(Listen to this story)
River gorges are beautiful. Water forcing its way between bare, vertical cliffs fills the heart with fear, awe and wonder. But gorges are useful too. There’s no better place than a gorge to build a dam because nature has already done most of the work of building walls around the river. You just need to drop the last piece in the middle.
When British engineers were searching for a site to build a large dam on the Satluj, before WW-I, they decided on the gorge below Bhakra village in Bilaspur because the rocky walls on its two sides were neatly aligned. More importantly, the sides connected under the riverbed, making a very strong frame. The rock was also very hard, which is why the gorge had remained narrow over hundreds of thousands of years.
An official note from 1919 says: “Construction of a dam at this site will be equivalent to restoring a small portion of the original rock barrier that had been eroded by direct river action.”
A dam on the Satluj was needed to prevent not only floods but also famine in parts of present-day Haryana, but the project kept getting delayed and the dam was not built until well after India’s Independence. More than half a century passed between the first recommendation and the dam’s construction.
But if you browse through the old papers, you will find the first idea was to dam the Satluj a long way upstream – right under Shimla’s nose.
Between two states
The first official recommendation for a dam on the Satluj came in 1908. Sir Louis Dane, who was lieutenant governor of united Punjab, travelled along the Satluj from Shimla to Bilaspur that year, and on November 8 he wrote a note recommending two sites “for dams for storage purposes and power development…”
The first of these was the gorge at Sunni, directly below Shimla on the road to Mandi. In those days, most of the Himachal hills fell under small princely states. Sunni was the headquarters or capital of a state called Bhajji that lay on the Sutlej’s left bank. Across the river was another state called Suket. An iron suspension bridge spanned the river at the narrowest point between them, and Dane thought this gorge was an excellent location for a dam.
Incidentally, many years after he retired, Dane was one of the people injured when Shahid Udham Singh opened fire on General Michael O’Dwyer in 1940, to avenge the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Soon after Dane’s recommendation, the English traveller M.C. Forbes journeyed from Shimla to Kullu and left a description of the gorge in his notes: “Nothing can be more magnificent than the rush of the river through this narrow gorge,” he wrote. “On either side the cliffs descend sheer to the water’s edge, and apparently far below it, full of great caverns, fissures, and round hollows…”
He was aware of Dane’s recommendation for a dam at Sunni, and seemed sure the dam would be built there – “it is at this narrow gully that the dam would have to be built, probably with a long tunnel under the hill on the Suket side, through which the water would flow.”
A lost world
Forbes crossed the suspension bridge that was jointly owned by Bhajji and Suket states, and entered the village of Tattapani, which had a rest house and was famous for its sulphur springs. The springs were just a few hundred metres away from the river’s sandy bank and their water was “so hot that the hand can just be held in it at the points where it bubbles up.”
Anyone who travelled from Shimla to Mandi past Naldehra even 15 or 20 years ago would agree that Forbes painted a fitting word picture of Tattapani and the Sunni gorge.
In September 2000 – the first time I visited Tattapani – the century-old suspension bridge was still the only way across the Satluj. It seemed to me the wooden planks shook under the wheels of my bike, but buses crossed it easily every day. Perhaps, the roar of the river below made me edgy.
Four years later, a wide concrete bridge had come up slightly upstream of the gorge and the old bridge was restricted for light use. On my third visit, in 2006, I found the old bridge had burnt down. Charred timbers hung from its middle. But the Sunni gorge was still as spectacular as ever, and Tattapani on the other bank a livelier tourist resort than Forbes could have imagined.
All that is lost now. The Sunni gorge never became a dam, but in 2015 the waters of ‘Koldam’ – a new dam downstream in Bilaspur – swallowed it and the springs of Tattapani. What Forbes had described as a “beautiful, clear, greeny-blue” river “bordered with date palms, bananas and giant bamboos” turned into a vast, still sheet of water.
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