The Meerut Scrapbook
Mustafa Castle, Ashoka Pillar
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Last updated - Tuesday, 16-Jun-2009 19:44:29 EDT
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Sunrise/Sunset for 5th May: Specifically for Meerut . Twilight start - 5:05am Sunrise - 5:36am Sunset - 6:20pm Twilight end - :6:56pm. Meerut Latitude : 29.0 deg N, Longitude : 77.5 deg E.
He has been out of sight for sometime, but nobody expected this. Sad Very Sad. What made him undergo all that heavy surgery? Maybe someone knows. His best selling record Thriller was made before his transformation. 5 Feet 10 50 kgs. That says it all. I downloaded my favorites . In order of Preference they are - Beat It ! , Billie Jean , Black and White. There was nothing on TV or the papers when I saw the news on the NET. From then on, on TV there was nothing else.
Thriller was his best selling album. In fact it still has the record for being an all time best seller. He was his normal self in that. The irony of the issue is that he underwent that grotesque 'restructuring' then sang a song like "it does not matter if you are black or white".
It appears that the 'case' for proving Qasab's guilt is ready and is being heard in court. After 7 months or so. Comparisons they say are odius, but .. inevitable. News travels fast on the net and is not limited by the discretion of those who run the media. This is a piece of knowledge which should make many people rethink things. The 2nd longest case in the history of Singapore Courts took .. hold your breath 41 days( Look for 'Tol Payoh murders on wikipedia' ). Yes their courts are also a legacy of the British. One word our courts avoid like the plague is the word 'obvious'. And another word which is their main pillar is 'evidence'. If you submit the PIL that the Earth is flat you will win because there is so much evidence :).
The best way is to start with their website - http://aarohi.org. They are located about 60 km from Nainital, in village Satoli, PO Peora. Aarohi is an NGO. They are doing many things which will put the foundation for a better life in what can certainly be called a remote area - even though Electricity ( as well as Internet, DTH TV) is available. Rural Area ? No place is that clearly defined. Every family has at least one person working somewhere else and sending money. They are trying out new things here too. Like trying to grow Tea ( Uttaranchal Tea is available in shops ), plant Mango orchards, rejuvenate Apple orchards. Most families keep hens, cows, buffaloes grow vegetables. Houses are at a fair distance from each other and clusters are not very large. The population in Kumaon seems to be quite evenly spread. Extreme poverty is absent. However they could certainly do with more employment. It is not uncommon to find men a little high at 11am . I thought Aerial ropeways,Switzerland type Alpine Railways, Helicopter Services could do wonders . However there would be an immediate objection from those who like the pristine beauty of the hills. They would like to keep the Economy pristine too. Another thing, if you have money to throw and would like a "house in the hills" it would be best to read Bill Aitken's Book Footloose in the Himalayas(2003) first.
Hot and sweaty . Head for the hills and meditate. Meditate about what ? Maybe about why multi-storied buildings a few hundred feet high offend the senses and Mountains thousands of feet high appeal. Years back every 4th or 5th Milestone / Kilometer stone had the height at that point written. This is missing now and one never knows how high ( in meters :) ) one is.
Were the hill regions always ours? For that too, we have to thank the East India Company . Early 19th century. No Electricity. The searing heat. You can imagine how attractive the hills looked to the EIC . A widespread invasion of Nepal was planned on Nov. 1st 1814. A heroic General Gillespie ( whose grave is in Meerut and a statue in St.Paul's London ) was assigned the task of making the first attack. He took a force of *4000 from Meerut. Of which 3000 were Indians. They were almost wiped out at Kalunga( Raipur Road ) near Dehradun. A much lesser known Octherlony was more successful ( as he had the benefit of Gillespie's experience ) and acquired the Simla region. The hills became a part of colonial India under the treaty of Sigauli. The great thing about the battle at Kalunga is that letters written when the Battle was on were found at the Bir Library by Mahesh Regmi. They form part of the translation work which continued for 20 years. You can read the letters translated into English here : Battle of Kalunga / Battle of Nalapani.
*There are now many accounts of the this battle available on the NET. Every account differs in the figures of Casualties etc. . Search for Gillespie and Kalunga / Nalapani on Google Books.An account of the battle
A little like Hotel California . Such a lovely place, such a lovely place. You can check out anytime you like but you can never leave.
Or has it just started? It certainly did win !! And what a win was there my countrymen! I certainly expected another dreary patchwork quilt. It seems it is mainly the unlettered souls who can see things clearly, and voted for sincerity and artlessness, perhaps mainly for a person who "says it as he sees it". And that certainly is unique in the decrepit Indian Political Mansion filled with antiques. I thoroughly enjoyed Rajdeep Sardesai's winding up of the Election scene. He does not have the expressionless BBC announcer's outlook on things and could barely conceal his glee. Even Karan Thapar peeping out of a window and giving his colonial comments was delightful. Now where do we begin? For a start by recognizing that the best of plans are so much trash unless they "degenerate into work"( Peter Drucker).
