Photos: The Bear
It was the 2nd of December, the day before the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war began in the west. My fellow hippies and I aboard our Asian Greyhound Bristol bus had just crossed the border from Pakistan into India at the Wagah border post when we stopped beside the Grand Trunk Road for lunch. I wandered over to a solitary Jawan (the Indian equivalent of a GI) with an ancient rifle at his shoulder and apparently guarding a small bridge over an irrigation canal.
“Namaste. You are well?” – “I am well,” he replied in good English. Many Indian people speak English, which is the second official language along with Hindi. It’s not surprising that they do; after all, India has 22 languages recognised by the constitution and over 1600 others which are not. It pays to speak a language that other citizens can understand. “And you?” – “I am the same, thank you. You know, over in Pakistan they are distributing papers with ‘CRUSH INDIA’ printed on them.”
This solitary turbaned guard with his single-shot bolt-loading rifle, within sight of what would that night again become a battlefront, looked at me with a faint smile on his handlebar-moustached face. “I think,” he said with great dignity despite his Peter Sellers accent, “we will be alright.” And of course they were. The war ended with a resounding win for India and 93,000 Pakistani soldiers surrendering over in the east.
The roads are not the only obstacle to riding in the Himalaya; the fog can be thick, too.
The history of conflict between India and Pakistan dates back to the ill-fated 1947 Partition of British India which established a Muslim-majority Pakistan and a Hindu-majority India. Kashmir’s Maharaja originally wanted independence but despite a Muslim majority eventually agreed to join India in exchange for help against invading Pakistani sheep herders. This set off the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947-48. The establishment of a cease-fire line (CFL) ended that direct conflict, but the tension has never lifted, and Kashmir has never belonged exclusively to either side. In fact, nearly 20 percent is under Chinese control. The 1971 war was about East Pakistan, over on the other side of India, but there was considerable fighting along the entire western border including Kashmir. Unrest continues.
Charlie loads up some lunch for the long ride to Srinagar.
One way in which this affects travellers is the frequent and seemingly endless Indian army convoys on the road between Kashmir and Jammu. This is probably less of a hassle than it was in my days of travelling on the bus or on the bike, when the only slightly sealed mountain road with its many hairpin turns and dubious maintenance was often reduced to a single lane. Nothing much had changed between 1971 and 1978. Not surprisingly, the army convoys had precedence on the cliffside road past the many washouts and rock falls which had been there so long that they had names, displayed on carefully positioned concrete blocks.
I wasn’t driving the bus, so I only really noticed how difficult the road was when the driver had to back up to take more than one shot at a corner. Worst of all on the Honda, however, was the Jawahar Tunnel, a dank, scary and intermittently lit rough hole nearly 3 kilometers long which has been partly replaced by an up-to-date twin tube tunnel. Fuel tankers and trucks carrying explosive material still have to use the old one, although it has been somewhat improved. An optimistic plan to turn the tunnel into a tourist attraction was launched a few years ago but “the contractor has not started work,” as the local newspaper reports.
I have rarely been as uncomfortable on a bike as I was in that tunnel with the XL250’s single candlepower headlight, and I’ve been in a few scary tunnels. The thing here is, though, that when you emerge from the northern end of the tunnel it is into the Vale of Kashmir, sometimes considered to be the original of Shangri La, the blessed earthly paradise of James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon. It does look beautiful, green and bountiful and a huge contrast to the rugged, bare valley leading up here from Jammu. No wonder the British of the Raj, when India was part of their empire, were keen to use Kashmir as what they called a Hill Station, a summer home above the heat and humidity of the Indian plain.
Fishing in Dal Lake – I’m not sure I’d like to try the catch.
It must have been quite a job getting up here during the Raj, though. Not only is it much further from Delhi than the journey to Shimla, say, the summer capital of British India; it would have been a much more difficult trip. The fact that it was considered worthwhile shows just how attractive Kashmir was. But when the summer tourists got up here, they encountered another problem.
Tune in again for the next post called “In Kashmir With Aruga the Robber.”
Yes, it is Himalaya (Sanskrit, “home of the snows”), not Himalayas.
