Spirit of Place: a grand old hotel rises from the ashes

The refurbished Hotel Savoy offers an atmospheric window into Mussoorie. My article for Outlook Traveller magazine.

The Savoy at night. Photo: Puneet Paliwal.

I had been to Mussoorie twice before. But this time, instead of coming to an end at Library Chowk, the Mall seemed to lead further up the hill, into the mist. A steep driveway curved into the massive grounds of what could well have been a castle. The taxi driver looked a bit sceptical when Puneet, the photographer, and I said this was indeed our hotel. One couldn’t really blame him. With the Savoy’s fairy-tale turrets as backdrop, we looked even scruffier than we were.

It remained a slight concern throughout the trip, this business of living up to the Savoy. Even freshly bathed (under a superbly luxurious shower), I never quite felt I could match up to what these corridors have been used to. After all, this isn’t just any old hotel. From 1902, when a Lucknow-based barrister called Cecil D. Lincoln decided to pull down the old Mussoorie School and build a massive English Gothic structure in its place, the Savoy has been the hotel of choice for a succession of Indian and international grandees. The Princess of Wales, later Queen Mary, attended a garden party in the Savoy grounds in 1906. Later, the hotel played host to several other royals: Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia and Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia. The Gaekwads of Baroda and the Wodeyars of Mysore were known to take over entire blocks for the summer (the Gaekwad ladies were ardent tennis players, apparently, and would insist on the block adjoining the courts).

The grande dame of Urdu writing, Qurratulain Hyder, spent a lot of her childhood in Mussoorie, seeing the British hill station through what was probably its biggest historical transition—Indian independence. “Throughout the day English sahibs, memsahibs, and their baba log cross the bridge on mules and horses or riding in rickshaws and dandis. In the evening, the same bridge becomes the site of milling crowds of Indians,” begins Hyder’s story ‘Beyond the Fog’. Of course, the Savoy remained preserved from any milling crowds until much later. Its Indian guests were either maharajas and maharanis, or taluqdars, or Anglophiles of the Nehru-Gandhi variety. Like his father Motilal, Jawaharlal Nehru stayed here, as did Indira Gandhi and, later, Rajiv Gandhi.

And yet, the Savoy isn’t quite the daunting place you think it might be. That might have much to do with Mussoorie itself. Unlike a Shimla, where the official presence of colonial government meant that Appearances had to be Maintained, Mussoorie-Landour was always an unstuffy place. Reputed as a place for romantic assignations, Mussoorie was all about being British without the stiff upper lip. And the Savoy was at the centre of the party. Travel writer Lowell Thomas, in India: Land of the Black Pagoda (1930), described the Savoy’s (in)famous Separation Bell: “There is a hotel in Mussoorie where they ring a bell just before dawn so that the pious may say their prayers and the impious get back to their own beds.” As Hyder’s short story has it: “In the ballroom of the Savoy the Anglo-Indian crooner and his band will soon start ‘Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.’”

Senior journalist Saeed Naqvi recently reminisced about having gone to Mussoorie as a schoolboy, in a gang of four that included Vinod Mehta. The young men from Lucknow saved up money to stay in a cheap hotel so that they could wear their ill-fitting suits and “peep into the grandest dining hall in the Empire.” But the Savoy’s glory days ended at least thirty years ago. Looking at the sheer scale of the property, it is easy to imagine how a place like this could have gone to seed. In fact, one doesn’t need to imagine it. One can see it.

On our second morning, Puneet and I took our post-breakfast coffee out into an open area adjoining the Grand Dining Room (it is now officially called that, while the hotel is officially called ‘Fortune The Savoy’). We’d spent a few minutes pleasurably looking out over the small-town business of Mussoorie far down below when we both realised that to our left was a wall, and behind that wall was a half broken-down building—with a turret exactly like the ones above us. “There’s another wing!” said Puneet. 

