Given a lifetime spent in hanging on like a limpet to the hills in Mussoorie, I have often walked past the old Railway School in Jharipani, gone on towards the ruins of grand buildings.
Those balusters made of solid lime and mortar are the sole reminders that Fairlawn Palace was not always so. Of course, one knew that it was once a home in exile to Dev S J B Rana, when as prime minister of Nepal for barely three months, his brother staged a coup now known as the infamous Kot massacre.
Arrived in Darjeeling, the British could not allow him to stay for it was too temptingly close to the Nepalese border and would spell trouble. Instead they gave him two options: first, land in Delhi (what was later to become Connaught Place) and the second, a place in Mussoorie. He chose the later.
I guess it must have been so much like the country he was forced to abandon. He chose a spot four miles along the old bridle path approach to the hill station. Seated on a ridge, it had splendid views and a big garden with plenty of water. Of course, the exiles had brought with them everything they would ever need. Among these was the famous Naulakhahaar—a necklace of multiple strings of pearls—taken from Nana Sahib when he sought refuge after 1857. This had been brought, concealed in a bottle of mango pickle.
Years later, the estranged brothers—Dev and Chandra—met once more in Calcutta, where the following exchange is reported: ‘Your Highness,’ complained Chandra, ‘you escaped and tricked me of your person.’ ‘Your Highness tricked me of my rightful kingdom,’ was Dev’s tit-for-tat. The book is a comprehensive history, tracing in great detail the ups and downs of a 100 years of Nepalese history through times when the Ranas reigned as PMs of Nepal, reducing the king to a mere figurehead.
The author takes the reader through the stormy days of the early struggle against excesses of the rule of the Ranas to a crisp and cold winter morning on November 6, 1950, when King Tribhuvan’s motorcade set with his family on what was ostensibly to be a picnic. As they approached the gates of the Indian Embassy, the king glanced to the left. To his relief, he saw what he hoped for, a signal from inside. The vehicles veered to the left, and were slammed shut again, leaving the guards stranded outside.
Given asylum in the Indian embassy, the king was flown to Delhi a few days later and the movement of national liberation was launched. It was the beginning of the end of a 100 years of Rana-dominated rule.
Reading the book you could say the more things change, the more they remain the same. Little has changed in regional geopolitics or for that matter in the internal affairs in the Himalayan kingdom. The book is a tour d’horizon of a hundred years of no solitude under the Ranas up until 18th February 1951 when King Tribhuvan ‘abrogated the 1846 treaty with Jung Bahadur Rana and declared that a republican constitution would be drafted by a constituent assembly’. Doesn’t that ring true in our times?