When a plane flew away on its own from Delhi's Safdarjung airport

Piper Super Cruiser reference image

Remember Unstoppable, the 2010 Denzel Washington movie? A runaway train hurtling full speed ahead towards a town, laden with a toxic cargo. Now, imagine a plane flying without a pilot. Nobody inside the cockpit at all. Impossible, you say? But such incidents happen. Not with the cumbersome airliners that come to mind first, but with small and simple aircraft.

It happened in New Delhi once. On January 16, 1961, a Piper Super Cruiser belonging to Lucknow Flying Club took off “automatically”, rather, “autonomously”, from Safdarjung Aerodrome with nobody on board. The pint-sized single-engine craft, weighing just 430kg — a Maruti 800 weighs 650kg — zoomed down the runway and was airborne before the bewildered pilot could jump inside the cockpit. Minutes later, the plane crashed to the ground, “substantially damaged”.

The case summary published in the annual report of Accidents Investigation Branch of the Civil Aviation Department, Ministry of Transport and Communications, read: “The accident is attributed to an error of the pilot in not exercising adequate precautions while starting the engine by swinging the propeller without a competent person at the controls.”

The matter came up for discussion in Parliament on February 28, 1961 under the heading: “Automatic taking off of aircraft from Safdarjung Airport”.

Members expressed surprise. Jaswant Singh from Rajasthan asked, “Whether automatically the engines got started, or whether the engines were already running and the plane took off?”

Dr P Subbarayan, then minister of transport and communications, replied: “Even in the case of a motorcar, when a man starts it by turning the handle, the car being in gear, it starts off even without the driver.”

Babubhai Chinai, a member from Mumbai, remarked: “But we have never heard about the aircraft and therefore I was enquiring about it.”

Subbarayan then explained that, unable to fire up the engine with the self-starter, the pilot had got off the plane to start it by turning the propeller. Unfortunately, he had not placed chocks in front of the wheels, nor left anyone at the controls. The engine spun to life, and the plane sped off with the pilot scrambling behind it.

Most small vintage planes are capable of such mischief, but the Aeronca Champion has a reputation for it. In 1997, a Champ landed in Ohio, USA, with mechanical problems. The pilot got off and started the engine by hand-cranking the propeller, but before he could jump in again, the plane took off and flew for about 160km — about an hour — before the fuel ran out and it crashed.

Aeronca Champion reference image

In another case, in 2001, a Champ took off while its owner was checking the running engine. It crashed after flying for about 56km.

And at an air show in 2009, a biplane with enough fuel to fly 240km took off on its own, only to crash into nearby trees.

A brief history of monkeypox

In the 1950s the world was getting serious about fighting polio. Labs in Europe and North America were busy making and testing vaccines. But they needed an army of lab monkeys to do their job. So, thousands of monkeys were shipped from Asia to these labs.

In 1958, a lab in Denmark noticed a strange smallpox-like disease in monkeys that had arrived from Malaysia. Tests were done at the State Serum Institute in Copenhagen, and scientists realised they had discovered a brand-new virus.

Because the virus and the disease occurred in monkeys, they named it monkeypox.

Tracing link to Africa

Between 1958 and 1968, several outbreaks of monkeypox occurred in lab monkeys, and because all the monkeys had come from Asia, scientists at first thought the virus reservoir was in Asia.

To test this theory, they took blood samples from more than a thousand monkeys in India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Japan, but found that none of the animals had monkeypox antibodies. This was odd because a viral infection produces antibodies that can be found in an animal’s blood even years later.

The mystery of the monkeypox virus’s natural reservoir was solved in the 1970s after the first case of monkeypox in a human was confirmed in Zaire – now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo – in central Africa.

This time scientists collected blood samples from animals in central and western Africa, and sure enough 7 species of monkeys and 2 species of squirrels had monkeypox antibodies.

While the mystery of monkeypox’s origin had been solved, one question remained – how had Asian monkeys become infected with it?