After lunch, a member of the invariably friendly Savoy staff took us round to the unrestored wing. Piles of old furniture lie around: a lovely large dresser, a nice little table (missing a leg), several broken chairs, even an old post box. The buildings are in absolute disrepair, seemingly without electricity. It was day, but as we climbed up the creaky wooden stairs, we could barely see where our feet were going. It felt a little like a re-run of R.L. Stevenson’s famous scene in Kidnapped: the next step, I was sure, was going to be into thin air. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Stepping out into a kind of gallery, we found we were above the old ballroom. One of the oldest photographs of the Savoy still in circulation is of an after-party image of this very same room filled with people in masquerade, the women’s ‘fancy dress’ costumes for New Year’s Eve unable to quite disguise their 20s flapper aesthetic. The grand old wooden floor still exists, but apart from that there is little sign of the room’s original avatar. A mammoth Santa Claus sprawls lopsidedly over one wall, from a children’s Christmas party before the property last changed hands. A badminton net is strung across the centre of the room: the staff currently use it to entertain themselves on a free afternoon.

Standing in the overhanging gallery, I first ask about the Savoy ghosts. Like Mussoorie itself, the hotel has long had a reputation for haunters. The most famous of these is Lady Frances Garnett-Orme, a 49-year-old spiritualist who was found dead in her room at the Savoy in 1910. The cause of death was poisoning, but the poisoner was never caught. But the technique—adding bromides to the lady’s own bottle of medicine to cause the strychnine already in it to sink to the bottom, where it was consumed by the victim herself in one single lethal dose—was so convolutedly foolproof that Rudyard Kipling apparently wrote to Arthur Conan Doyle, suggesting that he incorporate it in a story. He didn’t, but Agatha Christie did. In The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Christie had her English country-house murder of one Lady Inglethorpe achieved by the same method, to be solved by Hercule Poirot in his first-ever fictional appearance.

Lady Garnett-Orme, according to media sources as varied as Aaj Tak and NatGeo Traveller, still wanders the corridors, sometimes offering a blank stare, and sometimes singing softly. The Savoy staffer I asked said he hadn’t seen her. But he had once spied a couple of ghostly children. On the other hand, none of the spooks had made an appearance of late, he said, and anyway the management had forbidden all talk of ghosts. “There are no spirits,” was the hotel’s official policy.

Later, wandering through the premises, abutting the main wing, I found what looked like a little Sufi shrine, complete with a green silk chadar. “Who is buried here? Is it a saint?” I asked a passing kitchen helper. “No, no, it’s for Sai Baba. And he’s not buried here. This is to stave off the spirits.”

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Photo: Puneet Paliwal

Much of Mussoorie’s early British spirit is to be found in its graveyards. Landour, where most of these “villages of silence” are, is less than half an hour up from Mussoorie: but the trees feel mossier, the mist thicker. The cemetery on Camel’s Back Road is locked and deserted, and the other cemetery on Landour’s Upper Mall is guarded by a chowkidar and his host of dogs. But the Savoy’s Siddharth Nautiyal, who has driven us there, grew up in Mussoorie and has a friend on literally every street corner. The chowkidar is slowly but surely wooed; he even lets in Puneet and his camera. By the time we return after seeing the graves of the Alters—Tom and Stephen Alter’s father and uncle—Siddharth and the chowkidar have found a village connection. Next up is the Mussoorie Library, where again we only manage entry because of a special request made to Mussoorie chronicler Ganesh Saili. The library is a massive, many-roomed structure that occupies pride of place at the Gandhi Bazaar end of the Mall, off-limits to everyone except its seventy members, and there’s a Mussoorie residence requirement for membership ever since an “Angrez” flew out with some ten precious books. The deep red doors lead into a musty high-ceilinged space, where the old glass-fronted bookshelves reveal carefully arranged collections of history and literature dominated by titles from at least fifty years ago: Nelson’s History of the War (in 25 volumes), The Rise of Rail Power in War and Conquest 1833-1914 by E.A. Pratt. The Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck, who once stayed at the Savoy and is listed on a plaque at the hotel’s wood-panelled Writers’ Bar, is represented by her China books, of course—but also by East Wind: West Wind, which appears to be a royal Rajasthani romance.

