Hill Station's newspapers
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ewspapers have always had a place of pride in the hill station. It is a tradition we owe to John MacKinnon, who started off the race with the publication of The Hills in 1842, but soon it died out, only to be resurrected in 1865 and perish once again.
The Mussoorie Exchange Advertiser was exactly what the name suggests, just a broadsheet advertising of all sorts of establishments and their wares. A look at those advertisements reveal a lot about what was really happening in the early days of life in Mussoorie. Of course, a student of history will notice that for the first time, the old ‘Masuri’ was transforming into the modern ‘Mussoorie’.
In 1875, John Northam published The Himalaya Chronicle but we remember him today for bringing out the first proper guide of the hills in 1884. His Guide to Masuri, Landaur, Dehradun & the Hills North of Dehra is a comprehensive compendium of lives and the paths it took in those early days. No book on our little hill station can ever be written without reference to this lodestone.
"The photographs tagged-on cannot pretend to much originality," complained F Bodycot, owner of the Mafasilite Printing Works in 1907, as he wrote the next best Guide to Mussoorie. Harold C Williams, editor of the Mafasilite Press, who as the anonymous Rambler authored the gossipy Mussoorie Miscellany in 1931. Its doggerel, classic understatement and tongue-in-cheek style continues to charm the reader even today.
I feel the tradition of small town newspapers carries on to this day—there are over 386 newspapers, big and small, registered in the Doon, at the end of 2008!
Old newspapers like the Mussoorie Times, kept a record of the rise and fall of the hill station. We find, that by the turn of the century, the special magic of the hills had begun to vanish. The trouble-plagued schools floundered: Caineville perished, Bramleigh Towers wound-up while others managed to stem the tide.
(Excerpt from ‘Mussoorie Medley – Tales of yesteryear’ by Ganesh Saili, published by Niyogi Books).
