Discover India - Pithoragarh

Pithoragarh

Something to Write Home About
If you'd like a glimpse of the Nepal Himalayas without actually going there, then the dreamy district of Pithoragarh is the right choice this summer. It was once the capital of the Raikas who were over run by the famous Chand kings. Their ancient fort, much altered by the needs of today, stands as a solitary memorial to the might of that dynasty.

General Hardwicke, on the authority of the Raja's historians tells us of those hoary days: "In the reign of Akbar that prince demanded of the Raja an account of the revenues of his raj and a chart of his country. The Raja, being then at court, repaired to the presence the following day, and in obedience to the commands of the King presented a true statement of his finances, and for the chart of his country humorously introduced a lean camel, saying, ' this is a faithful picture of the territory I possess; up and down (uncha-nicha), and very poor. The King smiled at the ingenuity of the thought, and told him that from the revenues of a country realized with so much labour and in amount so small he had nothing to demand."
Rudra Chand was an intelligent and learned prince and during his reign he so encouraged the study of Sanskrit that his pandits were said to have rivalled those of Benaras and Kashmir. Of course, sometimes his orders had little to do with administration. It is said that when he was hurrying back from Delhi and was riding in the dark along one of the mountain paths where his bridle broke, the groom in the dark picked up a snake and with it mended the bridle. When daylight broke the Raja saw what had happ ened and ordered that the groom should received dastur (dues) from all the villages at the two harvests.
Internecine conflicts seemed to be the order of the day, in these hills which stretch out so peacefully before you. It was not always so. In his attempts to unite Kumaon, Rudra Chand was once routed by Rainka Raja HariMalia. Fatigued by the rapidity of his flight, bereft of retainers, the Raja lay down to rest beneath a tree, and looking upwards saw a spider spinning itsweb. Six times it failed in its attempts to unite one point with another, but the seventh time it succeeded.
The Raja, like the great Scottish king Robert Bruce, reflected that if an insect could thus by perseverance attain its object, surely a man of tried courage and fixity of purpose ought to succeed.
So, as the story goes, all it took next time was to cut off the water-supply to the garrison at Sira and victory chose Rudra Chand's side. In 1597, he joined the immortals.
Lakshmi Chand, the titlilar ruler of Kumaon, was always running into problems. Seven times he invaded the neighbouring kingdom but was repulsed with considerable loss, and to this day the locals point out with pride the ruins of the petty fort of Siyal B unga (jackal's fort) which withstood the might of the great Chand Raja.
To keep the gods on his side, he built the Lachmeswar temples at Bageshwar and Almora and made grants to the other great temples, including Jageshwar in 1602. Lakshmi Chand finds mention in Jehangir's memoirs: "The hill-prince brought a great number f th e valuable rarities of his mountains for my acceptance. Amongst them were beautiful strong ponies called gunths, several hawks and falcons, numerous pods of musk and whole skins of the musk-deer with the musk in them. This Raja is the richest hill-chief , and it is said there is a gold mine in his territory".
Why would the king have taken the skin of a musk-deer for the Emperor? There are no answers. For it is a greyish-brown coat of short, brittle, thick, insulated hair. Nothing much to look at or feel. But the musk gland produces the famed kasturi which has a strong fragrance when dry - a quality which has done little for its survival and has attracted poachers from far and wide.
Strange were the ways of the kings. We are told that a line of villages stretching from the snows to Almora were set apart for supplying the royal table with snow.
Soon, the supply of ice for the royal use was obtained in the mountains, from where it is was despatched by porters, to Damras on the Yamuna, a distance of sixteen kos, It was packed in boxes and carried by raft on the Yamuna for sixteen kos. to Daryapur and then reached Delhi in three days and nights.
Pithoragarh still retains the flavour of a rustic backwater where the excitement of the day is a visit to Rai Gufa- the Pataal Bhuvneshwar. Travelling from east to west, one is now on the edges of Kumaon and for those wanting to take a sip of the last drop, it is easier to exit through Tanakpur to take in the magic of the little towns of Champawat and Lohaghat.