We returned to the hotel, exhausted. After choosing Col. Skinner’s Fish and Chips (over the Bycullah Club Koftah Curry) in the admirably restored Grand Dining Room, I retired for a nap in my rather stately Suite, all blue and white and gold. When I woke up, it was around a quarter to five, and the Mussoorie mist had come calling. Wispy fingers of cottonwool had wrapped themselves round the green turrets, and were slowly descending to stretch across my balcony, forming themselves into a woolly white canopy. In the paved courtyard below, the fountain began to play. As I watched, the misty twilight dissolved into slate-gray night. Down in the Beer Garden, still slushy from the rain, two ancient mossy deodars stood mute witness to the proceedings, as they have done for the last hundred years or more. The spirit of the Svoy does live on. Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.

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The information

Getting there
Mussoorie is around 32km from Dehradun Railway Station and 55km from Jolly Grant Airport. The best overnight train is the New Delhi-Dehradun AC Express, which leaves New Delhi at midnight and reaches Dehradun at 5.40am the next day. The Dehradun Shatabdi is another option.

The Savoy
The Savoy (+91-135-2637000, is located at the Library end of the Mall Road. It has 50 rooms available in three categories: Savoy Chambers, Fortune Exclusive Rooms and Fortune Suites. All rooms open out onto the large front balcony, but the small individual wooden sit-outs at the back have better views. Weekday packages range from Rs 8,499 to Rs 14,999 per night (plus taxes). Weekend packages range from Rs 10,499 to Rs 16,4999 per night (plus taxes). Breakfast is complimentary. The Savoy Christmas package (2 nights, 3 days) starts at Rs 26,555. The New Year’s Eve package (2 nights, 3 days) starts at Rs 41,999.

What to see & do
The walk from Library Bazaar up to the Savoy is short but steep, and goes past the Savoy Post Office—this is probably the only hotel in the world to have its own post office. Mussoorie is very much a walking town. You can amble down the Mall, eating momos, buying woollen socks at streetside stalls and stopping off at the Aquarium. You can also take a long and pleasant walk down the Camel’s Back Road: look out for the point from which you can see the rock shaped like a camel’s hump that gives the road its name.

Mussoorie’s two other old colonial hotels still exist, but barely: the Hakman’s Grand Hotel on the Mall has gone to seed, while the Charleville Hotel in Happy Valley has become the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy, where Indian civil servants are trained. In Landour, inspect St Paul’s Church, where Jim Corbett’s parents were married, and the cemeteries. Look out for the houses of Landour’s famous residents: the writer Ruskin Bond, the actor Victor Banerjee, Tom Alter and Vishal Bhardwaj. It is traditional to buy jam from Prakash Brothers at Sisters Bazaar, and stop for waffles at Char Dukaan. For great Tibetan food in cheery surroundings, try Doma’s Inn (Ivy Cottage Landour Cantt, 0135-2634873). For a posher (very good) meal, stop by the restored Rokeby Manor hotel.

Published in Outlook Traveller magazine, 21 Apr 2014.

Tragedy in two acts: Meena Kumari

Vinod Mehta's republished biography turns the spotlight back on Meena Kumari.

Meena Kumari in Aarti, 1962.

Meena Kumari died of liver cirrhosis in March 1972. She was 39. A month or so later, Luis Vaz of Jaico Publishing called a young Bombay copywriter whose self-published book Bombay: A Private View had seen some success. Would he be interested in writing a biography of the woman universally acknowledged as Hindi cinema's greatest tragedienne?

In a memoir published 39 years later, the copywriter described that moment of decision: “Why not, I thought. And with the bravado of a 30-year-old who knew next to nothing about Hindi cinema, I launched into the project.” 

That 30-year-old was Vinod Mehta, and the biography he produced in October 1972 was pronounced “the most sympathetic, comprehensive and readable book on Meena Kumari” by the great writer-director KA Abbas. But after that first flush of critical acclaim, the book went out of print. And so it remained for decades, until Mehta's mention of it in his journalistic memoir Lucknow Boy (2011) aroused current-day curiosity.

Meena Kumari: The Classic Biography
HarperCollins, Rs. 350 

Republished by HarperCollins this September, the biography is a remarkable creature. It bears witness not just to the incredibly filmi life of one of India’s most beloved actresses, but also to a past Bombay film world as observed by an outspoken young outsider. Mehta had watched some Hindi films growing up, but he was no starry-eyed fan. Hollywood impressed him more. One of the reasons he took on the project was that he’d read somewhere that Meena Kumari had identified with Marilyn Monroe, and her husband Kamal Amrohi with Arthur Miller. 

