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The New York Times, January 29, 1882, p.8:

STREET SCENES IN BOMBAY.

LANDING EXPERIENCE AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS IN TOWN.

CURIOUS CONTRASTS IN CIVILIZATION--
HOW STUDIES AT MIDDAY AND AFTER NIGHTFALL DIFFER--
NO MAN GOING UPON HIS OWN FEET--
SOME BOMBAY HISTORY RECALLED.

    BOMBAY, Dec. 1.--India at last...

    The historical reknown of Bombay [Mumbai], and the prominent place it holds in the annals of England's eastern empire, are apt to raise expectations which its first appearance does not by any means satisfy. Ceded to Britain by Portugal in 1662 as part of the dowry of Charles II.'s Queen, Katerina da Braganza, it gave promise at the very outset of the sharp bargaining of which it was one day to be the centre. The two parties to the contract quarreled over its exact import, the English attempting to maintain that the cession included the adjacent islands of Galsette and Elephanta, while the Portuguese insisted that it referred only to the actual island of Bombay itself.

    Six years later the new colony was handed over to the East India Company, (then just beginning its wonderful career,) which, in 1687, transferred the seat of its trade thither from the adjacent port of Surat, and encircled the new factory with a wall, of which some traces are still left. When that wall was built the only other spot of ground possessed by the English in all India was the equally insignificant factory which lay within the ramparts of Madras [Chennai]. The sceptre of the East had not yet departed from the Moguls, and all the splendor that gilded the closing years of that wonderful dynasty seemed to have concentrated itself in the mighty figure of Aurengzebe.

    Little could the haughty and magnificent despot have imagined that the "huckstering unbelievers" to whom, with his luxurious palace at Delhi, he flung a permission to trade in his dominions as one would fling a bone to a stray dog, were one day to trample the Mogul empire itself in the dust, to make his own descendant the lowest of their vassals, and to reign supreme from the coral reefs of Cape Comorin to the eternal snows of the Himalaya.

    These grand associations harmonize but ill with the first glimpse of the famous spot itself. Owing to the flatness of the island, Bombay does not become visible for more than an hour after the huge shadowy outline of the "Western Ghauts" (which are to the Bombayan what the Catskills are to the New-Yorker) have come plainly into view along the horizon. And when the great city at length appears in the from of a few white houses shrinking away into a mass of trees, as if ashamed of themselves, or anxious to escape from the thick black smoke poured forth unceasingly by several tall factory chimneys, you are reminded of Manchester or Pittsburgh much more than of

Thy Towers, Bombay, gleam bright, they say,
Beside the western sea.

    But at this moment a seasonable diversion is effected by the sudden up-rush of a double jet of water from the sea just in front of our bows. In another instant the smooth surface of is shouldered into circling waves, in the midst of which rise the fluked tail and huge clumsy head and vast, black, unwieldy bulk of an enormous whale. While we are watching his awkward gambols, the town and the surrounding islets come out plainer and plainer every moment, and at length, just as the western sea is all ablaze with slanting sunlight, we drop our anchor just astern of a huge four-masted clipper, and are, as the Captain remarks with a complacent chuckle, "All snug for the night."

    And now, is not this a matchless panorama? To the west the white villas and wooded slopes of Malabar Hill, the fashionable quarter of Bombay, seem floating in a sea of golden glory; but behind us the dark ridge of Elephanta Islet, and the steep, tower-like hills of the mainland beyond it, have already waned from purple to gray, and are just about to vanish altogether amid the fast-falling shadows of night.
    Within a cable's length of us lie three or four big, clumsy buggalows (native coasting vessels,) painted and decorated queerly as a toy Noah's ark, and with such low prows and such enormously high sterns that they always seem to be sinking bow foremost. To and fro across the glittering surface the native boats shoot like fire-flies, showing at times a glimpse of dark faces and white robes and gay-colored turbans and scarlet sashes from beneath the huge lateen sail, which is so immeasurably bigger than the boat that carries it as to suggest a table-cloth hoisted over a spoon.

