THE DELUGE
My friend Rameshwar showed me this passage from Jim
Corbett’s ‘The Pilgrim Road’ included in ‘The Man-Eating Leopard of
Rudraprayag’. It is worthwhile quoting the para here:
‘Three days journey up the left bank of the Ganges and
you have reached the ancient capital of
Garhwal, Shreenagar, an historic, religious, and trading centre of considerable imporatance and of great
beauty, nestling in a wide, open valley surrounded by high mountains. It was
here, in the year 1805, that the forebears of the Garhwali soldiers who have
fought so gallantly in two world wars made their last and unsuccessful stand
against the Gurkha invaders, and it is a matter of great regret to the people
of Garhwal that their ancient city of Sreenagar, together with the palaces of
their kings, was swept away to the last stone, by the bursting of the Gohna
Lake dam in 1894. This dam, caused by a landslide in the valley of the Birehi Ganga,
a tributary of the Ganges , was 11,000’ wide at
the base, 2000’ wide at the summit, and 900’ high, and when it burst, ten
billion cubic feet of water were
released in the short space of six hours. So well was the bursting of
the dam timed that, though the flood devastated the valley of the Ganges right
down to Hardwar and swept away every bridge, only one family was lost, the
members of which had returned to the danger-zone after having been forcibly
removed from it.’
Were the Britishers more humane and better administrators
than the Indians?
Not that the warning was not there. The Commandant of a
Training Centre evacuated the entire School before it was washed away the next
morning. Did he have some information that the District Administration did not
have? The overflowing of Vasukital glacier lake hs an
uncanny resemblance to the bursting of
the Gohna Lake
No comments:
Post a Comment