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Himalayan Wonderland: Travels in Lahaul and Spiti MANOHAR Singh Gill, Union Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports, is a man of many parts. Early in his career as a young IAS officer of the Punjab cadre, he found himself "trapped" for a year in the rugged, remote valleys of Lahaul and Spiti beyond the Rohtang pass, which remained buried under thick snow for six-seven months from November to May, with virtually all contact with civilisation snapped. Indeed, he had asked for it. The region used to be part of Kangra district till 1960, when it was made a separate district with the headquarters at Kyelang. Gill had taken a course in mountaineering, and the then Punjab Chief Secretary E. N. Mangat Rai asked him if he would like to go there as Deputy Commissioner. Gill was unmarried then and had a passion for hills and was willing. He had "lust for knowing what should not be known", and jumped into a ramshackle jeep at Manali, with a fellow Sikh Fauza Singh at the wheel, who had steered Army trucks on the slopes of war-torn Burma, now "roaring down the mule tracks that did duty for roads in Lahaul".
Gill had stumbled into a strange and mystic land and lived in a house built over a century ago by Moravian missionaries, said to be haunted by the ghost of a missionary’s wife who mercifully spared him a visitation. He set about devouring dusty old district gazetteers penned by British officers and surveyors, uncovering old legends about the daunting Rohtang and the towering cliffs and peaks amidst which he lived. He read moth-eaten old chronicles left by Buddhist scholars and Moravian missionaries and everything else he could lay his hands on. He left no account un-perused written by Shuttleworth, Harcourt, Fairly, Emerson, Arthur Lall, Azim Husssain, Col Bruce or G. D. Khosla, recounting them in his inimitable style, enlivened by his wry wit. He wanted to get to the soul of the land and its people and mixed with them freely, in their joys and sorrows, in wedding celebrations or funerary services. He left no monastery unvisited, though tucked up on ever so high a cliff, Karding and Sha-shur, Kye, Dunkhar and Tabo, trudging up resolutely in still, silent, sunny winter months with his trusted Sancho Panja, Tshering Dorje. His delightful account of his sojourn in this Shangri-la, replete with allusions to the poetry of Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Kipling and others, brings it all alive to the entranced reader. There was hard work, too, to ameliorate the plight of the people, bringing potable spring water to their homes, making new seeds available for crops, ushering them into the modern world. Then, there was the tragedy of hundreds of labourers trapped in an avalanche at Khoksar and a party of Films Division and of geologists lost in a snowstorm on way from Spiti. Gill walked 54 km from Kyelang to Khoksar in rain and sleet and camped there for a few weeks, starting free food kitchens for the distressed people and rendering medical and other help. If Lahaul is out of this
world, Spiti beyond the Kunzum pass, doubly distanced from
civilisation, is over the moon! Gill’s class fellow, Virender Sibal,
two years his junior in the IAS, was the satrap of Spiti, who would
reproach Gill over wireless for " to his blighted region,
ensconced as he was in the salubrious climes of Kyelang! Gill decided
to inspect the Assistant Commissioner’s court. It was truly an
arduous mega march lasting a fortnight in the bone-chilling dry
desert, rarely, if ever, undertaken by a Deputy Commissioner. In the
night he returned to Kyelang, straining every nerve, as there was
heavy snowfall on the Kunzum pass. It was a hair-breadth escape from
half-year "captivity" in Kaza with Sibal, who lived in a
dark, dingy cell. Sibal had accompanied this reviewer to Kaza five
years ago, over forty years after he had left it, and had spent hours
searching for the his old cell in the new Kaza that had sprung up,
flaunting painted gable roofs, looking like a picture postcard!
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His
one-year sojourn in these enchanting regions, where gods, ghouls and
ghosts were a "living" presence, was to remain indelibly
imprinted on Gill’s mind and haunt him forever. The vision that
bubbled up as a delightful book in 1972 has now flowered into this
unputdownable memoir.