Landour cantonment is less quaint and more crowded now

Anjenie’s love story is what romance novellas are made of.

A Gujarati from Mumbai, she met the man of her dreams when she was in her 20s at the Standard Grand skating rink near the cantonment town of Landour in the early 1960s. Prem Dutt Bijalwan, a strapping mountain man, was the ice skating champ. Love blossomed and culminated in marriage in the face of stiff parental opposition. Even after 60 years, Anjenie’s eyes well up when she remembers the days gone by.

“They say love marriages don’t last, mine did,” says Anjenie. “Every day, we worked together shoulder to shoulder. And we were so happy.”

Her earliest memories of Landour, about 35km from Dehradun, are vivid and every moment tied to her late husband. “The Landour military cantonment was such a beautiful place,” recalls Anjenie. “The streets and drains were clean, everything was spic and span. It was a sleepy hamlet where everyone knew everyone.”

But the times have changed, so has the cantonment. “In the last 25 years, it has become horrible and messy,” says Anjenie. “I find it difficult to step out from my front gate to go buy vegetables. There is dirt all around. It is messy and the crowds have invaded. There are vehicles every minute ferrying excited tourists up the hill. Now I don’t even know my neighbours. Many have left, new people have come.” And, there are no more skating rinks, she says, wistfully.

Anjenie lives in an old stone house that her in-laws had bought from the British in the early 1960s. It needs renovation, but being inside a cantonment area, Anjenie will need permission from the cantonment authorities before making any changes.

She is in two minds over the government’s move to disband cantonments. “I have heard there will be smaller military stations,” says Anjenie. “I just don’t know whether it is for better or worse. In Landour, we have only known the cantonment board. We do not know how the civilian municipality will function. We have heard that there will be a plethora of taxes―for water, for power, for everything. But permissions to build bigger buildings and hotels will be easier. The beauty of Landour, of whatever remains, will vanish.” Anjenie’s two grandsons have brought out a book of poems on the Landour that was.

Named after a small Welsh town Llanddowror, Landour saw its first permanent building being built by the British in 1825. All of 1,040 acres with 86 houses that pay tax, Landour is a small cantonment on a comparative scale. Of the 62 cantonments in the downsizing list across the country, nine are in Uttarakhand. Of these nine, seven are on the de-notified list. The two exceptions as of now are Landour and Chakrata, about 90km northwest of Dehradun.

“The bazaar gossip is that the cantonment is being wound up,” says Ganesh Saili, author, photographer and illustrator. “As far as Landour is concerned, I don’t think it really is a good idea.” Saili has been in Landour all his life after his father, a cantonment employee, built a home on a hillside. “I was born here in 1948,” he says. “These are the roads where I have walked with my father.… The times we saw were simple times, of simpler people.”

Even then, a sense of community prevails in the town. “It is also a melting pot of cultures,” says Saili. “There are students from 29 nationalities that are studying in Woodstock school.”

Close to Saili’s beautiful home, Victoria, a young lady from Nagaland, and her husband have set up a cozy food joint serving Naga and Korean food.

The once sleepy town is slowly waking up to a new reality.