The answer was that, along with the Asian monkeys, the European and American labs had also imported some monkeys from west Africa, scientists Frank Fenner, Riccardo Wittek and Keith Dumbell wrote in their 1989 book, ‘The Orthopoxviruses’.

The Asian and African monkeys had either come in contact with each other or the virus had been transferred through their human handlers. After strict handling rules were enforced in 1968, monkeypox outbreaks in labs stopped.

But the discovery of human monkeypox set alarm bells ringing for other reasons.

Threat to smallpox fight

A global campaign to wipe out smallpox had started in 1967. It was so successful that by 1972, Americans didn’t need smallpox vaccinations. And on the 8th of May, 1980, the World Health Organization declared the whole world was smallpox-free. It’s the only disease we have been able to eradicate so far.

However, in 1970 scientists feared that if the monkeypox virus – which was similar to smallpox and produced almost identical symptoms – infected humans, it would jeopardise the ‘Intensified Smallpox Eradication Program’.

WHO asked the labs affected by monkeypox in America and Europe if they had recorded cases of animal-to-human transmission, but none of them had. And yet, a 9-month-old village boy who was admitted to the Basankusu Hospital in Zaire on the 1st of September, 1970 had tested positive for monkeypox.

His village had been vaccinated for smallpox, and nobody else in the area had reported fever with a rash, so smallpox was ruled out. But the boy himself was not vaccinated. He was the only unvaccinated member of his family. He got fever on the 22nd of August and developed a rash on the 24th.

While he was at the Basankusu Hospital, his pox scabs were collected and sent to Moscow, where tests showed he had monkeypox. He made a slow recovery over the next two months, but just when doctors were thinking of discharging him, he caught measles in the hospital on the 23rd of October and died 6 days later.

A poor spreader

Now that it was clear that monkeypox could infect humans, scientists became more vigilant. In 1971, suspected cases of smallpox in Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast turned out to be monkeypox infections.

But the good news was that monkeypox didn’t affect humans outside its natural reservoir in central and western Africa. Of the 404 cases reported between 1970 and 1986, about 90% occurred in small villages inside tropical rain forests where people led a hunter-gatherer life and had frequent contact with wild animals.

In one case a chimpanzee abducted a 6-month-old child from a Zaire village. People chased and rescued the child but a week later it came down with fever and a rash that turned out to be monkeypox. Zaire had the maximum cases of monkeypox – 386 out of the 404

Data also showed that monkeypox was not very contagious among humans. With smallpox, 58% of the contacts of a patient used to get infected, but with monkeypox this percentage was just 9% among people who had not taken the smallpox vaccine

In case you are wondering, the smallpox vaccine does provide a high degree of protection against monkeypox because the two viruses are so similar. And in the 1980s data from Africa showed that most of the severe monkeypox infections and deaths occurred in unvaccinated children.

Another interesting and reassuring finding was that monkeypox outbreaks naturally died out after a maximum of 11 steps of human-to-human transmission. That explains why even after lurking in the rain forests of Africa for centuries monkeypox could not become a common human disease even when the smallpox vaccine wasn’t around

But if monkeypox was always a disease of central and western Africa, how has it spread in Europe now?

Clues from America

We don’t know for sure, but the 2003 monkeypox outbreak in America might provide clues. That year, 82 infections were recorded in the US during May and June. New York Times journalist Denise Grady has described the chain of events in her book ‘Deadly Invaders’.

She says the first US cases appeared in the state of Wisconsin. A family got infected from its pet prairie dog, which is not really a dog but a squirrel. The family recovered but the sick pet didn’t.

In another case, an 11-year-old boy got monkeypox after his friend’s prairie dogs bit him. Later, it was found that every single US case had started from contact with a prairie dog. One particular animal managed to infect 18 people. A 10-year-old girl who owned 3 prairie dogs in Illinois became so sick she had to be given morphine to suppress her pain. She had sores inside her throat, Grady writes.