    But what is this burst of discordant yells and this frantic rush of dusky figures along the deck of the stately mail steamer on our port bow? Is she being attacked by pirates, or are a gang of Thugs exemplifying their peculiar theory of man's duty to man at the expense of crew and passengers?
    Not so; it is only a gang of native longshoremen "knocking off" for the day, with the inevitable accompaniment of screeching and chattering... But all sounds die away little by litte, and the deep, dreamy stillness of an Eastern night settles down upon sea and shore.
    The moon comes creeping up over the dark mountains, giving to the great city that shadowy, unsubstantial look which haunts one in the mirage towns of Gustave Doré; and you lie back on your cane lounge on deck to be lulled by the lapping waves into a confused dream of Aladdin, Nadir Shah, Baber, Selim the World-holder, and Sinbad the Sailor.

    But who can describe Bombay itself, seen for the first time in the stillness of early morning, beneath the splendor of the tropical sunrise? Now that Hawthorne and Dickens are gone, there is no man living who could do full justice to that mingling of ancient and modern, European and Asiatic, high class civilization and quaint, primeval barbarism. Even before you set foot on shore, the strange contrast begins to make itself felt.
    From the side of the big, black-hulled English steamer, with its red smoke-stack and sturdy blue-jacketed crew, you drop into a kind of trough of wattled bamboos with a ribbed cotton sail--the perfect likeness of those which swarmed around Vasco de Gama's "high-pooped caravels" when he neared this coast four centuries ago--manned by three or four gaunt, black spectres in white shrouds, thin and supple enough to be used for cording a parcel...

    You step ashore at a flight of stone steps which would just suit the Thames or the Hudson; but a tall cocoa palm casts its shadow upon them, and the turbaned Custom-house officer who rummages your valise has such a keen, narrow-muzzled profile, such sharp white teeth, and small cunning eyes, that you are tempted to adopt the Buddhist doctrine of transmigration, and to suppose that he is being slowly promoted into a wolf for diligence in the discharge of his Custom-house duties.
    Up comes a regular four-wheel hack carriage, whose white-robed, black faced driver wheels it round so sharply as almost to overturn one of those queer wheelbarrow-like native carts, drawn by hunch-backed Brahmin oxen, which were in fashion here when Abraham was still and unknown Sheikh on the steppes of Chaldea.
    In the shade of a post-pillar of the most approved modern pattern, a gaunt, sinewy, half-clad Hindoo cheestie (water-carrier) has coiled up his bare, brown limbs to sleep, with his swollen water-skin, which looks very much like a dead dog bloated by drowning, under his head by way of a pillow.

    The further you go the more striking does this curious contrast become. Looking up at the shop fronts as you pass along you see "Thomas Smith & Co., Shipping Agents," figuring side by side with "Framjee Cowrojee, Mat-maker." A tram car, blazing with advertisements, comes jingling and rattling past a gang of blue-frocked native women, who are plodding along with their children slung at their hips, and huge burdens dexterously poised on their heads, as their forerunners did before the first Mogul Emperor had crossed the Himalaya.
    A sturdy British non-commissioned officer, striding past with measured tread and shoulders thrown well back, almost brushes his jaunty scarlet jacket against a swarthy fierce-eyed native policeman in dark blue, with a genuine New-York "locust" in his lean dusky hand and a kind of flat red tea-cake on his head.

    But the character of studies from life in Bombay depends very much upon the hour at which they are taken.

    In the middle of the day the population is represented chiefly by dogs, oxen, and native policemen, with here and there a Hindu beggar attired chiefly in a pair of braces, and so meagre as to recall the story of the band-master who was so thin that when he stood up with his baton in his hand no one could tell which of the two was going to beat time with the other. A few gray-headed Parsee tradesmen may be seen peering from their narrow doorways like old rats in a trap, with their thin brown faces and piercing black eyes surmounted by those queer-shaped caps which look exactly like glazed sponge-bags; while the spacious verandas of the hotels are crowded with ladies in piquant morning toilet, and white-coated gentlemen lazily imbibing iced consolation through well-applied straws.
    You seek shelter from the heat in the shade of a clump of tropical foliage which encircles the portico of a magnificent building whose pillared front and far-extending colonnades suggest some famous Hindu palace or temple. But alas! the supposed palace is nothing more romantic than the general Post Office...