Champawat's claim to fame lies on the legendary Jim Corbett, born in 1875, the son of the postmaster of Nainital. Growing up in the forests around Kaladhungi, a small village in the terai, he absorbed a plentitude of jungle lore. He was to use his exper ience of the wild to subdue maneating tigers and leopards which held to ransom the simple village folk of Garhwal and Kumaon.
Corbett was a master story-teller and wrote of his adventures in books which were best-sellers at the time and even to this day. Worldwide recognition and fame were to come his way as he turned naturalist.
One of his first brushes with the world of the supernatural came as he arrived in Champawat in 1907 to take on the man-eating tigress of Champawat. The animal had strayed in from neighboring Nepal, killing over four hundred and fifty human beings. As du sk feel like a curtain over the hills, Corbett's companion, the tehsildar insisted on risking a walk to the village a few miles down the road in the dark rather than staying at the dak bungalow. What transpired that night he would never talk about, but w e have a letter from another friend which tells us why the tehsildar was so keen to get away from that bungalow:
'Jim and a friend arrived at a very isolated Dak bungalow late one evening and prepared to stay the night. However, after getting a scratch meal, neither of their bearers would remain at the bungalow and went off for the night.
'Jim and his friend occupied separate rooms, and Jim had a hurricane lamp on a table beside his bed. He was extremely weary after a long day hunting a man-eater, but about 1 a.m. he woke up suddenly to "feel" as he put it an indescribable evil presence i n the room. His light was then extinguished and whatever it was forced him to the door and out onto the hillside. He found his friend already there having suffered a similar experience, and he assured me that nothing would ever induce him to stay at the bungalow again;
These encounters with the extraordinary were to become a part of his life and a full thirty-one years after he bagged the Champawat Tigress, he was out tracking down the Thak maneater in the tali of September l938. As he sat atop a machan, he heard a ear -splitting scream 'Ar-Ar-Arr' fading away into a long note from a deserted village. He wrote:
'The scream had been the despairing cry of a human being in mortal agony, and reason questioned how such a sound could come from a deserted village. It was not a thing of my imagination, fort the kakar had heard it and had abruptly stopped- barking, and the sambhar had dashed away closely followed by her young one.'
Inexplicable events were to turn him into a believer in superstitions. Corbett addicts know of his proclivity to shoot a snake on the day before he was to bag a man-eater.
Foremost among the ranks of these almost mystical happenings was in 1929 at the holy hill of Purnagiri above a gorge on the Sarda river. It had been a gruelling trek of sixteen miles on a hot day through the Terai. As he sat back smoking an after-dinner cigarette, three lights appeared on the hill on the far side of the river. Presuming them to be the burning of deadwood in Nepal, he was forced to change his view as more lights appeared. Maybe it was some rich zamindar who'd sent out a search party to look for some valuable he'd lost, he mused.
At daybreak, there was no sign of human habitation or of burning either. He wrote: 'Where the lights had appeared was perpendicular rock where no human being, unless suspended from above, couidpossibly have gone.'
Purnagiri, dedicated to the goddess Bhagbatti, the Goddess of Plentiful, is visited by thousands of pilgrims each year. The climb to the highest shrine is for those favoured by the Gods while the lower one is open to all. Legend has it that a stubborn s adhu struggled to the top oblivious of his co-travellers. The angry Goddess flung the offender to the other side of the giacier-fed river. Banished forever, it is said, he continues his worship to placate the anger of the gods, two thousand feet up in t he sky.
These moving lights are visible only to the especially favoured and Corbett muses. 'This favour was accorded to me and to the men with me, because I was on a mission to the hill-folk over whom the Goddess watches..."
And true to form, the days of the Talia Des Man-Eating Tigeress were to come to an end. In eight years of its fearsome reign, a hundred and fifty people had met their gory end. For a true flavour of the world of Kumaon, walk around, off the beaten track and you might just meet an old timer who heard stories that are found in books of the epic struggle between man and the elements. The Kumaon Mandal Vikas Nigam is one of the bes t organised tourist infrastructures in the country. Its bungalows, big and small, are an oasis of delight. Should you be of the adventurous variety, stay at one of the old Dak Bungalows from the Raj and who knows you might have a really exciting stay-so mething to write home about!