An item from The West Australian, Tuesday,
November 28, 2000 (sent in by Brenda Naser nee Brewster)
Toy for all the world
Indians
love their Toy Train. Now the world can, too. The Darjeeling
Himalayan Railway, known as the Toy Train, has been handed over to United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which will
administer it as a World Heritage Site from Sunday.
Indian
Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee has dedicated the Toy Train, named because of
its small size, to the people of the world. UNESCO declared the 19th
century Darjeeling Himalayan Railway a World Heritage Site on December 2, 1999,
the second railway heritage site after one in Australia.
The UNESCO World Heritage Committee attached tremendous importance to
the emotional, cultural and economic relationship the small steam train had
built with locals since 1881.
The
train begins its nine-hour journey 121m above sea level and winds its way up the
Himalayan foothills to Ghoom at 2244m, the second highest railway station in
the world. It then begins its descent to Darjeeling, 6.5km away at 2064m.
For decades the Toy Train led the local economy, but as faster means of
transport became available, fewer people used it.
Snob
appeal fails to save India’s old school ties
by Julian West, in Darjeeling
The once great British
public schools, founded during the Raj to produce a new generation of empire
builders and their "brown sahib" heirs, are dying 50 years after
India gained independence. Many are simply crumbling away. Others, which
schooled the likes of the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, are the victims
of failing standards and poor English.
Almost all have suffered
from a decline of what old boys remember as "the public school
spirit", instilled by dedicated British bachelors and spinsters who
"stayed on" after 1947 to educate the next generation of Indian
schoolboys.
Nowhere is this more
apparent than in Darjeeling, the home of India's oldest British public schools.
Before the capital of British India moved from Calcutta to Delhi, this
Victorian toy-town, 6.000 ft up in the Himalayas, was the summer playground and
schoolroom of the Raj.
Darjeeling is still a
school town, its hillsides thick with small boys and girls in maroon and blue
uniforms. But, like the once elegant hill station with its potholed promenades
and collapsing colonial facades, most of the schools have seen better days.
Dow Hill and Victoria
schools, 1,000ft above Kurseong, a tumbledown tea town that was formerly a pony
halt en route to Darjeeling, embodied the grand colonial tradition.
Their register, which first records the admission in 1898 of "Winifred
Roake, of good character", recalls an era of copperplate handwriting and
upstanding Victorian values.
Victoria was founded in
Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year by British merchants in Calcutta to
provide the future backbone of the empire. But now its paint is peeling and
most of the windows are broken. A sign says: "Keep off the gardens".
But there are no gardens, only a dusty, unswept yard.
The academic standards of
its sister school, Dow Hill, have declined so far in the last decade that where
up to 70 per cent of pupils went on to higher education, now the figure is
barely 10 per cent.
Discipline has all but
collapsed and many children hardly speak English. Worse, for schools that once
prided themselves on character building, the esprit de corps, as the
deputy headmaster Sunith Battarcharjee put it, "has gone".
Mr. Battarcharjee, a
biology master who has spent 27 of his 53 years at Victoria, attributes this
partly to "corruption in admission procedures", a common practice in
India whereby parents pay to get their dim children into schools.
"Old boys and girls
from all over the world used to visit us. They knew every word of the old
school, song," said Radhika Pradhan, the headmistress of Dow Hill who
describes herself as "the last of the old lot".
She added: "Now they
don't love the school like they used to. We just can't mould them
anymore."
One old boy at least,
Kalyan Mukheriee, 42, a filmmaker-who spent his kindergarten years at Dow Hill,
views his school with nostalgia. "I had an English teacher, Miss Lavia.
She taught me there were beautiful things in life that were not about
money," he said. "The English in their own way set a standard.
Culture was more important than cash."
The centenary albums of
Darjeeling's six best-known British public schools evoke a bygone era of quaint
language and stiff upper lip. But, in reality, only one has remained faithful
to its original ethos.
St Paul's, sited loftily
above Darjeeling, founded in 1823 by Calcutta "boxwallahs" to provide
"an upper-class public school education" for their sons, has been
described as "the Eton of the north-east".
The school still draws its
750 pupils mainly from wealthy Indian business families. Alone among
Darjeeling's schools, it preserves a formality long lost in equivalent British
institutions.
Meals at St Paul's are
rather grand, with Anglican grace although most boys are now Hindu - and
turbaned bearers carrying platters of steaming rice. "We are the last
outpost of the older tradition and, yes, we're slightly ivory-towered,"
said David Howard, the Anglo-Indian headmaster. "Our philosophy is, 'You
have to be street-smart, but there's a certain level below which a Paulite will
not sink'."