    But with sunset the slumbering town starts into life... Vehicles of every kind--carriages, buggies, "gharries," and those queer overgrown coffins known as palanquins--disturb the powdery dust in every direction. Rotten Row (for the sea-fronting caplanade has copied the name as well as the appearance of the famous London promenade) swarms with smart young subalterns and jaunty civil service clerks, making their horses prance and caracole to attract the attention of passing ladies. Stalwart, red-whiskered British Colonels, omelet-complexioned District Judges, bilious, heavy-eyed Commissioners, newly arrived tourists in plaid or gray tweed, pretty girls imported from English boarding schools to become "fishers of men" in the Bombay marriage market, and corpulent Parsee merchants, attended by red-turbaned native servants, follow each other in endless procession. But one and all are either on horseback or on wheels, for in this country no European would ever think of affronting public opinion with the scandalous spectacle of a man going upon his own two feet.

    Close to the edge of the "sea wall" of piled-up stones which separates the shore road and the railway from the beach below, half a dozen loungers, spy-glass in hand, are guessing at the character and destination of a distant steamer; and just below them a score of natives are working, as gingerly as if the stones burned their fingers, at the new "Back Bay Public Swimming Bath," the subscriptions to which come in so slowly that a patriotic resident has just proposed to defray the cost by a lottery of 8,000 tickets at 2 rupees ($1) each.

    But by this time darkness has fairly set in, and it is time to go back to dinner in the hotel saloon, which, with vast height and extent, its picturesque mingling of many-colored Eastern costumes, and its huge punkahs (swing-fans) swaying to and fro overhead, looks quite like an operatic banquet on the stage. The dinner itself, too, is an exciting lottery, for you never can tell whether you will get what you have ordered or something utterly different instead. Indeed, there is sometimes room to doubt whether you will get anything at all, for it often happens that a native waiter will take to his heels the moment he has offered you the bill of fare, as if apprehensive of the consequences, not coming near you again till his rash act has been forgotten.
[unsigned, but written by DAVID KER.]

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    The Republic of India, Asia, is the second most populous nation and the seventh largest country in the world. The capital is New Delhi. The area of India is 1,222,559 square miles (3,166,414 square kilometers). The estimated population of India for July, 2007 is 1,129,866,154.

    The Indus Valley civilization, one of the oldest in the world, dates back at least 5,000 years. Aryan tribes from the northwest invaded about 1500 B.C.; their merger with the earlier inhabitants created the classical Indian culture.

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    By the 19th century, Britain had assumed political control of virtually all Indian lands. Nonviolent resistance to British colonialism under Mohandas GANDHI and Jawaharlal NEHRU led to independence in 1947. The subcontinent was divided into the secular state of India and the smaller Muslim state of Pakistan. A third war between the two countries in 1971 resulted in East Pakistan becoming the separate nation of Bangladesh.

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The New York Times, July 8, 1888, p.10:

CALCUTTA AND ON THE WAY.

PLACES THAT RECALL EVENTFUL DAYS OF OLD.

THE MIGHTY BANYAN TREE--TRAVEL NOW AND IN THE PAST--
WHEN SEEN AT BEST ADVANTAGE.

    SPENCE'S HOTEL, CALCUTTA, May 18--Our homeward journey has fairly begun at last. We have left Burmah far behind, and in India we have only one more thing to do, viz., to run up into the Eastern Himalaya by train, as Lord Dufferin did a week ago, and see the three highest mountains in the world melt into the cold splendor of the tropical moonlight or kindle into living fire beneath the glory of the tropical sunrise.

    Meanwhile we are making excursions through all parts of the "City of Palaces" in a carriage kindly furnished to us by our friend the Maharajah of Vizianagram, whose voyage with us from Madras [Chennai] to Calcutta [Kolkata] was described in my letter of Feb. 4. When he came here yesterday afternoon to offer us tickets for the Theatre Royal he certainly looked "every inch a King," and presented a very edifying contrast to the crouching Bengalis around the hotel door, although he wore only the plain white native dress in which we had first seen him on the Madras steamer, and displayed no jewelry of any kind.