So how did prairie dogs, which are an American species, become carriers of monkeypox? Grady says owning prairie dogs was a fad in 2003, with people paying up to 150 dollars for one.

A Chicago pet store called Phil’s Pocket Pets sold them in large numbers, but it also had a giant Gambian pouched rat imported from Ghana in west Africa. The prairie dogs probably got infected from the African rat.

And Phil’s was just one shop. Altogether 800 animals had been sent from Ghana in one shipment in April 2003. All the imported animals had to be traced and put down. Prairie dogs exposed to the imported animals also had to be killed.

Had the disease spread among America’s wild animals it would have become impossible to eradicate. Luckily, the outbreak ended without any human death, but the US banned the import of African rodents after it, and also the sale of prairie dogs as pets.

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Clive Branson: British soldier who wanted freedom for India

Sent to India just before the Quit India Movement, Branson was not at all like India’s British rulers. His letters reveal a man deeply in love with the country

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It’s February 1943. The Japanese are advancing on India from the east and the country is in the middle of the Quit India Movement. Not the best time to be a white sahib in India, but an English soldier camping in Karwar, Karnataka, is winning hearts.

He’s a poet and painter, and visits the local school one day to talk to the children about Wordsworth’s poetry. One of the boys asks him, “Britain has ruled India for 150 years – if India conquered Britain, how long would it rule?”

Instead of being annoyed, the soldier is impressed. “The brightness and intelligence of these children is splendid,” he writes in a letter to his wife Noreen.

It’s not the first time he has expressed his admiration for Indians to her. While based in Gulunche near Pune, he sees women making a road, and writes: “What dignity the women labourers here in India give to the very primitive making of a country lane.”

Who is this man, so out of character with Indian’s British masters? His name is Clive Branson. Born to a British army officer in Ahmednagar in 1907, he has returned to the country after 35 years.

While in India, Branson writes many letters to Noreen. They are published as a book, ‘British Soldier in India’, after his death in 1944, and it’s through them we know his views about India.

Sensitive to suffering

Almost the first thing Branson does on arrival in Bombay, in May 1942, is search for a book on Hindi. Then, on the road to Gulunche near Pune, he sees how poor most Indians are and writes: “After 175 years of imperialism in India, the conditions are a howling disgrace.”

Later, while based in Dhond, he expresses the same feelings in stronger words: “However much people at home believe in British imperialism, there are 400 million (Indians) who know by bitter daily experience the reality.”

As ‘rations corporal’ of the Gulunche camp, he goes to town daily to buy provisions, and uses the outings as an opportunity to make friends with the locals and learn Marathi. But in the camp, he has to tolerate the older soldiers who are hostile to Indians. Branson calls them “bloody idiots” and writes he is ashamed to think of himself as one of them.

When riots break out after the arrest of Congress leaders at the start of the Quit India Movement, the troops at Gulunche are sent out on law and order duty, but Branson avoids it because he regards it as “warfare against the people”.

His sympathies are with the Indian rioters: “Even though one does not agree with what the people are doing, one understands why they do it.”

He is a communist who has fought in the Spanish Civil War and spent time in a concentration camp. A keen observer of politics, he mocks the British Labour Party for urging the Congress leaders to call off the movement.

“How brilliant! doesn’t the Labour Party know that the Congress leaders are in jail, and that is why the rioting is going on – anarchistic because without leadership?”

Likewise, when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill implies in a speech that the riots in India are a Congress conspiracy to help the Japanese, Branson writes: “Churchill’s speech on India was just filth.”

When a soldier at the camp tells him he is lowering ‘white prestige’ by being friendly with the Indian tea and fruit sellers, Branson retorts: “The fact that white sahibs go into cheap brothels with native women must do much to uphold this prestige.”

He can’t stand the condescending manner Englishmen assume towards Indians. He tells Noreen: “When this war is over, we must come back to India as civilised friends.” In another letter he says: “I know I shall want to come back to India, where I can feel I am with humanity and not just one of a stuck-up little part of it.”