India's 55 public schools
still hold considerable snob appeal for the country's ruling elite. The most
famous is the Doon School, the country's first solely Indian public school, in
Dehra Dun, a hill station north of Delhi. Although not strictly one of the old
British schools, Doon saw a rush of parents desperate to admit their children
after one of its old boys, Rajiv Gandhi, became prime minister in 1984.
However, it is the very
cachet attached to schools such as Doon that has, in the opinion of one former
master, caused their decline.
"Parents who had money
but didn't believe in the public school system started sending their children
to these schools for status and connections," said Sumesh Singh. who has
also taught at Gordonstoun. "Earlier there was a spirit of community
service and idealism. Now everyone's out for himself"
In
search of history
By Aubrey Ballantine
My interest in genealogy
inevitably led me to research the history of South Park street cemetery
in Calcutta, where some of my ancestors were laid to rest. Less hallowed
by age lie the tombs and mausolea looming in this distant land, in memory of
generations of Europeans and Anglo-Indians. These sentinels of the past speak
silently of the way of life, habits, hopes and fears of a generation that lived
in the vast expanse of this city a century or two ago. Beneath the shady
avenues of cupolas, obelisks, pyramids and mausolea are buried the men and
women who built Calcutta out of a simple trading establishment. Without medical
knowledge of and no immunity to tropical diseases and fevers, they lived at the
mercy of the severe and unrelenting climate of their environment, and all too
often passed away in the prime of their life.
Opened in 1767, the old
cemetery replaced the yard of St. John's Church in the ruins of the old fort,
in which the founder of Calcutta, Job Charnock and his successors are buried.
The "new" cemetery stood some distance from the settlement which was
centered on the Dalhousie Square area, between Mission Row on the east, and the
Hooghly river on the west. The burial ground was then amongst irregular marshy
fields and patches of jungle, located along what was known as Burial Ground
Road. It was later renamed Park Street from the private deer park built by Sir
Elijah Impey, whose house was located on the present site of Loreto Convent in
Middleton Row. The area around what is now Free School Street was nothing more
than a bamboo forest, and it is reported that Warren Hastings hunted tiger here
towards the end of the eighteenth century.
The oldest monument in the
cemetery bears an inscription which reads "In Memory of Mrs Sarah Pearson
ob. 8th of September 1768 Aet. 19". A graceful Roman cupola and elegant
Grecian urn glorifies the memory of Colonel Charles Russell Deare, who fought
in North America and the West Indies, and was slain by a cannon-ball while
fighting Tippoo Sultan in the Carnatic. A finely proportioned stone column
marks the last resting place of the twenty-six year old Captain Cooke, who is
also commemorated in Westminster Abbey. He died from his wounds after an epic
sea battle in the mouth of the Hooghly in which he captured the french frigate
"La Forte". Here also lies the tomb of Colonel Vansittart, whose wife
was a descendant of Oliver Cromwell. Other graves of note are those of Lt. Col.
Robert Kyd, the distinguished botanist and founder of the East India Company's
Botanical Gardens down the river; Lt. Col. James Lillyman, who supervised the
building of Fort William; sons of Charles Dickens; and many others such as
Charles Short and Sir John Royds, after whom streets were named.
There are also a number of
Armenian graves in the cemetery, and one of the plaques is that of "Marcar
Arratoon", a prominent merchant. The Armenians were invited to Calcutta by
Job Charnock, and the East India Company extended it's protection to the
Armenian Church and frequently conferred with Armenian dignitaries.
One of the most interesting
monuments is that of Major-General Charles Stuart who was known as "Hindu
Stuart". He became a Hindu and used to walk from his residence in Wood
Street every morning to bathe in the Hooghly. When he went on leave to England
he took with him many images and idols of Hindu deities and performed religious
rites there. His tomb is surmounted by an elaborate edifice with stone carvings
of deities. Lucia Palk, the heroine of Kipling's sketch "Concerning
Lucia" in his City of Dreadful Nights is also buried here; and
there are one or two links with Thackeray, who was born in Free School Street.
Here also lies the tomb of Lady Anne Monson who was of royal blood, and whose
coffin was carried to the cemetery gates by Warren Hastings amongst others,
where it was handed to six ladies of gentle birth, who bore it the rest of the
way to the grave.
In these surroundings, the
growth of superstitions was inevitable. One which has persisted to the present
day concerns the Dennison family, whose tomb was known as the
"bleeding" tomb. It is said that at certain times of the year it
sheds fluid which resembles blood, and this can still be seen on occasion.
