An Anglo-Saxon Dream...

SOME hundred years ago—or was it two hundred—a lone Englishman chanced upon a rhododendron hill in Kumaon, and did whatlone Englishmen do when they chance upon a lovely spot. He set up a hill station. A gently curving Mall Road on the highest ridge, full of snug English cottages tucked away in forest groves, all with names like Fair Lawn and Rosemount and Snow Ridge and Mount View and Windy Hollow and Home Farm and Pine Lodge, all with extensive gardens, and plum orchards and pansy patches, with outhouses and sculleries and kitchens and larders for the Indian help. Discreetly hidden in the foliage, some fine stone churches—combing Anglican design and Kumaon stone craft. Then the Ranikhet Club, a sprawling arcaded structure with a fine wood spring dance floor and a well-stocked bar, overhanging trophies of man-eating tigers. At the far end of the Mall, the lower bazaar. As always, the English view of the world was gentle, civil, cultivated, tasteful and utterly English—the closest approximation of country life in Sussex. Ranikhet, as with all good colonial things, was but an extension of the Anglo Saxon dream.