    Calcutta cannot fairly be classed among those places which attract one at first sight. The Hooghly River, upon which it stands, might more justly be called the Ugly River, and the city itself is merely a big, showy, flat, dusty, thoroughly modern town, which, being neither so ancient nor so conveniently situated as its two great rivals, Madras and Bombay, might well seem to have become the metropolis of India by mistake. But if there is not much romance in its outward appearance, there is more than enough in the associations connected with it.

    Not ten minutes walk from this hotel in which I write lies beneath the shadow of the shining dome and jaunty pink columns of the new Post Office that fatal spot where 123 English prisoners died of suffocation in one night, cursing with their last breath the savage despot whose cruelty has handed down to remotest ages the terrible name of the Black Hole of Calcutta.
    In the very centre of the bustling and populous business quarter once stood, if native tradition may be trusted, the gloomy temple of the demon who presides over secret murder, whence the future capital took its name of "Kali Kuttah," (Kali's shrine.)

    Some local antiquary might even now point out the spot where, early one fine morning, a covered litter was seen passing which contained Sir Philip Francis (the supposed author of "The Letters of Junius,") who was returning with a bullet through his body from an interview with the Governor-General. His misfortune, however, was his country's salvation, for had that famous duel resulted in the fall of the Governor-General himself, (a pale-faced little man whose name was Warren Hastings,) that of England's Eastern empire would probably have followed it forthwith.
    Just below the city, where the brown slimy stream of the Hooghly widens into the beautiful bend of Garden Reach, Lord Clive, standing on the deck of a homeward-bound Indiaman more than a century ago, looked his last with those stern gray eyes of his upon the great empire which he had created, and turned his face homeward for the last time, to die by his own hand in the height of his greatness, amid the taunts and curses of the men whose honor he had saved and whose dominions he had enlarged.

    Near the same spot, not many years ago, ended in even deeper and more shameful downfall another life which had for a moment seemed destined to become almost equally memorable. Below Fort William on the left bank of the Hooghly, where the broad banner-like leaves of the palm groves stand massed together like an army in battle array, there rises high above the clustering tree tops a huge, flat-roofed, many-windowed building, fantastically ornamented, and surrounded by a massive white battlemented wall. During the years that immediately followed the great Sepoy mutiny of 1857, this building was at once the palace and the prison of the nominal leader of that tremendous outburst, the miserable old debauched idiot with whom ended the terrible race of Timour, and from whose palsied hand dropped at once and forever the sceptre of the Kings of Oude.

    By a strange and terrible retribution, the appointed jailer of this man in whose name the worst horrors of the great rebellions were perpetrated was one of the most famous of those whom it had marked for its victims -- Mowbray Thomson of Cawnpore, one of the four survivors of the massacre, whose bronzed and bearded visage, as I saw it years later in a quiet little French seaport, still wore that indescribable look wherewith death stamps those who have beheld him face to face in his worst form.

    It must be owned, however, that Calcutta is seen to the least advantage by those who, like ourselves, have just returned from Burmah, where the wonderful mingling of bright colors in the native dress, whether male or female, makes the most ordinary street scene as brilliant and striking as an operatic tableau. This splendid variety is wholly wanting in lower Bengal, where the most indulgent spectator must soon grow weary of the unchanging white of cap, dress, or turban, more especially when (as often happens) the "spotless robe of the picturesque Oriental" has become so grimed with soot and dust as to look very much like a collier's tablecloth.

    Nor does the panorama through which you come up to Calcutta from the sea do much to atone for the great city's own intrinsic shortcomings. Like most great rivers, the Ganges in its dotage is a miserable sight when, instead of rolling on as heretofore in one giant stream, deep and swift and mighty, it frets its glorious life away in a thousand puny and pitiable struggles. The transformation of the rushing Rhine into the creeping Vaal, or the noble Niger into the seven muddy ditches of the Delta, is not a more deplorable spectacle than the degeneration of this grand Asiatic river, which begins by leaping down like a flash of heaven's lightning from the unknown solitudes of the Himalaya, only to end at last as a shallow, slimy gutter amid the swamps of lower Bengal. Even West Africa in its sternest mood can produce nothing more dreary and hideous than these low, flat mudbanks bristling with dark, leathery leaves, these endless marshes, whose rank, unwholesome green betrays the unfathomable depths of foul oozy mire below, and these matted thickets, whose black, snaky tangle of intertwined boughs seems knotted into one horrid, unending coil.

