victoria Memorial Hall. It's Gandhi's!  You'll find old Queen Vic hidden away in the grounds of the University of Madras's Senate House, while King George presides over a car park in, of course, Georgetown.
I saw round Egmore on a heritage walk organised by the admirable Madras Inherited. Thank you!   What an extraordinary design for a cannon. The firing end bears the likeness of a tiger - the cannonball comes out of its mouth. And the two smaller apertures, which I guess is where the gunpowder is placed, are of the same design. But then, this was a cannon used by the renowned Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, in his battles against the East India Company and its allies at the close of the eighteenth century.  According to the sign - and this is in the grounds of the Government Museum in the Egmore district of Chennai so we must assume it's authoritative - the cannon was used by Tipu Sultan in his ill-fated defence of his capital, Seringapatam, in 1799. Tipu Sultan lost, indeed lost his life, and his capital was ransacked. One of Tipu's looted treasures remains on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. It's a close-to-life-size model of a tiger mauling a European soldier. And if you turn the handle, the soldier's arms flap up and down and he makes a noise which one assumes is supposed to be his death agonies. Charming!  The location of Tipu's sturdy cannon is a touch unusual. It's in the grounds of the government museum, but is one of several old cannons placed around the Museum Theatre - a charming and well-used building dating from the 1890s. There can't be many fortified theatres around the world!  The mouth of the cannon has been stuffed up, gobstopper-like, by a piece of wood - I suppose to stop squirrels and other critters making a home in it.
And poor Tipu, his ever so majestic cannon now rests on a Raj-made gun carriage, manufactured at Captain Broome's gun foundry at Cossipore outside Calcutta (Kolkata).  The museum's website has got brief entries on a couple of Tipu's smaller cannons on display here, but not about this majestic piece of military hardware.  I came across the cannon as part of a heritage walk along Pantheon Road in Egmore orgnaised by the always excellent Madras Inherited. Thank you!   Yusuf Madhiya is a Chennai-based businessman and a talented and successful artist and author. He's become a good friend over the years I've been coming to Chennai. We have a shared interest in the city's heritage. And at the weekend, he took me around his home area of Royapuram in the north of the city, close to the commercial harbour. Yusuf is a Dawoodi Bohra, a religious community within the Shia Muslim tradition and akin to (but not the same as) the Ismaili community. There are about two million Bohra Muslims globally, and perhaps 2,000 Bohra households in Chennai. They are traditionally a prosperous trading community from Gujarat - Gujarati is Yusuf's first language and the language of his household.  The photograph of Yusuf was taken outside the impressive Dawoodi Bohra mosque and community centre in Royapuram, where many Bohra families live. It's just four years old, spacious and well designed. Photography inside the building is not allowed, but you can see from the exterior how much attention has been given to the detail of the design. And the fundraising which enabled such an impressive building to be constructed reflects the wealth and strong sense of identity of the Bohra community.
Before the mosque was built, the community for some time used the premises nearby of another even smaller religious community, also of Gujarati heritage. They met in the Parsee club. Just down the road, the Parsees (or Zoroastrians) continue to have a well-maintained fire temple - where prayers are held five times a day and the fire tended to ensure it never goes out.  The sign at the front of the temple reads: 'ADMITTANCE TO PARSIS AND ZOROASTRIAN IRANIS ONLY' - non-believers are not allowed inside. Parsees are the Zoroastrians whose forbears fled Persia by boat several centuries ago and found refuge in Gujarat on India's west coast; Zoroastrian Iranis are the more recent migrants, many of whom left what is now Iran in the nineteenth century. The fire temple has its own priest, known to everyone as Dastur-ji. After his training, he has served as a Parsee priest in Mumbai, Lahore, Nagpur, Bangalore, Jamshedpur and a few other places before coming to Chennai.  There's been a Parsee presence in Chennai for more than 200 years; the fire temple was built in 1910. Nearby there's a community centre and an anjuman or social centre, as well as a small graveyard. The number of Parsees in Chennai is variously put at between 90 and 200 - it depends on definition. It is an ageing community. There are no Parsees of schoolgoing age in the city, and no more than eleven Parsees still live in Royapuram, their historic heartland in Chennai. Many have moved out to more affluent areas. The community remains wealthy and has offered free accommodation to any young Parsees who want to move to Chennai. But most prefer to stay in Mumbai, home to by far the greater part of India's Parsees. So the community in Chennai faces an uncertain future. Older Parsees in Chennai remain Gujarati speakers - so Yusuf talked happily to Parsee elders in a language which only 1%, if that, of Chennai's population understands.  Our other stop on this tour of places of worship in Royapuram was St Peter's, a Roman Catholic church which dates back to the 1820s. The design is said to be like a ship, and the church used to serve the local maritime and fishing community before the construction of the commercial harbour displaced the small fishing villages..  It's a strikingly elegant building, widely known as the 'madha' or mother church, and it has a small separate bell tower - and its large grounds are thronged at the weekend by cricket players.  Some of the design elements on the outside of the church are unusual - at least to my eyes.
A real pleasure to see such varied religious institutions - and big thanks to Yusuf for showing me round, and for the wonderful dinner, with homemade dokla and excellent biryani, at his home afterwards!  |
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