But what he really wanted was to place in her context the lower middle class Muslim girl who had become, like others of her ilk, a golden goose for her family, and to write about what kind of place India was in the ’70s. “I am often sounding off, and I enjoyed that,” Mehta told Time Out. That youthful pleasure is apparent in the summary dismissals that pepper the book. “For sheer vulgarity, dandyism, shallowness, squalor and dishonesty, the Bombay film world is hard to beat,” (p. 149), or “I can never understand how anyone who has the temerity to call himself an artiste… can find the time and mental apparatus to handle and organise the tortuous deceits necessary for hoarding hot money” (p. 185). “At that time it was fashionable to look down on Bombay cinema, not like now,” Mehta laughed. “And at that age I had an ego the size of a football.” But with zero journalistic experience or connections, it couldn’t have been easy to meet with Hindi film biggies? “Some of them were real prima donnas,” agreed Mehta. “What helped me was I had long hair; I used to wear a white raw silk coat and a tie and I had a bit of a British accent still. These film stars were quite flattered that a London-returned chap had come to see them. I quickly sensed that, and I exploited it.”

Whatever his reservations about the ’70s film world, Mehta has no doubt that it's a much worse place now. “I didn’t find the bitchiness that seems to exist today between [heroines]. There was space for everybody, and respect. Nargis spoke so well of Meena Kumari. And it was all extremely courteous – aap, aap, aap. I didn’t hear a single disparaging remark, not even from Amrohi [her ex-husband],” he said. There were, of course, those who refused to meet him, like her old love Dharmendra, and those, like Gulzar, who gave away nothing even when they did. The legendary lyricist-filmmaker, whom Mehta describes as “a cunning, urbane and sane man”, was bequeathed Meena’s diaries, and back in 1972, he scared Mehta by implying that he was writing a biography of her, too. But no biography ever emerged, and barring a small fraction of her poems, published as Tanha Chaand, Gulzar has kept Meena Kumari’s writing hidden away from the public eye, much to the disappointment of her fans (there are even those who suspect publishing her writing would reveal its influence on his own).

Mehta has no such illusions: he concedes that she may have been a third rate poet, more in love with the idea of poetry than adept at the craft. But, he writes, in a profession where most people “read nothing more taxing than Cine Advance”, that she was “able to put pen to paper… deserves a thirty-one-gun salute.” Mehta’s book is a combination of exuberant excess and judiciousness. He spends a whole chapter on whether she was a uniformly great actress, or only fitfully so. He evokes in loving period detail the stages of her relationship with Amrohi: the famous marathon telephoning, the silly but revealing quarrels over bassi roti, and the more serious ones over who entered Meena's make-up room, which eventually led to the break-up of their marriage. He evaluates her relationships with her family, and concludes that if she was exploited, it was because she chose not to cut herself off from people she felt she needed.

Mehta's recreation of the internal life of the woman he calls “my heroine” may seem rather imaginative to some, but he believes he was a model of restraint. “I didn’t find the nymphomaniac claim to be true,” said Mehta. “But she was quite promiscuous. Younger men, like Dharmendra or Sawan Kumar Tak, attached themselves to her and got breaks. And she almost certainly slept with all the top heroes.” He didn't put that in the book? “But that was standard. Kishore Sharma (married to Meena's sister Madhu) took me to this room with mirrors on the ceiling and said he was servicing her there. But he was such a shady character that I didn’t believe him,” said Mehta. On the other hand, he got fascinating details from her secretary, driver, doctor and three different make-up women: “people who had no axe to grind”.

The  book has brought offers to write about other film stars. “But present-day stars will accept only hagiography. Their PR people will give you a crore or two, but they want to vet your manuscript,” Mehta said. In any case, he hasn’t seen a complete Hindi film for 30 years. “These films of globalised youth, I find them completely artificial. I don't find becoming a famous rock star very interesting. Maybe I'm just too old.”

Published in Time Out Delhi, Oct 2013.