    These are the famous "Sunderbunds," which are to Bengal what the great Lincolnshire fens are to England, the marshes of Minsk to Russia, or the Bog of Allen and its sister morasses to Ireland. But in this strange amphibious region, where the water has mixed itself up with the land, the land has retaliated by intruding upon the domain of the water.
    Yonder, where the discolored stream and the swirling eddies mark the whereabouts of the formidable "James and Mary Shoal," stand gauntly up out of the thick brown stream the topmasts of a sunken vessel--the sole remaining trace of the British India steamer Arcot. Out of the same spot--a fatal one indeed for Anglo-Indian packets--our own steamer, the Almora, went aground two months ago, only a few days after we had landed from her in Ceylon.

    Even in these dismal wilds, however, there are not a few traces of man's presence, which grow more and more frequent as we ascend the stream. Every here and there, through a narrow gap in the great wall of clustering leaves, we catch a momentary glimpse of a tiny thatched hut, with two or three queer little brown "pickaninnies" grouped around its low doorway, half a dozen meagre fowl strolling listlessly over the clearing in front of it, and a small green square of rice plantation in the background.
    As we advance these patches of civilization become thicker and thicker, showy houses of stone or brick are seen peeping through the trees--a telegraph station makes its appearance--the whistle of an unseen train is heard behind the bamboo thickets--several bullock carts are seen plodding along in a well-made road which runs parallel with the river, and at length the vanguard of Calcutta itself comes in sight, in the form of the tall smoky chimneys and big red brick factories of Budge-Budge, a place as busy in its way and very nearly as ugly (though that is a bold word) as any manufacturing town in England.

    These mills and factories appear to be a leading characteristic of the outskirts of the so-called "City of Palaces," and when one's first sight of the great town is taken at daybreak through a judicious mixture of river mist and factory smoke, it is almost as hideous as Liverpool itself. But the picture wears a widely different aspect when the cloudless noonday sunshine lights up the dark glossy foliage of the Botanical Gardens on the Howrah side of the river and gilds the white battlements and carved pinnacles of the King of Oude's palace on the opposite shore.
    Very green and beautiful in the dazzling tropical sunlight, and much more like a toy fortress than one which has witnessed the bloodiest scenes of war, appear the smooth sloping earthworks of Fort William, which represented Calcutta itself in the early days of England's presence in Bengal, for at that time no "Ingrez" could venture to show his face beyond the limits of their circuit without the risk of being murdered.

    And then there begin to tower above the mass of buildings the stately dome which covers the new Post Office and the vast many-windowed frontage of the National Bank. The latter, according to Hindu tradition, stands upon the very spot where in ancient days rose the grim shrine of the goddess of smallpox, a fact which may possibly have suggested the tremendous sarcasm wherewith Burke shattered the exulting appeal of Warren Hastings partisans to the reported erection of a temple in his honor by the Hindus of Bengal: "I know that the natives of India, while worshipping some gods from love, worship others from fear. I know that they erect temples not only to the beneficent deities of light and plenty, but also to the demons who preside over smallpox and murder; nor do I at all dispute the claim of Mr. Hastings to be admitted into such a Pantheon."

    But in those days Calcutta was, in the eyes of every Englishman, more remote than Siberia or New-Guinea is now, and it was seldom indeed that any ordinary Anglo-Indian came home more than once or twice in a lifetime. Clive's first voyage to Madras gave him leisure to spend several months on the coast of Brazil and to become tolerably fluent in Portuguese. Warren Hastings second voyage to Calcutta afforded him ample time to fall in love with another man's wife and to make arrangements for purchasing her from her complaisant husband, which were afterward carried out to the letter. Even Lord Macaulay, as late as 1834, had time enough on his way out to India to read "among many other books," 70 volumes of Voltaire.

    But now the age of hurry has superseded the age of jog trot, and all such things have passed away forever. In our time one goes from London to Bombay in 23 days, and from Bombay to Calcutta in 63 hours. In the days of our grandfathers the one journey occupied at least six months, and the other two.