Just remembered the pre-election results scenario. Was amazed at BSP's publicity campaign. On just about any road to Delhi or towards the hills, you could not travel more than 5 km without seeing expensive blue sign boards introducing a local Umedvar of BSP. There were Independents too and I found one of their slogans as being nearest to the crux of the problem. The words were - Desh ka sudhar tab hi ho sakta hai jab sudharein Kar, Kanoon aur Neta. Of course such slogans never make it to the National News. Another one which lined the road between Meerut and Delhi was 'UP Hamari Hai, ab Dilli ki baari hai' .
Nice swearing in ceremony. A lot of envious folk noticed that the lights never went out. And just about everywhere in the vicinity of Meerut they were out so long that the Inverters also discharged. And you cannot watch TV when even the Inverter is down. No doubt someone is benefitting from the 100s of thousands of crores the common man pays to Government - and it is not the people who benefit. When the Nalas stop stinking and Electricity is at least back to what it was in the early 90s, people will say there has been some difference. On the positive side one can look back and say thank God so and so did not become PM. 28th May - Another ceremony, keeps them busy. They say at the ministerial level there really is no work. That is the real reason for the tight security - so that nobody finds out the truth. They sit in their offices looking at maps not more than a few square feet in size representing 100s of thousands of square miles.
There is a feeling in the air that this is the time for review and a fresh start. India woke up when Communism & Socialism were supposed to be the future, and a lot of excesses were effected which followed those half-baked ideologies. Colonialism was not dead yet. Monarchy was still taken seriously ( it still is !). Many will remember the Coronation in 1953 of the English Queen. We could do no better than meticulously imitate the English idiosyncrasies, and be very careful in pronouncing their words correctly :). This time there is a feeling that our regulations could be revamped with COMMON SENSE as the foundation. Actually that is the title of a book published just before the US Declaration of Independence, written by Tom Paine, it is credited with resulting in the US Independence.
We could begin with the broadest statement of the problem simply, and that just has to be this - So much to do so many people to do it not much gets done and there is so much unemployment. Actually this is not the statement of a problem, it is a statement of the paradox. The top most priority has to be given to the speed of Government Decision making. Today this is the greatest impediment in speedy Employment Generation. A few years back they were discussing a request ( on TV ) for a flyover in Bangalore. An ex-pm Devi Ghoda was also a participant. It seems the application was pending since 1983 or 84 - and they were considering it .. perhaps in 2004. By that time Microsoft had gone from a Garage operation to an Internationally dominating force. How quick should things be ? Well people get hungry after missing a meal or two. The only way to see the 'big picture' is statistically. Add up all the populations of the Metros - they probably exceed 50 million by a few millions, add the populations of the small towns maybe again just over 70 million . That leaves us with a rural population of 800-900 million. These are people who live without amenities which are considered basic in the developed World - Municipal services and Electricity(24hr). Something has to be done and QUICK!
The Budget is due anytime now, my view is that they should take a good look at the biggest chunk which goes to the Army. Can we afford to spend the entire amount that Mumbai pays in Taxes for defending barren borders. I have no idea what kind of defence The Taj or Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus had on 26/11 - perhaps a policeman with a three nought three. Which is considerably less than the sandbags and machine guns one sees outside the most innocuous of military offices.
Even though Rules & Laws - Old Grant 1836 - predating the Mutiny are still in effect ( many with much greater force than the post East India Company British 'Crown' exerted ), the bravery of the Mutineers is still celebrated. Such minor inconsistencies never bothered our Civil Service Babus, who should have weeded out a multitude of toxic laws immediately after Independence. Their reverence for their Masters prevented them from doing so. Now that there is no trace of the ICS selected by the British, a process has been set in motion.
The cover of a book sold on the Mutiny Train which visited Meerut in 2007. Written by Madhukar Upadhyay. Published by Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, New Delhi . Nobody can dispute Mr. Upadhyay's immense knowledge of the subject. Yet he makes one error in the book. This can easily be attributed to the fact that many aspects of Colonial India as well as pre-Colonial India were deliberately obscured or distorted. He calls Walter Rhinehardt* an employee of the East India Company. Rhinehardt was an Adventurer/mercenary from Luxemburg. In fact all the Rajas, Maharajas employed many Europeans in their armies at various levels. And the British mostly confronted such forces. You can check this out at Sardhana Cemetery - Poles, Italians, French lie there. At the Golf Course in Noida there is a big Sandstone tablet perched on a mound which is Titled Battle of Delhi, it says that a Lord Lake defeated Maratha Forces led by a Frenchman Louis Bourquien on Sep. 11, 1803 - deadly date :).
