 Wrapped in quiet and picturesque seclusion, Happy Valley is a short distance from Mussoorie’s busy Mall Road but the beauty and momentous place it has in the history of Tibetans in India remains a secret to most tourists. This is the place where the Tibetans first arrived, led by their spiritual head, the Dalai Lama, when they fled from Lhasa in 1959. In fact, the Tibetan government-in-exile established and functioned from here for a year before the Dalai Lama moved to Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh. Fifty years on, Happy Valley or Gadenling (Tibetan for Happy Valley) continues to be the bastion of Tibetan culture and ethos, a home away from home for hundreds and thousands of Tibetans. A place where they live like one big family.
To reach this haven of calm, one can either take a leisurely walk or drive down from the library at Gandhi Chowk towards Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA) on Charleville Road. The present site of LBSNAA is where the famous Charleville Hotel once stood. It was here in March 1905 that the Princess of Wales (later Queen Mary) stayed.
The winding road leading to Happy Valley is lined with oaks and deodars and dotted with several small hotels and cafeterias. As I leave the rush of tourists behind me and step on to the road that slopes steeply down to reach Happy Valley, I instantly realise that I have finally managed to get away from the madding crowd.
 When the 23-year-old Dalai Lama fled Tibet in March 1959 and reached Mussoorie, he along with his mother, Tendzin Choegyal, and a few other family members stayed at the breathtakingly beautiful Birla House, requisitioned for his use by the Indian Government. The place is a 10-minute walk from Tibetan Homes Foundation (THF) and is looked after by a team of caretakers deputed by the Birlas. In fact, every year in May, KK Birla and his wife would arrive here hoping to spend a few months in solitude. However, this year, the house wears a deserted look as both of them passed away recently. “But we expect some members of the family to visit us soon,” Gopal Singh Chauhan, one of the caretakers, tells me as I look around the verdant campus which has oak, pine and deodar trees. Known earlier as The Hermitage, it was sold by Col Andrew Kirkwood to Birla Cotton and Spinning Mills in 1944. A smaller cottage, also in the campus, is where Mahatma Gandhi stayed during his visit to Mussoorie in 1946.
In his autobiography, Freedom in Exile, the Dalai Lama describes this one-year stay here as “A Desperate Year” including several meetings with the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the first being on April 24, 1959 at Mussoorie.
Soon after the religious leader’s arrival in Mussoorie, a large number of Tibetan refugees landed in India. So the Dalai Lama sent his officials to receive them at the camps opened by the Government. On June 20, 1959, the Dalai Lama broke his silence and held a press conference that was attended by 130 reporters from several countries.
 “There was no interference from Delhi over how I or the growing number of Tibetans conducted our lives. I had begun to give weekly audience in the grounds of Birla House. This gave me an opportunity to meet a cross-section of people and tell them about the real situation in Tibet,” he writes.
It was towards the end of 1959 that the Dalai Lama came to know of the Indian Government’s plans to move him to a permanent accommodation at Dharamsala. “I found the town on the map and discovered it was a hill station like Mussoorie but considerably more remote. So I requested to be allowed to send a Tibetan government official to Dharamsala to see if it suited our requirements,” he writes. The official returned a week later and announced, “Dharamsala water is better than Mussoorie milk.” Thus began preparations to move the camp to Dharamsala. On April 29, 1960, the Dalai Lama left Mussoorie for Dharamsala with 80 officials of the government-in-exile. Others, who had already started working, stayed back in Mussoorie.
 The same year saw the first Tibetan school in India, Central School for Tibetans, being established at Happy Valley by the Dalai Lama. He also founded the THF for children who lost their parents on the long and arduous trek across the Himalayas while travelling between Tibet and Mussoorie. THF, which started off with three homes and 75 kids, now has around 1,600 children who live here with their foster parents. Happy Valley also has 11 smaller homes at the SOS Tibetan Children’s Village where 12 kids stay with a foster mother at a home.
“THF, one of the oldest institutions set up for the preservation of Tibetan culture, offers protection and help to Tibetans in India, particularly their children at a physical, social, cultural, religious and spiritual level,” says Tashi Phuntsok, THF general secretary. The Valley has a youth hostel, a SOS youth home, a home for the elderly, a dispensary, tailoring and an art centre. The SOS Village is within the THF campus. The children here go to the same school and share the facilities and festivities as other kids. The less academically-inclined ones are given vocational training, prominent being the seven-year course in traditional Tibetan Thangka painting and courses in modern oil painting, carpentry, cane-work and candlemaking.
THF’s education officer Ngodup Norbu tells me over a cup of refreshing cinnamon tea that nothing much ever changes in the Happy Valley. “I can say it with conviction as I have been here for the last three decades, having migrated back in 1966. It has been just as it was all these years,” he says.
 On the highest point of a cliff in the Valley is a Buddhist shrine, Shedup Choephelling Temple, consecrated by the Dalai Lama. This temple, the first Tibetan one to be built in India, is a major tourist attraction. Surrounded by marigold bushes, it seems to be the point from where the all-pervading peace emanates and engulfs this exquisite Valley. Students, in their bottle green school uniforms, visit the temple in groups. While some of them vigorously turn the colourful prayer wheels outside the shrine, others worship inside. On a flat-topped hill, the prayer flags move gracefully to the tune of the mountain breeze against the azure blue sky. Residents of the home for the elderly with long hats and skirts, rosaries in hand, mumble prayers while the lamas worship inside the shrine. Inside saffron-draped room reposes a large tome, turned to the page last read by the Dalai Lama on his visit.
Happy Valley is a shopper’s paradise too. Innumerable little shops here sell exotic Tibetan ware while restaurants serve chhaang (rice beer) along with momos and noodles mixed with fried carrots, cabbage and mutton. I opt for vegetable noodles and a cup of tea tinged with butter at the THF Staff Mess, run by two portly Tibetan women who welcome one and all with their benevolent smiles.
The zestful Tibetan lifestyle lends a lot of cheer and colour to the Valley. It perfectly captures the interest of most visitors who choose to walk into this little Tibet on their way to the Municipal Gardens or Cloud’s End, the last point in Mussoorie.
By the time I decide to take leave from Gadenling, it is dusk and time for the prayers at the shrine. As the monks blow the long trumpets, the ethereal sound echoes among the hills. It is a magical moment and time stands still around me. From the hill, I can see the sparkling lights of the Doon Valley. Memories of this moment will haunt me for long, I think to myself.
The words of Richard Llewellyn’s in How Green Was My Valley come back to me and are a great comfort at this moment: “There is no fence or hedge around time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough.” |
Mussoorie
Uttarakhand
India