    As soon as the hot season which is now upon us makes itself felt in earnest, "all Calcutta" (i. e., the handful of European residents inhabiting one corner of it) goes off to the hills as we are about to do ourselves, leaving nobody in town except the 500,000 natives who form the remainder of its population. But when the great migration is only just beginning, an evening drive down "Mall" along the river bank (which is to Calcutta what Rotten Row is to London, or the "Drive" in Central Park to New-York) will show you every detail of the lifelike picture drawn by a recent author:

    "Around you are men of countless different races, clothed in every variety of Eastern garb, from the sleek, swarthy Bengali in robes of pure white to the tall, fair-complexioned, but dirty-looking trader from Cabul, in his high turban and loose sheepskin tunic. Strings of rude bamboo carts, drawn by slow oxen, impede the progress of well-appointed broughams which are bearing rich merchants to their counting houses. The splendidly-equipped scarlet orderlies of the Viceroy's body guard are seen side by side with the tawdry and ill-mounted ruffians who hang upon the skirts of some petty native despot. Everywhere the completeness, polish, and brilliancy of Europe are to be seen contrasting with the rudeness, squalor, and tawdry finery of Asia."

    But the great "sight" of Calcutta is unquestionably its splendid Botanical Garden, on the further shore of the Hooghly, and the giant bunyan tree which stands in the midst of its palms and bamboos like a king amid his courtiers.
    It is true that the five-mile drive thither across the Canning Bridge and through the endless bazaars of Howrah (the Brooklyn of Calcutta) is anything but an easy enterprise to achieve satisfactorily. If you start in the morning the whole journey there and back is one long martyrdom to a heat and dust and glare which only those who have been in India can fully appreciate. If you start in the evening you arrive just in time to see the whole garden vanish from your eyes into the deepening darkness of night, and have to console yourself with the time-honored joke, "There was nothing to be seen, and I saw it thoroughly."

    The latter result attended the first effort which we ourselves made to reach the reknowned banyan, and the bazaar happening to be unusually full that night, our homeward drive through it in the dark, with an accompaniment of shouting and whip-cracking worthy of a royal "progress," vividly recalled Sir George Trevelyan's famous definition of "hi!" as "a monosyllable used by cabmen and omnibus drivers preparatory to running over deaf people."

    But such a spectacle as the monster tree of Calcutta is well worth a double journey, and our second attempt was more fortunate then our first. Starting from our hotel at 4 P. M., we reached the garden a little before 5, and had already driven more than half way across it when our "gharri" (carriage) halted suddenly at the entrance of a long, straight avenue flanked by two ranges of lofty trees, and our Bengali driver, pointing to the far end of it with his lean, brown forefinger, said impressively, "Dekho burra gach wahan hai" (Look, there is the big tree.)
    We followed the pointing finger with our eyes, but saw nothing except a thick grove of small trees, in which the path seemed to lose itself, and this was all we could make out till we got within about 100 yards of it. Then, to our amazement, we found that the supposed grove was all one giant tree, and that its countless trunks were nothing more than the shoots which it had sent down into the earth from each of its mighty boughs, to take root there and spring up again until the whole plantation was covered.

    After walking many yards beneath one huge bough, and noting that this giant was only one among scores--some of which, although so vast and ponderous as to need supports of solid brickwork, seem mere twigs compared with the enormous mass of the parent stem--I began to have a clearer idea of the real size of this vegetable Goliath than I ever could have gained from the inscription attached to one of its largest branches stating that the girth of its trunk is 42 feet, that the circumference of its crown is 850, and that is has sent down into the earth 252 "aerial roots."
    The same inscription tells you that the tree is more than 100 years old. When it was first planted Warren Hastings was turning his face homeward to figure in the greatest political trial which England had seen since Cromwell and his grim comrades sat in judgement upon "the man Charles Stuart." Two-thirds of India and the whole of Burmah were still independent of the British crown. Frederick the Great was still reigning in Berlin. The French Revolution lay hid in the unknown future, and the battle of American independence, though nobly fought, was not yet won.