The Park Street burial
ground can be regarded as a repository of social history. Collectively the
tombstones tell of much that would not be forthcoming from even the most
detailed biography of any of the individuals who are buried there.
The
Monsoon
By Aubrey Ballantine
It's "lights
out", and I lie awake in bed, listening to the sounds, as evening draws to
a close. It feels so good and warm beneath the sheets. The sharp and rapidly
intermittent click-clicking sound of cicadas consume my ears. My thoughts
wander at first, then gradually focus on the distant rumble of thunder which
ascends the hill. It turns strangely dark and ominous. The air is thick with
humidity and seems unbreathable. The thunder approaches, becoming louder and
louder. Lightening flashes, forking across the sky. Dead leaves rustle
constantly, as if being conjured up by the wind. The rain arrives. Gradually at
first, beating down on the dry baked earth, elicting delicious sweet smells of
watered greenhouses. Then it roars and descends like a waterfall. Thunder,
lightening, rain, wind and swirl. Brilliant, booming, deafening. Windows crash
and bang. Curtains blow about frantically in a wild crescendo. Rain, rain,
incessant rain. Continuous and monotone, drumming on corrugated metal roofs.
The monsoon has arrived.
THE LITTLE TRAIN THAT COULD IS IN TROUBLE
This article appeared in
The Province newspaper published in Vancouver, British Columbia, and was sent
in by Gillian Featherstone (nee Brewster) ... Thanks Gillian.
Historic railway faces the
axe as groups rally to try to save it.
The Darjeeling Himalayan
Railway, one of the world's most famous steam train routes and a beguiling
relic of British rule in India, is in danger of closure unless railway
enthusiasts from around the world back a rescue plan. Landslides and disrepair
permitting, the narrow gauge train winds 80 kilometers from the plains of West
Bengal up to the hill station of Darjeeling through lush forest with
spectacular open views of the Himalayan mountains, reaching 2,210 meters at its
highest point.
Completed in 1889 and soon
dubbed the "Toy Train" because of its two-foot gauge, it is an
engineering feat that has charmed generations of travelers and became a
pilgrimage for train enthusiasts the world over. But today its condition is
lamentable. Stations are falling apart, track is subsiding, carriages are covered
in soot and the toilets are unapproachable. The timetable is often a lottery.
At its peak at Ghum, the second highest railway station on Earth, part of the
platform's roof has collapsed and ground under the track has given way.
Virtually all that remains of its charm is the hoot and whistle of the
locomotives, which are between 75 and 105 years old, as they chug up steep
gradients and thread their way up the mountains. Locals and tourists restrict
themselves to short trips, as the full eight-or-nine-hour journey to the head
at New Jalpaiguri has become so uncomfortable. Along with the line to
Ootacamund, a hill station in southern India, it is the only steam route to
have survived a massive program of cost-cutting by the Indian government. Its
supporters worry that when an official review period ends in three years, both
lines will be closed for good. A combination of road transport and complete
indifference has led to its perilous decline.
Some railways officials in
Delhi see it as an unpleasant reminder of the luxury the British established
for themselves - the line cut the journey to Darjeeling from Calcutta from six
days to less than 24 hours and was crucial in establishing the town as the
"Queen of the Hills". Given half the chance, they would have closed
it years ago. Only local pressure and a little sentiment in headquarters has
kept it alive. It is unprofitable and they are always saying it's not really
viable" said Ranen Dutta, a member of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway
Heritage Foundation. It has put together a rescue package that aims to
transform the route into a tourist attraction, along the lines of the
Ffestiniog railway in Wales. "We don't want to leave the railway to the
tender mercies of the Indian government. Private investment is essential"
said Dutta.
The railway board has
commissioned a feasibility study of the foundation's proposal for a joint
private and public rescue project. Support and advice, that may lead to
investment, from the United Kingdom Friends of the DHR and its chairman
Benedict Cadbury has been vital to spreading the international appeal of the
project and to the establishment of a similar group in North America. Such help
will be needed alongside local enthusiasm if the line is to be saved. Early
indications from the study group are that a small portion of the line may be
reserved for steam locomotives and the rest converted to diesel. The driving
force behind the foundation, Sharab Tenduf, a Tibetan from a historic
Darjeeling family that runs the Windamere Hotel, a privately owned and
impeccably maintained memorial of the Raj, is nonetheless optimistic. "I
have high confidence it will be the attraction it was in the good old
days," he said.
History sadly suggests
otherwise.
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