* At Sardhana you could pick up a small booklet compiled by Bishop Patrick Nair ( retd.) for an amazing amount of detail for this region's history of that time. If you are a research scholar then you already know about the Rampur Library. If you are not then you should know that it is not far from Meerut and contains some amazing items, too many to mention in a little note.
The book contains what the real reason of the Gadar was - Revolts against Taxes/Levies. The nonsense that it was due to cartridges greased with cow and pig fat was deliberately allowed to spread as it diverted attention from a much more serious and essential pillar of the Raj ( money and lots of it ). Amazed that money is the root cause of all evil? Why do you think the Americans threw out the British. The slogan there was 'no taxation without representation'. Of course they threw out their 'constitution' too, which worshiped the British King as the Head ( the British by the way have an unwritten constitution ).
These revolts started a few years after the East India Company got its Tax Collection Machinery( The Indian Civil Service - the finest the world has ever seen ) in place, and continued much beyond 1857. Do not forget that the 'Sepoy' in the Sepoy Mutiny was a Peasant first and Sepoy later. The book The Peasant armed : The Indian Rebellion of 1857 by Eric Stokes for some reason is not easily available. There is another one The Peasant and the Raj also by him - not cheap.
So how do you label the 'cow and pig fat cartridges'? Complete fabrication ? Consider these facts : the British - at least of that time - were great collectors. They 'collected' a lot of things from a lot of different Countries in the name of God , Country and King. Simpler cultures would use a different word for that sort of 'collection'. To name a few The Elgin Marbles from Greece ( who want those back :) ), artifacts from the Pyramids. Some gullible souls actually gifted them with treasures like the Kohinoor diamond. Yet in all these collections there is no trace of cartridges which are supposed to have started a rebellion! Some of the most absurd, fascinating and non-sensical fiction comes from British writers like Lewis Carrol and J.K. Rowling. The kind of creativity to create 'Cow and pig fat cartridges' was well within the talents of whoever chronicled the rebellion.
Truth they say is stranger than fiction . These cartridges are not fictitious. They may not be in museums because they are available in specialist shops. Breech loading guns had not appeared at that time. These cartridges were used to load Muzzle loaders!! Interested ? Then search for P-53 Enfield Cartridges on the world's most comprehensive reference resource - the NET. The cartridges may not be fictitious but linking them to the rebellion certainly was a flight of fancy!
We cannot go about correcting the system without knowing where the system came from , why, by whom and for whom. One of the books is SOUTH ASIA : An Environmental History by Christopher V. Hill - 2007. Very Prosaic Academic language. Uses the word 'Government' for East India Company and Revenue for what was actually theft. In the snippet you can read "the British mind found it incomprehensible a society based on unwritten custom and Government by personal discretion". An interesting comment as England itself has an unwritten constitution. On the same page as this snippet there is a discussion about diara land ( maybe it is daria ). This was land which is fertile one year and a riverbed next year. It appears that once it submerged and came back it did not belong to the previous owner acording to the revenue mad East India Company laws..The book which says it like it should be said is The Evil Empire: 101 ways in which England ruined the World - 2009. The topic seems to be quite current.. Here is another From The Guardian of June 8th . Should all this history matter? Certainly - the structure and priorities are still retained, in fact most of the fullstops and commas of their statutes are still there . While the 'Government' can forcibly collect, there is nothing in the rules to make it forcibly deliver.
However what fascinates me is how this aspect of collection of revenue remained hidden for so long. I wanted to get the locations of 'Settlement' offices of the East India Company - NO LUCK.
MEERUT is an ancient town , but little literature about it is available . Any information mythical, factual, or hand me down stories preferably specifically related to your ancestors are welcome. Contact address is at the bottom of page. To come back to this site look for Meerut in Yahoo regional directory.
It is not generally known that Meerut was one of the 16 major
towns of Ashokan times . An Ashokan pillar was erected here which means
that this was a major Buddhist center . This pillar was shifted to Delhi near Bara Hindu Rao Hospital on the ridge around 1300 AD. The one at Firoz Shah Kotla Ground came from Topra. For the uninitiated the Ashokan Period (a short historical note) dates at
around 256 BC. About 75 years after Alexander's ( Sikander in Hindi ) invasion
of the Punjab.
Don't know what Ashoka wrote about ? Then
checkout the translation of all his Edicts by clicking here .