    And it may be that when not one stone of Calcutta shall remain upon another, and when tigers shall prowl and vultures shriek over the ruins of the Viceroy's palace, the giant tree will still appear amid a vast solitude, those mighty boughs that once shaded the bravest men and fairest women of India a silent and solitary mourner at the tomb of that great empire whose childhood was coeval with its own.
DAVID KER.

TIME Magazine, June 19, 1950 p.37:

FOREIGN NEWS: INDIA: Architect's Dream
    The towers of two crumbling Hindu temples look down on the Valley of Chandigarh, on its scattered mango farms, its monkeys, deer, and wild pigs, its blue jays and peacocks. For weeks now the jays have been screaming and the monkeys chattering because a group of Indian engineers have invaded their valley. The engineers are looking for well sites; they are going to build a city in the Valley of Chandigarh.

    The Punjab was split when India was partitioned in 1947 and the ancient Punjab capital, Lahore, went to Pakistan. The Indian province decided to build an entirely new city for its capital. Such planned capitals are rare. Peter the Great built St. Petersburg on piles in uninhabited marshes; Major Pierre Charles l'Enfant designed Washington for the Potomac swamps, and a U.S. architect, Walter Burley Griffin, drew up the plans for Australia's Canberra, which replaced a sheep station in a wide, shallow river valley.

    Unfettered. To plan the new city, Indian officials picked Albert Mayer, 52, a Manhattan architect. During World War II, when he was stationed in India as a lieutenant colonel of Army engineers, Mayer went out of his way to get to know some of the problems of India and its people, including Jawaharlal Nehru, now Prime Minister. When the Punjab hired Mayer, Nehru said: "Let this be a new town symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered with the traditions of the past." Designer Mayer was delighted with the prospect. Said he: "To a planner it is tremendously exciting. We start with just a blank sheet of paper and do as wonderfully or as badly as we can. It is an architect's dream."
    Mayer first consulted microclimatologists, who study climate in specific areas; with their help he hopes to achieve what Major l'Enfant failed to accomplish in Washington-- an arrangement of buildings that will catch any stray breeze.
    Mayer's Punjab city plan is composed of units called superblocks. Each superblock covers a rectangle approximately 1,000 yards long and 500 yards wide. A superblock is designed to house 5,000 people, includes a central area with elementary schools, playgrounds and parks, and a shopping center. Three superblocks make up a district, with the high schools, swimming pool and auditorium for the district in the center superblock. Only footpaths, bicycle and bullock-cart paths cross the superblocks; all bus, truck and automobile traffic goes around them; for direct traffic to the capitol from outside the city, two wide highways, called greenways, run from end to end of the city. A rivulet running through the valley will be dammed at one end for a lake which will reflect the capitol buildings. The city will start with a population of 150,000, can be expanded to 500,000.

    Most Charming. Novel as much of this is, Mayer has tried to plan for "a city in the Indian idiom." In his shopping centers, he has provided for the open bazaars of the East as well as the closed stores of the West. Of the small, self-contained districts, Mayer says: "The neighborhood principal is particularly important in India, where people usually come from villages." Mayer is also advising Indian architects on the kind of buildings to be used in the new city. His idea of the capitol is a cone-shaped building like the Buddhist monuments which Mayer saw in the Indian town of Gaya, which Buddha is said to have received his enlightenment. Highest buildings of the city will be the five-story legislature and the three-story secretariat. Other buildings, to be constructed of local brick and sandstone, will be two stories high. Building the city will require 10,000 workmen and will cost 125 million rupees ($26,262,500).
    Already the water engineers have sunk four successful wells in the Chandigarh Valley-- in each case the site was pointed out by the traditional Hindu water diviner. After the September monsoons, building will start on government employees housing. Says the Punjab's Chief Minister Gopi Bhargava: "It will be the world's most charming capital."

    Not everyone agrees with Minister Bhargava. Last week the mango growers of the Chandigarh Valley were up in arms. Arguing that the capital will take fertile land, some 170 farmers have been demonstrating against the city for five weeks, with torchlight parades during which they try to stop water-boring operations. The government's reply has been to arrest the demonstrators, take them out of the valley, and release them to walk home.

Chandigarh was the first planned city in India.

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