The Nilgiris Library, Ooty

 

Jenny Knowles with Kamala Ramchand on the steps of the Nilgiri Library. The link with Kamala to the book Cor Blimey! Where ’ave you come from? written by Jenny’s mother Winifred Tovey seemed very fitting as Winnie’s best friend was also called Kamala.

It was the serendipity of social media which put me in touch with artist and author, Saaz Aggarwal, and through her, with Kamala Ramchand of the Nilgiri Library Book Club, Ooty (also called Udhagamandalam).

ISBN: 9780956535931

I felt greatly honoured to be asked to meet with the Book Club members and present to the library a copy of my mother’s book, Cor Blimey! Where ’ave you come from?

In the book my mother, Winifred Tovey, wrote about our lives in India from 1951 to 1967. Dad’s work as a medical missionary at Holdsworth Memorial Hospital, Mysore, connected us with many places and people, from palaces to village huts, and from maharajas to beggars.

My siblings and I went to school in the Nilgiris, bringing mixed memories, the best of holidays that my mother wrote about:

‘Carrington was unique. The bungalow perched on the side of a small hill within a huge valley. The ground fell away quite steeply from the front aspect, giving a magnificent view overlooking the tea plantation. Deep down on the opposite slope nestled the tea factory. More mountains rose and fell all around. In the far distance we could just glimpse the plain, six thousand feet below. Beyond the plains stood the Anamali range of hills. Often, on waking in the early morning, we would rush outside in our pyjamas just to witness the glorious sight of the sun rising over on our left. Below us would be a vast expanse of billowing white clouds, punctured by one or two dark blue mountain peaks.

We watched in silence while the sky gradually changed from pale grey to blue and the clouds from white to a pearly grey, then to cream, until finally, the fiery orange-red ball of sun appeared, huge and glowing above the cloud mass. As the heat from the sun warmed the air, the clouds slowly began to rise. First we could see the bright sky above the clouds, then as the clouds levelled within our line of vision the sun was obliterated and below we had a clear view of the plains – truly breathtaking and never to be forgotten!’

This is a familiar experience for the book club members, who often wake up above the clouds … or in the clouds, and once the sun breaks through are struck again by the beauty of their landscape.

Staff and students from Providence College, Coonoor.

It was  wonderful to share with them experiences of life in India and in particular the Nilgiris.

The Nilgiri Library, photo from a Nilgiri Library Facebook entry

The Nilgiri Library is 161 years old.

Library interior, photo by Nikhil Paingy

Kamala Ramchand describes it in nilgirishistory.weebly.com as ‘housing more than 40,000 books, holding more treasures than all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island, where one can spend two lifetimes …’ 

The Reading Room

Fredrick Price in his book Ootacamund: A History writes that ‘Mr. Sullivan, founder of the Nilgiris, breathed life into the concept of a library in 1829: A subscription has been set on foot for a public reading room at Ooty.’

1829 was also the year when the foundation stone for St Stephen’s Church, Ooty, was laid. It seems incredible that a wild mountainous region, only sparsely inhabited by indigenous tribal peoples became a town big enough to warrant a large church and a library in ten short years.

The Nilgiris rise up from the plain.

Although the East India company took possession of the Nilgiris after the defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1799, the mountains had not been visited by any Englishman until 1818, when two sportsmen on shikari (big game hunting) accidentally discovered ‘the coolness of the ambience in the Nilgiris.

In 1819, John Sullivan, District Collector, Madras, noted above as ‘founder of the Nilgiris’, built the first house in Ootacamund. With great speed the East India Company established the town as a sanatorium for Europeans away from the stifling heat of the plains.

Up to this time, sick and ailing Company employees and their relatives had been sent by ship all the way to the Cape, Africa. Missionaries had no recourse unless their missions brought them home. It must have been exciting to discover a much more accessible place in the hills with a climate similar to an English summer.

For more on the authors and books mentioned in this post try these links:

 

An Elephant Kissed My Window

An Elephant Kissed My Window

by M Ravindran and Saaz Aggarwal

ISBN: 9789383465149

Recently I came upon this book and was instantly transported back to the tea plantations of South India which I was lucky enough to visit in the 1950s and 60s when my father was a visiting doctor to some of the Nilgiris tea estates and when many planters were patients at the hospital in Mysore where he worked.

If you’ve met an elephant at close quarters, you will recognise the extraordinary gentleness described by M Ravindran in his story about a nocturnal visitor …

There in the hazy porch light, stood a massive elephant right at our doorstep, blowing kisses on the glass pane.’

Many of the stories are about encounters with wild animals; not surprising considering the isolation of plantation bungalows, surrounded by hundreds of acres of tea bushes and dense highland jungle.

There are other tales about hauntings, fire-walking, snake catching, lightning strike, and quite a few anecdotes that will have you smiling at the eccentricities of Estate staff and servants, and neighbouring planters.

Saaz Aggarwal started working on the book in 2013, interviewing, among others, M Ravindran. Six years later Ravindran told her that he had written a collection of stories … and so the book came about.

Saaz has interwoven M Ravindran’s tales with stories from other planters; Carolyn Hollis, Denis Mayne, Ravindran’s son and daughter, plus some recollections from Saaz herself and interesting extracts and advertisements from old publications such as the ‘Madras District Gazetteer’ and the ‘Planting Directory of South India’. Along with more than a hundred photos and Saaz’s line drawings, this has created a fascinating insight to the lives of planters from the start of tea planting in the Nilgiris in the early 1800s until today.

In Saaz’s words; ‘This book took me back to an idyllic childhood, its pristine air-quality, vistas of sloping valleys of smooth green from sitting room windows, brilliant night skies and a certain formal grandeur and privileged way of living compounding the fundamental isolation of plantation life.’

The paperback book is published in India, but you can buy it on Amazon –