Currently these pages are partial to the immediate colonial past. See a 1904 map of the district ( click here) .And of the town (click here )
The picture which best represents Meerut is the spectacular Chaudhary Charan Singh University (CCSU) Gate. It is no easy job to label the style . Futuristic ? Modern ? Indian ? Western ? Ancient ? Rural ? Urban ? Take a good look, it is perhaps all of these. The pillars go all the way back to ancient Greece or Rome. And the security cabins? A roof under a roof ? It is perhaps the only one its kind in the world. Help !! Talking about labels.. why should one have a neat label for everything ? And as usual the name of the architect to whom the honours go is not easy to find. Not to a casual observer at least.
Regarding the mindset of people here it would be in order to quote a State Bank of India hoarding which said "Apna Ghar, Anpni Kar, Apna chota Karobar". That came close to defining the axle around which life rotates in many of the prosperous smaller towns in all of Northern India. It seems the coming or going of larger Industries in the vicinity does not have much effect on the economic climate. That is quite obvious in Modinagar where almost all Modi industries have closed down. Here in Meerut there is no let up in new shops opening and flashy Malls coming after Modi Continental closed down. Many visitors note ample evidence that ignorance is bliss. However that does not rankle them as much as the evidence that ignorance is wealth.
That is Ghantaghar in the picture on the left. Easily the most magnificent structure in Meerut. Built by the British in 1914, in place of what used to be Kamboh Darwaza(Gate). The window on the left looks out from a little room on the first floor where the old man the keeper of the big clock lived and ran a little shop for clock repair. He died in the early 1990s. Sure enough the big Clock stopped.. short.. when the old man died, nobody rewound it. It is a great change from the open and vacuous Cantonment area. Need a Calculator cheap clock transistor radio or want to get a mechanical/pendulum clock ( yes even Grandfather Clocks) repaired then this is the place. Further down is Lala ka Bazaar - ideal for cheap toys in bulk for Christmas trees, Birthday party favours, all sorts of plastic and glass jars are also available.
This milestone is about 400 meters north of Begum Bridge. This area is now known as the Zeromile point after the Meerut Cantonment Board very graciously looked up its records and put back the names which had become invisible on this, well, signpost. The distances are in miles.
Some facts and figures about Meerut. The latest census puts it in the above 1 million category. It has about the same population as Indore, Faridabad, Thane. It is the 24th largest town in India (populationwise), and the 4th largest town in UP after Kanpur and Lucknow, and Agra. Kanpur is larger than Lucknow with a population of 2.5 million. It is about 6 hours drive from the Taj Mahal Agra and Fatehpur Sikri. It is less than 50 Km from Hastinapur the seat of both Hinduism and Jainism. Haridwar - in the region where both Ganga and Jamuna enter the plains - is a little over 100 km.
A Computer page to share tips
The entrance to Mustafa Castle is shown below. Belongs to
the family of Nawab Ismail. One of the sons was a signatories of the Indian
constitution. There is a huge photograph of all the signatories of the
constitution in the main room. It is not a public place .
This is what Dr. Tariq Kuraishy ( now in the US for the last 30 years ) has to say about Mustafa Castle....
I am one of Nawab Ismail Khan's grandsons. I've been in the U.S. for almost thirty years, but have been back to Meerut a few times. What you refer to as the Grand Home is actually called Mustafa Castle. Built by Nawab Ismail's father, Nawab Ishaq Khan, and named for his father, Nawab Mustafa Khan Shefta. Shefta was a contemporary of Ghalib's and a prominent poet in his own right. My memories of living there in the 50's and 60's are wonderful ones. Of witnessing the end of a golden and opulent era. When the Nawabs and Rajas lost their estates, titles and lands, the mansions could not be kept up. It is almost sad to visit this once wonderful castle, in it's present state of disrepair. Somebody told me about your site, and it brought back a few memories.
Dr. Kuraishy's e-mail is : kuraishy@sbcglobal.net.
I have included a reply from an uncle of Dr. Kuraishy in Pakistan. You have to click the link in the text adjoining the next picture.
Perhaps the Grandest old building in Meerut. It is called Mustafa Castle. 'Palace' may not be off
the mark . Still occupied by the descendants of the original owners. The
Drawing room is retained in its original layout as a tradition . Among
many antique items is an old floor standing candlestand , which can hold
7-8 candles . Still used because of a very unreliable electric supply. It has been visited by Mahatama Gandhi,Sardar Vallabhai Patel, Nehru, Jinnah.
West End Road
Click here to read further details about Mustafa Castle sent by Mr. Iftikar A Khan in Karachi.If you want to book the area for a wedding , conference , birthday that is possible now click here
The whole place was upgraded in the summer of 2004. It can be hired for Weddings, Birthdays and conferences. It is called Castle View.
No text about Meerut can be complete without a reference to the Mutiny of 1857.
Click here for some notes. Use the Browser back button to come back here.
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