One night, he loses his cool when white officers hit and shout at a young Indian. “I am certain I shall not end my tour of duty in the army in India without getting into some trouble through sticking up for the Indians. But I know who is right,” he writes.

Part of a painting by Clive's daughter, Rosa Branson. She made it as a tribute to him in 2009. It shows him against the backdrop of the British war cemetery in Myanmar (Burma)

Politically conscious

Branson’s letters also record interesting political events in India. For example, his letter of September 26, 1942 mentions a campaign in Gujarat’s Kaira district (home to Amul) to collect 1 lakh signatures from 700 villages to demand the release of Congress leaders from jail.

When the British propaganda machinery tries to tar the image of student protesters with a rumour that some of them have raped a woman, Branson writes, “fancy Congress students demonstrating for the release of Nehru by raping women”.

The poverty of the countryside pains him. “A journey through this country is indeed painful – there is such a vast mass of human happiness, human intelligence, gone to waste.”

So when an officer asks him to paint scenes from army life, he writes: “If I paint at all, I want to paint the Indians...my conception of life is my conception of painting. I don’t paint things I want to forget.”

At the end of 1942, when Bombay is gripped by food shortage and workers are spending up to eight hours a day in food queues, Branson feels depressed at his inability to do anything to meet the “huge situation… so little able to atone for the stinking, filthy, crooked, hypocritical bastards of so-called Englishmen who rule this great country.”

The seaside break in Karwar in 1943 is a pleasant interlude on his tour. “I shall never forget these fishermen, these peasants, these children and their little town,” he tells Noreen. But he doesn’t know he has only a year left to live. On February 25, 1944 he is killed while fighting the Japanese in Burma.

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When Chandigarh was a fort, and Sukhna a river

Chandigarh is a city without a sense of local history. Founded by fiat, designed by a foreign hand and built on a greenfield site, it was born without an umbilical cord. Its first-generation residents came from outside and felt the rootlessness acutely. Their children also grew up in the dark because the school curriculum developed in Delhi didn’t touch upon Chandigarh’s history.

So, the belief that Chandigarh is a city without a history persists, but is it true? What was Chandigarh like before it became City Beautiful? Was it a jungle, or did people live there? What was their daily life like?

Some answers to these questions may be found in the tour reports of British officers. One of them, Dr Bateson, visited the area 154 years ago. He was the civil surgeon of Ambala, and was sent to investigate the reasons for the high rates of goitre and spleen (caused by malaria) in the region.

One of the interesting points in his report – submitted on March 28, 1868 – is that the name ‘Chandigarh’ existed even then, although it was not the name of a city or a village but of a fort on top of a hill.

Back then, the area was called Ilaqa Mani Majra. If you are not familiar with Chandigarh, Mani Majra is an old town that’s part of the Union Territory of Chandigarh now. In Bateson’s time it was the only town there, and it was surrounded by 69 villages.

When Bateson visited Mani Majra town it was already more than a century old and had 2,325 houses with 6,045 inhabitants.

The Gazetteer of Ambala district from 1884 says Mani Majra was part of the Sirhind province of Punjab under the Mughals. When the Mughal governor Zain Khan died in 1762, a Sikh leader named Garib Das seized 84 villages around Mani Majra, and made the town his capital.

The new ruler of Mani Majra got the title of ‘raja’ from the Afghan invader Ahmed Shah Abdali. Later, the British confirmed it when his successors helped them in their war against the Gurkhas.

The popular temple of Mansa Devi outside Chandigarh was also built by Mani Majra’s kings, and twice a year it used to draw about 80,000 pilgrims to fairs held in March and September. They were quite large gatherings for that era.

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Just as Delhi grew up along the Yamuna, Ilaqa Mani Majra was dependent on water from the Ghaggar, which used to be a perennial river.

