 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.  
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(... and read to the end for the story of Khruschev's chandelier ...)  In the first half of the last century, there was one commanding hotel in Srinagar - Nedou's. It's still there. At least, the building is. But it hasn't had guests for many decades. Indian security forces were billeted there, but they have now gone. The site, on M.A. Road (photographed as best I could through gaps in the fencing and barbed wire) is a mess. But word around town is that Nedou's is to be reborn, with the old facade retained. What a heartening prospect!  The Nedou family story is fascinating. Michael Adam Nedou - I think that's him on the right, photo courtesy of the Nedou's Gulmarg website - came to India from Dubrovnik (then also known as Ragusa), now in Croatia but at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nedou was an architect, and in the 1880s opened smart hotels in Lahore and then in the Kashmiri ski resort of Gulmarg. Nedou's Gulmarg is still going, and featured memorably in Molly Kaye's thriller, Death in Kashmir. (Nedou's have also recently opened a small boutique hotel in Srinagar). The writer on post-colonialism Nyla Ali Khan has retrieved the story of the Nedou dynasty in Kashmir - a family of which she is part (by my reckoning, she is Michael Adam Nedou's great-great-granddaughter). The best known Kashmiri Nedou is Michael Adam's son, Michael Henry Nedou, universally known as Harry, who was born in Pune in 1877. So he would have been in his early twenties when the flagship Nedou's hotel, on what is now Srinagar's Maulana Azad Road, opened in 1900. It was the city's first round-the-year, 'European' hotel - previously European visitors had usually stayed in houseboats. Francis Younghusband commended the hotel in his 1909 account of the Kashmir valley, and clearly found life there agreeable. 'Srinagar is indeed a gay place for the summer months', he wrote, 'with games going on every day, dances nearly every week, dinners, garden parties and picnics.'
 The entrance block of Nedou's, Srinagar as it is today  Nedou's was well placed to ride the wave of tourism and colonial-era 'rest and recreation' which enveloped Kashmir from the 1920s and hits its crest during the Second World War. In 1947, there were a few hundred all-the-year-round European residents of Srinagar. As a lashkar, an army of Pakistani tribesmen, advanced on Srinagar at the end of October 1947, Leela Pasricha told me how she fled from Baramulla to a well appointed lodge at Nedou's. It was where the foreign correspondents covering the conflict stayed. And in Nedou's bar, journalists got first-hand accounts from Indian army officers of the progress of the fighting and sought out the pilots who could hand carry their copy back to Delhi. In the National Army Museum in London, there's a letter written from Nedou's in early November 1947 by a British woman, Gwen Burton, who found herself unwittingly caught up in the first act of the enduring Kashmir crisis. 'We never thought we would be in the siege of Srinagar! Not at all pleasant + very nerve racking. Food is beginning to get scarce, no butter in the hotel now + flour very scarce. ... We have had lovely weather here so far + only hope it goes on.' She too found a pilot to carry the letter to Delhi and post it there.  I am not sure whether Nedou's was still taking guests right up until the insurgency started at the end of the 1980s.By the time I first came to Kashmir in 1993, the site was under Indian military control. And that remained the case for about twenty years. Now the security forces have left Nedou's, there's an opportunity for renovation. And according to a contractor I was chatting to in Srinagar the other day, plans are taking shape. If I find out more, I'll update this post. A couple of other commercial institutions from the colonial era (technically Kashmir was a princely state, not part of the Raj, but let that pass) - the Suffering Moses handicrafts store,and onetime society photographers Mahatta's - are still in business on the Bund, the riverside walk, a short distance away. It would be nice to have Nedou's back.  From a 1916 guide to Kashmir And as a footnote: the Nedou family married in to the premier political dynasty of modern Kashmir. Here's the story -
Harry Nedou married a Gujjar woman, Mir Jan. Their daughter Akbar Jehan (they had several sons too) married Sheikh Abdullah, the 'Lion of Kashmir', the foremost Kashmiri nationalist of his generation. (Tariq Ali has suggested that Akbar Jehan earlier entered into a brief marriage to T.E. Lawrence, but Lawrence experts are unconvinced). Sheikh Abdullah's grandson, Omar Abdullah, is currently the chief minister of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. So the Nedou family have played quite a part in Kashmir's history. LATER - NEWS FROM NEDOU'S: A family member has got in touch to confirm that there are indeed plans to refurbish and reopen their Srinagar hotel. The intention is to keep the atmospheric colonial-era exteriors, and to thoroughly modernise the interiors. I'm told Nedou's still has a chandelier presented to the hotel by, of all people, the Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev - unlikely as it may seem, he and Bulganin visited the Kashmir valley in December 1955. The chandelier is apparently structurally sound, but bits of the glass have been smashed and splintered over the years. (Is that a metaphor for something?) |
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