Lost now, this gorge once rivalled Bhakra

The Satluj’s gorge at Sunni, below Shimla, was once considered an ideal dam site, but it is lost in the waters of another dam now. A quick brush with history...

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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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Showing now: Bhakra Dam’s best-kept secret

The Ranganath Shiva temple in old Bilaspur, photographed in December 2004

Six decades after the dam was built, the temples of old Bilaspur town still emerge from the waters of Gobind Sagar when the reservoir level dips

If you are on your way to celebrate a white Christmas in Manali, slow down as you reach Bilaspur town and carefully look over the wide valley to your left. You will see a grassy, treeless ground. Grazing cattle and a few pointy mounds break its monotony. The mounds might remind you of temple spires, which they are. What you are seeing is the ghost of the old Bilaspur town, lost in the waters of Bhakra Dam’s Gobind Sagar reservoir more than 60 years ago.

Every winter, as the mountain snows that feed the Satluj river harden, the reservoir level falls till the river shrinks to its ancient girth below Bilaspur. By late December the ground is hard and dry enough to explore on foot. On a sunny day you can stand in its midst and imagine what the English explorer and veterinarian William Moorcroft saw when he passed by in the early 1800s.

“Bilaspur is not unpicturesquely situated on the left bank of the Satluj, which is here a rapid stream,” Moorcroft wrote in his journal. “The Raja’s dwelling, whitened and decorated with flowers in fresco, is neat but not large. His garden contains chiefly pear and apricot trees, rose bushes and beds of narcissus.”

Bilaspur was never a large town, nor the kingdom very rich. It stretched north to south on the Satluj’s left bank and occupied about 5sq km of area. The 1931 Census records 713 houses and 2,673 residents in the town. By the 1950s, when it was abandoned – or relocated uphill as New Bilaspur – the town had acquired a semblance of modern life.

There was the Shree Uma Club where women could read, and play table tennis and other games. A 500-seat cinema showed movies. The 1975 Gazetteer of Himachal Pradesh says, in its early days the hall management regularly told the audience not to panic on seeing the projected images and hearing the recorded sound. Bilaspur also had the Shri Bijai War Memorial women’s hospital with a clinical lab and operation theatre. It was built to commemorate the state’s contribution in WW-I.

All of these stood on the vast Sandhu-ka-Maidan, which also served as a makeshift airfield. “Twice have aircraft landed on the once exciting and vast Sandhu field,” the Gazetteer notes.

The town kept growing although the sword of Bhakra Dam had hung over it since at least the late 1930s. In the 1950s, when Dr M S Randhawa (of Green Revolution fame) visited the town he found the then king, Raja Anand Chand, had added a large Krishna temple beautifully decorated with mural paintings by the Bengali actor and artist Sarada Ukil.

Per an early plan, Bhakra Dam would have stood 152m tall. At this height, it would have partially submerged Bilaspur, 56km upstream. Eventually, it was decided to make the dam as high as was safely possible – about 225m from its lowest foundation. As a result, in 1963 Gobind Sagar stretched to a distance of almost 100km behind the dam. Bilaspur was obliterated.

Well, not immediately, nor entirely. Dr Randhawa paid another visit in October 1970. In his book, Travels in the Western Himalayas in Search of Paintings, he writes that while the town’s palaces were crumbling, “the stone temples still show remarkable vitality, and are intact, and would remain so for long. When the level of the lake rises, their tops could still be seen above the water level.”

He was right about the temples – more than 50 years and as many more submersions later, they are hanging on. Everything else is gone. There’s no sign of the palaces, nor of the stone and cement homes. It’s hard to believe that for 300 years this ground was the capital of a hill kingdom.

The Bilaspur royals trace their roots to Chanderi in Madhya Pradesh. The new kingdom they founded in the Himachal hills was called Kahlur, not Bilaspur, and until 1654 they ruled over it from other places. That year, Raja Dip Chand, a year into his reign and just 21 years old at the time, shifted his capital here.

The Gazetteer says he chose the site on the advice of four faqirs – two Hindu and two Muslim. It was already a place of worship on account of the Beas Gufa – sacred to the sage Vyas of Mahabharat fame – above the chosen ground. Legend has it that the sage used to winter here while spending the summer at Beas Kund – origin of the Beas river – near Rohtang Pass.

Dip Chand named his new capital Beaspur, but with the passage of time the name got corrupted to Bilaspur. He also built a palace called Dholar but it probably wasn’t the one that Moorcroft saw. Although the Kahlur rajas ruled from Bilaspur right up to Independence, the town was always at the Satluj’s mercy. It was washed away in a massive flood in 1762. In 1803, an earthquake caused a landslide that dammed the Satluj for some weeks. When the dam burst, Bilaspur was washed away again.

But the temples, some of which were already about a thousand years old, survived each time. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) says most of the shrines were built between the 10th and the 16th centuries and were dedicated to Shiva. Of these, the temple of Ranganath Shiva was the most important and an annual fair was held around it every May.

The royal family had its own special goddess: Rani Deomati, one of their ancestors in Chanderi. Pregnant at the time of her husband Raja Shib Chander’s death, she was dissuaded from performing sati on his pyre. Many years later, when she had seen her son installed on the throne, she performed the sacrifice.

The hill kingdoms had a tradition of honouring sati with stone memorials. Dr Randhawa, who was an art connoisseur, noted the presence of the Bilaspur temples but reserved special praise for its sati stones. “Some of the sati stones are carved in an artistic manner and are historical records of great importance...I felt that the sati stones deserved to be salvaged.”

Before the town was submerged, the deities housed in the ancient temples were removed to a new temple on higher ground. Plans to relocate the temples have been aired often, but not a stone has moved. With each passing year the temples are buried deeper in silt. If you want to see them, you will have to park your car by the road and walk down the hillside.

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