Most of the land was low-lying so the river water could be easily channeled to the villages for irrigation. But though they depended on the Ghaggar, the locals believed its water was harmful. The British settlement report of the area from 1859 says, “The villages are frightfully under-populated for the reason that the irrigation is most pernicious to health.”

It also noted that fever and goitre were extremely prevalent. The medical condition of cretinism, in which thyroid deficiency causes physical deformity and mental weakness, was common too. It was not unusual for a village to have four, five or even six cretins.

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Bateson began his tour of Ilaqa Mani Majra in Mauli village, about 3km south of the town, on March 22, 1868. He found that 17 men and 6 women in Mauli had goitre. The rate was higher among men because they were all locals. They had grown up in Mauli, unlike their wives who had come from outside. So, it’s not surprising that people connected the high rate of goitre with local conditions, chiefly the water from the Ghaggar.

Next morning, Bateson travelled to a large village named Pabhat (pronounced Pubhaat) about 8km south of Mani Majra. It lay across another river called Sukhna and had 357 houses with 1,630 residents.

Yes, Sukhna is only known as a lake now, but back in Bateson’s time it was a small river that started near Pinjore and joined the Ghaggar at Mubarakpur after a journey of about 25km. It was easy to cross and even in the rains it had only about 3 feet of water. Unlike the Ghaggar, the Sukhna had little water in March. Bateson says it was broad and nearly dry.

If Mowli was a sick village, in Pabhat the “inhabitants looked remarkably fine-looking and healthy”. It had only two goitre patients, and both had come from outside.

Bateson found out that Pabhat had 11 wells, and the locals drank water from them. They irrigated their fields with water from the Sukhna, and believed they were healthy because they stayed away from the Ghaggar.

It’s interesting that opium was one of the chief crops of Pabhat.

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Bateson mentions several other villages in his report that he covered within a few days. Remember this was the 1860s and he was doing all his travelling on horseback and on foot.

In sharp contrast to Pabhat, Abheypur village, which was entirely dependent on the Ghaggar, had 11 goitre patients among its 393 residents. The patwari of Abheypur told Bateson that some years earlier there had been 20 goitre patients in the village.

Chandigarh’s Sector 8 was once called Kalibar village. It was far from any stream and completely rain-dependent. And Bateson found it had neither goitre nor spleen. But in Barra Firozpur, about 5km away from Mani Majra, everyone drank from the Ghaggar and there were 14 cases of goitre. Bateson records: “Children died young. Some of them grew up deaf and dumb and daft.”

On the 24th of March, Bateson came to Mani Majra town, and found that 6% of its population had goitre. He doesn’t give the exact number, but there would have been about 360 cases in a population of 6,000. Even the dogs in Mani Majra’s streets had goitre!

The locals again blamed the Ghaggar for the disease and Bateson says whenever they detected symptoms of goitre arising, they tried to shift to a relative’s town or village “out of the influence of the Ghaggar” for a few months till the “incipient goitre recedes”.

Back in the 1980s, Mani Majra had Chandigarh’s swankiest cinema hall called Dhillon, which later became its first multiplex. It also had a large automobile repair market, but in Bateson’s time the Ilaqa was famous for its rice.

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What about Chandigarh, perhaps you are wondering. Bateson visited a village called Chandi on March 25, 1868. He describes its precise location: “I am just below the old fort and close to the grand trunk road from Ambala to Kalka – the seventh milestone from the latter place being right opposite me.”

So, Chandi was exactly 7 miles or about 11km before Kalka. And it was completely dependent for water on the Ghaggar. However, the fort on the hill above it, which was called Chandigarh, used water from a rain-fed tank and was free from goitre.

Bateson also visited a village called Dara near Chandi where water was so scarce 3 months in a year that its residents drank milk instead. None of them had goitre.

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So, Bateson returned convinced that the Ghaggar was the root cause of goitre in Ilaqa Mani Majra but his superiors were not so certain. They said chemical testing had found the Ghaggar to have very good water.

