‘Twas the phone call. It was music to the ears.
‘Tell me about my ancestor’s Mussoorie days!’ asks pretty Isha. Finally, I had found someone doing exactly what I have done all my life. Isha, in collaboration with curator Aditya Arya, was archiving old family albums of her family.
Shall I tell her about the ruins? Of crumbling gateways or balusters made out of lime mortar? In Fairlawn Palace they are the sole reminders of a grand past.
This was home to Maharaja Dev Shamsher Jung Bahadur Rana, Prime Minister of Nepal for 144 days, before he was deposed by his brother in a coup.
A stay in Darjeeling was forbidden. That would have been too temptingly close to the Nepalese border. The British offered two options: settle in Delhi (today’s Connaught Place) or Jharipani, four miles along the old bridle path approach to the hill station. ‘The hill was levelled at a staggering sum of three lakh rupees!’ Prince Jagat Shumshere, one of his sons, told me. A Nepalese style palace fit for his large family, twelve sons and four daughters, was built. The exiles brought with them almost everything, including the Naulakha haar – a necklace of multiple strings of pearls – concealed in a vat of mango pickle.
Chandra Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana |
Years later, the estranged brothers, Dev and Chandra were fated to meet one last time in Calcutta.
‘Your Highness,’ complained Chandra, ‘You escaped and tricked me of your person.’
‘Your Highness tricked me of my rightful kingdom!’ was Dev’s tit-for-tat.
The Ranas reigned as prime ministers of Nepal, reducing the king to a mere figurehead, who retreated into a hundred years of solitude.
Dev, after a stroke in his fifties, wrote to his brother: ‘I am growing old and am now a broken man. Pray grant that I may see my country once again before I die.’
‘Just as no forest can contain two tigers, nor one scabbard two swords, so there is no place in Nepal for you and me,’ was all his brother wrote.
Bursting into tears, broken-hearted, on February 20, 1914, aged fifty-two, he died ‘a mysterious death by his own gun’.
Searching for material for a book on Mussoorie, I asked Lt. Gen. R.K. Jasbir Singh, Isha’s grandfather, for memories of his wife’s home. ‘Fairlawn was a magnificent structure embodying the best of Nepalese and European designs – it needed a retinue of over a hundred people to tend to the place,’ he wrote.
Maharaja Dev Shamsher Bahadur Rana |
‘In the 1950s, Shumshere left the hills for Nepalganj. In his later years he turned to yoga and became a strict vegetarian. Now it may be nigh impossible finding one worth his salt who can do without meat (besides, wine and women!) ‘Mussoorie Rana’ is reputed to have more than made up for the loss of non-vegetarian food by fully indulging in the others until he passed away in Kathmandu in 1957.’
Go Isha! Go! Know this – you are loved. Go sing a song for the Ranas.
