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The obsession with Morni started as a simple desire to own a small house on the hills and to plant some trees. I had spent a year of my childhood at Shimla and ever since a house on the hills ... ... Read More »
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It was after much persuasion that the Doc finally agreed to accompany me for a ride on the Thunderbird to the hills. It was nearly two and a half years since we had made our historic first trip to the Tikkar Cottage in the hills on the motorbike. We had somehow managed to resurrect the […]
It was 7:35 AM when the phone chimed softly on receiving an urgent SMS. “It’s raining cats and dogs. Please reconsider the trip!” It was the King, getting the nerves before the trip. The request was five minutes too late!! I had actually managed to start dot on time at 7:30 AM. Not that I […]
It was aloo paranthas topped with dollops of delicious (cholesterol-enriched?) AMUL butter for breakfast! I hogged to my heart’s desire without any of the attendant guilt as we had decided to skip our lunch for the day. We had reached our friends’ rather tastefully kept home at Panchkula the previous night and I had the […]
A glass of sweet ‘lassi’ (buttermilk) awaited me as I turned into the lane for King Uncle’s house and headed for the majestic palms that make his house stand out in an otherwise nondescript small-town locality. The car battery had given me a scare on the way and I was not sure whether I could safely […]
I was late. It was Delhi again. Anybody who has had the experience of moving in to this ‘City of Djinns’ knows how the mega-polis discourages the newcomer from making the entry. It can be years before you reconcile to its undecipherable maze of unending roads, its congested gullies, the packed markets and the soulless […]
It was a cold, foggy morning of January as I started for a yet another adventure in the Morni hills. I had a new companion for the trip. My ‘e-pen pal’ from the land of the Blue Mountains. A nature lover I had encountered on the net and had struck a firm friendship with. We […]
The discovery of leopard pugmarks near the watering hole atop the hill at Mandana had excited me no end and I was sure that I was destined to encounter my spotted friend on my very next trip, provided I dared to venture deep enough into the forest. I was determined to make the trip before […]
It had been raining in the Morni hills for over three weeks and I was impatient to be amidst the cloud covered hills. The Morni hills are their greenest and undoubtedly their most scenic during the monsoon season but they are also their trickiest. The rain softens the hard compacted red clay of the Shivaliks […]
It was April when I learnt about the plans of the wildlife department of Haryana to conduct a census of the wildlife in the Morni Hills. The census is generally conducted during the dry season as most of the water sources dry up in the higher hills and the animals are forced to emerge from […]
A great thing about the Christian faith is that its holidays follow the Gregorian calendar and fall on fixed dates. Better still the Good Friday holiday has to, by definition, fall on a Friday and gives one an assured extended weekend. The Hindu, Islamic and Sikh religions are less obliging and holidays fall on dates […]
‘My naana-ji was a pehalwaan,’ he announced proudly, ‘Rustam-e-Punjab‘. This had us all in splits. Nobody comes to a post-grad hostel and talks about the physical prowess of his maternal grandfather. Everybody just knows it without ever having been taught. But he somehow didn’t. He was a ready-witted, hard-core fauji kid who was born with […]
The movie, ‘Zorba the Greek,’ immortalized by Anthony Quinn’s characterization of the rustic, full-spirited Zorba, left quite an impression on me. I thought and talked about Zorba until I had my wife worried. ‘You are increasingly mistaking eccentricity for style,’ she complained, ‘ and I hope you are not nursing a secret desire to live […]
The construction of the ‘Tikkar Cottage,’ our dream home in the Morni hills, was finally coming to an end. We had not realized the challenges involved in undertaking construction in the hills and our time schedule and budget projections had gone completely haywire. The plan was to have a cute little hill cottage with a […]
My appetite for Morni is insatiable. I can wander aimlessly in these hills without ever getting bored. We were into the second day of a weekend and I had managed to convince my pals to accompany me for a photography excursion to the hills. The ‘Doc’ had lost 25 pounds since our last misadventure with […]
‘Will these trees do well in Morni?’ I asked the dignified fauji owner of the beautiful nursery at the foot of the Morni hills. We were having tea in the Colonel’s breezy ‘field office,’ a modest wooden structure with a tin-roof. A tiny mouse peered at us inquisitively through a crack in the wooden false ceiling, […]