The problem seemed to be that the villagers were drinking contaminated water from irrigation ditches. The British administration concluded that the “composition of the subsoil had entirely changed the character of the Ghaggar water.”

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There’s more to Chandigarh’s past than goitre, malaria and a “pernicious” river, but the point of this story is that even if the city is young, it is not bereft of history.

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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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When a queen jumped to her death from Delhi’s Qutub Minar

Nina Grosup-Karatsonyi, photo from Theatermuseum

Before its doors closed to visitors in 1981, the Qutub Minar was not only a tourist magnet but also Delhi’s suicide point. On December 9, 1946, Rani Tara Devi of Kapurthala jumped to her death from its top

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By December 1946, the tall, slim woman with the wide-set eyes was a familiar sight at New Delhi’s Maidens Hotel. She had been staying there for about a month. Every day, she took her dogs out walking. But on the morning of the second Monday – December 9 – she came out of her suite alone, hailed a taxi and sped towards the Qutub Minar.

It was a long drive, the 13th-century tower – Delhi’s tallest building until then and for many years afterwards – lay outside the capital, about 20km away.

On arriving at the Minar, the woman left her handbag with the driver and started up the stairs. She must have been gone many minutes because the tower is over 72 metres tall – taller than a 20-storey apartment building – and not an easy climb even for someone in fine fettle.

The waiting driver might have stood leaning against his car, head bent backwards to see her emerge in one of the Minar’s balconies. He couldn’t have seen the look on her face when she appeared at the very top, breathless perhaps. But then, he would have frozen in shock as she jumped to death.

The Minar’s diameter grows from 9 feet at the top to 47 feet at the base. Some accounts say she fell on the edge of the second balcony. But newspaper reports of the day say her body was found at the base of the Minar.

A woman so beautiful that she had wowed Vienna’s elite on her first major stage appearance 11 years earlier, now lay smashed beyond recognition. Who was she? The contents of her handbag revealed she was Rani Tara Devi, 33-year-old estranged wife of Kapurthala’s ageing maharaja, Jagatjit Singh.

After a post-mortem next morning, Tara Devi was buried at the Nicholson Cemetery near Kashmere Gate in Delhi, and forgotten.

A charmer on stage

But Tara Devi wasn’t her real name. Before the maharaja married her sometime in 1941 or 1942, she was just a foreign national staying in India as his guest. A Kapurthala state declaration submitted to the British in 1940 mentions her name as Engenie Marie Grosupova, which might have been a typist’s mistake. Eugenie is the more likely name.

The rani was a Czech national, born on January 22, 1914. Before accompanying the maharaja to India shortly before WW-II started, she had been a promising new dancer on Vienna’s most famous stage, the Burgtheater. In his book ‘Maharani’, Diwan Jarmani Dass, who claimed to have been a minister in the royal families of Patiala and Kapurthala, says she was the illegitimate daughter of a Hungarian count. Dr Leon Pistol, who had been her guardian in Vienna from the age of 4 to 20 years, also hinted at this when he told the Canadian paper Photo Journal that she was the daughter of “a very wealthy member of the Hungarian nobility”.

In 1935, Eugenie had landed a meaty role as Anitra in the drama, Peer Gynt. She made at least two appearances, on June 8 and September 3 that year, and both times the press admired her for her beauty, femininity and dancing.

Austrian papers such as Die Stunde mentioned her as Nina Grosup-Karatsonyi. After her suicide, papers in America, Europe and Australia also used the name Nina Grosup, so did Pistol. So, Nina is what we’ll call her for the rest of this story.

A royal romance

After making a splash on the stage in 1935, Nina disappeared from it swiftly. In April 1947, four months after her suicide, Pistol told Photo Journal that the maharaja had been present at the Burgtheater during one of her performances. “Immediately after the performance, Nina’s mother called me to tell me that the maharaja wanted to bring them all back (to India) with him,” the article written in French says.