It was afternoon by the time I reached the Tikkar Cottage. I had a quick lunch. The usual dal makhni and aloo fry with paranthas that the cook of the next door cottage-hotel specializes in. I donned my biking shoes, slung my camera, strapped my helmet and thundered off to Tikkar Tal, my destination for […]
‘It’s a monstrous waste of money,’ I beseeched my brother-in-law for the nth time. He was in the process of buying a ‘Thunderbird’, a jazzed up version of the Royal Enfield’s 350 cc motorcycle, the classic ‘Bullet’. ‘A fuel-guzzling world war II relic that is bought only by the doodhwallahs (milkmen) for door-to-door delivery. An […]
My father loved the hills. He could feel the romance of a hill station. He would have loved to own a little ivy-covered stone cottage on a pine hill. To have walked down its cobbled pathway through the morning mist, sporting a masculine overcoat, the broad brim of his stylish felt hat pulled low over […]
The never ending search for the history of Morni and Kotaha has now led to the, hand-written British records of the 19th century that have been meticulously preserved in the archives of the British Library at London. These bound volumes form a part of the India Office Records – the records of the British Rule […]
Lieutenant Proby Thomas Cautley, the famous ‘fossilwallah‘ of the Shiwalik Hills, wrote a letter in April 1835 to the Secretary Bengal Asiatic Society (it was published in the 4th Volume of the Asiatic Journal the same year) in which he described the working of the gold washers in the beds of the rivers under Nahan. Cautley talks […]
One of the most powerful men to have visited Pinjore and to have hunted in the forests of the Pinjore dun and the Morni hills was Ahmad Shah Durrani (Abdali) who visited the valley during his seventh invasion of India in 1764-65. Abdali halted at the garden in Pinjore while marching towards Delhi with his […]
The Pinjore Dun was covered by a thick forest in the 19th century and was famous for its wildlife including tigers, elephants and even lions. Ahmad Shah Abdali, the Afghan invader had camped at Pinjore in 1765 for tiger hunting. The Pinjore jungles remained the hunting preserves (Shikargarhs) of the Patiala Maharajas since the middle […]
The persistent Akali demand for the creation of a Punjabi Suba on linguistic lines resulted in the setting up of a 22 member Parliamentary Committee of both Houses of Parliament in 1965 for finding a satisfactory settlement of the demand for the Punjabi Suba. The Committee was presided over by Sardar Hukam Singh, the Speaker […]
Captain Proby Thomas Cautley, an engineer of the Bengal Artillery (and a palaeontologist) did pioneering research on the geology of India and discovered many fossil remains of extinct quadrupeds at the southern foot of the Himalayas. Dr. Hugh Falconer, Superintendent of the Botanic Garden at Saharunpore was his close research associate. The duo were conferred […]
A number of Brahmanincal stone sculptures of the early medieval and the Pratihara period were excavated at the ancient Thakur Dwara Temple at Morni-ka-tal in 1970s.The sculptures include the icons of Karttikeya, Surya, Siva, Uma-Mahesvara, Ganesa, Lakulisa, Vishnu, Nataraja, Trimurti, Siva-linga etc Six such sculptures have been housed in the section on medieval sculptures in […]
The Meers of Kotaha ruled from their fortress at Garhi Kotaha with smaller forts at Mornee and Masoompur. The Masoompur fort is set on a small mud hillock and it overlooks the sharp ravines to its south that break into the plains beyond. The Masoompur village lies to the South-West. The fort was a post under the […]
The thick jungles that once clothed the Shivalik hill region west of Yamuna with its characteristic rugged, clay and boulder topography – a region with numerous seasonal soats (streams); dark narrow khols (rocky ravines); flat, wide duns (valleys); precipitous deep khuds and sharp mud escarpments – enjoyed a rich presence of wildlife till the end of the 19th century. The […]
The Fort: The Morni Fort is a modest stone masonry structure built sometime in the 17th Century atop the Morni hill at a height of about 1200 metres. The fort is strategically located and dominates the road to Badiyal towards Sarahan in Himachal, the road to Trilokpur, the ridge road towards Thapli/ Mandana and the […]
Kotaha Fort: Kotaha or Garhi-Kotaha, 20 miles north of Umballa, was the seat of power under the Rule of the Mirs that started with the coming of Hakim General Qasim-ul-Khan in early 17th century. The Mirs ruled the Hills of Morni and the ilaqa of Kotaha and Naraingarh from their formidable fort at Kotaha. Major William Lloyd and […]
There are interesting accounts about the nature, character and customs of the hill people of Morni in the 19th and early 20th century British Gazetteers, books and newspapers. Some of these accounts are reproduced for the readers: ‘The Morni cultivators: The cultivators in the Morni hills are chiefly Gujars, Kanets and Brahmans in the lower hills […]