Another article published in the Sydney edition of The World’s News on August 23, 1947 also says, “On the opening night she received an ovation from the crowd, and a huge bouquet of roses from the maharaja of Kapurthala, who had been admiring the dancer from his box.”

Pistol said he opposed the maharaja’s offer because Nina had signed a three-year contract with the Burgtheater, but “the suitor-royal simply shrugged his shoulders and offered to buy out the contract in question for $20,000.”

Soon after this, Nina, her then 46-year-old mother Marie Grosupova, and a 64-year-old maid/governess named Antonia Kaura, “followed the Maharajah to Paris, London, and finally, to India”.

It’s difficult to verify Pistol’s claims in detail but the International Herald Tribune of June 28, 1938 describes a luncheon hosted by the maharaja at the George V hotel in Paris at which ‘Mme Grosup’ (Marie), ‘Mlle Grosup’ (Nina) and ‘Dr Pistol’ were among the guests. Clearly, Pistol’s story had a kernel of truth.

By the time WW-II started late in 1939, the Grosups and their maid were already installed at the Jagatjit Palace in Kapurthala. Nina and the maharaja weren’t married but Dass says the 67-year-old ruler was lavishing all kinds of expensive gifts on the 25-year-old former dancer. There must be some truth to this also as after her death, her possessions in the hotel suite were valued at many thousands of dollars.

When in February 1940, the British government asked the princely states to submit a list of ‘enemy subjects’ residing in their territory, Kapurthala declared the Grosup women (Czechoslovakia was under German occupation) were “guests of his Highness the Maharaja of Kapurthala”.

Unhappy marriage

The maharaja was well-known in Europe and America and his engagements were regularly covered. Whole pages were written about him, so strangely his marriage to Nina doesn’t find a mention abroad. It’s true the press’s attention was occupied by the war, but still to ignore one of their favourites in this manner seems odd.

Maybe, the maharaja deliberately kept his sixth marriage low-profile, but it is a fact that Nina and he were married, and she was given the Indian name Tara Devi, because the question of “the grant of a British passport to Rani Tara Devi (formally Miss Grosup, a Czechoslovak citizen) wife of His Highness the Maharaja of Kapurthala” did come up in 1942.

It seemingly wasn’t a happy marriage for both parties. News reports after her suicide said they had separated in 1945 and Nina had been living alone. Pistol said she had even intended to visit America in December to settle there. The World’s News article said she had asked Pistol to buy her a house near New York City.

But much as she wanted to, Nina could not leave India. News of her death was covered well abroad but played down in India. The Madras edition of a prominent paper put it on its second page, below “Madras-Colombo rowing contest postponed,” and “Beedi workers’ strike in Malabar & S Kanara”.

Suicide or murder?

From the very first, Pistol said he suspected foul play in Nina’s death. He alleged that a month before she died, she had written to him saying, “Every day when I go out with my dogs somebody is asking me questions and follows me. I don’t know what he wants. I think it’s someone – a detective. But don’t worry.” She had also been jittery since her mother’s “mysterious death” a year earlier.

Pistol claimed Nina had left behind a fortune amounting to $150,000, including at least $100,000 in jewellery, “40 coats of furs and 52 trunks full of clothes”, all of which were his to inherit.

“I will not rest as long as it is not clear whether the mother and governess died of natural causes and the maharanee committed suicide or whether all three were murdered,” he is quoted in The Bombay Chronicle of September 22, 1948.

The National Archives of India has a record of an “Enquiry by Mr Leon Pistol, guardian of late Rani Tara Devi of Kapurthala, regarding her death in 1946,” filed in 1948. Four years later, in 1952, Dr Pistol also sent a request to the PM “for assistance and advice regarding investigation into the mysterious death in 1946 of Eugenie Grosup, popularly known as Rani Tara Devi of Kapurthala”. But by then, the maharaja had died and the rani, whom few knew in her lifetime in India, lay completely forgotten.

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The Jagatjit Palace in Kapurthala

Nina in her Anitra costume, 1935