Interesting insights are offered by a reading of the ‘Secret Letters’ that formed a part of the ‘Papers regarding the Administration of the Marquiz of Hastings in India’ that were tabled at a General Court of the ‘United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies’ on 3rd March 1824. A secret letter […]
‘A Memoir of Major-General R. R. Gillespie (1816)’ by Major William Thorn has an interesting account of the encounter of Lt. Col. R. R. Gillespie with the Rajah of Morni in 1807. Col.Gillespie rose to fame with his daring cavalry charge at the head of the Light Dragoons in July 1806 from Arcot to Vellore […]
During the Gurkha invasion of the Hill States, Morni fort was taken by Gouree Sah, a Chhetri-Rajput, a hill tribe from Pyuthan in South West Nepal.Pyuthan was one of the 24 small kingdoms in the Chaubisi Rajya confederation in the vicinity of the Gandaki river. Gorkha was also one of the Chaubisi Kingdoms, 60 KM […]
The 14 ‘BHOJS’ of Thakur Rajputs: The Morni Hills were originally held by Rajput Thakurs who had divided the territory into 14 small estates. Each of these estates was called a ‘BHOJ’ and included several hamlets or ‘DHANIS’. The sub-division thus effected persists to this day and each bhoj retains much the same boundaries as it […]
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Amongst the interesting sites to visit around Morni is a temple with a breath-taking cliff-side location at the centre of the formidable ‘Bhuri-Singh-Deota-Range’. The hill range is a sheer wall of rock running for 15 KM from Sarahan in the South-East to Naina Tikkar in the North-West in Sirmaur District of Himachal Pradesh. The temple […]
We hit the road at six and were already an hour behind schedule! The 400 km drive to Binsar through Moradabad, Rampur, Rudrapur, Kathgodam, Bhimtal, Bhowali and Almora was going to be one long haul. Musafir had insisted on driving the ‘Jazz’ as the winding hill roads make him sick unless he is at the […]
It was after much persuasion that the Doc finally agreed to accompany me for a ride on the Thunderbird to the hills. It was nearly two and a half years since we had made our historic first trip to the Tikkar Cottage in the hills on the motorbike. We had somehow managed to resurrect the […]
Amongst the interesting sites to visit around Morni is a temple with a breath-taking cliff-side location at the centre of the formidable ‘Bhuri-Singh-Deota-Range’. The hill range is a sheer wall of rock running for 15 KM from Sarahan in the South-East to Naina Tikkar in the North-West in Sirmaur District of Himachal Pradesh. The temple […]
We hit the road at six and were already an hour behind schedule! The 400 km drive to Binsar through Moradabad, Rampur, Rudrapur, Kathgodam, Bhimtal, Bhowali and Almora was going to be one long haul. Musafir had insisted on driving the ‘Jazz’ as the winding hill roads make him sick unless he is at the […]
Bhoj Kudana– comprises the dhanis lying in the low hills and spurs to the south of the ‘Valley of Tikkar’ with it twin tals and includes Baghwali, Barat, Bhamnol, Bhiyula, Kudana, Bounta, Dharket, Dharwala, Dighann, Duh, Dundal, Lad, Loharo, Mandhedi, Marad, Mathana, Mau, Meharwala, Samrotha and Tikar. Samrotha, an important dhani lies atop a hill […]
The Adventure Park at Morni was set up at a cost of Rs. 1 Crore by the Haryana Tourism Department in the Valley of Tikkar and was inaugurated in October 2004 by the then Chief Minister of Haryana. The park was set up on the heavily wooded hill that separates the twin lakes of Tikkar. […]
If you are not in a mood for adventure yet would like to spend some time alone with your maker, the short walk to the Mandhana cliff-top is an ideal choice. While driving towards Mandhana along the major district road to Nahan you cannot possibly miss the prominent sign post of the Green Park Resort […]
Karoh (Kroh) Peak at 1467 metres is the highest peak of the Morni hill range of Haryana. The peak can be reached after a rather sharp trek of about 2 KM along the steep hill path through the dhanis of Churi and Diyothi of Bhoj Darara. One ends up climbing a vertical distance of nearly […]
Morni hills are composed of a fragile mix of clay, rocks and boulders and experience heavy erosion during the monsoons. Landslides are common, especially where the natural stability of hill slopes has been disturbed by cutting roads and paths into the hill, rendering the structure unstable. The sudden heavy rainfall towards the end of the […]
The Song of the Magpie Robin – A Memoir Rupa Publications 2014 Zafar Futehally It was the attractive cover of the book that caught my eye. I had come across passing references to Zafar Futehally in books on conservation but I was not too sure whether I wanted to buy his ‘Memoir’. It was only […]
Hi!
I am a researcher from Wildlife Institute of India and working in Kalesar National Park. I read your other post titled ‘The Gujjar Herder of Kalesar’ by ‘The Seeker’ but could not comment. I would like to connect with you to know more about the story. Could you please send me an email at sakshi_rana@hotmail.com?
I look forward to it!
Thanks.